Thresholder

Kes sat at a desk that had been provided to him. The computer screen held an interface that was remarkably close to Windows 10. When Nitta had presented him with it, he had boggled at it, because there was no way that it should have been even remotely the same. In fact, when he’d first come to Earth 2, it had taken him a long time to get used to the different operating system Richter used on her machines, open source software that was apparently extremely common there. She had eventually had him describe what he was used to, then used AI tools to mock something up for him, which was overlaid on top of the OS. Perry had always seen the work she’d done as a labor of love, particularly the night she’d spent making him a QWERTY keyboard. (Because all the technology words had been coined long after the point of divergence, they’d had to spend a night mapping concepts against each other, and Marchand had been programmed to use Perry’s words.)

When he’d asked Nitta about the system, the answer was obvious in retrospect: they hadn’t used any fancy technopathic magic to extrapolate the interface and keyboard he was used to. Instead, they had simply used data stored on the version of Marchand they had quietly copied from the Natrix. When he looked closely, he could tell that it wasn’t quite what he remembered from Earth, because there were some limits to what Richter had been willing to get the AIs to do for him. And of course all that was just something laid on top of a system that was doing some very different things, even if most of the functionality as experienced by the end user converged on the same features.

The scanning program hooked into his triple bootleg Windows 10 and launched as a program from the desktop, one of several. Nitta had complained about interoperability, but everything seemed incredibly smooth to Kes, and while he was unfamiliar with the programs, it was nice to be sitting down at a computer again. He’d used one on the Natrix, as Perry, but that was a strange terminal with an unfamiliar keyboard, and more often than not he’d defaulted to just wearing the helmet and having Marchand project a virtual keyboard for him.

“It’s my baby,” said Nitta. She looked much different than she had before, apparently having put on another few ‘skins’. Her head was more proportional to her body, and she was looking to be a more healthy weight, but her skin was striped black and white, which extended into her hair. Perry couldn’t help but think of the Bride of Frankenstein. “Magic is always difficult to deal with at the best of times, and getting magic to work with computers is … I don’t want to say it's impossible, because clearly it works, but translating inputs and outputs, and making it all work with the supporting physics sometimes crapping out, is downright awful.”

“But you do get it to work,” said Kes. “That’s wildly impressive.”

Nitta grinned at him. “It is, but I’ve had help. I’ve been to more than a hundred worlds, and picked up practices and technologies along the way. When Cark and I were on our own, there was a time we hit three magitech worlds in a row, and I built up a pretty substantial toolkit.” She pointed to the front of the bridge, or the cockpit, or whatever they called it. “See those gauges? That’s one of the first things that anyone should build, if they travel the multiverse. Cark and I had one, and Hella had her own, though it was a lot different. We merged and renovated.”

“It measures physics?” asked Kes.

“No,” said Nitta with a laugh. “What you do is find a minimum viable method of moving a marble that only works under certain assumptions about the world. If the marble goes up, the underlying mechanism is working, and if it stays down, then that’s because that particular part of physics is broken.”

“Huh,” said Kes. “I would have thought it was more complicated than that.”

“You want it as simple as possible so you can make sure it works,” said Nitta. “That said, individual gauges are complicated, because there are many classes of magic that don’t just spring back to life when the physics change, and some that have very little mechanistic input at all. We try though.”

“Sometimes the magic goes away and stays away?” asked Kes. “You go to another world, and not only do your wands not work, but they’ll never work again?”

Nitta nodded. “It’s a hard life. It feels like with every new world we’re in a panic.”

“I know that feeling,” said Kes. “Just … maybe not quite as bad.”

“At least we don’t have people trying to kill us,” said Nitta. “Not as the default, anyway.”

They took some time to go over the basic functions of the interface. There was a system that worked a little bit like bookmarking that already had people of interest tagged: Dirk, Nima, Third Fervor, Perry, Mette, and Kes himself. The clones had apparently caused some errors early on, but Nitta had resolved them.

