Chapter 12

# Chapter 12

The Thornwall stair was older than the Thornwall.

This was not something Kael had learned from Veraine's maps or Torvane's lectures or any of the documents he had studied in the months since Lady Maren's death. It was something the lattice told him as he climbed—told him not in words but in the layered grammar of resonance, the way a geologist reads the age of stone by the pressure of its grain. The stair had been here before the wall was built around it. Before the briar took root in the mortar. Before the iron was forged and set into the stone in patterns that Kael now recognized, with a shiver of delayed comprehension, as lattice script.

Someone had known. Whoever built the Thornwall, eight centuries ago, had known what ran beneath this stair and had built the wall to protect it.

Or to contain it.

Sera climbed behind him, her footsteps as measured as his, her breathing easy despite the steepness. The stair switchbacked up the face of the wall in narrow flights separated by small landings, each one barely wide enough for two people to pass. The stone steps were worn to concavities by centuries of feet—thousands of crossings a day, Kael supposed, because the Thornwall stair was the only free passage between the Lower City and the Heights. The other crossings charged a toll. This one charged only the climb.

He was halfway up when the node reached for him.

It was not like the Coppersmith Bridge. The bridge had been an invitation—patient, specific, a single string offered for his hand. The Thornwall node did not invite. It surged. It rose through the worn stone steps and through the soles of his boots and into the architecture of his body with a force that buckled his knees, and he caught himself on the iron railing with both hands and stood there, trembling, while the lattice poured through him like water through a broken levee.

"Kael." Sera's hand on his back. Steady. Ready.

"I'm here." But he was not entirely sure he was. The node was vast—larger than the bridge's anchor, denser, a knot of intersecting threads so complex that his mind could not hold its shape any more than a hand could hold the shape of the sea. He understood, in a rush of perception that bordered on vertigo, why the stair was older than the wall. The wall had been built because of the stair. Because this point—this exact point in the city's bedrock—was where the lattice was thickest, where the founders had driven their deepest anchor, and the wall had been erected not as a political boundary but as a *ward*. A structure designed to hold the node's resonance within limits that would not shatter the city above.

The iron in the railings was not decorative. It was conductive. Every bar, every crosspiece, every ornamental curl that visitors took for artisan's whimsy was a channel for the lattice's energy, routing it through the Thornwall's mass the way copper routes lightning through a building, drawing it away from the fragile structures of wood and plaster and human habitation and grounding it in the stone.

"Kael, your hands."

He looked down. The iron railing beneath his palms was warm. Not the faint condensation-melting warmth of the Coppersmith Bridge—this was heat, actual heat, radiating outward from his grip in a visible shimmer that made the air above his knuckles dance. The frost on the rail had melted in a circle the width of his arm span. Below the rail, he could see the stone of the step glowing faintly where his boots pressed against it—a foxfire luminescence, barely perceptible in the grey morning light, but present. The lattice was coming through him with a force that the physical world could no longer entirely contain.

"Can you hold it?" Sera's voice was operational. Assessing. She had positioned herself one step below him, angled so that she could brace his weight if he collapsed and simultaneously watch the stair above and below for observers. A boy gripping a railing on a public stairway. Not alarming. Not yet.

"Yes." He closed his eyes and let the node take what it needed.

The sensation was different this time. At the bridge, the connection had been intimate—a single thread, a single conversation, the lattice meeting him as an equal. Here, the lattice was not conversing. It was *working*. Using him the way a river uses a channel, the way a bellows uses a valve. The cascade effect that Veraine had predicted was not additive—it was geometric. The Coppersmith Bridge node, still singing behind him, was feeding energy into the Thornwall node through the connection Kael had established, and the Thornwall node was amplifying it, multiplying it, and sending it outward in directions he could feel but not yet map.

He felt the lattice's reach extend. Past the Thornwall. Past the boundary between the Lower City and the Heights. The ancient web did not recognize that boundary—it predated it, underran it, wove through the bedrock beneath it as though the wall above were a temporary inconvenience that the stone had agreed to tolerate. Threads that had been dormant reached upward, probing the foundations of buildings Kael had never entered. The Scholars' Quarter. The lower ranges of the Heights. The Merchant Assembly hall with its pillars of imported marble. The lattice was waking beneath them, stirring in foundations that had not felt its touch in decades, and the sensation was like watching a frozen river begin to move—the slow crack of ice, the dark water beneath, the inexorable reassertion of a current that had never stopped flowing but had only been waiting for a channel to open.

