— not quickly, with the thoroughness of someone who takes decisions seriously.
"You're asking me to spy on Master Gavin," she said.
He didn't answer. That was confirmation enough.
"He's been using me," she said, and it wasn't a question.
"Yes. Without your knowledge. To communicate with a contact outside the household through a channel that avoids the normal courier records."
The expression that crossed her face was something he classified carefully: not shock, not betrayal, but the particular tired recognition of someone who has been managing one impossible thing for months and has just discovered there was a second impossible thing they didn't know about, and they don't have the energy to be surprised by it.
"I'll tell you," she said.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me." The words came out with a slight edge — not at him, at the situation. "This household — all of it. I've been folding sheets and keeping my mouth shut and watching things I shouldn't have seen and—" She stopped. Pressed her mouth into a line. "Vane's daughter gets her pension."
"Yes," Shinji said. "I'll make certain of it."
She looked at him steadily. Something in her face that he couldn't name precisely — not trust, not its absence. The careful provisional quality of someone extending something they're not sure will be honoured.
"You're not Julius," she said. Flat. Factual. The same register as Hendor's *the boy really did die in that forest.*
"Things change after something like that," Shinji said. "Julius knows that. I think you do too."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked up the next sheet and began folding.
"The laundry order comes through on Wednesdays," she said. "If there's a note inside, I'll find you first."
He left her to the work.
In the corridor, alone, he stopped again.
He thought about what it had felt like to tell her the truth — the selective, arranged truth — and watch her choose to trust him with it. He thought about Vane's daughter's pension, which he had promised with Julius's authority and intended to maintain with something other than affection.
*She's not in the Circle,* he thought. *She's a willing asset. There's a difference.*
He knew what the difference was. A Circle member had been chosen, and knew it, and bore the weight of the choosing. A willing asset had made a practical agreement. He'd been honest with Sera about using her. That was not the same as choosing her.
He filed this carefully. The distinction mattered. He wasn't sure yet why it mattered as much as it did, but the Origin Template's ongoing record noted the gap and he let it stand unresolved.
---
Kellach Ford's response came at the second hour past noon.
Hendor received it in his quarters — his former students used a private cipher, thirty years in development — and brought it to the training grounds where Shinji was running Julius's sword forms because being seen to run Julius's sword forms was operational rather than martial at this point.
He read Maren's transcription and the decoded text beneath it and felt the model shift.
Not Church-of-Luminous administrative code. Church of the Seven Luminaries — the internal financial arm, the network that moved money through local tithing offices without full transparency to the main Church hierarchy. Older notation. Tighter. The specific compression of a system designed for concealment rather than communication.
Kapel's letter had three components. A report that the target had survived. A notation that the target was exhibiting unexpected behavioural changes — *the young Muller is asking questions he should not know to ask.* And a request for instruction rather than extraction, signed with a designation: *Third Node.*
「Third,」 the Butler said. 「Which makes Gavin Second, presumably. And the architect is First.」
*Kapel doesn't know who First is,* Shinji thought. *He knows the designation. He reports to an intermediary — someone between him and the architect. A chain of separation.*
"The response will be an agent," he said to Hendor. "Not an extraction. Kapel asked for instruction, which means the structure doesn't consider the situation unrecoverable yet. They'll send someone to assess in person — someone with legitimate reason to visit a border fortress that's just lost twenty guards."
Hendor had been thinking about this since they'd spoken that morning. Shinji could see it in the specific quality of his stillness — the stillness of a man who has arrived at a conclusion he was hoping to avoid.
"A comfort call," Hendor said. "After significant losses, the Church sends representatives. Prayers for the dead. Condolence to the grieving."
"Which gives them access to the household, the Earl, and to Julius directly." Shinji looked at the decoded text again. "This is good."
Hendor looked at him with the expression of a man who does not immediately see why this is good.
"Because if they send an assessor," Shinji said, "the assessor will assess. And what they find is what we construct for them to find." He folded the transcription and held it over the training ground's small fire pit — a breath of [Poltergeist] to ignite it without reaching in — and watched the paper catch. "A confused household. A traumatised heir asking questions that go nowhere. A conspiracy already too entangled to extract cleanly, but not yet urgent enough to warrant escalation."
"You want them to decide to wait," Hendor said.
"I want them to decide that this situation is managing itself." The paper was ash. "Which buys us time."
