Bright magic flared in the bottom of the bowl. Alex leaned closer, holding the spell steady. He channelled Will through his hands, letting the power run through him steadily but without rushing. It was too easy to let power move too fast at a moment like this. The body got excited, the mind followed, and before you could say, “Crystal Ball,” your spell had broken, and you had nothing to show for it but a headache and a sterile bowl of cloud water.

Not this time.

This time, Alex made sure of his grip on the Foreshadow spell before he increased his focus on the vision. Will moved through him, the feeling of power and life surging in him as he channelled the magic. The yellow light of the spell flickered like a candle flame, then grew steady. The flow of Will steadied and became constant. His own heart slowed.

It was time.

He let his eyes focus on the water in the bowl. The clouds of white that had filled the water were dispersing, and Alex could see an image revealed on the flat bottom of the silver bowl. The scene was beautifully detailed, a gorgeous little picture, impossibly crisp and bright. He saw a shop front on a busy street in the middle of the day. Sunlight shone on the clean windows and the white stone of the building. A heavy door of dark brown wood stood slightly ajar, and inside, a young man was showing three customers his wares.

What was he selling?

Carefully, Alex increased the focus of the vision, allowing more Will to flow from his core into the scrying spell. He had to be very careful here, not allowing the Will to flood the spell, because the closer he looked at the vision, the more fine became the balance required to maintain the effect.

A part of himself was aware that he was breathing heavily, as if he’d just run a race. He made an effort to close his mouth and calm his breath, inhaling and exhaling steadily through his nose so that the force of his breath didn’t disturb the water of his spell.

Now, what are you selling? he thought. He succeeded in magnifying the vision in the bowl to the point where the window of the shop in the vision almost filled his view. As he watched, the young man in the picture turned to the window, apparently to better allow the light from the day outside to fall on his wares.

Alex saw the young man’s face. His own face. It was strange to see himself like this. Looking at a mirror is not the same as looking at oneself from outside. He did not look too bad. His thick mop of brown hair was untidy as always. His clean-shaven face was more round than angular, and that gave him a cheerful, youthful look.

It made him look more innocent than he was.

With a smile and a glow of satisfaction, Alex saw what it was that the version of himself in the vision was selling to the customer. He laughed, quietly. Unexpected, but not a bad idea when you considered it.

Knitted goods.

The image of himself in the vision was showing the customer a scarf of dark red wool, decorated with a twisting pattern of knotwork knitted into the weave.

Knitting. An innocent trade, and a valuable one here in Greenwyn City, where the rain fell more often than the sun shone, and the cold winds rolled down from Hammer Mountain to chill the citizens and make them lock their doors tight and wrap up warm even in what passed for summer.

Knitting. Not a skill Alex could claim, but one he could acquire.

He gazed at the vision a while longer. The version of himself he watched in his vision seemed to be doing well. The shop sold a wide variety of goods, thick and warm and done in bright, cheerful colours. As he watched the vision, he saw himself closing several sales, and the customers who left the shop did so with pleased smiles on their faces.

The sun shone on the front of the shop, and from what he could see of the street and the stone sides of the shop, he was looking into a sunny day in Greenwyn. Those were rare, he mused, at least outside of the middle of summer. So, his scrying spell was showing him a vision of something that took place sometime distant. Outside, today, it was the end of a long winter, and Greenwyn City would not see days like the one in the vision bowl for at least another three months, possibly four.

He tried to pull away from the shop in the vision, to get a view of the surrounds, and to try and work out the location of the shop, but in vain. The vision pulled out to the original magnification, then remained stubbornly in place.

Ah, well. It was definitely Greenwyn City - there was no mistaking that white stone, so ubiquitous in the sprawling centre of town - but where exactly, he could get no clue.

Alex felt his Will flow becoming strained. It was a long way from Depletion, but if he kept pushing himself, he would regret it tomorrow. And after all, he’d learned all he was going to learn from this summoning.