Kes was cleared to watch.

~~~~

Nima had been put in jail, but it was a nice one. It was meant for people whom the king did not trust but didn’t want to offend too much. It had once been used for visiting merchants and dignitaries, but their numbers had waned as the revolution swept its way through the world. From time to time, diplomats visited, but the special jail with fine furnishings was too much of an insult to pay them, at least for King Edmunt. He hadn’t liked them, of course, and the talks never went all that well, but putting them in a jail, even a nice one, would have been a step too far, at least while he was on the back foot.

There were plush pillows and a bookshelf with a selection of the king’s favorite books, all of which had been picked by an assistant and assuredly never read by the king himself. Whoever had stocked the place had made sure there were plenty of plants, most of them by the windows, and whoever had been in charge of security had made sure that there wasn’t anything all that sharp. There were bars on the windows, but they were subtle and tasteful, worked into the design and mistakeable for a fanciful pattern.

Nima was barefoot, in a white dress, not equipped for combat in the slightest. Her fingers were at the pendant she wore. She had said that it had its own thoughts and senses, almost like Marchand, but for the first time, Kes was able to listen in.

“I don’t like this world,” said Nima. The display subtitled it, which was good, because the audio wavered softly, as though spoken through a stream of water. Kes didn’t know whether that was what it naturally sounded like or whether that was a consequence of the Farfinder’s methods of picking through the magic from an extreme distance.

“Will you complain in every world we go to?” asked a woman’s voice. It was unnaturally deep, like a woman unsuccessfully trying to mimic a man in order to be taken more seriously. Kes thought of Elizabeth Holmes, a name that hadn’t gone through his head since — well, since he’d come out of the cloning vat, which was where his ‘true’ memories started.

“I will complain, if they keep being like this,” said Nima. “Perry painted a picture of the conflicts ahead. We wouldn’t get sent to a stable world, and certainly not stable in a way I would like.”

“This world will be stable when we leave,” said the pendant. “The king is dead, and the queen will follow. The last gasp of monarchy will lead to a deathly silence.”

“Not if we stop it,” said Nima.

“I’ll protect you, no matter what,” said the pendant. “But this is foolishness. Even if we ally with Third Fervor and she wins, monarchy is simply doomed. Thirlwell could become an economic and technological powerhouse, and it would still be unable to enforce its politics on the world. It could start a war, and even if that war were won, it wouldn’t be able to grind anyone down under its bootheel.”

“I want to survive,” said Nima. She let go of the pendant, and Kes wondered whether that was the end of the conversation. “I want to get out of here. I don’t care.” Her lips didn’t move.

“Sometimes we must fight for causes we don’t believe in,” said the pendant.

Nima frowned and got up from where she’d been sitting, smoothing out her skirt. “Before this all happened, I never had to. I did my work and there was no cause for fighting anyone. We had a nice, ordered society.”

“You were being prostituted to a man with control over your very destiny,” said the pendant.

“I don’t want to talk about that again,” said Nima. She went to the bookshelf and scanned the titles there. “Your perspective isn’t wanted. I’ll take you off if you’re going to try to fight me.”

“That would be foolish,” said the pendant. “You are many things, but foolish is not one of them.”

“I’m going to read a book,” said Nima. “We can talk later.”

“When we do, it will be about your long term goals,” said the pendant. “I will help you as much as I can, but to help I need to have some understanding of what you want to achieve.”

“What I want to achieve is reading a book,” said Nima. She wasn’t using her mouth to speak, but her lips were still tight. When she sank down into her chair and opened the book, it was with a certain amount of churlish motion.

~~~~

“They argue a lot,” said Nitta, who was looking over Kes’ shoulder with a hand on his chair. “Always about the same things. It must get exhausting.” She nodded to herself. “It’s good armor though. I guess you have experience with the claws.”

“I do,” said Kes. He was completely healed, back to as good as he’d been right when he’d come out of that machine on what was essentially the first day of his life. “Is there a point?”

“Livvi — that’s her name — is the bossy sort of helpful,” said Nitta. She shrugged. “I’m not sure there’s more to it than that. Some powers come with a drawback, you know that better than most.”

“I guess,” said Kes. He clucked his tongue. “The predictive stuff, what the portals do, that’s what guarantees a power to the thresholder?”

“We unfortunately have no idea,” said Nitta. “You’re worried about the Farfinder coming in and wrecking things for Perry?”

“Should I be?” asked Kes.

“Yes,” said Nitta. “It’s what we’re worried about. We live in one of two possible realities. In the first reality, the prediction from the Grand Spell is essentially all-knowing and has predicted the arrival of the Farfinder. It knows we’re here and in whatever it’s attempting to accomplish, it has accounted for not just us, but for all the predictive magic we have, along with Fenilor’s shielding. In the other reality, it did all that careful prediction and then we came in like the divine wind, upsetting everything.”

