They came back through Thresh-Bas on the return route from the First Collector's approach, resupplying for the deeper push that Solen had described.
Two days had passed since the crystal chamber. The First Collector was visible now from the higher ground east of the settlement: a tower smaller and older than any Collector Kael had seen, its stone the same dark irregular quality he had noticed in the abandoned tower outside Valdresh-Prime, built with the intentional specificity of someone who had chosen every component. From a distance, in the late afternoon light, it pulsed faintly, a violet so subtle that it could have been the angle of the sun or the Echo-Blood in the surrounding terrain.
It was not the angle of the sun.
It knows you're close. The mechanism Hael built is not passive. It's been waiting for an activation signature. You provide one.
"It's been waiting for four hundred years."
Hael didn't specify a timeline. He built for certainty rather than speed. He assumed it would happen; he didn't assume it would happen soon.
Kael looked at the tower for a long moment. Then he looked at Thresh-Bas below them, at the market district, at the practical grid of the settlement that had been serving the transit population of the border region since before the current Imperial administration existed.
"We need another two days of supplies," Solen had said. "What's in the Collector is not quick work."
Syrenne had said nothing to this. She had looked at the Collector and then at Kael and then said: "Market. Supply. Two hours."
* * *
The market in the late afternoon was different from the market in the morning. The supply merchants were still operating but running down their day's inventory, which produced better prices and worse selection. The food preparation stalls that were quiet in the morning were fully operational now, their smells layering over each other in a way that resolved, if you were hungry enough, into something collectively appealing.
Kael was hungry enough.
He was buying food at a stall run by a woman who clearly considered the transaction an interruption of more important work when he heard a voice to his left, directed at a different stall with a different merchant, conducting a different transaction.
"This is a grade three Vyrath shard," the voice said. "I'll give you thirty for it."
He turned.
The merchant at the adjacent stall was selling small crystallized Echo-Blood specimens in a glass-fronted case. The buyer was a young man, perhaps twenty, with the eager uncertainty of someone who had not been doing this long. The specimen on the counter between them was the size of a coin, violet, irregular, entirely unremarkable.
Kael looked at the specimen.
Fake. Pressed chalk with Echo-Blood dye. Whoever made it used genuine Echo-Blood in the surface coating, which is why it reads as authentic on a standard resonance check. The interior has no concentration at all.
He stepped toward the adjacent stall. He was not entirely sure why. The transaction was not his business.
"Excuse me," he said to the young buyer. "Can I see it."
The young man looked at him. The merchant looked at him with the expression of someone whose transaction was being interrupted.
"I'm not interested in purchasing," Kael said, which was true. "I have a professional interest in the specimen type."
The young man, to his credit, handed it over without argument. He was curious rather than committed to the transaction.
Kael held the specimen. He looked at its surface. He ran his thumb across the edge where the coating met the interior, which was, now that he was looking for it, perceptible as a boundary rather than a continuum.
"The surface coating is genuine Echo-Blood crystallized by controlled exposure," he said. "The interior is compressed chalk. The standard resonance instrument reads the surface and reports the interior as identical because the surface concentration is sufficient to overwhelm the instrument at this size." He set the specimen on the counter. "The tell is the edge texture. Genuine Echo-Blood crystal doesn't have a distinct boundary between surface and interior because it crystallizes uniformly throughout. This has a boundary because it was assembled in two steps."
He said all of this in approximately the same tone he would use to read a document back to the person who'd assigned it. The young man was staring at him. The merchant was staring at him with considerably less friendliness.
"I've been selling authentic grade three shards at this stall for twelve years," the merchant said.
"This one is not authentic," Kael said. "The others in the case may be. I haven't examined them."
The young man picked up the specimen and looked at it with new attention. He ran his thumb across the edge as Kael had done. His expression changed.
"Thank you," he said to Kael. He put the specimen on the counter and walked away.
Kael became aware, with the peripheral attention that was becoming more natural to him, that Syrenne was standing two steps to his right and had been watching the exchange.
She looked at him.
She looked at the specimen on the counter.
She looked at him again.
