As I did I realised it had been a long time since I’d heard any movement. The house was quiet-really quiet. I stopped and listened but couldn’t hear any activity at all.
The corridor I’d reached felt much older than the outer parts of the house. The furniture was dark and shabby, there were cracks in the plaster, and a fine layer of dust covered the tables.
And suddenly my precognition flared.
My divination magic might have been dulled, but my reactions weren’t. In a flash I was hidden in a doorway, the hood of my mist cloak concealing my face, fading into the background against the shadows of the dimly lit corridor.
The house was silent. I held myself perfectly still. Only my eyes moved, flicking up and down the length of the corridor. I couldn’t see or sense anything. But my magic was telling me that something very, very bad was going to happen if I moved even an inch from where I was standing now. One minute passed, two minutes, five. My feet itched but I didn’t let myself move. I scanned for enemies using every trick I knew and came up blank.
And all of a sudden the threat was gone. I checked and rechecked the futures and found nothing. I held still another five minutes, then moved quickly and quietly away down the corridor, holding my breath until I was safely out of sight.
Although I kept a tight grip on it, I was shaken. I hadn’t been able to make out what the danger was but I was absolutely sure that something would have happened to me if I’d moved. Usually my magic shows me the outcome of bad choices in gruesome detail. I’ve always thought it’s one of the nastiest bits of being a diviner but now I was finding that knowing something was after you without knowing what was actually worse.
As I moved I tried to figure out just what the hell had happened there. I’d sensed danger in the short-term future but the immediate future had shown nothing but an empty corridor. If something had been about to attack me, why hadn’t I seen any trace of it?
I didn’t know, but I wasn’t staying around to find out. I reached an intersection and scanned ahead. I still didn’t know which was the way out but I wasn’t looking for that anymore: All I was focused on was evading the invisible threat behind me. One of the routes gave me a stirring of unease and I took the other, moving as fast as I could. I was concentrating on scanning for the whatever-it-was rather than looking for rooms or people, and so I didn’t notice that I’d made my way back to the duelling hall until I came through the doorway.
The hall wasn’t empty this time. There was a young man standing by one of the tables, going through the papers. He was tall and thin, dressed in black with a whiplike quickness to his movements. It had been eight months since I’d seen him but I remembered him very well. His name was Onyx, and the last time we’d met he’d been trying to kill me.
As I stopped in the doorway Onyx’s head snapped up towards me. For a second we stared at each other.
Onyx cast a spell and I leapt back as blades of force slashed in an X pattern through the space I’d been in a second ago. Another blade hissed over my head as I rolled left into the corridor, coming to my feet in a run.
There was a wall between Onyx and me now, and I sprinted down the corridor before he could regain a line of sight. Looking ahead I saw that he wasn’t chasing me, he was going to-
Crap! I threw myself flat, skidding on the carpet, and as I did splinters and plaster exploded all around me as Onyx sent a lethal spray of force blades tearing through the building. They were at waist height and he’d fired them straight from the duelling hall, cutting across the corridor and through the wall on both sides.
As he did, a bolt of agony went through my head, a mental shriek of pain and fury. It was so powerful it blanked my thoughts for an instant, making my vision grey out.
When I came to I was curled on the floor, my hands over my ears. I staggered to my feet and kept moving, trying to shake off the fuzziness inside my head. My hearing was still working and I could hear distant shouts from ahead of me, and I knew that we’d stirred up trouble, but the noise was enough to orient me and suddenly I knew more or less where I was going. I couldn’t sense Onyx or the other presence anymore, and I kept moving. As I reached the corridor leading to the outer rooms, a group of people went hurrying past. I waited in the shadows for them to get out of sight, then slipped into the room from which I’d entered and dropped out the window.
As I left the walls of the mansion my vision of the futures ahead of me cleared, and my heart lifted as I could see properly again. I ran out across the garden under the starlight, my feet quiet on the grass. Looking back through the cold night air I could see the windows of Fountain Reach lit up. Distant shouts echoed through the walls, but I couldn’t hear any sounds of battle.
I made it out of the garden and started back up the forested slope in the darkness. I could have activated my gate stone, but I wanted to put a safe distance between me and any pursuers before I did anything to reveal my presence. As I scanned ahead through the futures, though, I saw that I wasn’t alone in the woods. Someone was ahead of me in the same vantage point I’d used earlier. Maybe they’d had the same idea as me.
I was tempted to just bug out, but I’d had time to recover from my scare. Now that my magic was working properly again I had my confidence back. I altered course towards the person above, and as I did I thought about Onyx.
Onyx is the Chosen of a powerful Dark mage named Morden. Morden was one of the two major players competing for the fateweaver back in April; he coerced me and a small cabal of Dark mages to go get it for him and sent Onyx along to ensure our cooperation. It turned out that Onyx’s idea of cooperation involved him leaving with the fateweaver and everyone else not leaving at all. I got hold of the fateweaver before Onyx did and we had a frank exchange of views.
It ended up with Onyx on the floor and bleeding, barely escaping with his life. Unfortunately I’d only won because of the fateweaver, and the price tag on those powers turned out to be a hell of a lot higher than I was willing to pay. The fateweaver was gone but Onyx was still around, and that was bad news because Onyx was one of the deadliest battle-mages I’d ever had the misfortune to run up against. I wondered if he held a grudge against me for humiliating him like that. I had the feeling the answer was a definite yes.
The person waiting at the viewpoint near the top of the hill was a girl, nineteen or so. She was just a shadow in the darkness, but by looking into the futures in which I switched on my light I recognised her as one of Morden’s slaves. I had to think for a minute before I remembered her name: Lisa. I hadn’t really expected to see her again. Slaves to Dark mages have a high turnover rate. I let myself fade into the shadows and waited.
Onyx arrived five minutes later. He was obviously trying to be quiet but I had the impression he didn’t spend much time in the woods and it wasn’t hard to hear him coming. Unlike me his magic didn’t give him any way to see in the dark and he’d resorted to some kind of black-light spell that cast a murky glow. I felt Lisa go tense as she saw him.
“Who did you see?” Onyx said as he walked up into the clearing.
“N-nobody.”
“Verus was in there.” Onyx was young, but his voice was flat and cold and sent a chill down my spine. “When did he go in?”
“I don’t know-”
The blow didn’t look powerful but it was augmented with force and took Lisa off her feet. Onyx had already turned away and was staring down at Fountain Reach. There was a sort of casual indifference to the whole thing. Onyx had been annoyed and Lisa had been in front of him, so he’d hit her. He didn’t care whether it had been her fault and in fact he seemed already to have forgotten that she was there. Lisa stayed on the ground for a while, cringing, then pulled herself upright.