What I appreciate most about this sentence is that my execution has been stayed for so long. Traitors don’t tend to get so long, so the fact that you are moving it up by three years doesn’t bother me too much. I would like it if you didn’t, but I understand. Want to get my head separated from my body before the army arrives, don’t ya? Well, I have a feeling you are already too late for that.

  - Confession of Gabric Tarn, on the eve of his execution

  An acrid scent lingers on the air, smelling almost like lemons left out to rot in the summer heat. One of the tentpoles of Illigar’s tent has come undone, and with no one bothering to fix it, it flaps the mild wind of the day, every so often riding the current just right to snap like a whip. The man sits at his table, the one he brought from Maidenlake, various maps and documents held down with lead paperweights in the forms of various celestial objects.

  The man has hardly moved for the last ten minutes, sitting back in his seat and flipping through the oiled pieces of vellum I dropped in front of him as soon as I made it back. He must have read through the entire packet three times now. Every time that he begins again, the atmosphere grows more dour, the people around the command tent slowing and looking worried as the frown on the army commander’s face continues to deepen. He begins a fourth read-through, his face so downcast that he practically glares at the information on the pages.

  It is a bit awkward, standing at the front of the table with people occasionally glancing in my direction, wondering what it was that I handed off to Illigar to make the man look so concerned. Worst, at least for me, is that I have no idea what I am supposed to do with myself. I have seen others adopt a martial pose when speaking to him formally, standing with their hands clasped behind their backs, feet shoulder-width apart, but others stand or choose to sit in an array of countenances. With all of the scrutiny on me, I find myself adopting the martial stance, which of course has locked me into standing in the incredibly stiff position for over ten minutes now.

  My eyes roam past the commander of the army, gazing out over the battlefield down the slope. If I had thought that there were a lot of dead monsters after the first day of conflict, the morning of the third day proves me disastrously wrong. Galea informs me that precisely twelve hundred and seventy-three termites lay broken on the churned earth of the valley. Most are of the acidic kind that reside inside the hive we have been assaulting over the last few days, but there are the red ones mixed in here and there.

  What truly captures my attention is one body in particular, its blood golden and shining in the sunlight. It lays half out of a huge hole smashed through the wall of the western hive, and even lying dead on the ground, the termite's body easily surpasses thirty feet in height. Its carapace is bone white, only stained here and there with splatters of its golden blood or the dirt of the crumbling hive wall. Unlike the other termites, it once possessed three great horns as part of its head, the largest on broken halfway up, the remnant stabbed into the ground next to its head like an inverted birch tree.

  The darkness of the hive’s interior spreads out behind it, a swarming depth that promises death beneath the earth. More rank two monsters than I have seen in the totality of my life lay dead outside the hive, a crawling swarm heading toward our position, the tide growing thinner as it nears.

  Before, when observing the battle of the army with my own eyes, I was impressed by the martial abilities of those down on the ground fighting the enemy with their own hands. Seeing the aftermath of the last few days, however, it is truly confirmed for me that every person in this army is in the highest echelons of their peers when it comes to raw power and skill. Less than a hundred adventurers assault thousands of monsters, and while we may not be invincible–at least six linger in the healer’s tent on this morning–the great flood of monsters will break upon the sole stone of the army.

  “You’ve read this?”

  The words snap my attention back to the table. Illigar sits in his plain chair, looking up at me with the bundle of papers in his hand, lightly tapping them against the table.

  “I have,” I confirm.

  He chews on that for a moment before reaching into a pocket while tossing the bundle onto the table. “Everyone else, back away,” he says.

  No one is fool enough not to do so immediately. Illigar’s hand comes out of his pocket with a small metallic sphere clasped in his fingers. The man only takes a moment to shift the sliding runes covering the object before a dome of faint blue energy springs up around us. The world grows eerily silent, the low thrum of the sudden barrier replacing the hum of the camp. People look on from the other side of the translucent wall, but a glare from Illigar turns most inquisitive eyes away.

  “This is a sound-isolating device,” he tells me, still glaring out at one woman in particular until she eventually breaks eye contact and scurries away. “The questions I am about to ask you and the answers you are about to reveal to me, do not leave this tent. A need for secrecy has apparently arrived.” The man’s baleful eyes turn on me. “You know how to keep a secret.”

  “I do,” I say.

