Chapter 507: The Weight Of Being Seen

"If you meet him, those questions are what he will want to discuss."

"it about politics?" Bruce asked

"Not that."

"Factions?"

"No."

"Advancement?"

"No."

Mord’s faint smile returned. "The questions themselves."

Bruce absorbed the answer. ’The questions themselves.’

That was specific. And it aligned almost perfectly with the territory he had been exploring.

The Codex. The three Codices. The fabric of the realm. The base-language.

The ancient unified ordering that had eventually divided into three separate systems.

Grave Ondar had apparently been contemplating these questions for a very long time.

And now he had noticed Bruce specifically because Bruce might be capable of engaging with them.

Bruce wasn’t sure whether that was reassuring or alarming.

Possibly both.

"I’ll think about it," he said. "Please tell Grave that I appreciate the courtesy of your approach."

He paused. "I have no way to contact him directly. How does your employer prefer to receive a response?"

"If you decide to meet him, come to the market square."

Mord gestured casually toward the surrounding stalls.

"Any time. I will know."

"You’ll know?"

"I am often here. If I am not, I will know that you came. I’ll return within an hour."

Bruce regarded him. "That is your system?"

"That is my system."

Bruce considered that for a moment. "That is a different system from Caelen’s."

"My employer is a different kind of man from Elenora’s employer."

"Fair."

Mord gave a slight bow—not deep enough to be formal, but enough to acknowledge the end of the conversation.

Then he turned and walked back toward his usual counter.

He did not sit down.

Instead, he walked past it and continued toward the edge of the square, disappearing into the flow of souls with the same unhurried pace he had maintained throughout the encounter.

Bruce watched him leave. He said nothing for several seconds.

Then Kael spoke quietly. "That went differently than I expected."

Bruce kept his eyes on the place where Mord had disappeared.

"So did I."

Theron glanced between them. "Are we meeting him?"

Bruce was silent for a moment.

He looked toward the market stalls, then toward the Guild district beyond them.

"Not yet."

His expression became thoughtful. "First, I want to understand exactly what Grave Ondar thinks he knows about us."

And, more importantly, Bruce thought, he wanted to understand what questions a soul who had spent three centuries studying the Codex had reached.

Because if Grave really wanted to discuss the questions themselves, then this meeting might be far more important than any political conversation.

It might be the first time Bruce encountered someone who had been searching for the same answers long before he had even arrived in Xiltra.

"He did not try to recruit you. He did not try to warn you. He did not try to flatter you. He just looked at you, told you his employer wanted to meet, and left."

"Yes."

"It felt honest."

"It did."

Theron spoke quietly. "Elenora said if Grave approached, we should listen carefully and not agree to anything and not decline either."

"Yes. That is what we are doing. Mord has not asked us to agree or decline. He has given us an open invitation. We can carry it as long as we need to."

"So we are going to tell Elenora."

"We are going to tell Elenora. Caelen at the fountain tomorrow. We tell her Grave’s man approached and extended an invitation. We tell her we are considering it. We get her read on what to do next."

"Alright."

They walked out of the square toward the rooming house.

The watchers were still around them.

Mord was gone, but there were still three others, and Bruce suspected now that two of them had been Grave’s observers before Mord revealed himself. The remaining visible watcher likely belonged to another interested party who had been watching Mord while Mord watched Bruce.

The political layer was becoming layered in on itself.

He filed this away.

He would think about it when he had the energy.

...

They ate at the Old Soul’s for dinner.

Wren Ollan served them without ceremony, the standard dinner, portions calibrated to their rank, followed by a cup of soul-clarifier.

The old soul watched Bruce with the quiet attention of someone who had read from his face that another small political development had occurred today and was waiting to see whether Bruce would mention it.

Bruce did.

"Grave Ondar’s observer approached me in the market square today. A man named Mord. He said Grave wants to meet."

The old soul looked up from their pot.

"Mord. Yes. He has been Grave’s eyes for perhaps a hundred and twenty years. He is honest in his function. Grave does not use people who are not honest."

"Elenora predicted Grave would want to meet us. She did not say he would move this quickly."

"Grave does not usually move this quickly. If Mord has already approached you, Grave has been thinking about you longer than Elenora realized."

"Which means he knew about me before Elenora did."

"Possibly. Or he inferred faster than she did. Grave has been thinking about souls like you for most of his life. He is probably the Nonagon member most prepared to notice the signs of a seventh case appearing."

