The court alchemist cabal's lockdown of the Aurelian deep archive had been in place for two years.
He had established this from the household records during the first evening's reading. The lockdown predated House Vermillion's filing, predated the Eternity Guild's registration, predated the Millennium Rainbow and the source node's removal. It predated everything that had happened since their arrival in the primordial world, which meant the lockdown was not a reaction to them. It was a preparation.
The question was: preparation for what.
He brought this to Isolde on the second morning, before the first of the martial family meetings.
She looked at the timeline he had reconstructed from the household records.
"The Aurelian deep archive holds the leyline network's original construction documentation," she said. "My family built it. The records of how the eastern leyline network was designed — what each node is for, what the network's defensive properties are — are in that archive."
"And if someone intended to corrupt the leyline network deliberately," he said.
"They would want to understand its architecture first," she said. "And then lock the documentation away so no one else could use it to identify what had been altered."
He held this.
"The corruption in Caelen," he said. "Early-stage, less than a year. But the lockdown is two years old."
"Which means the practitioner who ordered the lockdown either isn't contaminated yet," she said, "or was contaminated and addressed before the early-stage integration that we're reading in Caelen."
"Or," he said, "is significantly more deeply integrated than Caelen, and the corruption has reached the stage where the Fate's Eye reads it differently."
She looked at him.
"Deep integration looks different from early-stage," she said.
"Yes," he said. "At the level Saylor was at after two years, the Fate's Eye stopped reading it as contamination and started reading it as architecture." He looked at the household map of the capital's administrative quarter. "I need access to the archive. Not to read it — to read whoever is maintaining the lockdown."
"The archive is in the court administrative building," Isolde said. "Which requires a court-level credential."
"Which the guild registration provides," he said.
She looked at the guild documents.
"The Covenant's academic access clause," she said. "A registered sovereign-class guild has the right to access research materials relevant to stabilisation missions in their registered territory."
"The leyline network documentation," he said. "Directly relevant to a stabilisation operation."
"I'll file the formal access request this morning," she said.
The three martial family meetings ran across the second and third days.
Isolde conducted the first two. He attended the third as the guild's operational representative rather than as her grandson, which was the distinction the meeting required — the head of House Stormforge wanted to understand what the Eternity Guild was operationally capable of before committing to any formal alignment.
The meeting was, at its foundation, an assessment.
He submitted to the assessment honestly. What the guild had done. What it could do. What it was trying to do in the Aurelian Empire and why that intersected with the martial families' own interests in maintaining the eastern leyline network's integrity against the contamination threat he had identified.
House Stormforge's head was a Tier 6 practitioner named Errath who had the specific quality of someone who had spent forty years watching other practitioners overstate their capabilities in exactly this kind of meeting.
Markus gave him the operational record without embellishment. The frontier settlement, the guild ranking progression, the source node removal, the manufacturing sector survey, the gate clearances. Numbers and outcomes rather than impressions.
Errath sat with the documentation for a long time.
"The contamination in our eastern territory," he said. "Two of my senior practitioners have been showing the channel anomalies that your description matches."
"I can address it," Markus said. "The extraction requires direct spatial law contact with the affected channels. An hour per individual at early-stage integration."
"My practitioners aren't going to submit to channel contact with a foreign practitioner they've just met," Errath said.
"They don't have to," Markus said. "I can document the methodology and train one of your own Tier 5 or above practitioners in the technique. The spatial law application is learnable from documentation if the practitioner has the appropriate comprehension baseline." He looked at him directly. "The contamination will continue integrating if it's not addressed. Two more years at the current rate and the extraction option becomes significantly more complicated."
Errath absorbed this.
"The archive access," he said. "The lockdown was ordered by Tribunal Councillor Voss. He's been on the court's administrative bench for thirty years." He paused. "He was the one who proposed Vermillion's custodianship of the Aurelian estate."
"Is Councillor Voss one of the practitioners showing the channel anomaly," Markus said.
Errath was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't know," he said. "I haven't had reason to run that assessment."
"If you were willing to arrange an introduction," Markus said, "I could answer that question without Councillor Voss being aware the assessment was occurring."
