Orton knew he was playing a dangerous game.

The temple before him, invisible to anyone who didn't know it was there, sat like a nefarious black spike in the middle of Lucknow -- a surprisingly urbanized area of northeastern India that he'd never had the opportunity to visit before now. To his mortal sight, it looked like an old structure of black stone that, quite frankly, had seen better days and was probably deserted; his vision kept trying to skip over it or look somewhere else more interesting, and passers-by were constantly walking or biking around it without a care in the world. But to his other senses, it screamed malice and danger, illuminated by a constant surging blood-red river of power which thundered up from the ground and into the sky twenty-four hours a day. His sight beyond sight warned him unambiguously that to enter would be certain death without very specific and thorough protections and preparations, none of which he had. And worst of all, he'd be going in alone -- no Jiann or Enna to back him up this time. But he didn't have a choice -- Gentry's spell would kill Enna in nine hours. There was no turning back.

He should reset the loop. It was blatantly, insultingly obvious. He'd learned so much on this pass -- made discoveries and earned enlightenments that could accelerate his progress to the fourth tier in his next loop and virtually guarantee his reaching the fifth if he was careful and cautious on his next run through. And if he continued along his suicidally moronic current trajectory, there was every chance he'd be killed by some trap or cultist without the chance to invoke the amulet -- to say nothing of what would happen if Gentry learned too much about the situation. But something told him that this was an opportunity that would be hard to recreate -- a chance to learn more about Gentry's past, his powers, and his weaknesses -- and Orton had made quite a career out of listening to inchoate voices within the infinite layers of his subconscious mind. Ridiculous worries about abandoning Enna didn't even factor into the decision.

Yeah, keep telling yourself that, pal.

Orton sighed, cracked his knuckles, cast exactly one spell, and started forward. Much of the last fifteen hours had been spent recovering his depleted power -- he'd dozed on planes and trains while he spread a web of passive divination, sought out and consumed strange potions and animal parts in weird shops and markets, and focused on strengthening his body and his resolve rather than trying to think too hard about what was ahead. But now he was going unprepared into stupefying danger, and he was a little put out about the whole thing. But as long as he was sticking it out in this loop, waiting around wasn't an option.

He slipped through the first obstacle -- the barrier of Sanguine Forbiddance -- without even slowing down; merely attuning his aura to its wavelengths was enough for him to be recognized as "belonging", and might make him look like a resident to other traps and wards too if he was lucky. Strolling up to the entrance proper, he looked up at the door and grimaced.

It wasn't the most dangerous door he'd ever seen (that had been the Vanishing Portal of Chu Fu, which always sent you to your death -- he'd tricked it by dying and reviving himself, because long-dead sorcerers from pre-antiquity hadn't known about CPR) but it was no slouch. Twelve feet tall and carved in the shape of a great bull's head surmounting a pair of crumbling wings, he could sense an ancient, living malevolence imbued into the stone -- probably a lesser gallu from around, oh, two-and-a-half thousand years ago -- that was both aware and alert despite its immobility. It had the runes of amāru and damqu inlaid with bloodstone above the bull's head, granting it immunity to illusions and disguises, and the curved edges of the wings formed the sign of izzusu, which meant it couldn't be bypassed or circumvented; no shadowporting around it or doing something lame like busting through the wall five feet to its left. This, yet again, was going to suck.

A lesser mage (in fact, the vast majority of magi) would have been stymied, but Orton was not your run-of-the-mill spellcaster. He drew an arc of blazing, shimmering rainbow light in the air -- a canvas upon which to work -- and twisted the shadow it cast into runes of reversal and unbinding. Taking a cautious step forward, he cast the runes forward onto the door, letting them sink into the stone, and waited. This was not something your typical intruder would do, because it was incredibly stupid and dangerous, but at least that would give him the element of surprise. With a rumble, the binding on the door began to unravel, releasing the antediluvian spirit from its multimillennial captivity.

