Below us sorcery flared as at last began the ritual we’d been awaiting. Our respite. Chords of magic, thick and burning, began to flow along the trajectory the columns had set as the smell of ozone filled the air and a dim pressure began to mount. The dead god on his throne in Keter had blinded us, here in Hainaut, but his hollow miracles were not beyond us.

Hierophant laughed, exulting as the ritual took, and ripped open an eye in the sky.

- Book 6, Chapter 63: Dynamism

---

Truth was, even now Masego hadn’t found a way to genuinely break the rituals that the Dead King used to prevent scrying in the territories he held. For two years the Arsenal had tried, after we made it it clear to some of the finest magical minds of Calernia that regaining that capacity would be militarily invaluable, but no working counter-ritual had come of it. We had brought together exceptional people, but our enemy was more than just that: he was the Hidden Horror, the exception itself. So Hierophant, for all that he’d suffered a god riding his mind for most of a year and studied the wards at Lyonceau – where the Tyrant had borrowed from the Dead King’s work, among other things – had not been able to overturn the weight of the millennia’s bearing down on us. Zeze was brilliant, but there were some things beyond brilliance.

So Hierophant had stolen a mystery from an entity that could win.

...

The marble cube was seared on three sides, but it’d not just been fire thrown at rock. It’d been a sculpture, in a sense: the central valley of Hainaut and some of the outskirts, as seen from the sky. Each of the three facets had captured that sight for the blink of that great eye above and seen it seared onto the marble. There were imprecisions, of course. The Dead King’s rituals had muddled it up some. But that was the entire point of having several discharges, as there’d be very few places on our ‘map’ where the imprecisions had taken all three times.

“So this is what the world looks like through a Choir’s eyes,” I said.

“Not exactly,” Roland told me. “Think of angels as seeing the world through a lens. What you can witness seared here is what we mortals would see when looking through that same lens.”

“Humans don’t have the parts necessary to observe Creation as a Choir would,” Masego absent-mindedly noted. “Even soul scaffolding wouldn’t be sufficient, it would require complete essence reconstruction. As Duchess of Moonless Nights we would have been able to replace the marble with your mind and allow you to look directly, as the damage would have repaired itself, but as you currently are you would not survive the experience.”

I still remembered how much of a pain just stealing Ashkaran from echoes in Arcadia had been, so I suspected that he was downplaying the difficulties involved when he simply called it ‘damage’.

“Good to know,” I muttered. “I believe we can work with this, Masego. We’ll need magnifying glass for some of the details, but I can already make out the bare bones.”

Such as they were, which was pretty worrying. I limped back and forth between the facets, narrowing my eyes at what I saw. If I correctly understood where we were, then at the moment we were… north-west of what had to be the Iron Prince’s army. Unfortunately, that put us in the wrong place. Ahead of the Prince Klaus’ column was a large force of undead, but not so large he shouldn’t be able to defeat it on the field. Behind it, though, was what had to be the missing Luciennerie army. By the looks of it it’d divided into three smaller forces: one was headed south towards the Cigelin Sisters, but the other two columns were marching straight towards where the Iron Prince was going to have to give battle.

That put them square to the south of us, and went some way in explaining why this part of Hainaut was swarming with warbands. Worse, it looked like my allies had left part of their forces behind: to the west of Juvelun there was something that looked like a camp. Hard to tell numbers without using something to magnify the details, though, which could wait until we’d gotten back to camp.

...

I leaned forward over the ‘map’ Hakram had put together from the seared stone, tapping a finger on the representation of Klaus Papenheim’s army. The part of it on the march, at least.

...

“This,” I said, as I put down my finger on the Iron Prince’s army, “is the other Grand Alliance army in Hainaut. We want to save it, because if we don’t we’re fucked for the year – if not for much longer than that.”

I moved my finger slightly west on the map, maybe a day’s march away from Klaus’ army.

“This is an undead force, which has to be at least twenty thousand and probably more,” I said. “The Iron Prince is marching on it, and will probably beat it in an open battle, but it represents a trap.”

I moved even further west, still at the same height. There three forces could be made out, but I ignored the one headed south towards the Cigelin Sisters. That one was General Abigail’s problem, or if she got lucky her prey: should the Sisters fall before those reinforcements arrive, Abigail of Summerholm would be in a very good position to simply smash that army when it arrived before her. It was always pleasant to be reminded that, for all his advantages over us, the Dead King had limits to his sight as well.

“This is an army that used to be far to the west, in Luciennerie, but marched east to surprise us here in the valley,” I said. “It’s large, at least a hundred thousand, and odds are it’s going to hit the Iron Prince’s army just the day after it fought a battle against the undead force I mentioned previously. That would be bad.”

...

“We are here, more or less,” I finished, pointing to a spot on the map.

Northwest of the Iron Prince and the undead he would soon fight, north of the Luciennerie columns.

- Book 6, Chapter 64: Candidate Moves