"Wow." Despite himself, Orton was impressed. "This is pretty intense."

Enna wrinkled her nose. "That's not really the reaction I expected. He killed all these people, Orton."

Orton nodded, examining the scene. "He did indeed. Quite efficiently, from the looks of it, too." He pointed at the two corpses nearest the door, then at the two a few meters away; his sight beyond sight showed him the events that had transpired as if he were watching it with a rewind/replay function. "He set those two further ones on fire first from completely across the room... using some kind of magic stone, it looks like. They had wards, but he blew right through them." His pointing finger swiveled to the corpses near the door. "Then he took those out with physical attacks, without taking a scratch. That's four kills in less than two seconds."

Enna shuddered. "How can you be so callous about this?"

"Well, for one thing, these people were not innocent in any way." Orton summoned a minor illusion of darkness, then painted it over the corpses in the rough shapes and colors of their auras; Enna's mouth twisted in disgust at the sight. "These dudes were cultists, probably of a local demon-worshipping sect; not exactly Mother Teresa." He highlighted a particular arc in one aura. "See that there, the red? This dude ate a baby. I'm no fan of Gentry's, but these people were Shades. So no, I'm not going to cry any tears over them." With a gesture, he dissolved the illusion.

"Well, I don't know what Shades are, but they don't sound nice." Enna picked her way over to his side, gesturing into the far room. "When I came through the door, he'd just killed that huge guy over there."

Orton nodded, heading in that direction. To his sight, the remnants of the battlespace was chaotic; it had been a hectic battle with a lot of decisions made by both fighters, and the echoes of it were still strong here even days later. "To understand Shades, you have to understand Fade. And that's a long conversation that we don't have time for right now." He squatted down next to the corpse, examining it closely.

Enna rolled her eyes. "Right. I forgot how much you love mystical bullshit."

"I do, in fact, love mystical bullshit a great deal." Orton shot a quick grin at her, then returned his attention to the corpse. "But remember how much learning to perform your first invocation sucked? Learning about Fade is worse." Especially because it should have been one of the first things I taught you, he thought to himself grimly, but I was too scared you'd freak out and leave. So we can see my judgment remains awesome.

Enna frowned, then sighed. "Okay, fine, you can play Mysterious Teacher some more." She carefully stepped over to him and crouched down at his side. "What about this guy? Did he eat babies too?"

Orton ran a hand over his face, sighing. "No. But from the sight of his aura, that's probably just because it would have been too boring for him." He poked through the remains of the dead man's unravelling essence with his divinatory senses. "Yikes. This dude was a meister, the leader of their sect, and he did a lot of bad, bad stuff over a very long career -- he was ninety-four years old, and sustained himself with ritual human sacrifice and a lot of depravity." Orton shuddered; he was only just barely skimming the metaphysical echoes of the meister's life, but even at a great distance the oily dross of residual evil was enough to make him want to vomit. "I hate to say it, but Gentry probably did the world a favor here."

"So... maybe he's not the bad guy this time?" Enna pondered, looking down at the corpse with significantly less squeamishness than she'd had before. "I won't say he seemed like a good guy, but he was... nice, at least. Maybe he hasn't turned all bad yet."

"Two wrongs don't make a right." Orton gestured again, making the pulsing violaceous reverberations of Gentry's murderous intent visible to her. "He came here planning to kill these people, and he didn't know they'd be evil. And from what I know of him from previous loops, he went bad way before all of this." He wanted to stop there, but telling the truth was a bad habit left over from a very long tradition of spiritual piety, and his guilty conscience dragged the rest of the sentiment out of him before he could stop. "I don't know that he's completely irredeemable. I've tried a couple of times before, but just because I failed doesn't mean it's impossible." He grimaced. "But stopping him is a lot more important than saving him."

Enna hesitated, then nodded. "Okay. I guess that makes sense."

Orton made a few more gestures, executing ritual after ritual in his mind; to Enna, it seemed like he was just waving vaguely at nothing, but she could tell he was concentrating very hard. "There was a book that he took from here, but it's too powerful... some kind of tome. Did you see it?"

She nodded. "A big black one, with brass things on the spine. You can't tell what it was?"

Orton shook his head. "The more powerful the artifact, the harder it is to track." He searched for a way to describe it. "It kind of... burns out the trail. Like trying to look at the sun, even after the fact. And if he took it with him, I won't be able to trace him, either."

