Chancellor Marks slammed the door to his viewing chamber. He uncoiled the apparatus in the center of the room and put both hands over the orb as he stood over it.

Nothing.

Marks maneuvered his hands around the glass ball, but received no feedback, no electrifying energy as his soul connected with the orb’s nearly unlimited power. How could it abandon him at such a crucial time as this? It was an impotent feeling that once it began to take hold, Marks couldn’t get the orb to reciprocate at all. It was shutting him out.

“Blast it!” Marks shook his hands at the blank, glass orb that looked as clear as crystal. The ball could have been nothing more than a nick-nack sitting on the shelf of a glass blower’s shop for a child to play with. “If this is how you’re going to treat me then perhaps I’ll summon one of your brothers!”

There was a firm knock at the chamber door, which only served to infuriate the chancellor further. Marks took another look at the blank orb, snarled at it, and made for the door.

His long black and gray hair had gotten sweaty while being in the humidity of the vorago. He swept both strands of it from the front aside with his thumbnails that he noticed had become grimy and yellow.

Marks opened the door to see his good friend, Thayer, standing in the corridor. He wore his expensive attire: a long-sleeved linen shirt beneath his forest green tunic. The sleeves of his undershirt had been rolled to his forearms, and his travel jacket slung over one shoulder.

“I heard you speaking. Am I interrupting something?” Thayer cocked his brow at Marks.

“No,” drawled Marks as he stepped aside for Thayer to enter, “I was just complaining to myself about the ridiculous results of the Tornetum.”

Thayer entered and Marks closed the door behind him. Marks realized that he had been degrading the orb in near darkness before Thayer arrived. He lifted both palms with the practiced fire spell in his mind to light the torches within their sconces around windows at the top of his tower room.

“Yes, it was a bit lackluster, except for the monk.” Thayer said. “Curious, don’t you think?”

“What about it? The girl uses martial arts and that stupid staff to execute her strange acupuncture technique to immobilize all of her opponents.” Marks said as he rounded the path back to his viewing chamber with Thayer following behind. “Skillful, absolutely. Entertaining: not so much for the crowd.”

“She’s very interesting.” Thayer said. “None of these techniques have ever been implemented in the vorago games. How could a teenage girl with a wooden staff leave four dozen men incapacitated? She didn’t kill any one of her assailants, and even Rhenos will probably survive with a severe concussion. She didn’t appear to take any injury herself.”

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“Are you insinuating that she’s cheating in some way?” Marks leaned upon the stone apparatus for the effectively useless orb behind him as Thayer stood before him.

“Not cheating, but I think there are some ways we could level the playing field if you’re interested.”

The idea did intrigue Marks, but then so did the other ideas he’d had to take down the annoying girl. Part of him hated to give her another opportunity to succeed, but he was also a little curious as to what Thayer had in mind. The young man had exceeded all of Chancellor Marks’s expectations since he graduated from Ethan Academy at the top of his class. Maybe he could put this annoying pest to the dirt once and for all.

“Well, go on.” Marks waved.

“I mean, we did just take down an outpost from the Humans of Earth a few weeks back during a surprise night attack. They had all kinds of ordinance from their planet for us to commandeer. Why don’t we do what the Humans do and shoot at our problems until they go away?”

“I like it,” said Marks. “It’s dirty, but the way the audience rioted after Rhenos, I think they’d be perfectly satisfied to see her fall in a hail of gunfire.”

“We should save that for last,” mused Thayer. “Let the girl think she can survive, and then pull the rug out from under her. Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll fall early. Either way, she’ll die by the end of the day tomorrow. Then we can have our usual enjoyable finale on day three.”

Marks chewed the inside of his cheek. “What if she survives?”

“A monk versus a barrage of bullets? Unlikely.” Thayer said.

“I didn’t think she’d make it this far, so if she does…somehow survive, do you know where Nissentis is being kept?”

“I seriously doubt that will be necessary.” Thayer said.

“Deltia has hold of Ignasis. I told you to hide Nissentis, so bring Nissentis or pry that Omne forsaken globe from Deltia’s fingers. I only need two of the orbs to eliminate that girl if I have to, but she’s become a nuisance I no longer want to worry about.”

“Has something happened?” Thayer watched Marks.

Marks met Thayer’s green eyes. “Sykihr,” he pointed at the glass ball, “it showed me a vision of that damned girl…seated at the throne of Narcuss.” The words left his lips like poison. Speaking them aloud felt like sacrilege, as if doing so might make the likelihood of this vision more possible.

A dour look filled Thayer’s face. The orbs were very insightful. Even Thayer knew that from his little experience in contact with Nissentis. “This is troubling.”

“That it is.” Marks spoke.

Thayer held up both hands. “Give me a chance to work some magic.”

“See to it that you do.”

Thayer gave a quick bow to the chancellor and then hurried back down the ramp toward the chamber door where he entered.