"Do you think Mrs. Delina is going to cast bones again?" I asked excitedly.

"Well," Aldo said with the tiniest of eye-rolls, "she said she was gonna cast bones, so my guess is yes."

I rolled my eyes right back at him. "No, she said she'd try a divination, not that she'd cast bones. There are lots of other ways to do a divination…"

"I read that some diviners look into a darkened pool or a silvered mirror," Mailyn said.

"Did you see many darkened pools or silver mirrors in the Dead Canton?" Aldo asked.

"Silvered," I corrected him. Though, come to think of it, what was the difference between a silvered mirror and a silver one? Probably the amount of silver. But his general observation was valid. "She'll probably cast bones," I concluded.

"I hope we make it in time!" Mailyn added.

It was late afternoon - I'd just finished my translation work, Mailyn had just finished playing courier girl, and Aldo had just finished… whatever it was he was doing for extra money now. He'd been deliberately vague about it, which lead me to believe it had something to do with stealing. Either that or the three boys in our pentad had stumbled upon an easy gig and they didn't want Mailyn and me butting our way into their tollo trough.

With our paid work for the day done with, the three of us proceeded through the outskirts of the Old City and toward the great cemetery that occupied its eastern basin. It took us about an hour to get there from Mini Gionika - we'd walked across the bridges, taken the tollo coach east, and then hopped off before we got too close to the sprawling warrens of the Mendicant's Canton. The sun was low in the sky, blazing along the hazy, humid sky and sinking by the minute.

"We'll make it in time," I said, trying to convince myself. "I bet Mrs. Delina will find something in the bones tonight."

"You don't know that," Mailyn said.

"Then take me up on my bet. Hah! Didn't think so!"

I'd read what I could find about divination at The Learned Gentleman, which wasn't much. While what I know about divination could now fill a (fairly slim) volume, the most important thing to know about divination is this: you probably can't do it. That's not to impugn your skill or character - I'm a more talented mage than you'll find in most small countries, yet my divination skills pale in comparison to the wild-eyed mystics you occasionally encounter in remote mountain villages.

There are several widely-practiced forms of divination - casting, scrying, and augury being the most common. Of these, casting is the one you can most easily take as you travel. Sacrificial animals are a hassle to transport and large reflective pools/mirrors are, well, large. But you can take a pouch of bones just about anywhere.

In brief, casting works like this: a caster's pouch contains some number of small bones and large bones, about the size of a tollo or Wext schille, respectively. The caster selects an odd number of large bones and an even number of small bones, either 3 + 4, 5 + 6, or 7 + 10, and casts them upon an object of value, either monetary or emotional, in order to make a prediction pertaining to somebody linked to the object. More bones require more skill but give more detailed answers - the only person I've ever seen cast seventeen bones successfully is Oumaa Dead-Eyes, who nonetheless prefers augury. The pattern of the large bones points to either a direction or suggests a time, while the pattern of even-numbered small bones attributes a meaning to the place or time indicated. With ten small bones, deciphering the pattern (if there is any to be had) is a stupefying task, but it gives far more information than a simple four-bone pattern.

"Huh. Nobody's here," Aldo scoffed. "They better not've started without us…"

"They didn't," I said, more to convince myself than him.

We need not have worried. The three of us had actually arrived at the empty neighborhood of mausoleums a bit early, eyes peeled for shamblers as we crunched along the dusty trail - Mailyn and I wanted to avoid the damn things and Aldo wanted to sneak up and touch one of the damn things. There were none to be seen in the waning light, the sun still a finger's length above the grave-strewn crest of the nearby hill. From the little valley of the Dead Canton, you couldn't see the city at all, save a little strip of stables and storage sheds barely visible past the scrub to the south. It felt like what I imagined being in the wilderness to feel like (though, having since been in the true wilds of South Turia, being in an exurban cemetery isn't close to the same thing).

"Hey, I think I see them!" Mailyn said, skipping forward.

Sure enough, there they were - Mrs. Delina's cart lay in a little depression between the hills, lit by a dangling glowglobe rocking back and forth over Glimmie's head while the three of them skulked about the entrance to a nearby mausoleum. This one was circular and mostly open to the air, its construction like that of a miniature Turan temple: a perimeter of pillars as big around as my thigh holding up a large marble dome with a trio of sarcophagi resting underneath. The engravings on the mausoleum frieze identified its interred occupants: Resia, Rondo, and Gertillia Portence. I recognized the name of the mercantile family, obviously, though I could only guess how the three deceased were related.

"Hi!" Mailyn shouted. She scampered down the shallow hill with Aldo and me close behind.

Mrs. Delina looked up, recognizing us with a grim nod before carefully extracting her casting bones from their pouch. As with all good casting bones, hers were old human bones polished to smoothness. The best bones to use belong to somebody known to the caster, be they relative, friend, or enemy. I have no idea where Mrs. Delina's set came from, but I do know of one diviner who made a set from his own amputated hand - he claims they work wonderfully.

"Yer late!" Mrs. Delina said with only a hint of grumbling. At the time, I didn't think to wonder why she even cared that we were here. The fact is that there are many rumors about magically-sensitive children, and among the more reputable is that their emotional investment in a divination will increase its power. I'm not sure whether that's true, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. "Shall I cast?"

Po nodded and reached into his pocket, revealing… a dingy scrap of cloth? Mrs. Delina was as confused as I was, so Po explained: "This is the only thing Lucan has left from his mum… I think it used to be part of a blanket, but this is all that's left…" he glanced around, as if somebody else might be listening in. "Don't tell anybody, but he sleeps with it."

