The Esteemed Leading Knight Rasmusen sat lost in thought, his back to his desk as he gazed unseeingly into the evening beyond his office window. It was easy to imagine false portents in the subdued play of lights and shadows that troubled the diffuse glow of dimly lit streets and houses emanating upward from the subterranean suburbs of Butte Below. But it was only imagination. Bringing his mind back to the task at hand, he swiveled his chair to face his desk and the array of dossiers—each representing a candidate for Montana Tech’s Hermetic Order of Geomancers.
“Scott Peters,” he said, pulling up an AR image to hover above his desk. “GPA 3.1. Low, but his instructors are unanimous in their high opinion of his potential.”
“Taken,” a grumbly voice responded. A dense fog formed in the far corner of his office and quickly coalesced into the deceptively average form of a domestic feline. The Cat crossed the room and leaped to the top of Rasmusen’s desk, casually strolling through Scott Peter’s holographic image on its way to a stool beside his high-backed chair.
“Who? The Tau Mu Tau?” he guessed, going with the most likely match to Peters’ strengths. “Those frat boys haven’t recovered enough from giving Astral Hazing a whole new meaning to begin recruiting.”
“No, Lord Rasmusen,” the Cat smiled an uncatlike smile. “There are other forces working to gain this boy’s attention.”
“Who? Pentacles? MageWerks? Damn it, Blix, don’t just sit there practicing that infernal cryptic smile of yours. Peters is the best in only a handful of sophomores that would fit in our order.” He frowned ominously. “If I am to lose a potential member to a corporation there’d best be some compensation.”
Blix’s smile became a grin at Rasmusen’s threat, revealing rows of glowing galaxies where an honest cat had teeth.
“I would not be me if I were any more specific,” he said in reasonable tones. “But I will tell you that try as you might, any attempt to recruit Scott Peters will be futile.”
With a growl of frustration, Rasmusen waved his hand and the holographic images of dossiers and candidates disappeared. When he pushed himself to his feet, Blix flowed with moon-gravity grace to the floor and followed the human out of the office and across the hall. Galaxies still glittered from his smile, but there was a tension in the way shifting shades of blue pursued each other down his feline length.
Rasmusen pushed the heavy wooden doors to the room across the broad hall from his office just wide enough to allow himself and Blix to slip inside. Candlelight seemed to give the polished darkwood floor and the intricately carved bureau against one wall subtle highlights. ‘Seemed’ because there were no candles; an indirect, sourceless light filled every corner with a warm glow not unlike a cozy fire. In the center of the room was a mage circle, burned into the floor and filled with a silvery liquid that seemed to tremble with energy.
Hugging the wall, Blix sauntered to a high stool tucked in the corner farthest from the bureau and made a show of stretching before leaping easily to the seat. His pose of patient amusement was spoiled somewhat by the bands and blots of muted colors wandering across his fur.
Rasmusen took a deck of tarot cards from one of the bureau’s many drawers and stood for a moment shuffling them without obvious intention.
“I’m curious. Who that I do not know—or know of—is poaching my students?”
Blix did not answer.
Stepping over the shimmering boundary of the mage circle, Rasmusen settled himself comfortably on the floor and took a moment to center himself. Focusing intently on every motion, he shuffled the tarot cards thoroughly, then set the deck carefully on the floor.
Rasmusen’s lips twitched at the sight of the first card, the questioner’s card; he’d always considered the King of Cups to be his card. Shaking his head against the distraction, he narrowed his focus to the ritual as he placed the opposition card. Death. Which meant change—catastrophic, unexpected, complete, or merely uncomfortable—not necessarily and end of life. He lay the card across the King of Cups before reaching to draw the foundation card from the top of the deck.
Rasmusen grunted. He turned the card in his hand over, comparing its back to the deck on the floor, then picked the opposition card back up and compared it to the one in his hand.
“What is it?” Blix asked.
“A second Death card,” Rasmusen answered. “Identical to the original.”
“From another deck?”
“This deck. The cards are unique.”
“Then place it.”
Rasmusen looked at Blix, unsurprised that the cat’s face revealed nothing. He replaced the opposition card, then paused—recapturing the serene focus of the reading took effort. At last he placed the foundation card below and to the left of the others.
The cards burst into flames. A glaring silver-white light rose from the mage circle, enclosing him in a column of cold fire.
As quickly as it had begun, it ended. Rasmusen sat in the center of the ring of grey sludge that had been the silvery mage circle, smudges of black ash marking where the tarot cards had lain, and stared directly ahead.
Blix flowed from his stool and crossed the now inert circle to stand in front of the human.
“And now, my lord, you know as much as I do.”
Rasmusen turned his face toward the sound of the cat’s voice.
“Fear not, the blindness is temporary,” Blix assured him. “If you will grasp my tail, I’ll lead you out of this chamber.”
Reaching the doors exhausted Rasmusen; he collapsed against the wall in the corridor, gasping as though he had run a race.
“I saw nothing,” he said at last. “Or something. What did I see?”
“You saw someone—two someones—who do not wish to be known, my lord,” Blix said. “You saw two powers, each powerful enough to ruin the foundation of the ritual, clash. You saw what they let you see as a warning to you not to delve farther. Two Death cards; they were both telling you the penalty for persistence would be death.”
The Esteemed Leading Knight Rasmusen slumped against the wall, waiting for his breathing and his heart rate to slow down. Against the darkness of his blindness darker forms moved. He did not understand how he could see the black-on-black images nor what they meant, but one was unmistakably the silhouette of a wolf.
