In the solitude of her library, a predatory smile spread across Catherine's lips.
Her plan had imploded, but chaos was fertile clay.
The Rook and the Church, the two greatest powers of shadow and light, were now blind, while she, the spectator, was the only one who knew that her prey, Jun-Ho Park, had escaped.
The race to find him was beginning, and she had a head start. She felt, for the first time, like a true goddess of manipulation, observing the deadly game of her pawns from her olympus of velvet and dust.
It was at this precise moment of silent triumph that she felt the world tilt.
Her psychic vision was still focused on the house in Spinners' Alley, a distant observation point she had believed to be safe.
She was watching the chaotic battle raging inside. But suddenly, the aura of Brother Micah, that pillar of burning white light, ceased its assault on the house's traps. It froze. And then, with a terrifying speed and precision, it swiveled.
It was no longer a diffuse light seeking to purify an area. It was a searchlight, a concentrated beam that locked directly onto Catherine's invisible point of view.
She had the horrifying, vertiginous sensation of a sniper, hidden in the shadows miles away, who suddenly realizes the enemy general is looking straight down their scope.
He had felt her.
Micah, in the midst of the chaos, the dust, and the bursts of magic, had perceived her presence.
An adept of the Pathway of Judgement at Sequence 5 did not merely fight visible corruption; he could sense the gaze of sinners, of voyeurs who delighted in secrecy and shadow.
And Catherine's observation, her use of the power of Lust to penetrate the secrets of that house, was a transgression the Inquisitor could detect.
Catherine tried to sever the link instantly, but it was too late. She was hooked.
The white light of Micah's aura shot down the thread of her perception, a spear of pure conceptual energy tracing her trail at lightning speed.
For her, it was an experience of absolute terror. The dark tunnel of her remote vision was suddenly flooded with a blinding light, a white flame that did not burn flesh, but soul.
She heard a sound, not with her ears, but in her mind: a chorus of pure, fanatic voices chanting a hymn of purity, a sound that sought to erase all complexity, all nuance, all secrecy, leaving only a blank and repentant page.
It was the sound of Judgement, and it was coming for her.
She felt the heat of this light drawing closer, threatening to pinpoint her location, to incinerate her mind and reveal her position in Valerius's manor.
Panicked, she struggled to break free, to fight back, but it was like trying to stop a wave with her bare hands.
She could not fight this force; it was of a power level far superior to her own. Nor could she simply sever the link, as that would leave a psychic scar, a trail that the Inquisitor, that divine bloodhound, could follow later at his leisure.
She was left with only one option, a desperate maneuver drawn from the very essence of her Pathway. Deception. The bluff. Misdirection. Betrayal.
She could not destroy the spear of light, but perhaps she could make it change its target.
Gathering all her will, all her focus in a superhuman effort, Catherine honed in on the thread of her own vision.
She imagined it as a tangible thing, a strand of black silk she held in the fingers of her mind. The spear of white light was rushing up this strand, drawing dangerously close.
She cast her consciousness out across the city, ignoring her own fear, searching for another signature of power, another presence strong enough, corrupt enough, to attract the holy lance.
She found it. The warehouse on the docks. The Rook's headquarters. And inside, the cold, observant, envious aura she had sensed before.
Soren.
With a mental effort that made her teeth grind and sent a blinding pain behind her eyes, Catherine performed an act of pure psychic heresy. She unhooked her own thread of observation from Park's house and, with a flick of her will, she threw it, forcibly connecting it to Soren's aura.
For Micah, the sensation must have been like that of a fisherman feeling a fish struggle on the line, only for the line to snap and snag on a much larger, darker Leviathan swimming by.
The result was instantaneous.
The pressure on Catherine's mind vanished. The blinding light in her vision went out. She severed the contact, collapsing backward onto the library rug, her breath short, her nose bleeding profusely from the psychic strain.
She was free.
She was safe.
For now.
But she knew what she had just done. She had just painted a massive, flaming target on the back of The Rook's organization.
The Church of the Purifying Flame, which had perhaps initially been on the trail of its own agents, was now convinced that a major, corrupt power—the one they had just touched bwas operating from the docks.
She had diverted the crusade.
She had made her two enemies into direct adversaries.
She lay there on the floor, trembling, the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, the luxury of the library seeming to mock her.
The victory she had felt upon seeing Park escape now seemed hollow. She had survived, yes.
But she had just lost her greatest asset. Her ability to observe the world from the shadows, to be the invisible spider at the center of the web, had become her greatest liability. Every time she used it, she risked being detected by adepts powerful enough to hunt her down.
She was now blind.
Trapped in her gilded cage, with a suspicious jailer and enemies that were now entire factions. She looked at the note containing Park's address, which she still held in her clenched hand.
She had a lead.
But she no longer had the eyes to follow it safely.