“What are you doing, Barl?” Ada Mortyn demanded. “Leave my work alone!”

“Oh, be quiet, Ada,” she said, impatient. “I’m not touching it. Look—” She pressed the heel of her hand to her temple, wincing. “Something’s wrong. Can’t you feel it?”

“No,” said Nyn Bardulf. “You’re imagining things.”

She wasn’t. Frustrated, she watched Ibbitha and the others return to their benches, oblivious to the danger. The pain behind her eyes was pulsing… pulsing…

“Barl!” Ibbitha protested. “What are you doing? Stop it! Put that down!”

“I’m fetching Arndel!” somebody else shouted, but she didn’t care about them either. Eyes closed, she clutched Ibbitha’s silver incant cradle, but couldn’t feel anything wrong. The problem wasn’t here. Tossing it aside she leapt next to Baret Ventin’s bench. He tried to block her, but she was so angry, so desperate, she nearly pushed him to the floor.

And there it was, the source of the danger. The unravelling incant was in the central timepiece of Baret’s exquisitely opulent funeral clock. Commissioned by Lord and Lady Somerfell to honour his late father, it was worth even more than the Tarkalin of Ranoush’s extravagance.

And it was about to blow apart, and take the artisanry with it.

“Baret, you snivelling idiot, what did you do?”

Deaf to his ranting, to her shouting fellow artisans, she snatched up the clock. The unstable incant hammered against her mage-sense, throbbing pain through every bone and muscle. Fighting the urge to run, she opened herself to the twisting mayhem of Baret’s mistake.

Except it wasn’t a mistake. He’d done this on purpose.

What was he thinking? You can’t thread the central helix counterclockwise! All that does is unravel the incant’s foundations. Baret, you—you jigget!

His misguided attempt to treble the clock’s natural life span had resulted in a fatal torquing of the incant. Like beads popping off a broken string, each of its elements was springing free of alignment, tearing the delicate magework’s balance to shreds. And if she didn’t reverse its wild unravelling—

On a sob, she plunged her mage-sense into the heart of Baret’s chaos. Cried out as she felt the distortions of power lash at her. The incant was almost entirely unravelled now, a rope of fire with its strands cut nearly all the way through. Acting on desperate instinct and arrogant faith, she wrapped her mage-sense around the unstable incant and sank to her knees. Sought to smother the flames and undo the damage.

Hamina. Leba’cek. Nusti. Ach’ara. Dolni. Dolni.

They were words of command to halt stupid, ignorant Baret’s unravelling incant in its tracks. She felt them clash with his robust magework, sizzle and spark and shiver through the workroom. Crying out at the pain, she thought she might be catching fire. Wasn’t sure if she cared, though it hurt so much…