Something answered.

From the Heights. From somewhere in the upper districts, far beyond the reach of Kael's physical senses, a resonance answered the Thornwall node's signal—faint, tentative, like a voice calling across a valley. Another node. Not one of the nine that Veraine had mapped. Something else. Something that the lattice had built into the architecture of the Heights centuries ago and that had been silent so long that even Veraine's exhaustive research had not detected it.

Kael's eyes flew open.

"There's something up there," he said. "Something I didn't expect."

Sera read his face. She did not ask what he meant—she had learned, in the days since the Archive, to accept that Kael perceived things she could not and to trust his perception the way she trusted her own assessment of a street's danger. She simply adjusted. He could see her tactical map reorganizing behind her eyes, accommodating a new variable.

"Something good or something bad?"

"I don't know yet. Another node—not on Veraine's map. In the Heights."

Sera's expression tightened by one degree. The Heights were Voss's territory—the jurisdiction he controlled, the landscape he had mapped, the terrain where his watchers and his marshals and his carefully constructed legal machinery operated with the precision of a well-maintained clock.

"Can it wait?"

Kael tested the impression. The answering resonance was fading—not dying, but retreating, as though whatever had responded to the Thornwall's signal had recognized the danger of being heard and had pulled back behind its own walls. A node that could hide. A node that had *chosen* to hide, for years or decades or longer, dormant in the architecture of a district controlled by the man who was systematically dismantling the lattice it belonged to.

"It can wait," he said. "But not forever."

"Nothing can." Sera glanced up the stair. Two men were descending from the Heights—dockworkers, by their dress, heading for the early shift on the canal barges. They passed without a second look. Kael released the railing. The iron cooled instantly, the shimmer vanishing, the only evidence of what had happened a damp handprint on metal that could be explained by a hundred ordinary causes. "How do you feel?"

Different from the bridge. That connection had left him clearer, steadied, the hum reorganized into something functional. This one left him—he searched for the word—*expanded*. The lattice's perception had grown. He could feel the city in layers now, the way Veraine described it in her theoretical models: the surface layer of human activity, the structural layer of architecture and infrastructure, and beneath them both the lattice layer, the deep web of resonance that connected everything the city had been and everything it could become. Two activated nodes and the perception had shifted from a hum to a map—rough, incomplete, full of dark zones and silent spaces, but a map nonetheless.

"Different," he said. "Stronger. The cascade is working faster than Veraine predicted."

They climbed the rest of the stair and emerged at the top of the Thornwall, where the morning opened before them in a grey panorama of the Heights. The upper city was a different country—wider streets, taller buildings, the ordered geometry of wealth and authority replacing the Lower City's organic sprawl. The Conclave towers rose in the middle distance, their crystal facets catching what little light the overcast sky offered and holding it like accusations. Somewhere behind those walls, Torvane sat in a cell that the lattice could not reach.

Sera turned them left, away from the Heights, into a narrow passage that ran along the Thornwall's upper face—a maintenance walk used by the city's masons, hidden from the main thoroughfares by a parapet of old stone. It was the kind of route she always found. The arteries that the city's body forgot it had.

"Three nodes," Kael said, correcting himself. "The bridge, the stair, and whatever is up there. Three down."

"Two that we control. One that we don't." Sera was precise about these things. "What did it feel like? The one in the Heights?"

He considered. The answering resonance had been unlike the place nodes—unlike the bridge's patient anchor or the stair's overwhelming density. It had been quick. Aware. Almost *intelligent* in the way it had responded and then withdrawn, as though it were not merely a knot of lattice energy but a node with agency, capable of choice.

"Like someone heard me knock and decided not to open the door."

Sera processed this in silence. They walked the maintenance path, and below them the Lower City spread its rooftops and chimney pots and washing lines in the familiar chaos that Kael had looked down on from this wall his entire life. But it was not the same. The lattice was alive beneath it now—not in the abstract way he had felt it since the Archive, the general hum of a system operating beneath perception, but in the specific, articulated way of a network with active nodes and live connections. He could feel the Coppersmith Bridge behind them and below, a warm point in the web's topology. He could feel the Thornwall stair beneath their feet, vast and thrumming. And he could feel, faintly, the ghost of the signal from the Heights—an afterimage, a memory of contact, the way a hand remembers the shape of something it has briefly touched.

