In the middle of a desert, a solitary figure drifted across the low dunes. Her sandaled feet floating half a foot above the almost pure white powder that stretched as far as the eye could see… and her eye could see far indeed.

It’s almost like Galinder, Ahati-waqrat reminisced.

Her dress merged with the sand, looking like the local quartz grains swirling under the hot stiff breeze. She’d gotten it in a desert zone like this one, one of the treasures from a granite colossus, Barranco of the Dead, the final guardian of a necropolis hosting six Ancients statues and a Legend. Although this low-tier desert had a normal earth-like sun shining across the dunes, not the three orange orbs that illuminated tier-eleven Galinder.

Up, in the distance, she spotted a glint of metal and turned slightly, aiming for the Gate. But to her expert Focus-enhanced eye, it was certainly too small to be a Great Gate, open or not. Not a chance.

All Gates lead to your destination. You just have to decide what it is.

The marsh stretched over the edges until it got replaced by grey moss over dry rock, outside of the zone proper. Pierrin de Bellièvre trudged on, zig-zagging at a jog between the weeping trees, looking for Gates. The former knight of Henri I hated being on his own, in the Labyrinth or anywhere else.

Not that anything of the tier could bother him, even with a primary healing build. He’d switched gear, his Adjustment enabling a small set of offensive abilities that would swiftly end anything that attempted to attack him. Worst case, a single rank of Burning Aura fuelled by 3000 Intellect would do the trick here. But the level difference pretty much guaranteed that none of the local fauna would make a move unless directly threatened.

No, it was simply the human company he craved. Banquets and the like had been his favourite activity before the Labyrinth swallowed him two centuries ago, and wandering alone without good companions was not in him.

But beggars can’t be choosers, he recognized. There weren’t enough of them to travel, find a handful of lairs to get completion, and sweep the borders of the zones for a Great Gate that – almost certainly – wasn’t there.

Not enough people around. No way it’s been open.

The evergreen trees covering small hills almost reminded Johann Hausseger of the Schtwartzwald of his childhood, on Earth-570… and of every other Divergence. Of an idealized version of the woods of old.

Those are alive, he reminded himself.

The last time he’d seen the hills of his birth, they were covered by dead trunks, ravaged by an invisible miasma, the unholy cross of organic chemistry – mustard gas – and Power Crystal-pumped bombs that killed half of the upper life forms across Eurasia, leaving only some mosses and mushrooms choking on excessive biomass, without even a single insect to feed on them. The nightmare his former compatriots had made, defiance against an entire world, an extinction event.

He hadn’t been back there after his second decade, and he was never going to. Even thinking about it made him sick. Hopefully… whatever happened to that mysterious hidden Earth-113 wouldn’t be as bad.

All the others left the Labyrinth to keep late Germanies safe from would-be Drexlers. Only me remains, he lamented briefly. Only me to keep watch on the Divergences.

Being the Übermensch inspiration of the people who murdered an entire Earth was a heavy burden.

Hroskell Guthrumsson had known the zone would be a bust the instant he stepped into it.

It was an island. A hundred-mile disc of shrub-covered rocks, surrounded by waves of a grey sea under cloudy skies. Unsurprisingly, the weather had refused to lift as he made his way across the shore. That was the kind of zone you’d easily find in low tiers, sure. But not the kind of zone that made a starting zone, no matter how large it was. He didn’t know how anyone could have thought it a candidate for a Great Gate opening. Still, he persisted.

If you have to do something, you do it correctly or not at all, he always thought.

His team would be quick enough anyway. Nine large zones with lots of lairs to check. In theory, only five… if nobody spotted a Great Gate within five out of nine, then there would be none among the last four.

With any luck, they would all have Recalled to Panomekon and moved on to the next candidate before the two French mid-tier Professionals even made it to their first tier-one zone. Not that he expected much from them – that trunk had a low-tier linkage with another open sheaf, and even direct access across tier-seven and trunk to another recently opened Divergence, Earth-222. The odds of anything that close being more than one of the many empty barely used clusters of the Labyrinth were low. But not zero, or he wouldn’t have wasted an additional mini-team. Not when they were so short.

