“A map… I need a map…”

  Kes pulled from his pocket the map he’d grabbed from the common work hall and handed it to Calypso. He didn’t have a pencil on hand, so he spread the map out right on the withered grass and drew on it with a spell, as if tracing a bright red line with his finger.

  “Our colleagues are expecting a pentagram to appear in this zone today,” Calypso said, pointing to a district on the map.

  “Because supposedly the pentagram across the city should be drawn like this.”

  Calypso drew a typical pentagram on the map, marking three large dots in the city where pentagrams had already been opened.

  “Accordingly, the fifth pentagram should theoretically appear here based on these calculations,” Calypso marked a bright yellow dot at a square in the city park.

  “And that point would be the final one, breaking the seal. But the place where we are now doesn’t correspond to this pentagram at all. It doesn’t fit any angle.”

  “Maybe it’s just something new?” Kes suggested.

  “Attempt number two, someone starting over? Or something else?”

  Calypso slowly shook his head. His eyes had a strange look — frightened and tense, I’d say. I wasn’t used to seeing Calypso like this. Outwardly he remained calm, but his eyes gave him away, practically screaming profanities about the whole situation.

  “We’ve been looking in the wrong place…” he whispered in horror.

  “What?” Kes didn’t understand.

  “We set up the patrol in the wrong place,” Calypso said in a strange, tense voice

  “What if…”

  He shot a piercing look at the rune carved with the ritual dagger on the victim’s forehead.

  “What if someone has discovered a new type of pentagram for breaking the Seals of Creation?” Calypso said slowly.

  “Or not discovered, but simply activated something so different from shadow magic that we simply don’t know about it because there are basically no guides in the world, and no one to give advice on this? No one has ever done it before, and there’s no information about it. But that was true of familiar types of magic once too. Father shook down everyone he could on this topic but learned nothing new. “

  “We’re used to all Seals being absolutely identical in form. The classic five-pointed star, with the only difficulty being correctly determining the rotation angle of such a pentagram when laying it over a city map. And when properly activated, it creates a certain energy surge that tears through the fabric of reality. But maintaining the correct energy ritual pattern is critically important even a small deviation can ruin everything. But what if… What if in shadow magic that doesn’t work? What if there are different rules there, completely different laws of magic, and the Seal’s form can also be different?”

  “Sounds like nonsense, any necromancer would laugh at you,” Kes snorted, crossing his arms.

  “What other form could it possibly be?””

  “Well, for example… What if we assume…”

  Calypso bent over the map again and drew a zigzag rune in bright blue — an exact copy of the one on all the victims’ foreheads. He drew it over the three points — the previously opened pentagrams — and completed the image at the point where we currently were.

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  This rune, like the classic pentagram, also had five energy nodes, only they weren’t classically closed — they looked more like a lightning bolt, I’d say. Calypso marked the fourth node with a thick purple dot — and it was very far from where our colleagues and the Inquisitors were stationed today. We were currently closest to this point. It all looked like a strange zigzag pattern on the map, but if you allowed even for a moment that we’d been looking in the wrong place all along, that the pentagram points should be arranged across the city in an atypical pentagram, that such laws were possible in shadow magic, and that the fourth pentagram really was already open, then…

  “Holy shit,” that was the most decent expression among those spinning through my mind.

  Kes didn’t hold back on the language, and his curses echoed in my throbbing head.

  My head suddenly ached from the tension and realization of how blind we’d been — all of us. The clue had been dangling before our eyes the whole time — literally, right on the victims’ foreheads — and we’d been looking for some other meaning in it, never suspecting it could be the rune of an energy node for a fundamentally new type of pentagram. Not even a pentagram, but… I don’t know what to properly call this zigzag squiggle.

  “Armarillis and the General Staff calculated the timing of the new pentagram very precisely: it really does need to open today. But… we all failed to account for a different form of Seal. One unfamiliar to us, unknown,” Calypso said slowly, judging by his concentrated expression, the gears in his head were working at triple speed.

  “And it turns out that… They’re going to break the fifth pentagram today… And not where everyone is stationed. Not there at all. But… here,” with these words, Calypso pointed at the thick purple dot on the map.

  “And when will this happen?” I asked tensely, looking at my watch, which showed it was almost three o’clock.

  “The Mentor said if the pentagram doesn’t appear by three in the afternoon, the ritual will be disrupted. What about this squiggle?”

  “I already said: Armarillis and the General Staff calculated the timing of the new pentagram very precisely… The Seal of Creation’s form is different, but the timing remains the same: if the pentagram doesn’t appear by three in the afternoon, the ritual will be disrupted. And there’s still time before three. And the energy peak is happening right now, honestly.”

  “Then we have five to ten minutes at most,” I whispered in horror.

  And no way to quickly contact the Mentor, because all our colleagues have temporarily disabled their linked bracelet-artifacts. Just wonderful.

  “Can you send someone a mental message warning them?” I asked Calypso.

  He shook his head.

  “I can’t reach that far. With you it might work, but not with the others.”

  “What if we sent them some kind of message like an enchanted paper airplane?” Kes suggested.

  “It would probably burn up on approach or just veer off course our people have surely surrounded themselves with layers of wards. We can’t rely on that kind of magic.”

  “But we have to urgently tell the Mentor about all this!” I exclaimed.

  I literally clutched my head, trying to breathe evenly and calmly, but it wasn’t working well because panic was threatening to overwhelm me. I was nervous. Very nervous. Wildly nervous!! The situation seemed hopeless.

  “Let’s teleport to the Mentor,” I said decisively.

  “Right now!”

  “I’d rather teleport to the planned pentagram point,” Calypso shook his head, looking at me very seriously.

  “If someone is about to break the Seal of Creation right now, we might still be able to stop them. By the time we get through to the Mentor, time will pass, and time isn’t on our side right now.”

  “But we definitely need the Mentor’s help or some of our more senior Fortemins!”

  “I’ll go for help,” Kes said anxiously, running his fingers through his hair.

  “I’ll teleport somewhere to our people, find someone, raise the alarm, then immediately come back to you and guide our colleagues to you. You deal with the fifth pentagram. It’ll be faster if we split up.”

  Calypso nodded.

  “Makes sense. Kes run to the Mentor. Lori and I will head to the fifth pentagram point.”

  Kes nodded and teleported immediately, and Calypso reached for my hand so we could teleport together to the needed point. I gripped his palm tightly.

  “What happens if we’re too late?” I asked in a whisper for some reason, looking at Calypso’s face with desperate hope.

  “I’m afraid we won’t make it back for dinner,” he said grimly.