Bruce thought about this.

"Would you meet with him?"

The old soul was quiet for a long moment.

"I would be careful. Grave is not Elenora. He does not operate on the same timescales or with the same politics. His offers, when he makes them, are rarely political. They are more philosophical."

The old soul paused.

"He gives knowledge and asks for knowledge in return. If you meet with him, you will come away knowing more than you came in with. You will also probably reveal more than you intended to."

"That is a trade."

"That is a trade. It is one some souls would make. I made a version of it, a long time ago."

Bruce looked at the old soul.

"You met Grave."

"Twice. Over a hundred years. The first time was shortly after I awakened at the orb. He wanted to look at me. The second was fifty years later, after I had stopped climbing. He wanted to understand why."

The old soul’s gaze grew distant.

"Both meetings were valuable to me. Both meetings cost me more than I expected."

"What did they cost you?"

"The first cost me the illusion that I understood the realm I was in. The second cost me the illusion that I had made my choices alone."

Bruce absorbed this.

"Would you recommend I meet with him?"

The old soul set down their ladle.

"I would recommend that you decide whether you are ready to be seen more fully than you have been seen so far. Grave sees deeply."

A brief pause.

"He is kind, more kind than Elenora, in his way, but kindness that sees you fully is a different kind of weight from kindness that respects your boundaries. Elenora respects boundaries. Grave looks past them."

"Is that bad?"

"It is not bad. It is intense. Some souls flourish under that kind of seeing. Others shrink from it. I do not know which kind of soul you are, because I have known you only a week. You will need to decide for yourself."

Bruce sat with this.

"If I meet with him," he said slowly, "what should I do?"

"Listen more than you speak. Answer only what he asks. Do not volunteer."

The old soul looked directly at him.

"He will know when you are holding something back, and he will not press, but he will file away what he has noticed, and he will carry it forward. Grave has a very long memory. Anything you tell him will be with him for the rest of his life."

"Which is likely to be very long."

"Which is likely to be very long. Yes."

Bruce nodded slowly.

He had not yet decided whether to meet Grave.

But the old soul’s counsel was useful.

He would think about it tonight.

They finished dinner. Then paid and left.

...

At the rooming house, Bruce sat on his bed and opened the lecture manuscript again.

He wanted to read more about target seal durations and inscription techniques. Today’s Proving Ground had taught him that his inscription work was reaching an intermediate level. He wanted to understand the next tier of what inscription could do, long-duration seals, self-maintaining seals, and seals that could be inscribed at range rather than only through direct contact.

He read for an hour.

Kael read Yolen’s essay more carefully, taking notes on a piece of soul-paper that Bruce had given him.

Theron read the basic manual and made his own notes.

They worked in the comfortable quiet of three souls doing their own study.

Toward sleep, Bruce closed his book.

He lay down on the pallet and let his soul-body begin its overnight consolidation.

He sent the thread thought.

’I am all right. Trained today at the Proving Ground. Learned the duration of enhancement seals, the cost scaling of first-principle writing against resistant targets, and new combat formations’

Then he did the second thing.

He turned his attention to the thread.

Tonight, he did not push.

He had decided, lying there and thinking about it, that pushing every night was not the right approach. He would push once every few days, enough to test his progress but not enough to drain his reserves or exhaust the thread’s capacity to respond.

The rest of the nights, he would simply listen.

He listened. The thread was warmer than it had been last night.

He could feel its presence as a steady, thin line stretching away from him.

He listened for anything from the other side.

For several seconds, nothing.

Then, again, so faintly that he could not be certain, came the sense of warmth.

Of someone near the other end. Of familiarity.

He held it.nThe warmth stayed longer tonight than last night.

Perhaps five seconds. Then it faded.

He did not try to extend it. He did not push for more.

He accepted what the thread had given him and let his attention drift back.

The thread hummed, thin and warm, in his awareness.

He slept.

Outside, Xiltra moved into its night.

And far away, in another realm, in a labyrinth that was its own kind of city, Sophie sat beside a still body and watched over it with the patient care she had been giving it for ten days or ten months, or however long the realms’ differing flows of time made it.

She may or may not have paused for a moment.

Holding Bruce’s unmoving hand, she might have felt a faint sense that her husband was nearer than he had been yesterday.

She would not have known why. She would have attributed it to her own hope. She would have kept watch.

Bruce slept deeply. The thread hummed. And the eleventh day was done.