They called it the Order's map because once you saw it, you could not unsee the way the world had been threaded. Thorne spread the sheets across the Loom's long table like a cartographer laying out a new country: courier routes in red, private docks in charcoal, FACV‑coded invoices pinned with wax, and a lattice of small crosses where correction units had been recorded. The map smelled faintly of ink and warding oil; the lines looked tidy until you followed them and found how many hands had touched the same ledger.
Aria stood at the head of the table and let the room settle around her. Keeper Sera sat to her right with a stack of witness packets; Marcus leaned against the far wall, arms folded, the patrol list tucked into his belt; Thorne moved between the sheets with the careful hunger of a man who read sigils like sentences. The clerk's whistleblower had given them manifests that contradicted public ledgers; Kellan's logs had opened a hinge; Merrin Halv's name had led them to Corin Vell. Now the map showed the rest.
"Follow the docks," Thorne said, tapping a charcoal line that ran from Saltport to Greyhaven and then fanned into smaller private slips. "The broker uses neutral towns as cover. The manifests clear at one dock and reappear at another under a different trust. The FACV codes are the same across shipments—someone is laundering procurement through shell trusts."
Marcus's jaw tightened. "And the correction units?"
Thorne pointed to a cluster of crosses inland, near border towns and reclaimed villages. "They're not random. They hit nodes—market squares, memorial stones, places where attention pools. Someone is testing how a device behaves when it's fed concentrated civic feeling."
Aria felt the ledger's teeth close around the pattern. The committee had not been sloppy; it had been methodical. The map made that method visible: procurement channels feeding devices, devices deployed at nodes, correction units providing plausible deniability. The political motive—control of memory, influence over markets and votes—sat like a stain under the ink.
"We need to show this to the Council," Aria said. "Not as accusation but as evidence. The map is a narrative: procurement, deployment, effect. If we can make the pattern legible to magistrates and delegates, procedure will have to follow."
Keeper Sera's hand hovered over a witness packet. "We present with Remnants custody. We present the manifests, the clerk logs, the courier names, and the microetch samples. We ask for a targeted subpoena to Corin Vell's broker ledger and for the Greyhaven dockmaster's testimony under warded conditions."
Marcus added the practical edge. "And we prepare for pushback. If the Order's map points to a faction within the Council, they'll try to bury the broker or discredit the clerks. We need neutral delegates—Haven, Greyford—and a public framing that makes suppression costly."
Thorne folded a corner of the map and traced a thin line to a symbol Aria had not noticed before: a small sigil, half‑erased, stamped on a manifest that had cleared at a private dock. He fed the image through a warded lens and watched the microetch reply. "This is older than the committee," he said. "PreSevering template marks, repurposed. Whoever's running this knows how to hide in history."
The room went quiet. PreSevering marks were not casual; they were the kind of thing that made archivists whisper. If the procurement chain used old templates as camouflage, then the conspiracy reached into places that kept secrets for a living.
Aria thought of the Vault's disk and the treatise Thorne had found—how archives could be reservoirs for redirected feeling. The Order's map now suggested a deliberate architecture: use archival resonance to call attention, use devices to shape it, and use procedure to make the results look like governance. The scale of it made her chest ache.
"We'll do two things at once," she said. "We push the Council with the map and the Remnants' packets. Public enough to force action, precise enough to demand targeted subpoenas. And we tighten the field: more detectors at the nodes, covert teacher cells ready to deploy diffusion rites, and patrols watching the private docks."
Marcus nodded. "I'll move teams to Greyhaven and Saltport. We shadow couriers, record off‑manifest drops, and secure witnesses. If the broker tries to move goods, we intercept under Remnants escort."
Keeper Sera added a legal rider. "We prepare warded subpoenas. We do not hand artifacts to anyone without Remnants custody. We prepare to release witness packets to neutral towns if the Council tries to suppress. The ledger must remain public enough to prevent burial."
They worked through the morning like a machine. Thorne annotated the map with microetch variants and cadence keys; Marcus drew patrol grids and safe routes for witnesses; Keeper Sera prepared the Remnants' seals and the Oath of Witness forms. Aria drafted the public framing: a clear, factual presentation that would show the procurement chain and the deployment pattern without teaching anyone how to build the devices.
At midday a runner arrived with news that tightened the map into a noose. A private dockmaster at Greyhaven had been found dead—drowned in his boat, ledger pages scattered like wet leaves. The courier list he'd kept had been partially burned, but a single manifest survived: a FACV invoice with the broker's mark and a notation that matched Merrin Halv's shorthand. The death smelled of warning.
Marcus's face went hard. "We secure the dock. We treat this as evidence and as a threat. No one touches the ledger until Remnants witnesses are present."
Aria felt the ledger's teeth sharpen. The map had become dangerous in a new way: not only did it show who had been used, it showed who would be silenced. The committee—or someone who benefited from its work—knew how to make a ledger disappear.
They moved fast. Marcus sent a patrol to Greyhaven with Remnants escort and a warded subpoena. Thorne prepared a field kit to capture microetch traces from the dock's timbers. Keeper Sera arranged for Calder to be brought under warded custody to testify about procurement patterns. Aria drafted the Council brief and sent runners to Haven and Greyford to secure neutral delegates for the next hearing.
That evening, as lamps burned low in the Loom, Aria stood over the map and let the lines settle into a story she could tell aloud. The Order's map was not a single conspiracy; it was a network of commerce, clerical habit, and political appetite. It used procedure as camouflage and trade as cover. It had teeth and it had hands.
"We follow the broker," she said finally. "We subpoena Corin Vell's ledger under Remnants oversight. We bring Calder and the clerk whistleblowers to testify under warded conditions. We secure Greyhaven and Saltport. And we make the map public enough that suppression costs more than exposure."
Keeper Sera's eyes were steady. "And we prepare for the worst. If someone tries to bury the ledger with violence, we have witnesses and copies in neutral towns. We will not let a dead dockmaster be the end of the story."
Aria closed the Spiral Log and wrote the day's entry with hands that had learned to be both blunt and careful: Order's map compiled—procurement chains, private docks, correction unit nodes; Greyhaven dockmaster death reported; Remnants subpoenas prepared for Corin Vell and Merrin Halv; Calder and clerk whistleblowers readied for warded testimony; patrols to Saltport and Greyhaven deployed; public framing drafted for Council.
Outside, the city's river moved like a slow, patient witness. Inside, the Loom hummed with the small, stubborn work of turning a map into accountability. The Order's map had teeth; they had to make sure those teeth could not bite again.