“You know, we could—” Haken began.

“It’s fine,” I said. I was going to have to make an impression sooner or later. “Here.” I handed Haken my focus sword and walked forward.

The Keepers sitting on the ground scooted aside to let me in, and the laughter and conversation died away. All of a sudden everyone was looking very interested. I came to a stop about fifteen feet from Caldera. “Don’t want a weapon?” Caldera asked.

I shrugged. “You haven’t got one.”

Caldera raised an eyebrow. She didn’t say the obvious, namely that she didn’t need any.

We faced each other in the middle of the circle. Caldera was wearing a worn and dirty white gi with a red belt: she wasn’t carrying any tools or weapons, but given her magic type, that really didn’t make much difference. There was a mirror on the wall behind her, and in the reflection I could see myself, tall and long-limbed and wearing a black gi of my own. Thinking about it, it hadn’t been the smartest of clothing choices—having Caldera in white and me in black looked altogether too symbolic. Oh well.

Caldera bowed, and I did the same. Then she stepped back into a fighting stance and I put everything else out of my mind.

It’s hard for a nondiviner to understand what it’s like to use divination in a fight. I’ve tried to explain it a few times, but usually I can tell the other guy doesn’t get it—the abilities divination gives you are just so weird, so alien. Standing on the floor of the gym, I could see Caldera standing opposite, one foot back and hands ready. Her stance was a generic one, rather than one that identified with any particular martial art. From her posture, I could tell that she was taking this moderately seriously.

Layered on top of that was the additional sense of my magesight. I could see the spells of Caldera’s earth magic hanging around her limbs and body, solid and heavy, reinforcing her movements and keeping her braced against the floor. Other spells showed in my peripheral vision: the protective and sensory spells of all the other Keepers, the wards around the gym. All of this was what any mage would see, and it was a lot, enough that you could spend minutes analysing it all.

But on top of all that, I had another sense—my diviner’s sight—and it multiplied what I could see a million times over. Instead of just seeing the picture before me in three dimensions, I saw it in four, all the possible futures of every single person in front of me. To me, Caldera’s actions seemed to branch a dozen different ways, ghostly movements taking her back or forward or sideways, aggressive or defensive, depending on chance and whim and her responses to my own actions. And every one of those futures branched into a dozen more, and every one of those into a dozen more, hundreds and thousands of futures shifting and changing, winking out to be replaced by new ones as paths were closed off, never to become real.