With luck, we can even make three clusters by the time we have to find them something else to scout. Or get lucky.

Reading Room 4 of the Archives hadn’t changed much in the years. That was Babbage’s personal space, Jonas guessed. He’d never met the Archivist in any of the presumably three other Reading Rooms.

“Interesting. Very interesting,” the other Resilient Spellwrangler muttered.

Both men now shared the same tier-four Profession, although Babbage had more than 300 levels to Jonas’s 165. Skipping Milestones and an entire side Profession, thanks to Adjustment, made a huge difference. Although the vitals were a lot lower, of course. Jonas had a lot more than a level 160+ spellcaster would, but not as much as a true tier-four like Babbage.

“We couldn’t make it to the end. My guess is that it was going to be all Ancients from then on. And while we could skip the guardian platforms…”

“There was little point of you going unless you wanted lots of XP.”

Jonas laughed.

“No pressure, although I was almost at my next Milestone. That can wait for a few creatures. But it was the strangest lair I’ve seen.”

“It’s what we label a ‘long lair’. Linear and, well, long. Possibly the longest, in your case.”

“Oh, they are known?”

“You’ve got all kinds of lairs. We’ve compiled the numbers of guardians, and the most common type is in the 3-4 guardian range. But there’s still a lot of 5-guardian lairs, less so with 6, even less with 7 guardians and so on.”

“And it’s a record?”

“Your guess of 8 elites, 8 elders, and possibly 8 ancients would make it a 24-guardian lair. Yes, that might be the largest. There is a long catacomb lair in Caernastur, but like yours, nobody has gone to its end. It has 6 elites, 7 elders, and 4 confirmed ancients, with the fourth confirmed but unattempted so far, given that even the top British scouts attempts at the third Vampyr all have ended with one dead, ending the attempts to finish the lair.”

Babbage frowned.

“I thought they’d start trying it again, now that the war is over, but I haven’t heard from Miller’s expeditions recently. I’d expect a double team strategy. I wonder if they’re not focused on something else.”

“So… three fewer guardians?” Jonas guessed, based on simple math.

“Potentially.”

Babbage snorted.

“Although you haven’t completed it yet. The current completed record is a 19 guardians lair, the Four-Leaf Basin in Urgaster. Eleven elite, seven elders and a single final ancient.”

“Will someone attempt ours?”

“There are a few teams that have a competitive streak, usually the top Scouts ones. I wouldn’t be surprised if one went there just for the principle of doing a potential 24-guardian lair. A lot of them have access to Markandon by now unless they went in the trunk through Nindarul.”

Jonas smiled at the idea of Cowen and her team smashing through the cave. Now that he was out of the oppressive endless shaft, the lair was not that tiresome-feeling.

“It depends on which Gate they’ve kept. Most lost access to the trunk.”

“It won’t matter much when you’re caught by the idea. Running across zones when they’re already open doesn’t take that long,” Babbage said.

“What about the major Power Crystal companies. Would they be interested? How does that work?”

“I don’t deal much in the licensing stuff. The Archives of the Royal Society is too small and heterogeneous to bother taking lair licenses. I suggest talking to your manager. Or your boss, the Duke.”

“Will do.”

“Good luck. Selling information never really works. After all, it is the one good that you can sell again and again without losing it.”

Jonas, Guss and Ira were seated in front of Arthur Wellesley, in his office at the War Department.

“It’s a grey area,” the Duke sighed.

“How so?”

“The treaty signed with the USA in 1818 was a temporary one, made for the emergency following the Great Gate closure. When you re-opened the Gate, discussion on expanding its provisions stalled.”

“Oh.”

“The Americans have agreed to respect the licensing system, even though they don’t use one the way we have. But the method to determine which lairs can be licensed has never been defined. That Wrapelst zone is closer to the American Gate than ours, right?”

“In the number of zones, yes. Don’t know in terms of mileage,” Jonas replied.

“And so, whether or not the Americans would accept a license would be doubtful.”

“Would the High Labyrinth Office get money out of it?” Ira asked.