And Syrenne Ash, who did not smile, who deployed expression with the precision of someone who had decided smiling was a resource to be conserved, did something with her mouth that was not technically a smile but was in the same family as one. It lasted approximately one second. Then it was gone.
She turned back to the supply stall she had been addressing and continued the transaction.
Kael stood for a moment.
He wrote nothing. He filed it in the interior place.
* * *
At the market's east end, they found Syrenne's actual contacts.
Two people, a man and a woman, seated at a table outside an establishment that served food and information in roughly equal measure, with the visible ease of people who had known each other long enough that shared silences were unremarkable.
The man was large, quiet, with the particular stillness of someone who had learned to make himself less noticeable than his size would suggest. His eyes were the faint amber of Rank Two resonance. He looked at Kael when they approached and then at Syrenne with a look that conveyed a quantity of unspoken question.
The woman was small, quick-eyed, with a restlessness of attention that was not anxiety but something more like continuous interest in whatever her eyes landed on. She looked at Kael, and then she looked at a point slightly to his left, and she said to the man beside her, in a low voice: "There's someone behind him."
The man said: "Sable."
The woman said: "I know. I know. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying there's someone there."
The man, Dyne, looked at Kael. "Forgive her. She has a perception capacity that she doesn't entirely control yet."
"She's not wrong," Kael said.
Sable turned to look at him directly, with the full attention of someone who had just been told something that confirmed an experience they'd been uncertain about. "It's large," she said. "Whatever it is. And old."
Interesting. She's perceiving my presence without a resonance fragment. That's considerably rarer than what you do.
"His name is Vyrath," Kael said.
Sable went very still. Then she went back to looking at the point to his left, and whatever she found there made her expression do something that was not fear but adjacent to it. "He's amused," she said. "Why is he amused."
Tell her: because she can see me and most people can't, and it's been a long time since most people couldn't.
Kael relayed this.
Sable considered it. Then: "That's either reassuring or deeply unsettling."
"Yes," Kael said.
Dyne was watching this exchange with the focused calm of someone filing it for later rather than responding to it now. He looked at Syrenne. "The Collector woke," he said. "We felt it two days ago."
"We know," Syrenne said.
"Half the Relic Hunter networks between here and the western coast will know by the end of the week. The ones with sensitive instruments knew before we did." He looked at Kael. "There will be interest."
"How much interest."
"Significant. The First Collector activating has been a theoretical event in the Guild archives for four hundred years. Everyone has a position on what it means. Now that it's happened, everyone will want to be near it." He paused. "Some of those people you don't want near it."
"The Choral," Syrenne said.
"The Choral is the one I'd be most concerned about. They've been operating in the border settlements for fifty years. They have resources and they have a very specific agenda about what should happen to Divine Anomalies when they surface."
Kael kept his expression at its standard neutral. "What agenda."
Dyne looked at him steadily. "They believe divine consciousness, residual or active, should be removed from the world permanently. Not neutralized the way the Empire does it. Removed. They've been working toward the capacity to do that for two generations." A pause. "They would consider you a target rather than a subject."
Sable, who had not stopped watching the point to Kael's left, said quietly: "Tell the large old thing he's now being looked for. That his presence through you is visible to anyone with the right perception capacity."
Kael relayed this.
I know. I've known since the Collector activated. The Choral's instruments will have registered the resonance. We have approximately four days before their nearest response team arrives in Thresh-Bas. Plan accordingly.
Kael passed this on.
Syrenne looked at him. Then at Dyne. Then at the road east toward the First Collector. "Four days," she said. "We go in tomorrow."
Dyne nodded. Sable had not stopped watching the empty air to Kael's left, but her expression had shifted from the adjacent-to-fear configuration into something more like the specific interest of someone who had found an unusual specimen and had not yet decided what it was.
"When you come out," she said to Kael, "I'd like to talk to you about what it's like. If that's all right."
He looked at her. "I'll tell you what I can."
She nodded, apparently satisfied with this. "Good. It looks like something worth knowing about."
He thought about that. He thought about Vyrath, and the chamber, and the solid light, and the copy book that was filling with things he had not anticipated having to record.
"It is," he said.