Barnaby Holt kicked open the cedar door of the herb laboratory, his boots spraying gravel across the threshold.
Inside the quiet workroom, Alchemist Linnea sat behind a heavy oak examination bench, adjusting a brass magnifying lens over a tray of dried silver-leaf stalks.
She looked up with a start, her hand freezing above her glass tweezers.
“Barnaby?” Linnea asked, noting the wild gleam in the old man’s eyes. “What happened? Did the barrier fail?”
“The barrier held,” Barnaby said, breathless as he hurried to the table. “The mountain is safe. But something far more sinister is happening.”
He cleared a stack of parchment and glass beakers with a sweep of his arm.
From beneath his coat, he pulled the bundle of oilcloth and laid it in the center of the wooden table.
Beside it, he placed a jagged shard of black slate—a captured fragment of Grand Regent Malakor’s False Domain array, recovered from Siege General Vorn’s fallen command tent.