He sighed, leaning back from the bowl, and thanked the spell and his Will for their service, repeating the ritual words of gratitude three times in his head. Lifting his hands and turning them palm upward, he closed the channel he’d created for his Will to flow through and felt the primal power cease pouring from himself. The light in the bowl faded swiftly, and the clouds of white in the water closed over the bottom of the wide, shallow scryer’s bowl.

As the light faded, Alex sat still in his chair, taking long, slow, even breaths as he let himself come back to awareness of his surroundings. The room had grown dark in the time he’d been working, the last of the winter light fading in the street outside. It was still early by the clock, but a glance through his small window showed him a city street at night. Orange light from the streetlamps threw lurid shadows into his room.

He shivered suddenly, and stirred himself, wary of the encroaching lethargy that too often followed a deep scrying session, even when he didn’t push his flow of Will into Depletion levels. The solution was food, water, and movement. Even if he didn’t feel like it, he had to get up and get moving when a scrying session ended.

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From the window of his room, he could see the hands of the clock tower on the local district assembly hall. The hands glowed eerily, phosphor green above the orange glow of the lamplit city.

He smiled. No time like the present, he thought, as he moved toward the door.

Time for a visit to Mortys. And anyway, he could do with a walk.

Greenwyn City gleamed slick and wet in the persistent rain. Alex pulled the hood of his cloak up to cover his head. He pulled the cloak close around his front, holding the collar in place and hunching his shoulders against the weather. It was bitterly cold, and the rain was being blown in from the river at a near horizontal angle. The tiny drops were like freezing needles when they struck his face. He was glad of the deep hood on his cloak, and of the well-made leather gloves that protected his fingers.

Not everyone in Greenwyn City could claim to have such good clothing. Alex was far from being a rich man, but they were certainly people in the city who were a lot worse off than he was, and he didn’t forget it.

His room - a low price, rented apartment in one of the least desirable areas of town - was several miles away from where he wanted to go tonight. Despite the weather, the city was busy as he strode swiftly through the streets.

First, he marched through his own area, a rambling rabbit warren of streets and alleyways officially known as Dockyard Hill, but better known by the name the townsfolk gave it - the Stench.

The name was well earned. East of Greenwyn City, the Longway River flattened out and pooled into a huge body of water that was almost a lake, and a massive area of harbours and drydocks had grown up into this deep, safe anchorage. The city of Greenwyn had grown out from the harbour, feeding on the revenues, taxes, and population growth that came from the harbour’s trade and industry. Greenwyn had begun as a shipping city. It had become a sprawling commercial metropolis, the greatest trading hub in the north of Mirrindom.

Unfortunately, dockland trade and industry were not the most pleasantly scented things in the world. If there had been less room for the city to spread, then perhaps the area around the harbour would have being more carefully protected, but as it was, that had been a wide sheltered area of open country and rolling hills stretching for miles and miles out west from the Longway anchorage. So, as the city had grown, it had grown away from the stink and noise of the dockland industries, and the least desirable trades had grown to dominate the dockland area.

Hence the name that had become attached to the district. The Stench was home to leather tanners, slaughterhouses, foundries, tar pits, and many, many low dens where rough living ship crews who stopped at the Greenwyn harbour for a night or three on their way downriver could gamble and drink and carouse and fight to their hearts’ content before going on their way.

The Stench was home to the smells and sounds that came with these industries. It was also Alex’s home.

Apart from the smell, Dockland Hill (as the residents preferred to call it) wasn’t too bad a place to live. It was a rough part of town, but it wasn’t dangerous in the way many of the folk from other parts of the city thought it was. If a person went looking for trouble, then of course they were likely to find it, but there was a sense of camaraderie, a feeling of community and mutual support in the rough and ready population who lived in its narrow streets that Alex loved. It was also a sense of community that he had yet to find elsewhere in Greenwyn City.