“And if it’s the latter, then you can probably just kill us all on your own,” said Kes.

“Don’t overestimate us,” said Nitta. “We’re about survival more than offense. This isn’t a warship. We’re not a military. None of us had any active service beside Hella.”

“You might have to kill Fenilor, if Perry falls and the door opens,” said Kes. “You can’t let Fenilor go through, because if I understand it right, that’s when the ‘punch’ happens.”

“Yes,” said Nitta. “And it’s cowardly, I think we all agree with that, hoping that Perry wins, helping where we can, trying not to have a pitched battle where Fenilor takes apart this ship. All that caution might be totally irrelevant, and we’re trying to get Perry on our side while helping him only minimally.”

“When you know you’re on a bad path, you can stop and turn around,” said Kes.

“We’re re-evaluating once Perry reports back on whatever Fenilor is covering up from scrying,” said Nitta. “Check on him?”

Kes went to the interface and tried to look at what Perry was up to, and found that there was nothing there. When the video failed to materialize, Kes selected Mette, and found that there was no video feed for her either.

“They’re at the site then,” said Nitta. She let out a breath. “I’m going to set up an alert for when we have them again.”

“If we do,” said Kes.

“If we do,” nodded Nitta.

He had been hoping for reassurance, and she hadn’t offered it.

~~~~

From above, it was an abandoned mining village, no more than a half dozen large buildings and some equipment around it. The information from the Farfinder had indicated that the blocked area was a mile wide, and Perry had aimed right for the center, hoping that he wouldn’t have to go to the air and search for a building or site on the fringes. Thankfully the buildings were right at the center of the circle, and given that it was a mining village, there was only one conclusion: whatever Fenilor had been doing here, it had been underground.

The place must have been abandoned a long time ago, because it was grown over with plants. If the island Mette had wolfed out on had been left behind two decades ago, then the mining village must have dated to two centuries ago, if not more. They were far to the north, and there was half a foot of snow on the ground, which had worked its way into most of the buildings, whose roofs hadn’t stood up to all that time without maintenance. The thick bricks had meant the walls had stood up much better.

Perry let Mette out, and she immediately went back into the shelfspace to grab a thick coat they had taken from the library.

“What if the mine has collapsed?” asked Mette.

“Then we move on to the next one,” said Perry.

“And the plan for traps is just … run into them face first?” asked Mette.

“Marchand will scan ahead for us,” said Perry. “We can do the sonar thing.”

“Sonar isn’t going to pick up magic,” said Mette.

“That’s not necessarily true, ma’am,” said Marchand. “From the data the Farfinder has given us, I have been able to tune my sensors to detect a fair number of different thaumic classes.”

Mette didn’t seem terribly convinced.

“We go slow,” said Perry. “Fenilor is using security through obscurity, this place is extremely far away from anything or anyone. It was important enough for him to cloak it, which means that it’s important enough for him to lock it up tight or trap it. Maybe this is a place he visits sometimes, or maybe the protection is something he built in before going off to bigger and better things, but … I don’t know, we need to understand him, and currently we don’t.”

Mette let out a breath that became visible in the cold air. “Slow,” she said. “I wish I had tools.”

“Hopefully I have the only tool we need,” said Perry.

“You’re too kind, sir,” said Marchand.

They went down into the mine, which Marchand was mapping ahead of them. The only light came from the suit, shining out as brightly as it could, illuminating wooden supports that thankfully didn’t seem to have rotted much with time. There was dust everywhere, and no tracks through it, but that didn’t mean much given that Fenilor could fly.

“Nothing so far?” asked Mette.

“You know, I will stop you before you trigger a tripwire,” said Perry.

“Right,” said Mette. She bit her lip. She was following behind Perry while trying to crane her neck around to see what was ahead, and if there had been a tripwire, he would have gotten the brunt of whatever it was wired to.

“There’s a shaft that goes straight down,” said Perry. “Up ahead. I would guess that’s what we’re aiming for, but the mine is larger than I thought it would be.”

“People weren’t meant to live underground,” said Mette.

“The miners didn’t actually live underground,” said Perry. “Those structures we passed were dorms, they would come up out of the mines after a shift to wash off and sleep there. A mine is a dangerous place, even with lanterns or technology or whatever else. There’s too much to worry about, whether it’s the stability of the tunnels or the quality of the air.”

“That’s not helping me feel better,” said Mette.

“If there’s a problem that’s not some trap set for us, I can protect you,” said Perry. “You’re a werewolf now, and I’d just need to transform you to heal you back from injury. My moonlight blasts aren’t anything to write home about as an offensive weapon, not even remotely on par with the gun, but I can change you. And there’s the shelfspace.”