Enna shrugged. "There goes our lead, then."

"Maybe not. There's got to be some kind of clue." Orton cast around for other trails, then headed back to the entrance where the other bodies lay. "Something over here... were you carrying something other than your grimoire?"

"A little book of folded papers, yeah." Enna shrugged. "He left it on the train, and I was bringing it out to him. I dropped it somewhere when I ran, though, and it's gone now."

"It is, yeah -- he picked it up when he left. But that wasn't magical, just some notes." Orton grinned, then made a few more gestures. "Check this out."

The room darkened, then sprang to life; wispy figures began to coalesce out of the shadows, flailing and drifting spasmodically as they jerked through weird, unnatural motions. Enna sucked in a breath and quickly dashed to Orton's side, but he shook his head. "It's another illusion. I'm just showing you what I can see." She watched, astonished, as Gentry un-pursued her own image up the hallway, then ducked downwards to deposit the sheaf of papers on the floor. Orton froze the procession of images, then brought the image of the folio into the air before them, where it opened on its own and leafed through its own pages, backwards and forwards.

"Holy crap. Dude, this is like CSI:X-Files, or something." She stared, awed, at the fracturing image hanging in space. "And this is what you see all the time?"

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"Oh God, no way." Orton shook his head vigorously. "Only when I do really hardcore divinations. Normally I just sense feelings, concepts, and stuff like that. If I saw full-scale recreations all the time, I'd be even more cracked up than I am now." He squinted, peering at the writing on the pages, then sighed. "Looks like he didn't have anything written down after yesterday's date. This is already useless."

"Boo." Enna stood up, groaning as her weary muscles complained. "Guess he gets away, then. And I'm betting you can't follow his, uh, ghost trail or anything like that."

Orton grimaced. "He's got some kind of ward that keeps him from being tracked -- not that it's easy on a practitioner of his caliber in the first place. And every time I fought him in the previous loops, he was damn good at counter-divinations..." He slowed, then stopped, as a wicked grin spread aross his face. "But that was years from now. He might not know those techniques yet."

"So you can track him?" Enna perked up.

"Track him, no. But divine where he's going to be? That's another story entirely." Forgetting for the moment that he was still broadcasting his perceptions to the room at large, Orton lost himself in a flurry of divinatory meta-rituals; Enna watched, awed, for a long time as he flicked through fantastically complex preparations and excruciatingly elaborate rites with the ease of a concert pianist improvising a solo. Ghostly silver pendulums swung over intricately-filigreed maps and wheels of burning emerald light spun through arrays of runes; dozens of cascading decks of cards, emblazoned with weird symbols and words from a dozen languages she couldn't even recognize, folded themselves into shapes, scattered apart, and were replaced by clattering dice and bones that faded away in turn. Slowly and quietly, she became aware of exactly how much Orton had been downplaying the real scope of his own expertise and power. Fuck, and I thought I was such an innovator, she groused to herself silently. No wonder he always took things so slowly!

Eventually, the flurry of images and symbols slowed, then stopped; Orton paused for a moment, then started and dismissed the phrenic display with a final sweep of his hand. "Oops. Uh, sorry about that." He rubbed his head in embarrassment. "It took some work -- he's warded to the gills. But he doesn't know enough yet to shield his contact vectors; I could follow the echoes of the non-trail he leaves behind. Will leave. Ugh, you know." He sat down heavily, trying to regain his spiritual equilibrium. "He'll be in Venice in two days."

Enna's heart skipped a beat. "Venice? That's, like, super close to here. We could be there by tomorrow, easy."

Orton nodded. "Sure. We just have to not die when we get there."

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Gentry was concentrating harder than he ever had before. Sweat poured off him in rivers, despite the relatively temperate climate here in Tangier, but the consequences of a lapse were dire beyond anything he dared to contemplate. With his left hand, he formed the precise sequences of the sigil gestures, while his right traced a perfect circle in the air repeatedly in time with the chant he'd learned from the book. The Lore of Astakilpus had contained many powerful spells and enchantments, but he'd wasted no time in casting the only one he really cared about: the rite to remove the next binding on the sealed box. Six years after its acquisition, he still had no idea what was contained within; he'd removed the first of the wards long ago, but each one he unbound revealed another, with increasingly obscure and demanding rites to unlock it further.