Hendor looked at the fire pit. Then at Shinji.
"What you're describing," he said carefully, "requires you to convince a trained Church operative that everything here is ordinary. Depending on who they send, that operative may include people with — capabilities. For detection."
"Yes," Shinji said.
Hendor held his gaze. "Are you confident you can manage that?"
Shinji thought about the Ghost Core three centimetres behind Julius's eyes, the partition between it and the vessel's normal magicule signature, the way [System Stability] compressed the spiritual resonance into a space small enough to pass casual assessment.
"Yes," he said.
Hendor looked at him for a long, quiet moment.
"Then we wait," he said. "And you'll tell me what to expect?"
"A priest. Middle years. Kind eyes." Shinji turned back to the practice blades. "They always use kind eyes. It makes people lower their guard." A beat. "Pick up a blade, Sir Hendor. We should still be seen working."
---
The southwest anomaly did not announce itself. It simply grew.
Shinji noticed the change at the third hour past noon, during a brief interval alone in Julius's room — the magicule density to the southwest had crossed a threshold. Not dramatically. But the accumulation that had been gradual was now compounding, each new signature pulling the existing ones into tighter alignment, the whole mass becoming more coherent as it grew.
He extended Magic Perception to its limit and held it there.
The shape of it was wrong. Everything about it was wrong in the specific way that manufactured things were wrong when you were used to natural ones. Creatures had distinct soul-signatures — varied, individual, accumulated from living. Human souls were messier still, carrying the sediment of personality and choice and history. Even large armies felt *human* at a distance, the individual variations producing a kind of noise that was, once you knew how to read it, deeply recognisable.
This had no noise.
Thousands of signatures, and they were identical to each other. Not similar — identical. In the way that items produced in sequence from the same specification were identical. Each one a copy of a template.
「The veteran's account,」 the Butler said. 「Captain Vane's memory. The old soldier describing "the seven-day heaven." I have been running his description against what we're detecting, and the alignment is — significant.」
*Tell me.*
「He described the sky filling with light. Light that moved in formation — not the scattered light of fire or explosion, but directed, purposeful. He described sounds he couldn't categorise: not the sounds of battle but something prior to battle, a registering presence. He was young during the event. His account filtered it through what he had language for.」 A pause. 「What he described, and what we are detecting, have the same fundamental quality. Manufactured. Uniform. Not alive in any sense he could recognise.」
*When?*
「His account places the event at sixty to seventy years before his own youth. He was elderly when he told Vane. Vane was forty-three at death, active service beginning at sixteen. Rough calculation: the event the veteran described occurred approximately one hundred and fifty years ago.」
Shinji ran the implication.
One hundred and fifty years. And these signatures were accumulating *now.* Which meant the interval between events was roughly — he didn't know. He didn't have a second data point. But the veteran had described it as a known thing, something with a name, something he'd heard of before he survived it.
*It's cyclical,* he thought. *It's scheduled.*
「Yes,」 the Butler said. 「Someone is doing this deliberately, on a timetable, with sufficient authority to summon entities of this scale. The uniformity, the concentration at a fixed source, the compounding alignment — this is a summoning of significant magnitude. Whatever is being summoned is being called from somewhere else and is still arriving.」
*How many?*
「At current density and rate of increase — conservatively, tens of thousands. Possibly more. The edge of our detection range is limiting the count.」
Shinji sat with this.
Tens of thousands of uniform B-rank equivalent signatures, compounding toward a fixed point six hundred kilometres southwest, following a schedule someone with enormous power had established at least one hundred and fifty years ago and likely much longer.
He thought about the veteran's description: *the seven-day heaven.* Not the seven-day war. Not the seven-day disaster. *Heaven.* A name that said something about what it looked like from below, from the perspective of someone surviving it.
*Something comes from above,* he thought. *From above, in formation, uniform. For seven days.*
He thought about soul-harvest. About what ten thousand battlefield casualties would do to his magicule reserve. About the gap between Spectre and the next evolution — one thousand souls for Apparition, ten thousand for Wight. About what a Wight's stable physical form would mean: an existence that didn't require a possessed vessel, a solid presence he could maintain without the constant overhead of keeping Julius's body running.
*I need to be there,* he thought.
