Yutten Turse in the style of Félicien Rops, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  The case of the archive burglary had now basically taken over Yutten’s life. She was not particularly active on the social scene even at normal times, but now she did not respond to messages, she canceled appointments, and she generally spent all her time working. She was having the time of her life, though.

  After sleeping on yesterday’s conundrum, she was still uncertain. Too many assumptions at work.

  Was it possible to cast a detection engram that would encompass other engrams which presently did not exist, but which would be associated with the detection engram in the future?

  She had been told in Divination school that Divination magic (other fields of magic too? she supposed so) could never be open-ended. A Divination engram had to have a specific focus.

  You could place a surveillance engram on a door and be alerted when someone passed through it – and then a partner could place a second surveillance engram on that person – but the first surveillance could not somehow extend itself to cover both the door and the person. You had to deal with things separately.

  This seemed to imply that the detection engram surveilling Canardo could not also surveil itself, and definitely not any associated obfuscation engram. A second engram would be necessary to surveil the first, and so forth.

  In theory, then, there would always be an unprotected layer – a topmost eye that does not have another eye watching it. But in practice, she suspected, several layers of detection engrams could probably not be differentiated from one another except by Divination.

  Unless, perhaps, a person was so perceptive that they could differentiate between those different layers just by looking at them. Was that possible?

  As an investigator, she had never investigated Diviners before. Diviners prided themselves on being upstanding citizens, but surely there must occasionally be a bad apple among them? Maybe catching such people is what Protectors are for.

  Another thing she thought about was that if she did trigger the detection engram surveilling Canardo, how would she know? In the Divination with Z?rgiebel, this had been plain to see, but what if the alarm report was itself obfuscated?

  That would seem like an obvious choice if you did not intend to respond to the alarm right away. Maybe you just wanted to surveil the person digging into your secrets.

  In that case, in order to have any idea about what is happening, she would either have to be very perceptive, or she would need her own detection engram.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Yutten had never surveilled a magical space before, but she had plenty of experience surveilling physical spaces, which was standard investigator procedure. What if she tried her usual surveillance engram, which she had used routinely on various physical spaces, to target a magical space instead?

  Maybe it is basically just the same thing, although she had never considered focusing it on anything other than a physical area.

  Worth a try, she thought. She Divined a long-dead person and tried to cast a surveillance engram on that magical space, but the flow collapsed.

  Annoyed, she wondered if she could discover the source of the flaw in the engram’s schema. Her conversations with Chandrian had taught her enough magical theory to understand most sigils and how they worked together.

  She looked at the schema in detail. Sure enough, one of the sigils specified a physical location, so the flow would collapse if the engram was directed at something not fitting that description.

  But Yutten was on a roll now. She was thinking outside the box. What happens if I remove that sigil, she thought. That’s the kind of experiment magisters of magical theory play around with.

  She was not aware of any law saying such experiments were forbidden to anyone who is not a magister of magical theory. (There were norms, though. You were supposed to be careful with stuff like this and not work on your own.)

  She replaced the sigil that specified a physical target area with a sigil specifying only a general target. It was not very difficult, although that was probably mostly because Chandrian had helped her understand how schemas work over many years of conversations.

  Once again, she tried to surveil the magical space surrounding the long-dead person, so that it would report back to her if anyone were to Divine this person. Then, while keeping the surveillance in focus, she Divined him.

  The surveillance engram immediately reported back to her. Wow. Why had no one taught her that this was possible?

  She played around with it on other topics. As an experiment she picked a celebrity musician – an Invoker named Stel Atan who mixed enhancement magics into their music – but had to take the surveillance engram down immediately as several reports of Divination of this person pinged into her mind.

  Huh. Diviners obsessing over celebrities just like everybody else. Ethically ambiguous, too. But then, so was her surveillance.

  She got a little spooked. Yutten did not have an Abjurer at hand, so unlike the detection engram surveilling Canardo, her surveillance would not be obfuscated. It might be obvious to anyone Divining Stel Atan.

  Careful now. She had a habit of sometimes getting overenthusiastic. Don’t go too fast.

  But she had a clear idea of how she might proceed with this. If she set up an engram surveilling the outcome space of her original Divination – the three Glitter victims and the translucent thing attached to one of them – that engram might be able to detect any changes to the space, including the generation of outgoing reports.

  To go through with her original plan – a Divination targeting the obfuscation engram hiding the detection engram surveilling Canardo – she would then need three separate engrams of her own: the original Divination engram establishing the outcome space, the secondary surveillance engram keeping an eye on this outcome space, and the final Divination targeting the obfuscation.

  It was getting complicated, and she just learned how to do two engrams at the same time yesterday.

  Obviously, she needed practice, but it did not have to involve Canardo. She could set up a Divination of the potted plants in her living room – just one cactus had managed to survive over the past years, although she had recently acquired a few other plants that, come to think of it, she needed to water straight away – and then practice surveilling this magical space and, as a step number three, triggering this surveillance with a new Divination engram.

  Pretty innocent. She watered the plants, then practiced her magic all evening. The two first steps went fine, but she struggled with the third. Maybe she was just tired.

  Falling asleep was easy.