Veiled by Benedict Jacka Page A

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.
    For a normal person, the problem in a fight is lack of information. Diviners have the opposite problem: they have too
much
information. Even interacting with another person in a stable, predictable environment gives you more possibilities than you could explore in a lifetime. In something as chaotic as a fight, it’s a thousand times worse. Novice diviners usually go catatonic the first few times they’re thrown into a stressful situation: they get overloaded by trying to process the sensory input from all the possible futures at once. If you stick withit though, a diviner can actually be quite an effective fighter, in an unconventional sort of way. We aren’t any stronger or faster than regular folk, but all that information gives us an awful lot of leverage.
    The futures ahead of me shifted. Now the next few seconds were all going to play out the same way; Caldera was going to close in and attack. By the time she moved I’d seen the punch and made up my mind about how to block, and I barely noticed as her fist glanced off my forearm. Caldera specialises in reinforcement magic, and the spells sheathing her arms and hands were strengthening effects, boosting her power and durability. She can punch through concrete with her bare hands, and a full-power blow would shatter my skull. But for now she was just probing, and it was easy for me to deflect the strikes, keeping a safe distance.
    A minute passed, two. Neither of us was going at anywhere near full strength, so we weren’t getting tired. I made a few casual counterstrikes which Caldera brushed aside, but I wasn’t seriously trying to hit her. As seconds ticked by with neither of us landing a blow, Caldera grew more aggressive. She closed the range, aiming for a body strike. I didn’t really want to escalate things, but I wasn’t going to stand there and be a punching bag. Caldera’s attack left her head open, so as she moved in for her attack I hit her open-palm in the forehead. The impact rocked her back and pushed the two of us apart again.
    I heard a murmur but didn’t look around. Surprise flashed across Caldera’s face, followed by annoyance. I hadn’t hurt her but she hadn’t been expecting to be hit like