「I know.」
*Timeline?*
「At current rate of accumulation, the gathering reaches what I'm estimating as critical density in four to five days. After which — based on the veteran's account of light moving in formation — the event begins. Duration, if the veteran's estimate is accurate: seven days.」
*I can't leave yet.*
「No. The Gavin situation requires your presence until the Earl has been brought to a position of understanding. If you disappear now, during a household crisis, the absence will be noticed and its timing will be suspicious.」
*Three days,* Shinji said. *Minimum. If the agent arrives within two days of Kapel's letter reaching its destination — which puts them here tomorrow or the day after — and if the assessment goes cleanly, the household will have enough stability for Julius to credibly announce a desire to travel.*
「Julius was going to travel,」 the Butler said. 「To study. That was the original plan, before the ambush.」
*People change after trauma. They seek movement. They want space from the place the grief happened.* He thought about how to arrange this so it read as true. *It is true. Just not in the way anyone watching will think.*
「Shall I begin drafting a travel itinerary?」
*Not yet.* He looked at the southwest, through the fortress wall, toward the invisible mass of whatever was gathering out there. *Wait until after the assessor.*
---
Father Sevan arrived two days later.
He came exactly as Hendor had predicted — a man in his middle years wearing the road-worn vestments of a travelling priest, carrying a letter of condolence from a bishop whose name the Earl's secretary recognised immediately, moving through the fortress gates with the specific humility of someone who knew they were expected and wanted to be seen as grateful for the welcome rather than entitled to it.
Kind eyes. Brown, set in a face that had been designed by years of deliberate expression management into the face of someone you instinctively trusted.
Shinji watched him cross the courtyard from the window of the second-floor corridor.
「Soul-wavelength,」 the Butler said immediately. 「Disciplined. He is running active suppression on the upper registers — the signature of someone who has trained for years to present a specific baseline and has mostly succeeded. But not entirely.」
*What's underneath?*
「Holy Magic training. Not the ambient kind — active practice. The specific resonance of someone who uses Holy Magic as a tool rather than a background property. He is performing the priest. He is not a priest.」
*He's a Holy Knight. An assessor.*
「Almost certainly. The Church sends Holy Knights when they need to detect spiritual anomalies. He's here to determine whether what Kapel described — Julius asking questions he shouldn't know to ask, exhibiting unexpected behavioural changes — has a supernatural explanation.」
*He's here to detect me.*
「Yes.」
Shinji considered this with the precision it required.
Holy Magic bypassed Physical Attack Nullification. It interacted directly with spiritual bodies — with Ghost Cores, with undead signatures, with anything that existed in the space between material and immaterial. A trained Holy Knight running an active scan would find the partition between the Ghost Core and Julius's vessel and would know, immediately, what it meant.
*What does he need to find?*
「A traumatised boy with minor Aura capability and elevated emotional distress. Both of which Julius would legitimately have.」
*The distress is real — the vessel's physiological systems are running warm from the active suppression work. That reads as grief if he's not looking for something specific.* He thought through the architecture of what he was about to do. *[System Stability] compresses the Ghost Core's resonance into the partition space. The vessel's natural magicule signature is normal — Julius had minor Aura capability, which is consistent with the warmth. The distress makes the warmth contextually legible.*
*The risk is the partition itself. If he looks specifically for a divided soul-signature—*
「Then we have a problem,」 the Butler said. 「A human soul with a partition is anomalous. He would recognise it.」
*So we don't give him a reason to look specifically.*
「Which means the performance must be convincing enough that he doesn't probe beyond a surface assessment.」
*Then let's give him a surface to assess.*
He straightened Julius's collar. He adjusted the left cuff. He went downstairs to meet a man who had come six hundred kilometres to determine whether he was a ghost.
---
The introduction was performed in the Earl's receiving room, which was not the formal hall — a deliberate choice by Raymond that communicated *comfortable condolence* rather than *official inquiry.* Tea. The household's good silverware. The Countess present, which added the layer of familial grief that made the gathering emotionally legible without requiring explanation.
Father Sevan was very good.
Shinji observed him observe the room — the specific quality of someone cataloguing while appearing simply to appreciate. He noted the Earl's posture and filed it. He noted the Countess's grief and noted what it cost her to contain it in front of a stranger. He noted Hendor's presence at the wall and the particular watchfulness of a military man who had decided the visitor required watching.
Then he noted Julius.
Not overtly. The kind eyes swept the room with the natural curiosity of someone unfamiliar with the household. But when they reached Julius, they stayed a fraction of a second longer than everywhere else.
