The ssage was brief. Kieran was, apparently, a man who respected brevity in written communication even if not in personal presentation. It contained: a list of six nas on the central continent, a confirmation that the Ravenhall courier network ran through four cities between the Aldric Mountains and Icrilis, and a single sentence at the bottom that read: ’The matter we discussed proceeds. First delivery in three weeks. K.’
Jack folded the ssage and put it in his pocket.
"Does it have a na?" he asked Petra, looking at the bird.
"Number Seven," she said. "The naming convention is sequential. House Ravenhall has forty-three."
"Seven is mine?"
"For the duration of the arrangent, yes. She responds to a whistle in this pattern." Petra demonstrated: three short, one long. The bird’s head turned with imdiate precision. "She can carry a standard letter case or a ssage capsule of up to half a kilogram. She can cross the Aldric Mountains in four days with a favourable wind. She knows the Ravenhall waystation locations and will rest there. You’ll receive confirmation of delivery when she returns, which will take eight days round trip assuming no delays."
Jack looked at Number Seven. Number Seven looked back with amber eyes that suggested a rich inner life of professional judgnts.
"She’s beautiful," linda said from behind him.
He hadn’t heard her approach, which was new. A month ago he would have tracked her footsteps from the stair. Either she was getting quieter or he was getting less attentive, and he didn’t like either explanation.
"She’s a courier asset," he said.
"She’s beautiful and a courier asset." linda ca to stand beside him and looked up at the bird with an expression Jack recognised as the one she deployed when she’d decided to find sothing magnificent regardless of its official classification. "What are you going to send first?"
He had been thinking about this. The six nas Kieran had provided were contacts in the central continent — scholars, rchants, a minor noble house, and one na that had stopped him cold for a mont before he recognised it from the ga’s secondary lore: an independent mage researcher who specialised in ancient rune systems and had, according to the wiki, been trying to reconstruct the theoretical frawork behind pre-cataclysm Space Magic for thirty years.
’Before the ga’s events, that researcher publishes sothing that changes the academic consensus on spatial mana theory. That paper is what eventually gets him an invitation to Icrilis.’
Jack had certain information that would accelerate that publication by approximately twenty-five years.
"Conduct a correspondence," he said.
"With who?"
"A researcher. Soone who wants information I have. In exchange for—" He paused. "Access to their network. Their credibility. Their na attached to work we do together."
linda tilted her head. "You’re going to ghost-write academic research."
"I prefer to think of it as a collaborative arrangent."
"The researcher presumably won’t know they’re collaborating."
"They’ll receive accurate and unprecedented information about their area of specialisation. Whether they understand its source is irrelevant."
linda was quiet for a mont. Then: "You’ve thought about this for a while."
"Since before we left the university," he confird. "The central continent is the next stage. To arrive there with credibility, I need to be known before I arrive. Academic correspondence is slower than force but considerably less likely to result in people trying to kill before I’ve unpacked."
Number Seven made a sound — low, resonant, like a bell struck at a distance. She was watching Jack with those amber eyes and the general attitude of a professional who had sowhere to be.
Jack went to the study, wrote the letter, and returned in twenty minutes. He had composed it in the asured and slightly formal register of an anonymous colleague who happened to possess so interesting findings and wished to share them. He had not signed it with his na. He had signed it with a symbol — a circle with a single thorn through its center, which was both the emblem he’d been forming for Blackthorn in his mind and a thing that could be recognised later without being attributed too early.
He attached it to Number Seven’s capsule. Petra showed him the clasp chanism. He whistled three short, one long.
The bird spread its wings. The courtyard air moved with a sound like a slow exhalation, and then Number Seven rose, banked north in a long, unhurried arc, and disappeared over the tree line.
Jack watched the sky where she had been.
linda stood beside him. She did not say anything. She had developed, over the past weeks, a useful instinct for when words were wanted and when they weren’t. This was the latter.
Four days to cross the mountains. Eight days round trip.
In eight days Jack would know if his first move on the central continent had landed.
In the anti, there was an aquifer to open, a dungeon to map, August’s watchers to manage, and a fortress that still slled of scaffolding and ambition.
He turned from the sky and went back inside.
The thorn-circle letter was in the air. The first piece was on the board. And sowhere far below, in the dungeon’s deepest gallery, sothing older than the fortress was breathing in the dark — and had been, Roselyn suspected, for a very long ti.
****
The aquifer opened on a Wednesday.
Jack watched from the eastern wall as the marquess stood in the mud fifty ters out from Blackthorn’s gate and simply... listened. His eyes were closed. His arms hung loose at his sides. He had been standing like that for approximately seven minutes, and in that ti not a single one of his knights had moved or spoken, which told Jack a great deal about the quality of the man’s authority.
Then the ground groaned.
It was not a dramatic sound. It was the sound of sothing very large and very patient being redirected — a geological sound, the kind that existed at the lower edge of hearing and resonated instead in the chest. The mud around the marquess’s boots darkened as moisture wicked upward from below. Then a fracture opened in the earth twenty ters north of the gate, clean-edged and deliberate, and water ca.
Not a trickle. A column, rising three ters before it found the grade of the land and began to spread in the orderly fashion of water that knows where it wants to go. The marquess opened his eyes, looked at it with the expression of a man reviewing his own work, and made three small adjustnts with his right hand that Jack’s Perception Field registered as targeted Geokinesis pulses, shaping the flow channel so the water would reach the pipes Leon’s crew had laid out the previous day.
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