“If we have a bunch of rocks fall on us, and we go into the shelfspace, we’re basically just done, right?” asked Mette. “I watched the footage of you slithering your way through the tunnels of Esperide with bugs crawling over you, and I kept thinking that if you got stuck, you would have been toast.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “And now that’s not helping me feel better. But what are we going to do, leave because there’s a hole in the ground?”

“We could go to the other sites,” said Mette. “We could see whether those are also holes in the ground.”

“We could,” said Perry. “They’re very far apart though, and we’d have to go up to get out of the atmosphere, so it would take us a pretty damned long time.” He stopped. “I am now thinking that this is a very good place to just drop several gigatonnes of rock on someone. It would kill or incapacitate most thresholders who don’t have a portal, teleportation, or some ability to move rock. Or something that could punch through rock without killing them, I guess.”

“Yeah,” said Mette.

Perry had not stopped moving that entire time. He thought if he did stop moving, he would end up going back the way he came, abandoning this endeavor entirely. It was important though. Fenilor was a blind spot, literally and figuratively, and letting him move in the background seemed like it would be very bad. Depending on what the matchup actually was, a portal could open up for him simply from allies doing fights without him. So far as the Farfinder knew, that was a loss condition.

They came to an elevator shaft, which was for ‘elevators’ in the sense that some kind of machine system had changed the elevation of things. If there had been rope, it had rotted away, and there was no sign of the elevator itself, only the shaft. Without the sword, Perry would have been left to try some very dangerous climbing, but with it, and Mette stored in the shelf, he descended slowly, keeping a careful eye on the map that Marchand was continuing to generate.

When Perry reached the bottom, he let Mette back out. She seemed grateful not to be stuck in there, but not so grateful to be underground. She looked up the shaft and swore.

“It’s deep,” she said.

“Suspiciously deep,” said Perry. He looked up the shaft. “This is solid rock here. Solid rock is work to dig through. Lanterns don’t work well on rock, even if they work a little better than on metal. When you’re making a mine, there’s a lot of guesswork involved. You look for surface deposits, you get some geological knowledge, you follow veins, you dig exploratory shafts … you don’t do this, not out in the middle of nowhere. You don’t go straight down without branching off in different directions. Not if you’re interested in mining … what would this mine have been mining for?”

“Neither of us know the world well enough to say,” said Mette.

“There were branches,” said Perry. “But they were at the upper level. From the map March is making, this level goes straight.” The suit was shining its light, and it pointed forward, to where the hallway carved from stone opened up into a large cavity whose extent was still unknown. “And we’re below the water table here. Mines have a dewatering process for that, but abandoned mines don’t, and they all flood sooner or later.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Mette.

“I’m an educated guy,” said Perry. “I went to college for … maybe not this kind of thing, but something like it.”

“So you’re suggesting that this mine might be the hideout of a nefarious so and so?” asked Mette. “We already knew that.”

“Either there’s a lot of magic at work here, or it’s still in active use,” said Perry. “And he didn’t just take over an abandoned mine, he must have had most of this custom-built for him. This shaft isn’t something he dug with a powerful tool. It’s something that laborers spent an awful lot of time on.”

He stepped forward, keeping an eye on the map, which Marchand was updating with every step, and sometimes without them. Mette followed behind. The rocks were bone dry, in spite of what he’d said about the water table, which he was pretty sure was true. In fact, some of the dust on the hewn stone served as a sign that no one had been here in a very long time, which was odd, because the lack of water meant at least some level of upkeep.

The chamber turned out to be a dome, and the lights of the suit fell upon an entire underground living area. There was a thin layer of dust on all of it, and some things had fallen apart, but there was a table with some chairs, a desk that was falling apart, and a bookshelf that looked like it had been looted. There was a lantern in the center of the room, of a design that Perry had never seen before, with a cone that projected light upward, but it was of course not functional. There was no kitchen or bathroom, just this solitary chamber.

“So … no traps,” said Mette. “Just dusty refuse.”

“Yeah,” said Perry with a frown. “Why protect it like this though?”

“Why a dome?” asked Mette.