Orton, already regretting a large number of his decisions, shouldered the door open and ducked inside. A faded, guttural howl seared across his mind, but the gallu was midway between its bound and unbound states -- no longer protecting the door, but it couldn't chase him yet. Orton didn't have a plan as such for when it caught him (unless "die horribly" was a plan), but he couldn't care about that now. That was slightly-further-in-the-future Orton's problem.

Beyond the doorway, the hall opened up into a great chamber, currently deserted -- probably some sort of worship space when the temple had originally been built -- which showed signs of recent foot traffic but no actual habitation. Orton quick-stepped his way through it, scanning vigilantly with all his ability for traps and wards, but couldn't detect anything. That's always a great sign, he thought to himself sourly. The hall dead-ended at a large and decrepit altar, but Orton could see the secret lever in the stone as clearly as if it had been glowing, mostly because it effectively was glowing to his sight beyond sight. He studied it morosely, spinning up a few tentative divinations as a mental clock in a distant corner of his brain ticked down to "get eaten by unstoppable demon (urgent)".

His first few efforts turned up only conflicting and misleading shadows, but a slightly desperate casting of Vyasa's Unveiling painted emerald letters in his mind which were almost certainly not his own imagination (he hoped) revealing that the lever was coated with a spiritual poison which would transfix his meridians and freeze him in place for several minutes while setting off alarm perceptible to anyone monitoring a particular thoughtspace. Orton aligned his psychal orientation with that of the effect on the lever, picked up a stick, and shoved the lever down to avoid touching it with his hands; a secret door, leading into a cramped stairwell, opened up next to the altar. Orton let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. That's two.

He tread cautiously into the stairwell -- there were physical traps, but he could avoid those almost without trying -- and began making his way up the steps two at a time, keenly aware that he didn't have much time before the gallu would be free. He scaled three floors, then six (well beyond what the height of the temple when viewed externally would have allowed, naturally), and followed the urgings of his divinatory senses to bypass every door except the one which seemed unimportant at first glance. That one, he kicked in and dove through at top speed as the toothed metal blades crashed down behind him; he rolled, looking backwards at the blades with annoyance. And that's three. Not exactly subtle. As his Tripartite Serendipity spell expired, he tensed his muscles and fell into a martial trance -- up until now, he'd been guaranteed to dodge or be missed by any attack or threat, but he couldn't count on that any longer, and he didn't have the power to spare to spin up any servitors to help him defend, either. He glanced around warily.

The room appeared to be a small storage area, where dry goods and barrels of what was hopefully water were kept, but he knew better -- his sight beyond sight had revealed this as the most-protected room in the temple almost immediately. Unfortunately, here was where his foresight ran out -- whatever was beyond or inside this room was warded past even his level to perceive, which was probably why his clairvoyance had been warning him that coming in here would be certain death. Think, dumbass. What cards do you have left to play?

Orton sighed, then pulled out the phone he'd been given -- a meme-worthy Nokia 3510 -- and pushed the button to return the most recent call. It rang twice, then was answered with a crisp click by Gentry's smooth, imperious voice. "Was there something I was unclear about?"

"I don't have time for games," snarled Orton. "I'm in the warded room, but the trail dead-ends here, and I have about fifty seconds before a pissed-off Babylonian demon pulls my crown chakra out through my butthole. If you want the Eye, fucking help me out."

"So, you use Hindu paradigms," mused Gentry. In the background, Orton could hear pages being flipped and a series of irregular heavy thuds, which might be intermittent blows against a locked door -- Enna might have been captive and relatively powerless, but it sounded like she wasn't taking it lying down. After a moment, Gentry's voice came back on the line. "Let's see here... ah. 'Hidden from the sight of thieves...' -- are you using an Authority of Passage?"

Orton rolled his eyes. "Of course I am," he snapped back. "This isn't some two-bit operation here."

"Please, Wilkerson, at least try to maintain a little decorum." Orton heard Gentry turn a few more pages. "Here we are. 'True sight is only given to the blind.' Try --" There was a loud beep as Orton hung up on his nemesis. Take that, fucker.