  “Good. Describe what happened in the village to me again. Don’t spare any details.”

  The recounting doesn’t take long. After that strange woman fled from the village, I spent some time looking around. Inside the largest house that remained somewhat intact, I found a bundle of papers wrapped in a piece of leather beneath the ruins of a table. After seeing what was on the papers, I made for the encampment immediately, skipping the last few stops I was supposed to visit. Judging by Illigar’s reaction to the information I found, it was the right call.

  “What do you make of these?” he asks, tapping the bundle on the table.

  “They look like predictions of how the beast tide will move,” I tell him. The papers inside the bundle are twelve different detailed maps showing five of the six cities of the duchy and some of the lands surrounding them–Maidenlake and its surrounding lands were not shown. After seeing a map of the duchy laid out in the adventurer’s hall just a few weeks ago, it isn’t difficult to recognize the terrain. What was strange about it, though, was that the forces of the beast tide were called out along with the positions of the various armies taking part in the operation, arrows drawn to indicate how each side will move.

  “They could be predictions,” Illigar says. “Or they could be instructions.”

  “You are suggesting that someone is controlling the beast tide?” I ask.

  “That was always a possibility. This wouldn’t be the first occasion that a beast tide was triggered as part of some offensive action, but even in the records that I have of such times, the actual monsters summoned do not act with a defined will. To control hordes of monsters as effectively as what has been observed so far, rank four monsters are usually the triggering culprits. The level of intelligence and that ability to exert will to dominate so many hostile creatures is usually beyond the capabilities of even a peak third-rank creature.”

  I realize that Illigar is not speaking to me. The man stares down at the table, his eyes unfocused, speaking his thoughts aloud in an attempt to puzzle it out.

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  “You said that it seemed like this woman, Izmeralada, was capable of controlling monsters?”

  “It looked that way to me,” I confirm. “She had three wolf-like monsters with her, Lycanids, and they were not hostile towards her. When I faced her, she called out into the storm, and a moment later, a huge flying creature attacked me. She escaped with that monster, hanging onto its leg as it flew into the sky.”

  “And you are certain that she isn’t a magician?”

  “She was not,” I say. “I would have known if she was. Are there magicians capable of controlling monsters?”

  “It is a rare skill, but it exists.” Illigar grabs a sheet of paper and begins to write on it with a bit of charcoal. “Describe her features again.”

  I take my time in doing so while he scratches on the paper. My memory has only become even keener after ascending to the second rank; there is hardly anything now that I can forget. The woman’s features are hard to forget at any rate, her goat-like eyes and the way her face stretched outward like she was almost a beast herself.

  “You say that she looked strange but that you think she was human anyway,” he says a moment later.

  “It was just her face that was odd. Other than that, she would have looked human.”

  “Her skin did not have a hint of gold to its palor, nor was her hair seemingly made of vines?” he confirms.

  “No, why?”

  Illigar waves away my question, finally turning the sheet of paper toward me. Three distinctive looking crests are scrawled on the page in intricate details. “Was she wearing a crest like any of these, or did was she dressed in a kasai? You would maybe know a kasai as a summer dress made of orange and teal silks.”

  I take the page, squinting at the drawings. I do not answer the man immediately, instead staring deeply at the insignias, trying to match them to my memory. With a sigh, I hand the paper back to him. “No. She didn’t look to be wearing any kind of insignia, and she was dressed in a faded and torn brown coat, typical traveling clothes underneath. What are these questions for?”

  “An attempt to narrow down possible origins.” He returns to pondering in his chair for a time, leaving me stranded to stand in front of him. It takes him several minutes of consideration before he asks another question, a question that catches me off guard. “You were in the tower when that thing attacked, yes?”

  No further context is needed; the memory comes back unbidden. I remember standing in front of that monster, looking at its terrible, blank face. It moved faster than I could see, and a casual swipe from its hand almost broke me in two. Even with my arms clasped behind me, I can feel the scar on my back, the place where an invisible blade almost cut me in half.

  “I was,” I manage to say, trying hard to keep my voice steady.

  “You saw it, the beast that attacked the trial. Did you get a familiar feeling from this woman as you did that monster?”

  “I don’t understand. Are you saying that these two might be related? Is that possible?”

  “Answer the question, Devardem.” His voice grows hard with command.

