A squalid miasma altered reality in its vicinity, unfettering vast creatures of the deeps, giving them mastery of the sky as they before hunted the sunless seas. Tentacles slithered and crawled in cold rookeries encrusting the vast object's sheer sides.

But these were mere servitors, children compared to the sinful, gelatinous carapaces of those creatures within. Their minds churned with philosophies inimical to all beasts not part of their ancient Sovereignty. They waited for the call of mortal priests who perverted their souls and hollowed their minds to serve abominations.

Roused from the drowned depths, the fabled city was fable no more.

Telarian screamed and opened his eyes.

He lay on the floor in the center of a divinatory circle. The circle's periphery was decorated with skulls, hourglasses, butterfly wings, and unidentifiable sigils. A twelve-pointed star was inscribed inside the curved pattern. Smudgy lines of burning incense rose from each of the twelve corners . . .

. . . which meant the circle hadn't been broken. Telarian wished he could sigh in relief; instead, he wanted to scream again. If the pattern had been breached, he might have been able to convince himself he'd experienced a false foretelling. But his view into the far future, as chancy and unreliable as such arts were, remained accurate, unchanging, and too awful for Telarian to accept. The same scene had blistered his mind each time he looked so far forward.

He rolled to his stomach and pushed himself to his feet. Muscles in his legs shook from having clenched too long without ease. The scabbard of his new blade knocked awkwardly against his thigh. He wasn't used to carrying such a thing. But desperate times were the mother of desperate strategies.

Telarian walked the circle's exterior and carefully pinched off each burning stick of incense. With each glowing ember doused, he spoke a mental syllable designed to calm the mind and moor the spirit. When it came to the art of divination, ritual was important. Not so much for its own sake, but as a way to condition the mind against the rigors of peeling away the present to reveal the future. Most diviners could see heartbeats or moments ahead with relatively little effort, but days and years . . . few could match Telarian's skill. He'd pushed the art forward by centuries during his time in Stardeep. But he wasn't vain about his accomplishments.

As a Keeper of the Cerulean Sign in the heart of the dungeon constructed to hold the Traitor, unmatched resources were available to Telarian for his research. He had tapped those resources, especially the singularly potent construct Cynosure. His interactions with Delphe, his co-Keeper, were few and far between. Her duties monitoring the Well were substantial, and thus her relative absence granted Telarian free reign in the Outer Bastion. Not that she had any direct authority over him, nor could he command her. Still, best to keep Delphe mollified. Delphe's problem was she didn't quite know what to make of his ability for prophecy, and thus often failed to appreciate the personal costs true visions of the future demanded. In the end, when he labored to pierce the veil of the far future, he kindly refrained from telling her, and she did not complain.

Of course, his lapse in telling Delphe of his construction of the Epoch Chamber, the chamber wherein he stood at that moment, might one day make her doubt him. Nor would she look kindly upon him should she discover that he often directed Cynosure to lie about his location. It was a risk he was willing to take.

The Epoch Chamber was smoothly spherical. Its lower portion sloshed with mystical fluid he'd distilled from years of dream-wandering. A disk, scribed with a twelve-pointed star, floated immovably on the surface of the fluid, and when Telarian reclined in its center, his divinatory ability was enhanced by orders of magnitude. He'd predicted fires, earthquakes, the deaths of kings, and the initiation of wars years prior to their occurrences. He'd never been wrong.

Was there anything he couldn't foresee?

Perhaps, but he cared to preview only a single event. He obsessed over it, and each time the vision thundered through his mind's eye, his despair grew.

Despair wasn't an emotion a Keeper could afford, so he converted melancholy to a desperate plan. He disavowed the future he saw. He would prevent it from occurring. If he did less, could he honestly claim to be a guardian of the Cerulean Sign?

And so, his arrangements proceeded—daring, appalling arrangements that, if successful, might prevent the horrid soaring city of his vision from ascending.

The city he had seen in the thundercloud was Xxiphu, and it was inhabited by aberrations of the ancient world, creatures known as aboleths that were old when the sun was yet young. While aboleth splinter populations persisted in the world, Xxiphu was the seat of the Abolethic Sovereignty, possessed of a malignancy inconceivable. If it rose from Faer?n's core, shorn of its supposed dependency on the depths .. . could an age of terror and slavery be far behind?

CHAPTER THREE

City of Laothkund, Shadow Tongue Lair

A man in soot-blackened clothes balanced on a ledge three stories above the winter-chilled street. A gaggle of sentries on its way to Sal's Tavern for warm buttered rum passed beneath him. The lamplight from their shuttered lanterns receded, once again plunging the shivering seaside district into night's full embrace. He loosed his held breath, wending steam into the icy air.

The man faced the wall, the pitch-soaked toes of his boots gripping the frigid mortar hardly at all. As if in supplication, he rested the side of his face against the tomb-cold stone, his arms splayed to either side. He hadn't counted on the freakishly chill weather. Gusts off the Sea of Fallen Stars usually kept the city of Laothkund bearably temperate, even in midwinter. Not tonight.

He eased his left foot forward. His supple, calf-hide boots were ordinarily like extensions of his feet. But he was so cold he couldn't feel his toes, and instead of providing extra grip when he needed it, the pitch seemed determined to trip him. The wind, muttering with winter's chill, threatened to pull him from the precipice, with or without help from the pitch on his boots, and dash him to the street.

A particularly stiff gust nearly turned his speculation into reality. He hadn't had such a rude introduction to the hard cobble streets since childhood. Fear was not an option; he simply required a better hold. Immediately.

He inched his left hand along the too-smooth wall, feeling for irregularities between the bricks, his fingers searching for a grip. He'd removed his black gauntlets, as thin and fine as they were. Despite their demonic talents, an unimpeded sense of touch was too precious to hamper when taking the street less traveled. But his fingers were quickly losing sensation in the heat-thieving zephyr.

The man, known in the city of Laothkund as Gage, was no stranger to heights. He'd plied his trade too long and too successfully to hesitate over leaping an alleyway chasm, or to shy from ascending a tower in utter darkness. He was so familiar with the lofty, tight places of the city he actually preferred them to the wide streets. Normally.

His fingertips eased over a gap, deep enough for good purchase. "Thank the Queen of Air," he muttered. With the new handhold, he levered himself around to the east side of the building, out of the wind.

Gage was a slender man, so much so that most assumed he was a wood elf mix. Many in Laothkund were, after all. But his birth hadn't followed a moon date. No, his wiry shape was forged from years spent running through Laothkund's twisting neighborhoods. Few could match his knowledge of the city or his ability to quickly navigate the congested lanes. No one was better at jumps, vaults, wall runs, slides, or lucky tumbles. No one knew better which of the many laundry lines would hold a man's weight, and which would instantly snap if tested.