What can she bet on? She would like to bet on an attempt using no non-buff circled spells attempt reaching at least the Doors of Night, a similarly spell-less attempt breaking the Prismatic Wall on the walls, and on Professor Vargas reaching the Doors of Scouring. Are those bets on offer?

The Abadarans will take some of those bets!

An attempt with no non-buff circled spells reaching at least the Doors of Night currently has 1:5 odds, and Professor Vargas reaching the Doors of Scouring has 1:20 odds.

While there are unsubstantiated rumors and questionable historical records indicating the walls of the Hall of Wards contain a permanent prismatic wall, they are just that: unsubstantiated and questionable. The furthest in they'll take bets on is breaking the dead-magic wall without non-buff spells, at 1:25 odds.

Right. They're the boring ones, it's the Norgorberites she would need to go to for the interesting bets. And they would just lie.

Well, good enough. Best not to be fully confident in the vision, some things did change... She walks home and writes up another contract.

Ulon wanted her to be subtle. If she was meant to just change things by telling people what she saw, hiding her thoughts would make no sense. Mother even told her she was not to reveal this had happened. Counterpoint, a vision unused is wasted. Her instruction, thus, must be to act on this in a way which means her relevance in particular is unknown.

When she puts it that way, it's obviously correct; what public knowledge of Ulon exists believes the cult nearly destroyed, and remembers its times of power only as times which called for its destruction. The local Norgorberites don't much care about three-millenia-old grudges, but Norgorber himself may well. If Ulon has found a way to use prophecy, and is puttig it to use here, he wants it to stay hidden, which means not drawing too much attention to herself. A spider's-claw without meaningful connection to her or Ulon? Far more usable. Of course, pulling in an actual person to play the role would be an immediate risk, and that seems foolish as well.

The Bank of Abadar is known to hold client information safe. It is not known to hold it infinitely safe, but it at least tries not to spread things around. It also doesn't actually require a client to be present in person to open an account, though it makes clear its fabled security measures are of limited use for an account handled entirely remotely. Fortunate for her, then, that those security measures won't be what she's counting on.

The contract she writes for the Bank claims to come from a caster who likes privacy, and is willing to take some risks for it. Unfortunately, they also know of ways to track a caster by their magic, and so will be proceeding without directly casting any spells on exposed objects. It requests the creation of a new anonymous account tied to a codephrase. The codephrase is written on an attached paper in a liquid invisible on paper until heat is applied, at which point it permanently becomes visible. ("If the codephrase can be seen before you have gone through this procedure, my counterparty is not as trustworthy as expected, and the entirety of this contract is null and void.") It then requests the transfer of 200 gold sails from the account of "the undersigned" to that new account, to be bet on the conjunction of the expected Breaching results, with as much as possible of the winnings from one bet to be immediately placed on the next. The day after the Breaching, the undersigned is to be returned half the funds in the new account, whatever those might be. The remaining fraction is to be retained for use with the codephrase.

With that done, she signs the contract in her own name as the undersigned. That should look appropriately like she is simply a coincidentally available, somewhat naive money source for an actual wizard. That account should be able to send messages with the Bank's approval that they are indeed from a source which knows a great deal. If she ever needs the extra money, the Bank will doubtless require irritating and prolonged verification protocols, but even half the proceeds should be quite sufficient for a long while.

And off to the bank to submit the contract! (Will they adjust those betting odds when she does this? Probably. Oh well, that's why the contract says to place the bets at Abadaran-fair rates whatever they may be at the time.)

She meets with a banker.

"We cannot accept a contingent bet of that size with those multipliers, because it has the potential to exceed the total liquidity of our betting pool. We do not allow any individual bet to exceed one thousand gold sails. If it is acceptable to your counterparty, we can accept a modified version of those bets with the understanding that each individual bet will be capped at one thousand gold sails."

"It said t'take the biggest bets you've got, so I think so? I dunno, it just looked like a good offer t'me. ...ah, an' I'm not sayin' I got any spells cast for this, of course." Merely heavily implying it.

The contract does say to simply take as large a bet as possible, if betting everything isn't an option. The proceeds, whatever they may be, are to be distributed appropriately.

"Very well." She takes the contract and leaves the room.

A minute later, she returns with a small sheaf of paper. "Your bet has been accepted, and the money has been transferred. The documentation for the anonymous account is here. Good day."

"Thank ye kindly." She... takes the paper. Right. Paperwork is traceable, isn't it. Oh well, so it goes.

She'll bury it across the river, then, after copying down the necessities onto a different piece of paper which shouldn't be connected magically. If the bet sizes are limited like that, she doesn't need to get the money from selling the gems any time soon, so she's... free until the Festival? Seems like it. She can't send a bank-backed letter until the bets have come in, of course, and that's the next step.