Taking a deep breath, Orton concentrated and blocked out his senses one by one. He expended a soupçon of power to spin up a servitor process to maintain his martial trance -- now would be a really crap time to get ambushed -- and walled off his sight, his hearing, his olfaction, and everything else which might distract or mislead. He spent rather longer than he should have lingering over his last sense -- his sight beyond sight -- simply out of a raw fear of being so naked and vulnerable without it. But, at last, he closed it off too.

Now he was in darkness -- a profound, limitless darkness beyond any possibility of fathoming. He was defenseless, insensate, and utterly lost -- he didn't even know which way led to the door he'd come in through. Despite himself, he grinned. Not a great environment for an intruder. But a very, very good environment for quantum manipulation. He spun himself around, deliberately not paying attention to his orientation or balance, and lumbered blindly forward.

This was a gamble stupid enough to border on suicidal -- for all he knew, he was about to stumble right back into the blade trap he'd just dodged. But he kept on staggering in whatever direction he was going -- two steps, three, five, seven, eleven -- and knew he'd gone further than the room would have appeared to allow. He began to turn his senses back on, starting with his prescience, and immediately felt a blared warning to drop to the ground. He fell on his face, imagining a blade or kick he couldn't feel scything over his head and hoping he wasn't just being an idiot.

As the rest of his senses resolved and awareness returned in stages, he felt a confused welter of sensations and did his best to react appropriately -- he rolled, kipped up, and did a sideways hands-free cartwheel followed by a flurry of kicks in the direction of something he couldn't yet perceive, but didn't connect with anything. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes, exploded energy outwards through his meridians and cleared his mind, then snapped his eyes open. The scene which greeted him was startling.

He was somewhere else -- definitely not in the storage room he'd been in, and probably not in the temple proper or even likely fully in the mortal realm at all. The walls seemed alive when glimpsed out of the corners of his eyes -- the stone seeming to turn into heaving, shifting slabs of black flesh shot through with pulsating crimson veins -- and great sweeping arcs of golden cloth were hung or affixed in strange patterns that cris-crossed the walls, the floors, and the ceiling in ways that made his vision twist and stutter. Three monks -- their flesh hanging in ragged strips from their bodies and their eyes covered by thick crimson strips of twisted wool -- were striking at him with lightning-fast blows from emaciated limbs. Are these guys mummies? Or just, like, Starvin' Marvin types? Orton parried two elbow strikes, dodged a leaping crescent kick, and decided it didn't matter. Punch anything hard enough and it dies.

He rolled, ducked, and sprang towards his foes with a flurry of punches and kicks, but to his surprise, the flesh of the blindfolded monks simply rejected his strikes like sheets of rubber. Orton blinked. Those blows should have dented steel. What's happening here? He had to retreat to avoid an answering series of blows -- blows which, he noted with unhappiness, had enough force behind them to kill if they touched him -- and noticed with dread that his sight beyond sight seemed to be losing track of his foes the longer the battle went on. Oh crap.

His mind raced, realizing the truth: these were andha-maharishi, Blinded Seers, who studied the same precognitive arts he practiced. His blows weren't being absorbed at all; the monks were simply dodging them just enough to avoid being struck by the kinetic energy of his punches. The fact that he was able to strike them at all was due to the difference in ability -- Orton was possibly the most practiced user of sight beyond sight still living, having independently mastered it five times now -- but the monks had the advantage of numbers and were quickly working to overwhelm him. He needed to do something clever, and fast.

Risking most of his remaining power, he sundered the battlespace; each of the three monks found themselves lost in a precognitive hall of mirrors, fighting against echoes of Orton's possible actions. He conjured up a few servitors and sent them into his mindscape, willing them to act out a handful of scenarios; the monks cast spells of their own, trying to see through his meta-feints, but only succeeded in making more timelines to confuse themselves. Grinning, Orton struck out against the nearest monk and managed to land a hit; but though the blow struck much more solidly this time, it was obvious that it would be the work of many minutes just to subdue a single one of his opponents -- minutes he did not have. He was just starting to wonder exactly how much time he did have when the rear wall of the chamber dissolved into bloody mist and the gallu came raging through.