Not that he’d lived anywhere else in the city, of course. As a man who had come to Greenwyn City off a fishing trawler crewed by some of the hardest men and women he’d ever known, he figured he had a more sympathetic view of such people than others might have. It was important to him to remember his roots. Alex was somebody who tried not to leap to judgement of others, mostly because he disliked it so much when others leaped to judgement of him.

Once out of Dockland Hill, Alex walked through the wider, straighter streets of the area known as Scriber’s Den. Here, rows of office buildings housed the labyrinthine administrative machinery that was required to support the massive shipping and trading industry, the beating heart of Greenwyn City’s economy.

Most of the offices were closing up as Alex passed them. Harassed-looking junior clerks hurried about outside the offices, heads and shoulders hunched against the rain, fighting the wind to get wooden shutters closed over the windows for the night. In the offices that were staying open for a few more hours, the warm glow of oil lamps shone through thick windows of frosted glass, and here and there a client stepped out of a doorway, hurrying down the street with hood raised and head down, or hurrying to the door of a horse-drawn carriage held open by a liveried footman.

The rattle of cartwheels and the clop-clop of horses’ hooves was a constant counterpoint to the swoosh of the rain. As Alex tramped through Scriber’s Den and up into Fairfield, tantalizing scents reached him from the restaurants that called this place home. Already, despite the relatively early hour, the restaurants in Fairfield were doing a solid trade.

The buildings had changed as he passed through the districts, becoming grander and grander the further he got from the Dockyard Hill. There, the buildings were thin and narrow, built of timber, four or even five stories tall, and roofed with shingle. The buildings of Scriber’s Den were the first ones where white stone dominated, but despite their two-story construction and slate roofs, Scriber’s Den retained the narrow, space-saving feel of the Dockyard Hill architecture. In Fairfield, the architecture matured and began to spread, as if when they’d got to this point, the people who had designed the structures had belatedly realised that they no longer needed to conserve space and building materials.

As Alex passed Fairfield and took a shortcut through the residential area around Plum Street, the buildings got larger and larger, until they became positively palatial. He stepped out from a quiet lane into a crowded thoroughfare.

Bright lights flooded the streets, no longer the eyewatering orange of the cheap streetlamps that lighted his home district. Here, the streetlamps threw out clean, creamy white, warm green, or soft reds. The streetlamps were supplemented by oil lamps on stands outside the cafes, restaurants, theatres, and other more discreet entertainment venues.

The wide streets were packed with people. Horses and carriages were barred from the city centre districts, so those who didn’t wish to walk were instead borne on litters carried by sturdy servants.

This was Greenwyn Centre. He had almost reached his destination.

The rain had eased. Alex pushed his hood back, enjoying the feel of the light breeze. Here, away from the river, it was warmer, and he relaxed, holding his head up and smiling at the people he passed. Some smiled back at him, but others looked away. An old man in ragged clothes approached him, holding out his cupped hands with a pleading expression, and Alex dug a coin out of his breast pocket, where he always kept a few coppers, and dropped the money in the man’s hands.

As the beggar bowed and turned away, a flash of movement caught the corner of Alex’s eye. He whirled, in time to see a small, skinny youth with very pale skin goggling at him from wide, staring eyes. The youth had been lifting Alex’s cloak and reaching for his belt purse, a small blade in his hand, seeking to cut the purse free while Alex was distracted by the beggar. As soon as he saw he’d been discovered, the cutpurse melted into the crowd and vanished away.

Alex shook his head and resolved to keep his eyes peeled. After a moment’s thought, he reached down and plucked his purse from his belt, holding it in his right hand under his cloak so no one could try to pinch it again. On a night like this, the criminal element of Greenwyn would be out in force. Alex had no desire to finish his trip without his purse.

He crossed Soulin Square, looking up over the high buildings that surrounded the square to where the opulent towers of the university glowed against the blackness of the sky.

A little below the university, at the base of the hill, lay his destination.