Errath looked at him.
"Discreetly," he said.
"Yes," Markus said.
The communication from Aethelgard came on the fourth day.
Rosanne's channel, the brief quality of someone using a scheduled check-in window rather than an urgent transmission.
"The third week started yesterday," she said. "The calibration work is complete. The Vanguard Crucible assessments ran three days ago — the faculty graded the results as anomalous for first-term students, which I understood meant they had to go back and check their grading rubric."
"Were there complaints," he said.
"One of the senior instructors requested a meeting with the programme director," she said. "We weren't invited to the meeting."
"The kinetic resistance recalibration," he said. "Where are you individually."
She walked him through each team member's assessment results. The improvements were consistent with what the calibration week had been designed to produce, and the Nexus Institute's structured environment had done what the structured environment was supposed to do: fill in the gaps that unstructured field calibration missed.
"The corruption in the upper-ring syndicates," she said. "The ongoing surveillance."
"Still present," he said. "Isolde's counter-compound is in development. We address it when the compound is ready and the citadel's connection to the local infrastructure is confirmed. Don't push it."
"Understood," she said.
"One more week," he said. "I'll be back before the programme ends."
"The team wants to know about the Aurelian situation," she said.
"Tell them: complicated, productive, ongoing. Full debrief when I return."
"That's what I told them you'd say," she said.
He confirmed the next check-in window and closed the channel.
Councillor Voss's public appearance at the tri-weekly administrative assembly gave him the thirty seconds of Fate's Eye proximity he needed.
What he read was not early-stage integration.
What he read was what Saylor had been at the two-year point: structural. The corruption had been present long enough and at sufficient concentration that it had reorganised the channel architecture in the specific way that deep integration produced. The Fate's Eye no longer read it as contamination layered over the practitioner's existing structure. It read it as the practitioner's existing structure, significantly altered.
Two years, minimum. Possibly three.
Which meant Councillor Voss had been in contact with the corruption source before the archive lockdown. The lockdown was not a corrupted official making a protective decision. It was a corrupted official making the decision the corruption's architecture wanted him to make.
He sent the documentation to Isolde.
She sent back: He can't be extracted through the same methodology as Saylor. The integration is too deep for the spatial law alone. The counter-compound needs to be complete first.
He sent back: Then we hold. The archive access request is still in process. Is there another route to the leyline documentation?
She sent back: The household records. We have the original builder's documentation. It predates the archive copies by two hundred years. It may be more complete.
He sent back: Show me tonight.
She sent back: Yes. Also eat something. I can tell from your messages that you haven't.
He sent back: I'll eat.
He ate, and then he went to find Sloane, who had been managing the Vermillion court filings with the specific patience of a military administrator who had spent forty years producing documentation that was too thorough for opposing counsel to find errors in.
"The counter-filing," Sloane said, when he sat down. "The Covenant access clause for the archive. I filed it this morning. The response window is five business days."
"Voss will block it," Markus said.
"Voss can try to block it," Sloane said. "But the Covenant clause doesn't go through the court administrative bench. It goes to the guild's international arbitration board."
"Which Voss doesn't have jurisdiction over," Markus said.
"Correct," Sloane said. "The filing was designed that way."
He looked at his grandfather.
"You've done this before," he said.
"I spent twenty years as a border garrison commander dealing with cross-jurisdictional paperwork," Sloane said. "You learn which filings go around which walls."
He sat back.
"Five business days," he said.
"Five business days," Sloane confirmed. "In the meantime: Isolde's household records, the martial family contacts, and whatever the Solarian intelligence operative sends back."
"She said three days," Markus said. "Her check-in was scheduled for this evening."
"Then we wait for this evening," Sloane said.
He accepted this.
The waiting was part of the work.
He had learned this, over years of cultivation and mission work: the intervals between actions were not wasted time. They were the time in which the actions settled into their consequences and produced the information that the next decision required.
He sat with Sloane and drank tea and waited for the evening, and the three suns moved through the Aurelian sky, and the work continued at the pace that careful work required.