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backed a step without taking his eyes off it. It disturbed him strangely, lying there among the other cards, stained as it was.
    He felt the others around him watching him, Burge and Blossom and Rudi, the two patrolmen, the night watchmen, and the four Attloi who had come seeking him. Even Exebur. No one had closed the old seer’s eyes yet. They were all watching him. Perhaps they, too, felt the same strange tension, like a fire in the air.
    Let them think what they would. Garett couldn’t help himself. He picked the card up again and held it to the candle flame. At first, it only sputtered and smoked, too wet to take fire. But the flame found a dry spot near Garett’s fingers and began to eat its way into the card’s heart. Garett dropped it. Before it touched the floor, most of it was ash. What remained blackened and curled and folded and crumbled in on itself.
    A tenuous smoke wafted unpleasantly through the room. Garett looked at his comrades as he took another step away from the table. The sole of his boot was sticky. When he looked down to see why, he discovered that the red pool around the old man had spread to the spot where he’d been standing.
           Three more seers were found dead before morning rose over Greyhawk. In the Garden Quarter, the seeress Katina was found drowned with no more than a scrying bowl full of water on the table above her body. In the River Quarter, Davin Timbriel was discovered by the late-night arrival of his lover, who had summoned the watch at once; his skull had been crushed, and his own crystal ball had been the weapon.
    On an impulse, Garett sent Rudi’s patrol back into the university section of the Halls to check on old Qester Redmorn, the most renowned seer in the city. The aging Redmorn lived alone and seldom ventured out. His ability to foretell events once had brought him renown throughout the entire Flanaess. Rudi found the old man with the thin gold chain of a pendulum twisted and knotted around his throat. The windowless room in which he died had been locked from the inside.

    All the greatest seers in Greyhawk were dead, murdered in one night, possibly in the same hour, each by the instrument of his or her divinatory art.
    “I want this kept quiet,” Korbian Arthuran insisted, thumping his hand down on the corner of his desk for emphasis. He glared at his night shift commander. “Do you understand? Warn your people they’re not to speak of it. The mayor’s investiture is just a few days away. We don’t want to frighten the citizenry before such an important occasion.”
    Garett stood at ease in the center of the captain-general’s office, unable to hide the look of disdain on his face. It had been a long night and a longer morning. He rightfully should be home in bed now, but there’d been too much for him to attend to for him simply to leave at the end of his shift. Unfortunately, he’d been obligated to inform Korbian of events. Now his superior officer was trying to tell him how to run the show.
    Korbian Arthuran, however, had not been able to keep the news to himself, and shortly after his arrival at the Citadel, the new mayor had walked in. For most of an hour, Ellon Thigpen had listened quietly, even intently, to Garett’s report. He had asked a few reasonably intelligent questions, then fallen silent again.
    Suddenly, though, he stepped away from the shadowed corner where he’d been leaning. “And how do you propose to keep the murder of five notable citizens quiet, Korbian?”
    Thigpen was all politeness and manners as he moved about the room. Yet, Garett wondered abruptly if there wasn’t just a hint of acid in the mayor’s tone of voice as he spoke to the captain-general.
    “Particularly these five,” Thigpen continued. “Except for the priest, Kathenor, and old Qester, the others have clients, some of whom are probably showing up for appointments even as we stand here.” He rubbed his chin with one hand and inclined his bald head