"Veraine needs to know about this," Sera said. "The Heights node."

"How?"

"She's at the estate by now. Lord Aldric would have received her at first light—he's expecting her, she arranged it through channels I don't want to know about." Sera paused at a junction in the maintenance path, checked both directions, chose left. "I'll go tonight. Not through the main routes—I know a way through the Saltway undercroft that comes up inside the estate's service entrance. It's not on any map Voss would have."

"And if he's watching the estate?"

"He is watching the estate. He's watching the front gate and the garden wall and the carriage drive, because those are the entrances that exist in the Regency Council's property records." The ghost of something that was not quite a smile. "The service entrance isn't in the records. It was built during the Third Succession, when the Deverane family needed a way to move people in and out without the sitting Regent's knowledge. Lady Maren showed me."

Lady Maren. The name settled into the conversation the way a stone settles into water—a brief disturbance, a spreading silence, an object that would remain long after the ripples passed. Kael felt the lattice respond to it. Not with grief—the lattice did not grieve in any way he could recognize as human—but with a resonance that was warmer than the baseline, a frequency that he had come to associate with the founder's mark, the deep imprint that Maren Deverane had left on a system she had spent her life protecting.

"She planned for this," Kael said. Not a question.

"She planned for everything. Or close enough." Sera leaned against the parapet. Below them, the maintenance path dropped away into a gap between the Thornwall's inner and outer faces—a narrow space filled with the roots of the briar that gave the wall its name, black and gnarled and so deeply embedded in the mortar that removing them would bring the wall down. "She planned for Voss, for the Conclave, for the possibility that her bloodline would fail and the lattice would need a new anchor. She planned for you, Kael. She left you the folio, the token, the estate, the legal standing—every tool she could give a boy she'd never met, assembled across twenty years for a crisis she wouldn't live to see."

It was the most Sera had ever said about Lady Maren. She had known the woman—briefly, in the months before her death, through whatever channels connected a scholar's ward from the Lower City to the matriarch of a Pillar House. Sera had never spoken of those meetings. Kael had never asked. The omission was its own kind of architecture, a room in the structure of their trust that they had agreed, without discussion, to leave sealed.

"Tell Veraine about the Heights node," Kael said. "And tell her the cascade is accelerating. Two nodes in, and I can already feel the third. The Saltway customs house—it's pulling at me."

"Now?"

"Since the stair. The amplification is real, Sera. Each node I connect doesn't just strengthen the web—it makes the next connection easier. Faster. Like the lattice is learning how to use me."

Something moved in Sera's expression—a flicker of the discomfort she carried whenever the lattice's agency became too evident, too purposeful, too much like the behavior of a mind rather than a mechanism. She did not share Veraine's theoretical wonder or Torvane's scholarly awe. She assessed the lattice the way she assessed everything: as a variable with potential utility and potential danger, to be managed rather than marveled at.

"How many can you do today?" she asked.

Kael reached inward. The hum was stronger than it had been this morning—not louder but deeper, richer, a chord with more notes in it. The weariness he had braced for after the Thornwall stair had not arrived. If anything, he felt more capable, as though each connection fed back into him some fraction of the energy it drew. A circuit. A feedback loop. The lattice was not depleting him. It was using him as a conduit through which energy moved in both directions, and the flow left him not emptied but clarified, the way a river leaves its banks cleaner for having moved through them.

"Three more," he said. "Maybe four. As long as we stay ahead of the watchers."

Sera nodded. She pulled Veraine's map from her coat and spread it against the parapet's stone. The red ink points glowed against the parchment like embers—nine place nodes, two now connected, the remaining seven waiting. She traced a route with her finger: the Saltway customs house, the canal junction beneath the Ashmarket, the old cistern in the tanners' district. A circuit through the Lower City that would avoid every marshal station, every toll crossing, every point where Voss might have placed observers.

"We do these three before midday," she said. "Then you rest. Not optional—non-negotiable rest, Kael, even if you feel like you could keep going, because what you feel and what is true are not always the same thing, and I am not going to explain to Veraine how I let you burn out on day one of a three-day sprint."

"And after I rest?"

"After you rest, I go to the estate. I brief Veraine. I come back with whatever she's learned from Lady Maren's workroom and whatever new instructions the most obsessive archivist in Aranthor's history has generated in the twelve hours since I last saw her." She folded the map. "And tomorrow we do the last four."

