Clairvoyance 8

The almost-but-not-quite-hostile conversation continued, but Jace ceased listening. With a moment’s effort—made only moderately more difficult by his lingering injury—he allowed his senses to recede, pulling away from the table but not dismissing the spell of clairvoyance entirely.

***

And then the moment was gone, blown away along with Jace’s concentration as someone pounded on Emmara’s front door with a brutish, heavy fist. Jace fell back against the pillow with a gasp as the sharp sound not only came to him faintly through the floorboards, but directly into his mind via the spell that kept a portion of his senses hovering in the room below.

Curious and perhaps more than reasonably annoyed at the interruption, he directed the spell to flow outward, moving it past the many pillars that supported Emmara’s manor, slipping it through the wood of the heavy portal, allowing him to take a good solid gander at the man outside. He saw nothing of note, just a large, vaguely gorillalike fellow with a crate under one hand. A courier of some sort, obviously.

But Jace’s paranoia was in full bloom, and he took a moment to really concentrate, to scan the surface thoughts of the man outside. It was difficult, reading his mind through a lens of clairvoyance, but that just made it a better test of his recovery.

And then Jace was out of bed, stumbling and slipping against the lingering pain, careening off the wall as he lost his balance, reaching desperately for the nearest teleportation pillar.

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 23