The first ward had been simple, but the second had been a doubled binding; the third had been triplet of interlocked and deviously interdependent fortifications, and followed by a fourfold gate of ingenious design that had taken him the better part of a month just to analyze. Below that, several sets of dodecahedral constructs, each with their own unique twelve-component key, had awaited; each one had taken months, and in the most recent case an entire year, of painstaking research and exhausting travel to unbind. And now he faced the Great Seal of Astakilpus, a stupefyingly dangerous and cunningly labyrinthian rune that only the knowledge from this specific tome could hope to assay.

The process took hours; he chanted until his voice was hoarse and his tongue felt like sandpaper, and his leaden limbs burned with fatigue and exhaustion. He invoked ancient gods and loathsome demons; he lanced and scored his own flesh, ingested substances toxiferous and strange, and contorted his mind around concepts that strained even his considerable imagination. By the time he was done, he felt half-dead, his body ravaged and his psyche savaged; even his soul felt torn and chaveled. But the task was done; the Great Seal of Astakilpus lay unbound, and the mystic wrapping was torn in two.

Staggering feebly, he tugged it from the box and groaned with dismay; another layer of wrapping lay below, branded with a new symbol which burned at his eyes with maleficent spectral power. But this time, he had a lead; the symbol, formed of dozens of encysting runes, was built upon a central sigil that he had seen once before. It took some minutes of enervated excogitation, but he eventually managed to recall it; the sign of Zimpagani, one of a number of deeply obscure demonic princes.

And from that, I can locate a cult; and from that, I can find their lair, he thought as weariness overtook him. He flopped onto the bed and collapsed into slumber; tomorrow, he'd begin again. But for now, he slept, and in sleeping, dreamt the dreams of satisfaction and fulfillment that always accompanied a job well done.

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Jiann had been digging and weeding for nearly nine hours; one of the many perks of undeath, he reflected, was immunity to fatigue. He was not, unfortunately, immune to boredom, and the exacting nature of the work was sufficiently challenging that he couldn't just delegate control of his body to a servitor. Still better'n stockin' shelves, though, he thought to himself with a mental chuckle. He'd had many jobs over his very long life -- especially considering his nightmarish lifetimes trapped in Orton's mind -- but stocking shelves had been his very least favorite. Wiping nonexistent sweat from his brow (someone might be watching, after all), he decided he'd done enough for today and began to trudge back to his cottage. He might be undead, but he could still have himself a beer.

Things were progressing nicely, despite the recent setbacks of an errant beetle incursion and a problematic alkaline shift in a small portion of the estate's soil; he could now actually taste things he consumed without being afflicted by actual hunger when he went without. Integrating his gustatory and gastronomic models had been the work of nearly a solid month, but the reward was intensely agreeable -- much of undeath had felt like a Faustian bargain where each new capability had been paid for with a lost pleasure of life. But now, finally, he was beginning to feel as though he was regaining progress along his spiritual path; unlocking new and more advanced holistic developments that expanded, rather than replaced, his essential faculties was a feeling he had desperately missed.

Entering his cottage, he ambled into the kitchen and selected a bottle; the local grocer's carried a small but exquisite selection of brews from all over the country. He fished around in a genial fashion for a bottle opener, then debated frosting a mug; eventually, he decided to simply drink it as it came. He pried the top off the bottle and inhaled the escaping vapor (his sense of smell was still rudimentary, but it was definitely better than nothing), and emitted an only-slightly-graveworn sigh of satisfaction. A beer at the end of a day of hard labor was definitely a pleasure of living that he intended to savor.

Which meant, of course, that just as he was about to take his first sip, a perfunctory knock came from his front door. He sighed, putting down the bottle -- it never failed. Despite the heavy-duty wards around the property to deflect casual attention, he still got many more visitors than he liked; his Entanglement to his property was too strong to be easily obscured, so his degree of Fade was anomalously low relative to his power for local residents. The local sheriff had been by dozens of times, as had all of his neighbors (particularly old Ms. Morris, the unsteady and determinedly amorous septuagenerian from the next lot over) and associated other locals, including the snot-nosed delinquent son of the local gardening supply store owner. He hoped it wasn't that last one -- the kid mostly visited as an experiment in seeing exactly how racist he could be, and sooner or later Jiann was going to punt the little wanker through his roof. He levered himself out of his chair, sauntered over to the door, and opened it, filling his fibrous lungs with air in expectation of either courtesy or castigation.

"Howdy," said the man named Cameron, and shot him through the forehead.