Four nodes tomorrow. The deep ones, according to Veraine's map—the nodes that sat beneath the oldest parts of the Lower City, in foundations so ancient that the buildings above them had been rebuilt three and four times while the lattice points beneath remained unchanged. The wellspring in the old quarter. The foundation stone of the first chandler's guild. The bedrock seam beneath the Underfold's central market. And the ninth node—the one Veraine had marked with a circle instead of a point, the one she had labeled in handwriting so small that Kael had needed a lens to read it.

*The Threshold.*

He did not know what it was. Veraine had not explained, and Sera had not asked, and the lattice, when he reached for the word, offered nothing but a resonance so deep it felt geological. It was the last node on the map. The deepest point. The place where the lattice came closest to whatever it had been built to contain.

But that was tomorrow's problem. Today's problem was simpler: three more nodes, three more connections, three more threads in a web that was growing faster than the man in the Heights could cut.

"Let's go," Kael said.

They descended the maintenance path, slipping back into the Lower City through a gap in the Thornwall's base that Sera had known about since childhood—a mason's access, sealed on the Heights side, open on the Lower City side, because no one in the Heights had ever thought to secure a passage leading *down*. They emerged into the familiar clutter of the tanners' district, where the air was thick with the ammonia stink of the curing vats and the streets ran with the colored runoff of a dozen competing workshops.

The Saltway customs house was seven minutes south. Kael could already feel it—a warm point in the lattice's expanding map, brighter than it had been an hour ago, brighter than it had been before the stair. The cascade was building. Each activated node was not merely adding its own energy to the web but amplifying the energy of every other node, and the effect was compounding, and the compound was growing, and the growth had a quality that Kael recognized from the folio's descriptions of the lattice's founding: the quality of something that had been sleeping for a very long time and was now, with gathering speed and gathering certainty, beginning to wake.

Voss had three days. The lattice had eight centuries. And between them, walking through the streets of a city that was learning, one node at a time, to remember what it was, a boy and a girl carried the future in their footsteps.

Sera set the pace. Kael followed. And beneath them, through the stone and the water and the ancient bedrock of a city that had survived everything the world had thrown at it, the web grew.

---

The Saltway customs house squatted at the intersection of two canals like a toad guarding a crossroads—low, broad-shouldered, built from river stone that had been darkened by a century of damp air and coal smoke. Its windows were narrow and barred, its door iron-bound, its roof a sagging expanse of slate that had been patched in a dozen different shades of grey. It was not a building designed to impress. It was a building designed to process cargo and collect tariffs and make no impression at all on the merchants who passed through its ledger rooms. The kind of building that existed in the margins of every city's memory, too functional to be remarkable, too ordinary to be remembered.

Kael had walked past it a hundred times in his life without giving it a second glance. Now, with the lattice singing through him, he could not look away.

The node was in the foundation. Not beneath the foundation, as he had assumed from Veraine's map, but *in* the foundation itself—the cornerstone, the first stone laid when the customs house was built three hundred years ago, a block of granite that had been cut from a quarry that no longer existed and carried to this spot by men whose names had been forgotten before their grandchildren were born. The node had been set into the stone during the cutting, sealed inside the granite like a seed inside a fruit, and the building had been constructed around it with the same care that a jeweler uses to set a gem.

The customs house was not built on top of the node. The customs house was built *because* of the node. The entire building—every stone, every beam, every iron hinge and leaded window—was a shell designed to protect what lay at its heart.

"The morning shift starts in fifteen minutes," Sera said. She had positioned herself against the wall of a neighboring building, her eyes on the customs house's main entrance, her posture the casual lean of someone waiting for nothing in particular. "The night clerk will be finishing his ledger work. He usually leaves through the side door, which means the main hall will be empty for about eight minutes while he locks up his office and passes the keys to the day clerk. That's our window."

"Eight minutes?"

"Eight minutes if we're lucky. Six if the night clerk is efficient. Four if he's in a bad mood and decides to check the seals on the warehouse before he goes." She did not look at him. Her attention was on the door, on the windows, on the street beyond, on every variable that could introduce itself into a plan that had no room for variables. "Can you find the node without seeing it?"

