She sips from her cup. “Do you really see the future, Reverence?”
“But how could I?” the girl says. “One cannot see that which is not set in stone. I see only possibilities, and even then, small fragments. The future is an infinite number of threads branching away from a single continuously moving point: the present. Through the Void I see many more threads than you do at any given time, so I am able to tell which ones are thicker. That is not the same as prophecy.”
“So you do guesswork, essentially.”
“Exceptional guesswork, Your Highness.”
“Can you guess why I’m here, then?”
“You are here to help me, of course.”
The Enchantress feels a mirthless smile breaking on her face and sits back in her chair. “Am I, now.”
“I believe so, yes,” the sibyl says. “There is a great disturbance in the threads of time. Something is in motion, but there are too many threads affected for me to pinpoint where the disturbance is coming from. I need a piece of information, a trail or a scent—something that will help me focus. You are about to give that to me.”
For a moment the Enchantress wonders if this girl is truly as young as she looks. “Perhaps I am.” She gazes into her tea while she orders her thoughts. It would not be wise to reveal too much, at least not before she has pried the answers she seeks from the girl. Then it won’t matter what she sees. “Someone with a key to something old and very powerful is approaching this city. I need to know everything you can tell me about them, if they really exist, anything to help me identify them when they arrive.”
The sibyl finally raises her head, and all the light in the chamber flees, pooling at the edges and corners as if a tangible cloud of darkness has materialized to push it away. At the center of it the sibyl’s eyes are impossibly black windows into the Void, bordered by weak halos of light.
The Enchantress shivers despite herself.
“A key . . .” In the unsettling gloom the sibyl turns her head like she’s tracking movement in the chamber, and the Enchantress thinks she sees mounting awe in the child’s expression. “Yes, a key is the source of the disturbance. Although . . . it is only part of it. A small part. A vital part.” She gasps, her soulless eyes fixing on something in blank space. “Oh, these are ancient threads.”
The Enchantress frowns as a prickle of anxiety turns to impatience. She needs her answers before the sibyl sees too much. “Tell me what you see, Reverence. Tell me about the one who brings this key.”
The sibyl pries her gaze away from whatever she was looking at and picks up the bones on the mat. The Enchantress watches her rattle them between her cupped palms only to scatter them in front of her. She is quiet for a long time as she peruses the bones, a spread hand moving over them with its palm facing downward.
Finally the Enchantress loses her patience. “What are you doing?”
“Do you know of the Great Forgetting?” the sibyl says, and the Enchantress has to struggle to hide her alarm.
What has she seen?
“I know of the legend. Supposedly there was a night several thousand years ago when all history was erased from the minds of every human being alive. Why do you ask?”
“It is no legend but truth.” The sibyl keeps moving her hand over the bones. “These bone fragments belong to an ancient queen, a woman of great consequence who lived before the Great Forgetting. Though her deeds are lost to us, they touched so many threads of time that she serves as a lodestar to those of us with the dark sight.”
The sibyl’s hand stops when the halos around her eyes brighten. And then, with a bloodcurdling voice as old as she is young, a voice that seems to transcend time itself, she says: “I see a prince with a bow, riding a terrible beast of the wild with fur as white as sap. A warrior cloaked in blood follows him, then a seeker of justice shrouded in the night, then a maiden of death who wields the Void . . .”
Before the Enchantress can puzzle out what this means, the sibyl withdraws her hand like it has been scorched by fire. “Oh no.”
The Enchantress edges forward in her chair. “What is it? Tell me.”
“So much death . . . so many threads crumbling to ash . . . the riders bring doom upon this city.”
A thrill of fear and excitement runs through the Enchantress. She traces a lacquered nail over the rim of her teacup, feeling it tremble in her hand. So it’s true. The key to the Ascendancy’s power has been found. “Is that all you see?”
Now the sibyl looks straight at her with those horrific eyes of hers, and the Enchantress burns with the sudden desire to know exactly what she sees. “You must not let the prince pass through the gates. You must stop him. Save this city!”
The Enchantress decides that it is time to leave. Clearly she has extracted as much use from the young sibyl as she ever will. She places her teacup on the table and picks up her gloves. “You have been most helpful, Reverence. And thanks for the tea.” And then she rises from her chair and makes for the exit, only to stop at the sibyl’s desperate pleas.
“You don’t understand the scale of the destruction we face, Your Highness,” the child cries. “You must stop the prince before he brings ruin upon us all. Surely it is why you are here.”
With a chilled smile the Enchantress turns around, and she lets a morsel of her power peek through the veil she hides it under. “But ruin is exactly what I seek, my dear sibyl.”
The sibyl stares in shock. If she could not see the threads of time that touched the Enchantress before, she can certainly see them now. “You,” she whispers.
“Indeed.”
The Enchantress leaves the chamber without another word, and just before they reach the portal to the undercity, she turns to her masked Jasiri and whispers, “Put spies near the city gates. I want to know the moment someone rides in on a white beast, something sizable and likely predatory. He will be traveling with three companions.”
“As you wish, Your Highness,” says one of her masked guardians, and his voice comes out with a harsh metallic edge.
“And one last thing.” The Enchantress casts a glance down the tunnel, where the hum of voices can be heard, the sounds of cultists living their lives and raising families in these sewers like rats. “Purge the sanctuary. No one gets out of here alive.”
A brief silence as the two Jasiri share a look. “What of the sibyl, Your Highness?” says the one who spoke before, and the Enchantress lets a silent gaze answer his question. His fiendish mask conceals his face, but the hesitation is clear in his voice when he speaks. “But she is the last soothsayer. The late king consulted with her regularly. She was under his protection.”
“Am I flinching?”
After a pause, the Jasiri nods. “It will be done.”
And it will; of this she is certain. The Jasiri will not fail to carry out her orders to the fullest extent, and the Cult of Vigilance will be wiped from this city once and for all.
A smile stretches her lips as she leaves the sanctuary. It falters, though, when she hears the first screams behind her, but she forces it to hold.