Mailyn snickered, but everybody else managed to stay mum. Mrs. Delina nodded in approval. "That'll do nicely, then." She set it upon the marble floor of the mausoleum with careful reverence before raising her hand and letting the bones fall. Her already-creased brow furrowing further. "Oh… hm… I'm going to cast again…" and, after she did so, her expression was no less concerned and her voice wavered with worry. "We need to find him…"

"What is it?" I asked.

Mrs. Delina explained that, since the large bones had all fallen in an imaginary perimeter around the small bones, they indicated direction and, since the triangle they formed was very narrow, the direction was quite certain. Probably nearby. Moreover, the four smaller shapes (connected in series starting with the small bone closest to a large bone) was a 'besh' rune, which indicated crisis and/or opportunity. The worrying bit was 'crisis' being indicated in the direction of the arrow.

"What are we waiting for?" Sharp Lia shouted.

"It'll be dark soon, dear. Not all of us can see in the dark." Mrs. Delina rummaged around the pack in the back of her cart, returning with three portable glowglobe lanterns. "I've only got three… wouldn't be the worst idea to go in pairs, regardless. Aside from Lia, are any of you armed?" The herbalist was only a bit surprised when all of us drew blades - it was pretty foolish for a Scamp to wander about Floria without at least some protection. Even grizzled predators tended to think twice about messing with a kid if they knew you could gut them with a lucky swipe. "Right… I'll go with you, Lia… need somebody with two knives since I haven't got one…" Of course, Mrs. Delina did have her trusty walking stick (or perhaps it was a witch's staff), which I imagine she could swing with great tenacity.

Aldo shot a worried glance in my direction, but who Mailyn and I would pair with was a foregone conclusion. Without looking, I reached out and grasped her hand, nearly gashing my palm open on her still-drawn blade.

"Careful!" she hissed.

I wasn't even fazed. "Come on!" I pointed in the direction of the divination arrow, waving our glowglobe about. "I'm not letting the boys find anything first!" Mailyn nodded in agreement, and off we went.

We swept through the graveyard, three pairs of us, each with a glowglobe - it wasn't yet dark enough to really need one just to walk around, but it would soon be impossible to see details on the ground. Fortunately, it was going to be a two-moon night, the pale and pink moons nearly full as they began the evening's trek up the sky. They were nearly in the same spot, the pink moon trailing right behind the pale. It would overtake it by dawn. Now, though, they were two gibbous ovals near the horizon, the gauzy pink moon the size of a tollo held at arm's length and the pale about half that diameter.

"How will we know if we've gone too far?" I asked.

Mrs. Delina replied by way of holding her weathered fist high and revealing a bone clutched in her palm. "The bone will hold the magic for a little while yet, dear! I can feel the tug to tell when we're getting near!"

"Okay, Mrs. Delina!" I shouted back.

Mailyn and I crunched through the dry grass, past tombstones and little shrines. Some plots had dried flowers or wooden offering plates at them, signs that at least some people bothered to honor the dead. One grave had a little straw broom next to it and was obviously kept tidy by somebody who cared. But most had been forgotten for ages, tombstones crumbling, cracked, or tilted askew. As the light dimmed and night drew around us, I grew increasingly terrified that a shambler would stumble out of the dark and surprise us, but we didn't encounter a single one. Cool breeze swept through the grasses, jostling little weeds and flowers that Mrs. Delina probably would have wanted for her shop on any other day. Actually…

"Golden weathervine," I said, carefully extracting a plant from the ground - it had been on the herbalist's list, useful for treating gout and fluid retention.

"Hey…" Mailyn whispered pointing right next to the clump of flowers. "This ground's been disturbed recently…"

She was right - the earth had been upturned and tamped back down in a rectangle about two meters to a side, maybe a bit bigger. None of the nearby tombstones were recent, so it wasn't a recent burial, which meant… "Mrs. Delina! We might have found something!"

Mrs. Delina approached with the others, grumbling as she balanced the bone on her calloused palm. "This's it, alright…"

"Is… is it a grave?" Po asked, his voice wavering.

Instead of answering, the herbalist paced back and forth upon the square of disturbed earth, occasionally tapping on a random spot with her staff before continuing on. Then she motioned us back. "My old bones only got enough oomph to do this once, so we'd better do it right. Everybody take three big steps back…" She waited for a moment. "That's three steps away from the dirt patch, Aldo, dear."

"I knew that," Aldo mumbled sheepishly, having backed right into the middle of the plot.

Once we were well clear of the area, she raised her staff and… tapped it against the trunk of a gnarled fig tree. I felt a pulse of thaum emanating from the spot - probably the strongest I'd felt since my thaumic senses began to awaken - and then… nothing. Well… nothing above ground. The earth in front of the tree began to roil as if infested by a troupe of python-sized earthworms. I let out a shriek of surprise as one surged past my foot, only slightly mollified when I saw that it was a knobby root and not a worm or snake. With the creak and groan of straining wood, the earth itself split, roaring with the sound of tearing loam and grinding stone. Just as suddenly as they'd started, the animated roots hushed to a stop.

"It's…" Mrs. Delina started.

Unable to hold myself back, I scampered back to the upturned site, gasping when I perceived the crevasse leading down into the earth. It wasn't a grave at all. It was…

"It’s stairs!" I shouted. "Stairs going down!"