For all intents and purposes, the demon was basically invisible, even to Orton -- it was in no way a physical being, and could best be described as a highly specific cultural dread with twenty-five hundred years of occult inertia behind it. But Orton could definitely feel its malice, corrupting and poisoning the air all around the empty spot in space it occupied, and he was momentarily grateful that his martial trance sustained all the muscles of his body in taut readiness, because one of those muscles was his sphincter and it meant he didn't shit his pants. He winced involuntarily, expecting a horrific and prolonged death, and began preparing his mind to reset the loop yet again. His concentration, sufficiently intense to occupy even his vast and powerful mind, prevented him from noticing what was happening for a good four or five seconds, but eventually, Orton did in fact realize that he was not being holistically flayed, and looked around curiously.

The three cultists were making noises which might, very charitably, be considered screaming; Orton supposed that the gallu had had rather a larger bone to pick with those responsible for its imprisonment than with its liberator, at least for the moment. He averted his eyes and other sensory capacities from what was happening to them, then turned and ran through the first door he could perceive. Hopefully there won't be any traps this far in. He crashed through a maze of twisting tunnels, all alike, before emerging into a tiny cube of red wooden slats with no other exits. He screeched to a halt, blinked, and tried to remember to breathe.

The Eye of Alma Mayasha was, to the physical eye, a big roundish rock about four inches in diameter made of greenish stone; it nestled in a bowl with about eight other similar rocks of various shapes and colors, but to Orton, it stood out like a hot coal among soft plastic toys. He started to pick it up, thought better of it, and instead pulled off his right boot. Feeling foolish as he tugged off his thick woolen sock, he drew two ballpoint pens from his pocket and used them like chopsticks to pick up the Eye, then dropped it into the sock before tying it closed and shoving it in the pocket of his trenchcoat.

His mission accomplished, Orton shoved his sockless foot back into his boot and laced it back up as he pondered how the hell he was going to get out of here. In the distance, the various sounds the cultists were making had started to grow weaker; he didn't want to be here when the gallu finished with them. For that matter, he didn't want to be here right now. He looked around, hoping for an emergency exit -- it took nearly five or six seconds for the solution to dawn on him, as he was somewhat agitated and overstressed. When it did, however, he grinned, closed his eyes, and spun himself around again before diving in a random direction. He rolled repeatedly upon landing, dodged this way and that, and bounced off a few walls before landing in something soft, yielding, and utterly foul-smelling. Inspection revealed it to be a large bag of garbage, and his immediate environs to be a dumpster somewhere in Lucknow. He sighed, groaned, and was beginning the long process of inventorying his new bruises when the cell phone in his pocket rang. He grimaced, then pulled it out and thumbed the "answer" button.

"I deduce", Gentry's voice began on the other end of the line, "that due to the fact that you are still alive to answer my call, your mission was a success."

Orton scowled. "Yeah, yeah, I've got your damn rock. But I'm not stupid enough to just give it to you -- you'll kill the girl as soon as you have it, and me too if think you can get away with it."

"I am aggrieved by your accusations, sir," Gentry murmured, "but I shall make no attempt to gainsay you. Still, if you do not give me the Eye, the young lady will unfortunately perish anyway; and if that were an acceptable outcome to you, you would never have gone through all that effort to retrieve it. So I assume that you have some counter-proposal."

Orton clenched his fist, then sighed. "Yeah. We need some way to make the exchange where we both feel like neither of us can betray the other."

"I see." Gentry's side of the call was silent for a moment. "Did you have any particular suggestions?"

"I do have one, yeah." Orton leaned back into the garbage, looking up at the sky. "Ever been to Lapland?"