Want to know where someone’s been recently? Check their shoes – they know all the roads they’ve walked on.

Charge cost: TBD*

Ritual Ingredients
— A pair of shoes belonging to the person you’re trying to track.
— A large flat pan, like a cookie sheet with a shallow lip.
— Printer’s ink, black, and enough of it to nearly fill the above pan.
— Stones gathered from the road nearest to your target’s dwelling and to wherever you’re doing the ritual. Chunks of asphalt or cement work fine, as do the cobblestones or flagstones of older cities.
— Maps of the areas you want to trace your target’s movements through. If you’re interested in detail, you may need several maps of varying scales. Roads only – no topographical maps or anything like that.
— Plenty of blank paper.
— Your own blood, drawn yourself and not more than a day old. Technically you need enough to fill your cupped hands, but unless you’ve got large hands a pint should be plenty.

Ritual Action
Using the stones you’ve gathered, completely scrape the treads and patterns off the sole of both shoes, until you’ve got as close to a flat plane as the shoes’ construction will allow. This can be done at any time before the rest of the ritual so long as the shoes are properly prepared, and since even a little bit of leftover tread will make the ritual fail, taking your time (if you can) is recommended.

Pour the ink into the pan, being sure to cover the entirety of the bottom of the container. Next, pour in your blood and mix it in. Spend your charges* as you stir, and be careful not to splash any out of the pan. Once you spend those charges, though, you’ve only a limited amount of time to take advantage of the ritual, so move quickly.

Take a shoe and press the sole hard against one of the maps. Dab the sole into the mixture in the pan, then apply the shoe’s bottom to the blank paper. Doing so will leave a footprint-sized copy of that area of the map, with the stretches of road those shoes have walked on drawn in pure blood instead of the ink. Do the same with the other shoe, and continue to alternate shoes as you map out the movements of your target. You only have until any of the blood in the mixture or on the maps dries to continue “stamping” maps. (This is why you don’t want to splash any out of the pan.)

You can change maps at will, so if you want you can use very small-scale maps to be very precise, or you can get a general idea of the target’s movements over very large areas. The shoeprints will only highlight roads the target has walked on in the past seven days, but something as simple as getting out of a taxi puts their feet on the street, so a spot of blood will show up there. However, car travel and public transportation won’t leave traces, and if the target wasn’t wearing this pair of shoes when they went somewhere you’re simply out of luck.

All of the blood on the maps dries at the same time, leaving the routes taken highlighted in that peculiar reddish-brown. As with most such rituals, once a pair of shoes has been used in this manner, it can’t be used again. Technically, the shoes could be worn for a while and then tracked again, but few people are likely to continue to wear shoes so damaged.

Notes:

Internet mapping programs are a godsend to dukes using this ritual; with a fast printer, it’s quite possible to narrow someone’s movements down to a particular house they visited by printing smaller-scale maps on demand.

Good luck acquiring the shoes of the person you’re interested in. Hope you don’t mind a little breaking and entering, or mugging.

What you hear:
— Urbanomancers who know about it hate this ritual, given how much time they spend walking the streets of their cities. It’s a bit of an overreaction, though; street rats tend to cover so much ground that it obfuscates any particular travels of interest.

— No idea how old this ritual is, but back in the early `90s when people were supposedly killing each other for their shoes? Makes you wonder exactly why people wanted those Air Jordans, doesn’t it?

— With some really powerful mojo and some modifications to this ritual, it’s supposed to be possible to guide the feet of the shoes’ wearer to a particular location. No one’s saying how to do that, though, if anyone really does know.

— Someone’s working on an even more frightening version of this ritual that uses car tires.