“Assuredly not. I’ll have to ask my brother Richard, but I think the first explorer status gets you a free license for the first year if you want it. It won’t be common, since most of the lairs discovered these days are by his Scouts, and they have very little competition in their usual tiers so they’re not bothered by the system.”

“Lucky them,” Ira commented.

“Lucky us,” Guss added.

“Do you want to use that lair?” the Duke asked.

“Once we’ve got a few more levels, a lair with eight guaranteed Ancients would be insanely useful for getting good gear for us. Although keeping fast access to the zone is going to be problematic. But if the Americans have priority…” Jonas mused.

“You’re making more work for the diplomats, even if indirectly,” Wellesley grinned.

“I’m sending a letter to Sylvia Underwood. Do you want me to ask her how that would work?” Jonas asked.

“She’s got connections with the Federal Bureau if I remember right. It might be useful to sound them beforehand… that depends on how fast she’ll answer.”

“I’ve invited her for the Twenty Years celebration. I hope she’ll be able to.”

The Duke opined, “Then go ahead. Just remind her it’s going to be a decision for her government. Just because she’d got a mission once doesn’t mean she’s qualified to negotiate backroom deals.”

Jonas acquiesced, before turning back the discussion on what had really brought all three of them at the War Office.

“Anything I need to ask ‘there’?”

“Just how they’re going to consider the French situation, and how much of what they originally gave them can we expect to get. Louis XVIII is already tight-fisted with Dominion documentation.”

“Isn’t he grateful for his restoration?” Jonas asked.

“I’m sure he is. But he’s already thinking back of his kingdom first. As you’d expect from a proper King.”

“Makes you wonder why we freed him”, Ira mocked.

“Oh, he still wants us around. Most of the Professionals have yet to swear fealty to the restored throne of France, and Louis needs Great Britain’s help to deal with Bonaparte once the Gate reopens.”

“And we can’t be sure of when that happens.”

“The Great Gate of London was barely ready to re-open after almost four months, and the Versailles one was a lot more damaged, thanks to your teammate. I’m not expecting it for many months. Although nobody’s going to check that side to make sure.”

“Any other Gates open?” Guss asked.

“Not that I know,” the Duke replied.

Unlike their previous visit in Krilziar, the Spring Recycler mushroom guardian was there to “welcome” the three once they burst out of the wood fissure that connected the lair to the hidden Gate. The welcome was short-lived, without any of the spores reaching “maturity”, and Guss grumbled that he hadn’t even needed to heal Ira in the fight against the level 75 elder.

“Next time, we probably will come with just us two,” Jonas said.

“And next year, you won’t need me,” Ira said.

“Not so fast. I still need to kill it before it kills me. That spore cloud does significant damage if it takes too long for that while I’m getting pummelled,” he replied.

“Depends if we start having enough heroic gear,” Guss mused. “Tier five is when you’re making the transition from mixed gear to full heroic, according to Laura.”

“That’s because you spend so much time in tier-four. Which won’t be the case for us,” Jonas countered.

“We really need to use this lair to the fullest,” Guss noted.

“It’s so oppressive, though,” Ira grumbled.

They climbed out of the hollow housing the only guardian of the Compost Heap and looked around. Under the giant roots, the only thing that was visible was the various veteran mushrooms wandering in the half-outdoor lair and they walked out of the cover.

“Too early?” Ira asked.

Jonas looked out, before reminding himself that the Moon phase in the zone could be slightly different from outside. But he was positive they were at the Midwinter Moon, January 29th. He’d made sure of the right moon and English-style date with the Zulu contact – Cashile Impi – before leaving last year.

“The full moon is beginning. Let’s wait for a few days.”

“Nothing,” Ira said as the night fell again, for the third time. “They’re not coming.”

Jonas sighed.

“We’ll try again next full moon, in case. One Fast Travel charge wasted for a mismatched date.”

“That, or they got their Gates shut down,” Guss hypothesized.

“Do we check those?” Ira asked.

“No. Impi said not all Zulus are in their conspiracy, and I’m not risking stumbling on a team that might cause complications,” Jonas immediately said.

“Then it’s Recall?”

“The official celebration is only in five days, but the people are going to begin early.”

Ira clasped Jonas’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry. She’s coming, unlike those Africans.”