Blake awaited news from the search teams, calmly doing paperwork to keep himself occupied, after all an orderly office is an orderly mind, anything else was merely a pathetic shade of true organisation, and a blasphemy that insulted the great tome Filofacs.

Eventually the report came back, and it was not good, somehow they had not only evaded capture, they had even managed to slip into the unremodelled part of town. That was most inconvenient, and angered him to the point where in his unbridled rage he scattered paperclips. (He really was ashamed of himself after that, no true disciple of Ordurlee or Neyt should behave in such an unsightly manner. As penance he would spend the next three hours organising his desk, not that he didn’t consider that a reward deep down inside mind you.)

“Have the search continue, and begin the great categorisation, the rite must be completed on time, if we miss the great conjunction we will be put behind schedule by five hundred years, and I will be most inconvenienced. Should that happen I will become irate.” (It never seemed to enter his head that the life expectancy of a human tended to top out at maybe a fifth of that, then again Blake is probably the kind of man who would force death himself to wait while he put his affairs in order, so maybe he could pull it off.)

He had to get everything filed on time, the great filing could not be delayed. Especially not the big transfer, it was essential for the takeover to succeed.

************************************************************************

While Mibbet desperately ransacked the building in the search for her coveted bean of choice, Rosalind divided her attention so her, Elvira, and the others could listen closely to the newcomers story.

“It all started a few years back, Blake Holsun took the town charter, and by some weird loophole ownership of the city, since then things have been going constantly downhill,” Eileen ranted. “I became an architect to change this city for the better, To move away from the damn boxes, and Blake wants us to instead standardise them and make them more efficient.”

“OK why?” Elvira asked, listening as best she could while putting the point back on Spikey The Motivational Pike using a whetstone fished from her pouch.

“It’s all about control, he thinks if he can get the city “standard” enough he can predict every change that happens in it. But that isn’t the weird bit.”

“Really? He wants to be able to see the future by building and that isn’t the weird bit? Then what is?”

“This is” replied Eileen, pulling out a complete proposed layout of the city. “I don’t know what they’re really up to but it reeks of magic.

The city layout was indeed strange, layer upon layer of complex grids, and unlike most city layouts it was a square. Most cities tended to avoid squares for a damned good reason. Squares had corners, meaning the city walls had corners. With magic like fireball, explosion, and meteor you did not want corners.

Besieging a city was a lot like completing a jigsaw puzzle after all, if you really want to do it in a hurry all you have to do is aim for the corner pieces. To knowingly weaken your own city like that there could only really be two possibilities, either they were really crap at urban planning, or they were working with the enemy.

“Rosalind” Elvira shouted, “you’re better at this hocus pocus crap than me, mind taking a look at this and see if you can figure it out?”

“Just a minute, YEEEEESSSS I’VE FOUND IT.” Mibbet howled in glee, holding aloft the sack with a coffee label on it, only to be stopped by Errol.

“Uhhh Princess, I don’t think that’s coffee.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but see that hole in the bottom? I think mice got into the coffee sack.”

Mibbet quickly dropped the sack with a whimper. “Okay then, let’s go with distraction, what do we have here?” She quickly picked up the blueprint, and went pale. (Elvira seriously wished she played poker, she had never ever ever seen such a bad poker face.)

“Addy, we need you in here immediately.”

Addy lumbered over, “you need help?”

“Yeah, we need to get word out as soon as possible, can you send a copy of this to the palace please? Immediately if not sooner. We need mages here ASAP, Blake must be nucking futs to do this.”

“Princess I regret not telling you this already, but that will not be possible.”

“OK you never usually tell me that, what is going on.”

“The city has actively blocked outside ethereal communication, there weren’t many of us in the city to start with but none of us can get a signal out.”

“How the hell did they pull that off without anybody noticing?”

“They block it all, but lower the block long enough to leak out the occasional picture of a cat.”

“Oh yeah that’d do it,” Mibbet replied with a sigh. “We have to stop that bastard no matter what it takes, this isn’t just any old ritual.”

“What do you mean?” Elvira asked. “He’s just another bad guy, we’ve seen all sorts, the system, portals to hell, we’ve seen it all, what can he possibly have up his sleeves that is worse than all that?”

“You seem to be confused about what he wants, usually bad guys always have the same goal. Causing mayhem. Blake is different, he doesn’t want chaos, hell is useless to him, and he has no use for power but to further his goals.”

“Then what could he possibly want?”

“He wants everything neat and tidy, he wants power, and he wants control. This ritual circle is a lot like the one for an invocation of the elemental realm of chaos, if you take out all the curves. Make everything predictable.”

“You mean?”

“Yeah, he’s trying to invoke the elemental plane of ORDER.”