It took me six minutes to reach the rock by the route none of the porters used.
The west side of the camp had a footpath that the survey work followed along the ridge, and this morning I had taken it because it would let me out of the camp without crossing the cookfire’s line of sight.
It did not take me much to slip out of my tent, since I cut a hole through the back and left without alerting any of my friends, most importantly, Rex.
The path angled north-west for about two hundred meters, then bent south-east as the ridge curved.
At the bend, I stepped off the path and cut across open ground for another three hundred and fifty meters until I reached the rock.
The rock was a glacial deposit, weathered, the size of a small house, sitting alone at the southern edge of the open ground.
From its eastern shoulder, I had a clean line of sight back to the camp and to the eastern face of the pyramid. From any angle other than my own, the rock blocked the line of sight to where I was crouched.
I had been here for fifteen minutes watching the camp.
The wind had picked up, and the cold morning was becoming even colder.
There were small movements in the grass, and the occasional whisper of dust against the rock, the kind of ambient noise that would mask the sound of my boots if I needed to move.
I crouched against the eastern shoulder with my back flat to the stone and my staff across my knees. The bell at the head of the staff did not ring. I had wrapped a fold of my robe around the charms before leaving the tent so they would not give me away.
Death-Touched sat across my awareness without flaring. The title was active, and at this distance, the camp registered as a faint background pressure rather than as cold spots.
I had figured out that this Title could be used as a detection tool, and surprisingly, it worked. No one was looking for me, no one was preparing to harm me, and the title was not finding anything immediate to flag.
Good. It meant I was where I was supposed to be.
The camp was at mid-morning. The cookfires were burning at full. Aldis, the cook, was scraping the porridge pot; despite being a bad cook, he was clean, and I think that was why we endured him.
Pell was complaining to someone about supply crates. Two of the junior researchers were unrolling a length of canvas at the southern edge, for what purpose I had never been sure, because the canvas always came up and went back down in the same hour without anyone using it for anything I could see.
These were the people who would die. The cook, the porters, the researchers. They had been dying in front of me for eleven mornings, and I had let myself stop learning their names because there was nothing I could do for them at the level of power I had reached.
At our cookfire, Bari was holding a bowl in one hand and gesticulating with the other.
No doubt he was telling one of his crazy stories, but I could see him glancing at my tent, knowing him, I had about an hour before he came to check up on me, no doubt he thinks I am meditating or preparing for the day.
Bari thinks I took my studies too seriously, and I no longer try to convince him that I liked the work it takes to become a Magus.
Many conversations between us mostly went like this,
"Why would anyone want to meditate for seven hours?"
"I do, because unlike you, who was born with a high Anima Sensitivity, mine only grows when I take the time to meditate on the essence of the world."
From this distance, I could not hear the story Bari was saying, but the shape of it was visible in the way his shoulders moved, and Dara was beside him with her bowl in her lap, looking past him toward the pyramid, and occasionally nodding.
Always the pyramid. Dara’s attention had been on the pyramid in every loop.
That was the first thing I had to think about.
She had fought and died beside me many times, and I was not suspicious of her, but I could not forget the way Dara had looked at me at the moment of her death.
She had known something, maybe not the ritual, but something about her attitude was not normal. Dara had a story, but this was not the time to ask her for it.
Dara was not an enemy, but she could be a complication. Could this complication help me in this situation, maybe, but I needed to be more careful about how I decided to unwrap it. I did not want a repeat of Rex’s accident.
I tracked my sight north. Commander Rel was at the northern edge. From four hundred meters, I could not read her expression, but she appeared neither tense nor relaxed.
I tried not to stare because I knew the perception of Adepts was high and they would sense my gaze, so I quickly moved my eyes away, and kept her in the field of my peripheral vision.
She was my enemy, and I had to figure out how many enemies I had in the camp.
However, I did not know why in the previous loops, Scholar Orath and Rex had vanished, but she seemed not to have any idea where they had gone.
Did something unexpected happen, or was she not part of the entire conspiracy?
Why would anyone want to release demons from the earth? Or was this an unknown side effect of activating the pyramid? Did they know that demons would emerge from the earth, or was it all part of their crazy plan?
I moved my sight to the south, where Mage Torvin was at the instrument table, his magnificent mustache catching the morning light, and his hands moving across an instrument I had seen him calibrate every morning of the expedition.
He should be checking his readings, and his attention was on the brass dial in front of him, and the dial was on the pyramid.
There was a slight frown on his face, as if he saw something that he did not like. I wondered what it was.