Kael closed his eyes. The lattice's map of the customs house was not visual—it was a topology of resonance, a three-dimensional structure of warmth and density and flow that he navigated by feel rather than sight. The node was at ground level, in the eastern corner of the foundation, approximately twelve feet from the main entrance. It was surrounded by a shell of inert stone that dampened its signal—deliberately, he realized, a layer of ordinary granite that had been chosen for its insulating properties and fitted around the node with the precision of a lock around a key.

"Twenty seconds to reach it," he said. "Another thirty to connect. Maybe more—the node is shielded. The founders didn't want this one found easily."

"Then don't be easy." Sera pushed off from the wall. "Follow me. Stay in my shadow. Don't speak unless someone speaks to you first."

They crossed the street. The cobblestones were wet with canal mist, slick underfoot, and Kael felt the node's resonance through the soles of his boots before they reached the customs house's door—a low thrum that vibrated up through his shins and into his knees, the frequency of something that had been waiting a very long time. The door was unlocked. Sera had known it would be. She had been watching this building for three days, had catalogued the habits of every clerk and guard and messenger who passed through it, had built a mental model of its operations that was more detailed than any blueprint.

The main hall was empty. A single lamp burned on the counter, its flame low, its glass chimney clouded with age. The air smelled of ink and paraffin and the faint sourness of old paper. Ledgers were stacked in neat piles on the counter, their spines aligned, their pages marked with ribbons of faded red. A clock on the wall ticked with the measured patience of a heartbeat.

Kael crossed to the eastern corner. The floor was flagstone, worn smooth by decades of feet, and the node was beneath the third flagstone from the wall—a square of granite that looked identical to every other stone in the room. He knelt. The stone was cold against his palm, cold and rough and ordinary, and beneath it the node burned like a coal.

"Time?" he asked.

"Five minutes. Maybe six." Sera had not moved from the door. She was listening, her head tilted, her body angled to intercept anyone who entered. "The night clerk is still in his office. I can hear him moving papers."

Kael pressed both hands flat against the flagstone. The resonance rose to meet him—not the overwhelming surge of the Thornwall node, but something quieter, more deliberate, a voice that had learned to speak softly because it had spent centuries in hiding. The node recognized him. It had felt him coming, had felt the activation of the Coppersmith Bridge and the Thornwall stair, had been waiting for him to arrive with the patience of stone.

*I am here,* he thought. *I am the anchor. I am the connection.*

The node answered. Not in words, but in a spreading warmth that moved through the flagstone and into his hands and up his arms and into his chest, a warmth that was not heat but *presence*, the feeling of being held by something vast and ancient and utterly indifferent to the concerns of human time. The node was not a machine. It was not a tool. It was a *place*, a point where the lattice concentrated itself into something that could be touched, a knot in the web where the fabric of the city gathered and held.

He felt the connection lock into place. The Coppersmith Bridge node brightened. The Thornwall stair node deepened. And the customs house node—the third node, the hidden node, the seed in the stone—opened like a flower unfolding after a long winter, and its resonance joined the growing chorus beneath the city's streets.

"Done," he said.

Sera did not relax. "Two minutes. We need to move."

They slipped out through the side door, the same door the night clerk would use when he finished his shift, and emerged into an alley that ran behind the customs house. The alley was narrow and dark, the walls on either side so close that Kael could touch both with his outstretched arms, and the air was thick with the smell of stagnant water and rotting wood. Sera led them through a maze of passages that twisted and turned and doubled back on themselves, a route that seemed designed to confuse anyone who did not know it intimately.

"The canal junction," she said. "Under the Ashmarket. That's next."

They moved. The city flowed around them—the early-morning traffic of merchants and porters and cooks heading for the markets, the clatter of cart wheels on cobblestones, the calls of vendors setting up their stalls. Kael felt the lattice adjusting to the new node, recalibrating its map of the Lower City, the third point adding its voice to the chorus. The hum was stronger now. Clearer. He could feel the individual threads that connected the three nodes, the paths of resonance that ran through the stone and the water and the iron of the city's infrastructure, and the map in his mind was no longer rough and incomplete but *sharpening*, gaining detail with every step.

"How many more after the junction?" Sera asked.

"Two. The cistern and the wellspring." Kael paused. The names felt different now, charged with meaning the way the bridge and the stair and the customs house had been charged. "But the node at the junction is different. It's not in stone."

"What is it in?"

"Water."