Perry looked up and considered that. He hadn’t given it much thought, but it was weird. So much of the rest of the mine — or fake mine — had been filled with utilitarian tunnels, the kind that you would expect from a real mining operation. A dome was structurally stable, yes, but removing all that material and then getting it up the elevator would have been a lot of work for very little benefit.

“I don’t like it here,” said Perry.

“Come on, there are books,” said Mette. She moved over to the bookshelf, then looked back at him, because he was her light source.

They each took a book. They were high quality, bound in leather or something equally thick and sturdy, and whatever had been used to treat the pages, they were still intact.

“I was hoping for journals,” said Mette. “These are technical documents.”

“This one is sociology,” said Perry.

They put the books back and tried different ones, picking books that had interesting titles. It was Mette who found something that seemed to be a notebook rather than a reference or educational title, but when she opened it, it was filled with writing in a language she didn’t speak. She reluctantly handed it to Perry.

The letters were swooping and overlapping each other, with far too many dots. It was harder to read intent from the page, and much different from hearing another language spoken aloud. In fact, Perry wasn’t even reading letters on a page, he was reading letters presented from the interface of the helmet, which had been captured by the exterior cameras. Still, Perry had some experience by this point, particularly with translating texts recorded from the library in Moon Gate, and the words began to feel like English.

“It’s a collection of notes,” said Perry as he quickly read through them. “It’s going to be a pain to get a translation up and running for Marchand.” They had a system down though, which mostly consisted of Marchand doing rapid mappings and asking for clarification on unknown symbols or getting corrections. It had been one of the downtime projects during the long two years on Esperide, though it hadn’t borne fruit — no surprise given that most techniques were supposed to take years on end to learn.

“Notes for what?” asked Mette.

“Science, mostly,” said Perry as he flipped through the pages. “I’m seeing a few diagrams, and a lot of math. And … notes on effluence. Lanterns. Domes, but …”

Perry read closer.

It is clear, now, that it is not enough to raise production. The lanterns were built better and larger, with great strides made in creating more with less, but the common man has seen far less of the benefit than I had hoped. I had thought that prosperity would lift everyone up, but the bitter lesson is that power concentrates unless concrete steps are taken to prevent that from happening. The effluence had seemed a small price to pay when I’d thought that the lanterns would bring an end to poverty. Instead, they have made poverty worse, at least in many respects.

Failure.

The word was underlined twice.

“Uh,” said Perry. “I’m going to have to read this in full, but … it seems like Fenilor was responsible for the lanterns.”

“What?” asked Mette. “Why?”

“He was trying to make the world better,” said Perry. “The culture wasn’t his first attempt at remaking the world, it was the second. Or it was at least the second. If the Farfinder is right and he’s been here for five hundred years or something insane like that, then I mean, holy shit, he must have been working this world that whole time. This is all his fault.”

Mette stared at him. “You’re jumping to conclusions,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Perry with a nod. It was always a little unnatural to nod in full armor with the helmet on, even as close of a fit as it was. “For sure. There’s a whole book to read through. I’m pretty sure this is partial, and if it was left here, it can’t have been that important to him.” He flipped to the start, then to the end, looking for dates. There were none. It would have to be gleaned from context, except what context could there be when Fenilor had seemingly spent a lot of time sequestered down in this room, away from civilization?

“We’ll keep looking,” said Mette with a sigh. “What were we hoping to find here?”

“A cache of magical weapons,” said Perry. “A detailed plan. I mean, this is good, it’s proof that he really has been trying to reshape the world for a long time, but,” Perry looked around. “No signs of a battle. No scorch marks, no cuts in the wall, nothing. I was thinking we would find … I don’t know. He’s been killing baby thresholders. Lots of them.”

“Mmm,” said Mette. “Like me.”

“Yeah, like you,” said Perry. “Or like Nima.”

Mette looked around. “So he came out here to do … nothing? To wait? Without going to the bathroom?”

“Skipping the bathroom is easy,” said Perry. “Honestly, I’m surprised that he’d have a bed at all.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. “We take the books, put them inside the shelfspace, then go on to the next one, I guess. But I’m not confident that we’d find anything there. I thought that this place was going to be a killing field for other thresholders, but somewhere he could guarantee he’d get a battle that suited him and wouldn’t screw up things in the rest of the world, but … where are the bodies?”

