Chapter 184: Deep Table Map

An older source below had heard its name.

The root maze shattered.

Stone tables split in half. Black roots shot down from above and slammed into the ground. In the middle of the room, the Deep Table map was lit with the black-and-white light of the sovereign echo. Dust poured down from above in gray streams. The sound of old roots cracking filled the room as the tables shattered more and more around them. They felt another low growl rise from somewhere below.

"Grab the map!" Calder shouted.

Tessa reached for the map as it lifted off the stone table. The map sent roots out of the stone, and the roots turned into old map guardians. They were made of stone and bone, with routes carved into their shapes. None of them had any facial features, and each one held a tablet in its hand. They walked slowly toward the team, their stone bodies heavy and dead, the old roots breaking off them as they moved.

Letters spread across the tablets in their hands.

ONE HAND HOLDS THE WORLD MAP.

Austin Veyron’s wrist mark tingled.

This source felt different from the others. It wasn’t offering him a route, or a crown, or a book of debts. It was offering him what he wanted most: to know where every source was.

If he took the map, he could learn where all the sources were located.

He could learn where Vordessa was going to attack next.

He could keep everyone else from ever touching the map. No more chasing splinters. No more guessing. Just the quiet, steady comfort of always knowing what came next.

DEVOUR liked the idea of giving him what he wanted. This time it wasn’t about power or a crown. It was about knowing. He wouldn’t have to rush to the sources and arrive too late anymore. He would always know where the hunger was, and no one would get hurt because he hadn’t known. It sounded like the right thing to do, and that made DEVOUR’s claim seem far less evil than it actually was.

Veyra stood in front of Austin Veyron as he looked at the stone guardians.

"Tell me what you want."

"I want the map."

"What will it create?"

"The knowledge of where all the hunger leads."

Sable’s piece of the crown glinted in the falling dust. "Then the map would become a crown as well."

Austin Veyron let out a breath, and some of the tension drained out of his shoulders. She was right. If one person knew where all the hunger was, that knowledge would be its own kind of crown, and Austin Veyron didn’t want a crown anymore.

The first stone guardian lunged at the team.

Orena blocked the guardian’s tablet hand with her spear, and the force knocked her back onto the ground. Rin’s arrow bounced off its stone face. Veyra went for the routes carved into the guardian’s legs and sliced through them. White sparks lit up as Veyra cut the routes out of the guardian.

It stumbled backward, its heavy feet grinding against the stone floor.

Another one reached for Nyra.

The blue-black shard lit up in her hand and showed the stone guardian a boundary. The guardian stopped in its tracks when it saw it.

"These are old source protocols," Nyra said. "They aren’t meant to guard. They’re only meant to hold a claim on the map." Her boundaries were shaky, since she was also keeping one around the debt chime and one around the pale splinter.

"The Emperor must have made these so no one could find the original sources," Calder said.

"The sovereign echo is trying to do the same thing," Tessa said. "Only one person gets to have the map and decide where it goes."

Austin Veyron saw the small phrase on the stone guardians’ tablets.

ONE HAND HOLDS THE WORLD MAP.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The phrase about holding the map. Not the map itself. Not their stone bodies. Not the source paths."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable said.

Austin Veyron pressed his white root chain to the closest tablet.

DEVOUR opened. The phrase on the tablet tasted like a locked atlas.

ONE HAND HOLDS THE WORLD MAP.

He consumed holds.

The tablet shattered.

The stone guardian didn’t fall over. Its face turned into route lines, and it lowered the tablet in its hand. Then it turned and walked away from the table. The rest of the stone guardians stood still as their claims vanished from their tablets, the red letters fading one by one like embers going cold. For a moment they simply stood there, and then they stopped moving completely.

The map settled flat on the stone table.

Tessa didn’t take the map right away. She stood over it, ready to grab it, her hands hovering just above the stone, but she thought better of it. Austin Veyron watched her make that choice, and he felt something in his chest unclench.

"We can copy the map and give a copy to several people."

Ceryn took the waterproof cases from Glasswake and pulled out clean sheets of paper. They pressed the paper down onto the map, and Nyra’s shard showed them which lines to copy.

They had very little time, so they moved quickly. Dust rained down onto the paper, and the floor trembled beneath their knees, but none of them stopped. Tessa copied the paths on the map while Ceryn held the paper in place and Nyra moved her shard along the routes.

The root maze shook around them.

Calder held the broken circle open with both hands as his wrist mark flared red. His face twisted with pain, and the old contestant symbol burned bright against his skin.