Sera looked at him. For a moment, her composure cracked, and he saw the question behind her eyes—the question she never asked, the question she carried with her through every street and every alley and every encounter with the invisible architecture that Kael had learned to perceive. *What are you becoming?*

"I don't know," he said, answering the question she had not spoken. "I don't know what this is doing to me. I don't know if the cascade is changing me or if it's just revealing something that was always there. But I know that the node under the Ashmarket is in the water. The canal. The junction where the three branches meet. The lattice runs through the water, Sera. It always has."

She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and turned back to the street.

"Then let's hope the water remembers what it is."

---

The Ashmarket sprawled across a low island formed by the intersection of three canals, a triangle of stone and timber and tarred rope that had been a trading ground for longer than anyone could remember. The market was already filling with vendors when they arrived—fishmongers and fruit sellers and dealers in second-hand clothes, their stalls arranged in concentric rings around the central junction where the canals met. The water was the color of old pewter, thick with the runoff of a thousand transactions, and it moved with a sluggishness that seemed deliberate, as though the canals themselves were reluctant to carry away the evidence of the market's commerce.

Kael felt the node before he saw it. It was not in the water—it *was* the water, distributed through the canal system like a dye, invisible until activated but present in every drop. The junction was the node's physical focus, the point where the three branches converged and the resonance concentrated, but the node itself was the entire network of canals that threaded through the Lower City, a web within the web, a lattice of water that had been here before the streets and the walls and the buildings that had been built on top of it.

"Stay close to the edge," Sera said. "There's a spot near the south pier where the water is deep enough to reach. The node is there?"

"Everywhere." Kael knelt at the water's edge. The canal lapped against the stone, its surface scummed with oil and debris, and beneath the filth the lattice burned with a cold, clear light that only he could see. "The junction is just the center. The node is the whole system."

"Then how do you connect to it?"

He did not know. He had expected a node like the others—a point, a place, a physical location where he could place his hands and feel the resonance lock into place. But the water node was different. It was diffuse, distributed, a presence that occupied the entire canal network without being anchored to any single point. The founders had built it this way deliberately, he realized. They had wanted a node that could not be found, could not be destroyed, could not be removed from the city's infrastructure without draining every canal in Aranthor.

He reached out. His fingertips touched the water's surface, and the node *responded*.

The connection was not like the others. It was not a surge or a warmth or a pressure. It was a *dissolving*—a sense of boundaries becoming permeable, of the distinction between his body and the water becoming less certain, of the lattice moving through him not as energy but as *flow*. He felt the canals spread out from the junction in a network of veins, felt the water moving through them with the rhythm of a pulse, felt the resonance of every bridge and every dock and every wharf that had been built along their banks. The water node was not a place. It was a *system*, and the system was waking, and the waking was spreading through the canals like a tide.

"Kael." Sera's voice was tight. "Your hand."

He looked down. The water around his fingers was glowing—a pale, greenish light that seemed to come from beneath the surface, from the depths of the canal where the sun never reached. The glow was spreading, radiating outward from his hand in concentric rings, and where it touched the debris and the oil and the filth of the market's runoff, the water *cleared*, as though the light were burning away the accumulation of centuries.

"Can you stop it?"

"I don't know if I should."

The glow continued to spread. Kael felt the node settling into the lattice, felt the water network joining the chorus of the Coppersmith Bridge and the Thornwall stair and the Saltway customs house, felt the fourth point locking into place with a resonance that was not sound but *clarity*. The map in his mind was no longer rough. It was detailed enough to navigate by—a three-dimensional topology of the Lower City's lattice, with the four active nodes shining like stars in a constellation that was still incomplete.

He pulled his hand from the water. The glow faded, the canal returning to its ordinary murk, and for a moment he thought he saw something moving in the depths—a shape, a shadow, a presence that had been stirred by the node's activation and was now settling back into its long sleep.

"Four down," Sera said. She was watching the canal with an expression he could not read. "One more before midday."

"The cistern."

They moved again. The lattice was singing now, a chord of four notes that resonated through the city's foundations, and Kael could feel the remaining nodes reaching toward him like hands in the dark. The wellspring. The chandler's guild. The bedrock seam. And the Threshold—the ninth node, the deepest point, the place where the lattice came closest to whatever it had been built to contain.

He did not know what he would find there. But the lattice was teaching him, one node at a time, to listen.