“Sir, I believe I might have an answer to that,” said Marchand. “I’ve been expanding the map as you’ve spoken, adjusting it based on sonic profiles. It appears there is a passage below the central lantern.”

“Secret passage,” said Perry. “Cool.”

The unlit lantern in the center of the room was pushed to the side, and once it was, Perry could see what Marchand had been talking about. There was a stone with what was now obviously a recess that acted as a handle, and it was only with the suit’s full strength that he was able to lift it up and move it to the side.

It was a secret passage within a secret base, but it wasn’t all that well-hidden in retrospect.

“Ugh,” said Mette, bringing a hand to her nose. “Smell.”

“Smell?” asked Perry.

“Death,” said Mette.

There was no ladder, and Perry descended down with sword in hand, leaving Mette standing up there. The armor was airtight, but he trusted Mette’s nose. The descent took almost no time at all — it was only ten feet, if that. To one side was a thick black slab with the same writing on it as the notebook, though less able to be parsed through Perry’s translation. It was made of a strange material that looked pliable to the touch and slightly desiccated, but it was difficult to tell. He would take it with him, if it could be removed.

To the other side, there was a small chamber filled with bodies.

Perry went in and stared at them. They had been laid out in rows, more than twenty of them, all mummified and long, long dead. In most cases the cause of death was obvious, a hole through their midsection or head. The skin was black or dark brown, pulled back around the mouth to show teeth, and the hair was preserved. Beneath each of the bodies, there was a black puddle of what looked like tar, which must have been the liquids of their bodies that leaked out after death.

The bodies were dressed differently from each other, with a range of styles and materials. Some were leather, others cloth, and a few had plastic clothes or something like it, colors still vibrant in comparison to everything else.

They were all notably missing weapons. Perry peered down at the bodies, and used a toe to move them. There were no tools, no implements, no significant pendants or amulets that throbbed with magic.

“You left me in the dark here,” Mette called down. “Anything down there?”

“Like you said,” replied Perry. “Death.”

He spent some time looking for something significant on them, something that would give a clue to why Fenilor had been able to beat them. The elf had never lost a fight, had killed twenty people — at least twenty people — in what seemed like they should have been fair fights.

Perry grabbed the tablet and rose up the shaft.

“Don’t leave me in the dark again,” said Mette. “Let me get a light out from the shelf.” She looked at the tablet. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “Given its position, I think maybe it’s the thing blocking a view of this place from the Farfinder. Or maybe it’s what’s keeping this place dry. Or … both, possibly.”

“He took everything else of value from here when he left,” said Mette.

Perry nodded. “There’s no advantage for us here. Nothing that would help against him, if that’s needed.” He sighed. “We need to decode this notebook and try to stitch together something. He’s been at this a long time. It seems like he’s undefeated. If these people had powers, implements, he’s taken them for his own.”

“The matchmaking fouled up?” asked Mette.

“Maybe,” said Perry. “Or he fouled it up. Or he lucked out with a power that grows better over time, which for a long-lived elf would be … problematic.” He narrowed his eyes. “If we take it as a given that he was responsible for the lanterns, that this whole world has been his playground for the last five hundred years or whatever, then I don’t think he’s going to give it all up. What do you do when you’ve made a world into your image? You make a second world into your image.” He hefted the tablet. “If we can confirm with the Farfinder that this blocks scrying, then at least we’ve gained a tool.”

“Or magic,” said Mette. She peered over and tried to read the writing. “There’s something underlying this. Something that makes it work.”

“We’ll figure it out,” said Perry. It was less than he had hoped for, but at least there hadn’t been any traps.

They gathered up the rest of the books and placed them into the shelf to be gone over later. There had only been the one notebook, but there were a few other writings from Fenilor, most of them technical in nature. It was possible there was a secret about the lanterns in there somewhere, but Perry was skeptical about that. The research institutes of the many kingdoms, or of the culture, should have uncovered more than Fenilor had ever known. But if the Farfinder crew were right, then magic had been leaking into the world over the course of centuries, changing the physical reality, and some of them wouldn’t have any impact, but others … Perhaps an experiment run a hundred years ago would get a different result.

They were leaving the chamber when a noise came from the corridor ahead of them.

Marchand zoomed and corrected the image, and in the darkness, Fenilor’s form was made clear.