Tomorrow maybe she'll go and look at the castle. If the dragon was there for anything, it's probably not public, but there's no harm in checking just in case.

KORVOSAN CARRIER
STARDAY, DESNUS 30th, 4708

SCANDAL AT HOUSE GREY, SECRET HEIR REVEALED

The weather worsens. Rain pours in loud sheets. The sky crackles with lightning. Three ships delay setting off until the storm passes. Gemshare Jewelers is robbed by an expert. The value of the stolen goods exceeds a thousand gold sails. Archbanker Darb Tuttle sells a regenerate.

Castle Korvosa, situated atop the Grand Mastaba, towers over the city. The shield-walls Tencednil remembers surrounding it are absent.

If they were already present, that would be a remarkably bad sign.

Can she see the balcony on which the king was supposedly killed?

She'll have to climb the hundred steps to the top of the Grand Mastaba.

The castle has three great towers with a couple balconies each, she doesn't know exactly which one the king died on. There's also the castle walls, which don't have balconies as such but do have ramparts.

Up she goes. How crowded is the area around the castle? In particular, how many people are in a... roughly fifty foot radius circle directly beneath the balconies? Also, how far off the ground are the balconies?

This morning, in the area open to the public, there's probably a few dozen people around. Nobody is directly beneath the balconies, they hang over the interior courtyard behind the castle's outer wall. Their height varies, but anywhere from fifty to seventy feet above the ground is a good estimate.

Well, that's consistent with a large red dragon breathing on one and killing only the King. Probably. The stories of ninety-foot breath weapons are mostly from things she doesn't really trust, and Glarataxus probably isn't that powerful even if that can happen. Are there any other traces the breath would have left in the vision? Hmm. Can dragon breath melt stone? It might be able to.

...even if it can, she wouldn't have known if one of the balconies had been destroyed, she didn't get the chance to look. Oh well.

Back down the Mastaba, out to where the shield walls were. Can she see the towers of the castle from here, even if the balconies are hidden?

She can see the towers from down there, as well as some but not all of the balconies.

Were all of the towers she can currently see there when she saw the castle in the vision?

Yes, but she remembers the top of the tallest tower being melted and warped.

Oh good. That seems like evidence that the story was true, and that it was the top tower where the king was killed.

Or someone was trying to fake it and wanted visible dragon breath results, in which case it's possible they tried too hard. Sigh. Mother is the one who's good at this kind of thing! Well, if she was chosen, there was a reason for it.

She spends the rest of the day hunting for anything she can find on dragon fire. Probably not much, but it's better to try.

Tencednil doesn't really get anywhere. Most of the books on the specifics of dragon fire are probably within the Acadamae's walls, if they even exist in Korvosa at all.

What she does find is mostly just "it's unnaturally hot", "it's fire", and "it kills and melts your stuff".

Oh well. She still has some additional evidence for the red dragon claim, that should be good enough.

Eventually it gets dark outside, and not that long thereafter she finds herself shepherded out the doors of the various places she had been searching. It's nice to be walking back in the dark, especially when she remembers being trapped inside in the vision. If things work right, she'll be able to do things like this even in a week.

For now, time to sleep. Tomorrow is the Breaching Festival, and with it will come her chance.

KORVOSAN CARRIER
SUNDAY, DESNUS 31st, 4708

SHINGLES GANG BRAWL TURNS BLOODY, NINE DEAD

A perfect circle is carved into the sky, two miles wide. The storm seems to bend around it. It's a bright, sunny day. The Acadamae opens it's doors to outsiders for the festival. The guard struggles to handle a crowd. A small ship wrecks against the Varisian coastline, far in the distance. A devil has breakfast with his great grandson.

The Academae spending a seventh circle spell keeping the weather nice for the Breaching is ridiculous, of course, but it's just as impressive now as it was in the vision.

She has no need to get any Removes distributed, though she still doesn't know what was in that part of the dresser. But then, there are many things she doesn't know, and this can go on the list nowhere near the top. She lets herself sleep in a little later than she saw herself, but still arrives at the Academae before the vision had her there.

The Hall of Summoning didn't have anything more it was willing to share with her. With Vargas on the Breaching Festival list, she'll go over to the Hall of Shaping. What sorts of demonstrations are they putting on today?

She pushes through the crowd to the Hall of Shaping's entrance. Large double doors are held wide open. A man next to the door is selling use of a greater hat of disguise, charging by the minute. There's a line.

In the foyer, she can see a schedule on the wall (similar to the one in the Hall of Summoning) advertising demonstrations of polymorph spells, demonstrations of extradimensional spaces, and demonstrations of flight.