*He has a baseline,* Shinji thought. *The Church monitors noble households. He has records of Julius's magicule signature. He's comparing.*
He held very still, internally.
The vessel's warmth. The legitimate grief of a young man who had survived twenty deaths and spent five days performing the normalcy of coming home. The minor Aura capability registering as elevated but contextually coherent. The Ghost Core compressed to absolute minimum resonance behind the partition, held with the care of someone carrying something fragile across uneven ground.
He let Julius's face carry exactly the right amount of exhausted relief at seeing a Church representative — the specific emotion of a young noble whose faith was not deep but who had been raised to find the Church's presence reassuring in difficult times.
Father Sevan moved on.
Over the next two hours, he was excellent company. He offered condolences with genuine warmth. He spoke of the guard's deaths with the specific language of someone who had done this many times and had learned that the right words existed and the effort of finding them mattered. He asked the Earl three questions about the household's needs and listened to the answers as though they were the most important things he'd heard this week.
He asked Julius four questions. They were framed as pastoral — about how Julius was sleeping, about whether he'd been able to speak to the chaplain, about what parts of his faith he found most sustaining in difficult times. They were also, Shinji recognised, structured to elicit specific types of response: the particular verbal patterns of someone operating under possession produced different speech rhythms than the patterns of someone operating under grief. Father Sevan was listening to the rhythm as much as the content.
Shinji gave him grief-rhythm throughout. Julius's formal register, softened and slightly roughened at the edges. Sentences that began with precision and trailed into silence, the way genuinely distressed people's sentences trailed.
At the end of the last question, Father Sevan looked at Julius with the kind eyes and said that his resilience was admirable, and that the Church would hold services for the fallen guards at the nearest chapter house, and that if Julius ever needed spiritual counsel — truly needed it, not the formal kind — the doors were always open.
He said this with warmth that was not entirely performed. Shinji registered this with something approaching professional respect.
*He means it,* he thought. *The pastoral care is real. The assessment is also real. He holds both simultaneously without the contradiction troubling him.*
He thanked Father Sevan with Julius's correct gratitude and watched him go.
---
An hour after Father Sevan's horse cleared the gate, Hendor found Shinji in the training grounds.
"Well?" he said.
"He found a traumatised boy with minor Aura capability and elevated emotional distress," Shinji said. "He will report that Node Three's concerns were overstated." He sheathed the practice blade. "The Muller situation will be deprioritised. We have a week before anyone in that structure looks at this house again."
Hendor let out a slow breath — not quite relief, but the near-miss quality of relief.
"And the Earl?" he said. "It's been two days."
"Tonight," Shinji said. "After dinner. You come to him with what you've observed about Gavin — the account discrepancies, the access patterns, the book. You're a concerned old knight who has been watching the household for forty years and needs to say something he's been holding." He looked at Hendor directly. "Not an accusation. A concern. Let him do the accounting."
"And if he doesn't believe it?"
"He'll believe it. He's been doing his own accounting since the interview." He paused. "He noticed I held something back. He's been asking himself why ever since. When you give him the shape of Gavin as an answer, it will fit the space he's already built for it."
Hendor was quiet for a moment.
"What happens after?" he said. "To Gavin. To Kapel."
"Gavin will be removed from the accounts and confined to the fortress while the formal inquiry runs. Kapel will be monitored until there's enough in the intercepted correspondence to build a case that doesn't require explaining how we intercepted it." He looked at the Jura Forest treeline. "The Church architect — Node One — we don't have yet. The inquiry will surface more of the structure. The Kellach Ford route stays open for the next courier."
"And you," Hendor said. "Julius. After all this is stable."
"Julius needs to travel," Shinji said. "He needs space from the place the grief happened. People who've survived things like this often need movement." He adjusted the left cuff. "The study-tour plan he had before the bravery test — we resurrect it. He leaves in three days. He heads west, toward the interior, somewhere his father will check on him occasionally and find him studying and establishing contacts."
"And actually?"
Shinji looked southwest.
The anomaly was still growing. He could feel it even without extending perception — a faint directionality in the ambient magicule currents, the barely perceptible pull of something vast accumulating in a specific direction.
"West," he said. "And then south." He paused. "There's something happening. Far from here. I need to see it."
Hendor followed his gaze. He couldn't feel what Shinji felt — a human's Magic Perception didn't reach this far. But he looked southwest for a moment with the instinct of someone who had spent forty years watching borders for things he didn't yet understand.
