Cursed

The man Talisid had nodded towards was the one who’d been in the driver’s seat, now standing a little apart from the others. He was tall, with short sandy hair and an athlete’s build, strong and fast. He was wearing black body armour with a high-tech look, along with dark combat fatigues, black gloves and boots, and a webbing belt that held a handgun, a machine pistol, a knife, and half a dozen metal cylinders that looked suspiciously like grenades. A second pistol rested in an ankle holster, and he carried a weapon in a sling that looked like a cross between a submachine gun and an assault rifle. He watched me with calm blue eyes as I walked up. “Garrick?” I asked.

Garrick nodded and spoke in a deep voice. “What’s the layout?”

“I’ll tell you once we get inside.”

“Going with Talisid?”

“With you.”

Garrick raised an eyebrow and looked me up and down. I was wearing combat trousers, black sneakers, a belt with a few things hooked into it, and a light fleece. If Garrick looked like something out of a military thriller, I looked like an amateur camper. “I’m flattered,” Garrick said, “but you’re not my type.”

“I’m your recon,” I said.

“That’s nice,” Garrick said. “You can do it from the van.”

“I’m not going to be in the van.”

“This is a combat mission,” Garrick said patiently. “We don’t have time to babysit.”

A lot of people think diviners are useless in a fight. All in all it helps me more than it hurts me, but it’s still a bit of a nuisance when you want to be taken seriously. “I’ll be the one doing the babysitting,” I said. “Those guns won’t do much good if this thing takes your head off from behind.”

I expected Garrick to get annoyed but he only gave me a look of mild inquiry. “What are you going to do? Punch it?”

“I’m going to tell you exactly where it is and what it’s doing,” I said. “If you can’t figure out a way to beat this thing with that going for you, then you can back off and let us handle it.”

Garrick studied me a moment longer, then shrugged. “Your funeral.” He turned to the other men. “Let’s move.”

The inside of the factory was pitch-black. The power had been turned off a long time ago and the lights that hadn’t been smashed or lost their bulbs were dark. Corridors were cluttered with old machinery and pieces of junk that had been piled up and left to decay, forcing us to pick a winding path through the obstacles and making it difficult to get a clear line of sight. The air smelt of dust and rusted metal.

The creature we were hunting was called a barghest: a shapeshifter that can take the form of either a human or a great wolflike dog. They’ve got preternatural speed and strength, and they’re difficult to detect with normal or magical senses. Or so the stories say; I’ve never met one. But all the sources agreed that the creatures killed with claws and teeth, making these sort of dark, cramped quarters the absolute worst place to fight one. There were too many possible hiding places, too many ways the creature could lie in wait to attack from behind.

Of course, that was the reason Talisid had brought me along.

To my eyes, the factory existed on two levels. There was the present, a world of darkness and shadow, broken only by the torches in my hand and on Garrick’s rifle, looming obstacles blocking our path and the threat of danger around every corner. But overlaid upon that was a second world, a branching web of lines of glowing white light, the web branching over and over again through four dimensions, multiplying into thousands and millions of thinning wisps, every one a possible future. The futures of the corridor and the objects within it were fixed and solid, while my and Garrick’s futures were a constantly shifting web, flickering and twisting with every moment.

Looking through the futures I saw my possible actions, and their consequences. I saw myself stepping on the loose piece of scrap metal in front of me, saw myself tripping and falling, and corrected my movements to avoid it. As I did, the future in which I fell thinned to nothingness, never to exist, and the futures of me stepping around it brightened in its place. By seeing the future, I decided; as I decided, the future changed, and new futures replaced those never to happen. To anyone watching, it looks like pure fluke; every step in the right place, every hazard avoided without seeming to notice. But the obstacles were just a detail. Most of my attention was on the near and middle future, watching for the flurry of movement and weapons fire that would signal an attack. As long as I was paying attention, nothing in this factory could surprise us; long before anything got into position for an ambush, I could see it and give warning.

This was why Talisid had wanted me along. Just by being here, I could bring the chances of things going seriously wrong down to almost zero. Knowledge can’t win a battle, but it’s one hell of a force multiplier.