"I am not a contestant," he said.

Sable placed her crown piece against his wrist to hold back the mark.

"Will it go away?" she asked.

"When I stop thinking I’m a contestant," Calder answered. He knew it would be something he had to remind himself of every day, so that he never took on that role again.

The third stone guardian turned toward the map.

It didn’t attack them this time. Its tablet opened and showed a route leading east across the map.

"It wants to show us something," Nyra said.

"It’s showing anyone who reads the map," Tessa corrected her.

A path lit up on the Deep Table map.

It started beneath the Hollow Crown and went east, past mountain ranges and plains. It continued until it reached a vast desert marked with circles of ash. The path led to a stair that went down beneath a ruined desert city.

THE ASHEN STAIR.

Ceryn wrote the name down on three pieces of paper.

Below it, a black-and-white line lit up.

The sovereign echo had entered the source path, a thin dark thread crawling east beneath the world. Nyra felt her shard burn and pulled it back slightly.

It was traveling toward the Ashen Stair.

The roots above them broke through the ceiling of the maze, and chunks of stone crashed down onto the table where the map had been only moments before.

"Take the copies!" Orena called.

Tessa handed a copy of the map to Ceryn, Calder, and Veyra. She kept the stone rubbing of the map under her coat, not because she owned it, but because now everyone could check it.

They all ran for the exit as the maze crumbled around them. Veyra took point, with Rin and Orena following her. Austin Veyron stayed in the back, making sure everyone made it to the surface.

The old roots broke apart behind them as the team rushed out of the table maze. The stone guardian with the opened tablet stood in the room, watching them leave. Austin Veyron looked back at it as it disappeared into the clouds of dust. No one had shared the knowledge of that maze in a very long time. Somehow, watching the guardian let them go felt like a small victory all on its own.

Black roots blocked their path as the team rushed up through the roots beneath the Hollow Crown. Austin Veyron saw a red phrase appear across them.

THE SOURCE PATH ADMITS ONE.

It was trying to get him to leave by himself, to prove that the oldest rule of hunger still held. The roots shifted to let only one person through. He could hear his team struggling behind him.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The admits-one phrase. Not the roots. Not the exit."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

DEVOUR opened. The phrase tasted like a door that would only ever let one person through.

THE SOURCE PATH ADMITS ONE.

He consumed one.

The roots opened, and his whole team climbed out of the hole. Austin Veyron was the last one out. As he pulled himself onto the surface, he heard the roots snap shut behind him with a sound like a closing jaw.

His team stood on the surface, looking at the collapsing pit of the Hollow Crown. They were covered in dust from the destruction below. Everyone stayed silent as they brushed it off, coughing and catching their breath while the dust cloud slowly settled over the ruins. Then they made their way back to the eastern transfer mark and contacted Marcus.

"We felt that," Marcus said over the relay. "What did you find?"

Tessa held up the copied map for all the witnesses on the relay. Her hands were still shaking from the climb, and dust streaked her face, but her voice was steady.

"We found the Deep Table. It connects the hunger sources below the surface. The echo made it to the first path."

Through the relay, Austin Veyron could hear how busy the Freehold was: voices calling out counts, chalk scraping across boards, a child laughing somewhere in the background. Then Elena’s voice came through. "Can Grand Meridian close the source?"

"No," Nyra said. "If we close the source, we’d be closing every path that leads to it. We don’t know how many there are."

"Then don’t close it," Ysara said from the witness desk. "Mark it as known, and prepare any settlements that might be exposed."

Back in Grand Meridian, Marcus gave copies of the map to every relay team, making sure each team knew what was happening without giving them a command to follow. Elena warned every settlement in the east about the black-and-white line on the map. Nahlia marked the sovereign echo’s line as uncertain, not as fact. She knew that if they treated the source path as a certainty, it could become a path of hunger, just like the ones they had destroyed before.

Calder folded the edges of his copy tightly and handed it to Sable. "We’ll take the expedition to the source, but we won’t have the only copy."

Sable nodded and promised that they would tell each other if the path changed, before anyone decided what it meant.

Austin Veyron stared at the path that led east. The Ashen Stair waited beneath the desert, somewhere past the mountains and the plains, in a ruined city none of them had ever seen. His mark pulsed once, slow and steady, pointing the way.

Veyra stood next to him as they both looked at the copied map. The black-and-white line crawled slowly across the paper, a thin, steady scar moving east.

They knew where the hunger was headed, but they didn’t have the power to stop it alone.

The sovereign echo traveled across the map.

Toward the first source path below the surface.