She gazed at the doors for a few moments, then moved off. “Annubi treats me like a child,” she muttered to herself. “Everyone does. Nobody takes me seriously. Nobody ever tells me anything. Ah, but I know a way to find out.” She turned and looked back at the closed doors and saw a challenge to her ingenuity. “Should I?” she wondered. By the time she had reached the end of the corridor, she had already made up her mind.

Flitting like a lithe shadow along the darkened mazework of lower rooms and corridors Charis came at last to a narrow red door. Without hesitation she put her hands on the door and pushed it open. The room within was lit by a single lamp hanging from a chain by the door. With practiced movements she drew a beeswax taper from a wicker basket, lit it from the flickering lamp, and made her way to the round table in the center of the room.

On the table, resting on a base of chased gold, sat the Lia Fail, a stone of murky crystal the size and shape of an ostrich egg. Charis placed the taper in a holder and stretched her hands to the egg, peering into its depths. The veins in the stone were dark, like blue smoke, and turgid, like the silted waters of the River Coran; it was, Annubi liked to say, the smoke of possibility and the fertile thickness of opportunity.

She composed her thoughts as she had been taught, closed her eyes, and recited the incantation for seeing-once, and then twice more. Gradually she felt the stone warm beneath her hands. She opened her eyes to see that the smoke-tinted veins had thinned, becoming transparent wisps that seemed to writhe and dance like a sea mist fading in the sun’s first rays.

“Seeing stone,” she addressed it, “I seek knowledge of what is to be. My spirit is restless. Show me something…” She paused, thinking how best to phrase the request. “Yes, show me something of traveling.”