Mind Reading 5

He walked as fast as he could without seeming to hurry. He reached out, carefully, into the minds around him. It was a cacophony, a mad tangle of voices, and half of them weren’t even human.

Vagrant. Thief. Poor kid. Wretch.

His headache was getting worse.

Still, he was able to snatch scraps of meaning from the din. This was the garment district, and his clothes—ringer garb, some buried part of him said—looked like rags by comparison. Some holiday called Rauck-Chauv was coming up soon. A group known as “Orzhov” seemed to own this area, or politically control it, or somewhere in between. Hundreds of minds, and not one of them was thinking about anything outside the city. Was that strange? Maybe city folk were like that.

He spotted at least two distinct law enforcement agencies, and stayed out of their sight as much as possible. He needed to get somewhere where he’d draw less attention. He seized on the seediest, grimiest thoughts, the minds that wore the clothes that looked most like his, and followed them like a thread.

In ten minutes he was somewhere else, a district where the alleys were narrower and the shadows darker, and everyone was focused on their own business.

He walked on, mindful of ambush, reaching out to the minds around him for any scrap of information that could help him.

At last, cradled like a treasure within the mind of a filthy, hungry girl, he found it:

Emmara Tandris.

She took in strays. But where?

Ovitzia.

Good enough.

JACE’S ORIGIN: ABSENT MINDS