"How dangerous?" he said.
Shinji considered how to answer this honestly.
"I don't know yet," he said. "I know it's large. I know it's scheduled. I know it's been happening, in some form, for longer than either of us has been alive." He looked at Hendor. "I need you to hold this household together while the Earl processes what you're going to tell him tonight."
"I know how to hold a household together," Hendor said, with the quiet gravity of someone who had been doing exactly that since before Julius was born.
"I know," Shinji said. "That's why you're in the Circle."
Hendor looked at him. The look that said *I chose this and I am measuring that choice against everything I am watching you become.*
Then he picked up a practice blade and handed Shinji one.
"Three days," he said. "The Earl processes on his own timeline. You don't rush grief and you don't rush revelation. Give him three days."
"Three days," Shinji agreed.
They trained until the light went.
---
That night, Shinji sat in Julius's room with the locked drawer in front of him.
He had the key — he'd located it during the second night reconnaissance, a small brass thing tucked inside the spine of a book on the fiction shelf, the one shelf Julius had read least. Hidden where someone who knew him well enough would look, and no one else would think to.
He held it.
He thought about what kind of person locks one drawer in an ordered room.
Someone who keeps everything else accessible — to himself, to the household, to the implied audience of a life lived under moderate scrutiny — and reserves one small space specifically for the thing he doesn't want observed. Not valuables. Julius didn't have valuables beyond the household accounting. Not contraband.
*Something private,* Shinji thought. *Something that would embarrass him. Or something that would cost him if it were found.*
He thought about what Julius had been. Careful. Controlled. Building the formal exterior that the Earl expected while privately cataloguing discrepancies in the account books that he didn't know how to raise. A boy who kept his room in perfect order and locked one drawer.
He turned the key.
Inside: three letters, tied with a cord. The handwriting on the outside of each was Julius's — addressed to himself, never sent. And underneath them, a journal that was different from the personal ledger. Smaller. Older. Written in a hand that was Julius's but younger, less controlled, from several years earlier.
He read the journal first.
It took two hours.
When he finished, he sat very still in the chair and looked at the middle distance.
「Master,」 the Butler said, carefully.
*He knew,* Shinji said. *About Gavin. Not specifically. But he knew something was wrong with the accounts, and he knew Gavin was at the centre of it, and he'd been building a private case for two years. He didn't know how to bring it to his father without destroying something his father loved.* He paused. *He was going to travel to study how noble households handled internal financial investigations in other territories. He wanted to come back with a methodology that was — established. Official. Something that didn't look like a son accusing an uncle.*
A long silence.
「He was trying to protect his father,」 the Butler said.
*From the knowledge,* Shinji said. *Not from the truth. He intended to bring Raymond the truth eventually. He just wanted to bring it in a form that didn't break something in the process.* He looked at the journal. *He was more careful than I gave him credit for.*
「Are you—」
*I'm not going to leave this for the search party to find,* Shinji said. *Or the inquiry. What's in this journal is Julius's work and it belongs in the investigation through a channel that honours how he built it.* He thought about Hendor. About the trusted old knight who was going to go to the Earl tonight with a concern he'd been holding. *Hendor gets the journal. Not as evidence from Julius. As something the household retains in trust, for the inquiry to use when the time is right.*
「That's not strategically necessary,」 the Butler said. 「The inquiry has enough without it.」
*No,* Shinji agreed. *It's not strategically necessary.* He tied the cord back around the letters and set them aside. *But Julius spent two years on it. And he was right.* A beat. *Equivalent exchange. He's owed the rightness.*
He closed the drawer.
He sat in Julius's room, in Julius's chair, wearing Julius's face, holding Julius's key, and thought about a nineteen-year-old who had died in a forest before he could come home and do the thing he'd spent two years preparing to do.
*I'll make it true,* he'd promised. In the forest. Before the dive.
He hadn't understood, at the time, the full weight of what he was taking on.
He thought he was beginning to understand now.
Outside, the southwest anomaly continued building. Uniform, purposeful, patient — gathering toward whatever it was gathering toward on a schedule older than the fortress, older than the Muller family, older than every human institution visible from this window.
Three days.
Then the road.
Then whatever came next.
He closed Julius's eyes and performed sleep until the morning.
---
*End of Chapter 6*