Yutten Turse casting magic in the style of Léon Spilliaert, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  She had been afraid she would not be able to sleep with such an exciting – and, she thought, potentially momentous – case swirling in her head, but again the Blight helped her out. After a full day of magical concentration, she was mentally exhausted anyway. But she woke up feeling rested and enthusiastic about moving forward.

  It would have been just as easy – in some ways more so – to do this work from home, but she wanted everything to look as normal as possible. So, she went to the office like usual, acting normal but feeling like she was onto something big. And that she had found a method to move into it.

  She spent the whole day observing the translucent thing she had found, although she had to split up her effort to avoid exhaustion.

  The need for breaks also gave her an excuse to walk around and chat with people about the war, keeping up appearances. When she would normally have called it a day, she went home and continued her work from there until she was too tired.

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  The invisible thing was a detection engram. She was pretty sure about that.

  It was waiting for a Diviner to show an interest in Canardo, which would activate it, presumably so that it raised an alarm. The whole thing was probably not too different from the engram that had caught her and Z?rgiebel the other day.

  While it was clearly Divination magic, it belonged to a class of engrams that Yutten had never been taught. She knew about surveillance engrams, which were standard investigator procedure, but Yutten had always been surveilling physical spaces. What she was looking at here, however, was an engram surveilling a magical space.

  Something reserved for Protectors? She wondered what Chandrian would say about it. And she wondered if she would dare to ask him.

  One question was: the detection engram was looking for anyone focusing Divination on Canardo, but was it also looking out for itself? Would it react if she focused an engram on it?

  It seemed like a gamble. To know its inner workings, she would have to Divine it, thus risk triggering it. Or she would have to observe it being triggered by someone else, which also seemed risky. She didn’t know what measures her adversaries would go to if they found out someone knew about Canardo, but she wasn’t eager to find out.

  Perhaps general archivist magic could be the solution. She had no experience with this, but it seemed possible to focus a general query on the magical space produced by her previous query.

  To do that, she would have to focus a second Divination engram on the results obtained by the first engram, meaning she would have to maintain her focus on the first query while launching the second. That wasn’t easy, but it seemed the worst thing that might happen was that she failed, losing focus on the first Divination while trying to raise energy and flow for the second.

  She decided to sleep on it.