  Swallowing the lump in my throat, I shake my head. “No. That thing in the tower was a different monster. It made everyone go crazy, made me lose myself. Even with how far I have come in the last few months, I don’t have any confidence that it couldn’t just kill me without much effort. There was an eerie feeling to the woman I met yesterday, but it was different. She didn’t have an aura, and I saw no mana about her, but I detected something.”

  “Something?”

  “I can’t identify it. I have only started to develop a real sense for magic recently, and there are so many different kinds of mana I have never encountered before. It was strange. The air about her tasted…poisonous but sweet, if that makes any sense.”

  “That is one of the shortcomings with humanity,” Illigar says, tapping his bit of coal on the table, little black rubble breaking off the end and scattering across the paper like sand. “Without a native sense for magic, the ones we might develop later in life are subjective, hijacking the senses we are born with. The manakith can take a description of magic and match it against their archives, but the more mundane species, like us, have no unifying understanding of the divine energies.”

  He studies me for a long moment, chewing his thoughts. Illigar reaches forward, tapping the device, creating a sound-blocking barrier around us. With a few shifts of the runes on the surface of the device, the barrier around us grows opaque, bathing us in a small circle of azure light.

  “What I am about to show you is not something you are meant to see,” he says, reaching again for a pocket. “Giving you knowledge of this will bring the Willian Guild’s attention to you in a way that you likely won’t be able to get away from. Any idea that you had of evading the guild will go out the window; that is how important this information is. The guild will not countenance you straying away with this knowledge.”

  I stare at the man’s hand bulging in his pocket. He could have such a dangerous secret in the pocket of his coat? The thought of turning him down, of walking away from this here and now, tempts me desperately. I can’t stop myself from taking a step back, ready to leave this where it is. I have no love for the Willian Guild outside of Dovik, and there is no way that I can trust them. If what I have heard about them is true, they are one of the five greatest guilds in the world. If they want me, is there anything I can do to get away from them?

  Before I can turn away, the sight of that small town, Cloverleaf, comes to me unbidden. The whispers of that old woman as she rocks back and forth in the church almost seem to float on the air.

  “If I answer your question, will it save lives?” I ask.

  “It might,” he says.

  Breathing out, I pull myself straight once more, standing in front of the man. “Show me then.”

  Illigar takes out a small vial from his pocket, a tiny bit of strange liquid inside that looks dark in the blue light. Despite the small quantity, the potency of the magic I sense from it is overpowering. The back of my tongue almost sizzles with the dangerous taste I feel coming from the liquid.

  “That’s it,” I say. “It felt just like that.”

  Illigar looks as if my words are a physical assault. Slowly, he placed the vial back into his pocket, saving me from the burning sensation of its magic. “I was afraid that you might say that.”

  “What is that thing?”

  “Something found by Arabella Willian. It comes from a metallic canister she discovered during the trial when she was attempting to find the origin of the invading influence that put conflict into the hearts of the trial takers. You saw for yourself the creature responsible. This fluid was found in its dwelling.”

  “So, they are connected. How? Why?”

  “That is what I need to figure out,” Illigar says. He turns the pages containing the maps back to face me. “Does anything else stand out to you about these maps?”

  My mind lingers on the previous thought long enough that Illigar clears his throat to pull my attention back. Still, to think that the faceless monster that nearly killed me and the woman I saw yesterday might be related, how is that even possible? I distract myself from the thought by looking at the maps, seeing how the hordes of beasts are positioned to move about our forces. With the idea that these might be marching orders, a new and terrible thought comes to me.

  “We have a spy in our armies,” I say. “These maps show our forces in too much detail if they were made by those controlling the beast tide.”

  “Exactly,” Illigar says, taking the maps back and binding them. “So, now you understand why secrecy is of the utmost importance. You have brought this information to me. Certainly, that could be a ploy, a dangerous and crafty one if it is, but I doubt it. We find ourselves facing an intelligent enemy, letting them know that we have discovered that would be bad for us. Still, I need to act on this information. Fetch for me Tacit the Grim and Adriana Mailigar; I need to speak with them.”

  The information of the last few minutes strikes me so numb that I agree without thought. Before I can make it away from the table and toward the edge of the barrier, Illigar stops me again with a word.

  “Rest well while you can. The army will be going into the western hive at noon. Things will be dangerous in there. You will need your strength.”

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