Page 34

He did not come until the light had nearly gone. When he did, he inclined his head at both of them and said nothing at all. He moved through the session as though the night in his chamber had been struck from the record, and Maia found she had nowhere to put a single one of her questions.

He was there the next day, and gone by noon. The day after that, he did not come at all. Two weeks passed without a tremor, long enough for the city to start believing the worst was over.

“Again?” Julen muttered one evening, glancing at the empty chair beside her. “He’s been gone half the afternoon.”

Maia traced the edge of one containment dish with her finger. “I can feel it when he’s gone,” she said quietly. “They’re different, aren’t they?”

Julen frowned.

“Feel what? What’s different?”

“The fragments.”

She hesitated, unsure how to explain something that sounded absurd even to her own ears. “They change.”

Julen’s brow furrowed.

“How?”

Maia looked down at the shards.

“They’re quieter when he’s here. It’s like he calms them down, you know? It’s like they recognise him.”

Julen leaned back in his chair, studying her with growing frustration. “I’m surprised you noticed that, given he’s mostly never here. But yes, maybe you’re right.”

“Do you think he’s connected to it all?” she asked, mostly to herself.

Julen smiled at her, incredulous. “Of course he is. The Umbralyn are born of the Fracture. How could they not be? The real question is how is he connected to it all? Because I for one have a very clear answer.”

Maia didn’t answer, prompting Julen to sigh. “We must stay out of it, Maia. We can only do what we were brought here to do. It’s much bigger than us, there’s things we won’t know. And it’s important we stay safe, and we don’t go looking for it.”

She didn’t stay out of it. She had never been built to.

It was the dust that had decided it, in the end. He came back to the table one evening a full hour after he’d left it, and when he leaned past her to set down a shard, the hem of his cloak brushed her wrist, damp and gritted pale. The kind of dust that only came off stone that had never seen daylight.

He saw her look at it, said nothing, and neither did she.

***

Two nights later she heard the rest of it. She was carrying a ledger back to the lower stacks when two guards passed the head of the eastern stair, close enough that she caught the end of what one was saying.

“…gone down again. The third time this week.”

“Leave it. Whatever they do in the ruins is theirs.”

Then they saw her and stopped talking, walking away a little too quickly. Neither of them had intended for her to hear their conversation, so she knew what they were saying was true.

The lower levels were watched, not locked. Umbralyn patrols passed the stairhead at intervals, but she’d spent enough late evenings in the Archive to learn their rhythm: the same unhurried circuit, the same gap after they turned down the eastern corridor before the next pair came through. A few minutes of empty stairwell, twice an hour. Long enough, if she timed it.

She told herself she would only look. That she’d stay near the stairs, listen for a few minutes, and leave. She’d already prepared an excuse if anyone found her: she was looking for a text referenced in one of the older fragment catalogues, one that might be shelved in the lower stacks. It was thin, but plausible at a push.

That night, once she was certain Julen had returned to his quarters, she left.

She waited in the dark at the turn of the stairs until the patrol passed and their footsteps faded down the eastern corridor. Then she moved, quick and quiet, down past the stairhead and into the lower dark before the next pair came through. The lower levels opened beneath her in stages: first the familiar stacks, then older corridors she’d passed but never entered, then passages where the stone changed colour and the air grew heavier.

She had intended to stop at the first landing, and perhaps go back another night. For some reason, she kept going, her legs moving before her mind followed.

The sound drew her further: low voices, the clink of metal, something that might have been laughter if laughter could sound that controlled. Each time she told herself to turn back, her natural curiosity pulled her one corridor deeper.