The attribute flux cleared on the second morning.
He woke up knowing it immediately — the way you knew, in buildings, when the noise stopped. Not better, exactly. Baseline. Whatever the new baseline was. He moved his legs and they moved correctly and he sat up and the room didn't tilt, and that was enough.
*[ATTRIBUTE FLUX: RESOLVED. Endurance integration complete.]*
*[Current profile: Endurance 40, Metal Resonance passive active. Blood Curse drain rate unchanged.]*
*[You are still operating below full capacity. The curse suppresses physical stats by approximately 40%. Endurance 40 is, functionally, Endurance 24 in practice. This is still better than before.]*
*[I mention this not to discourage you. I mention it so you understand the math.]*
He understood the math.
He dressed and stood at the window for a moment — the shutters open today, grey morning light and the smell of cold mud from the outer yard below. Two stable hands crossing the yard with their breath coming in clouds. A cart wheel that needed new iron binding. The southeast parapet shedding a small stone as he watched, dislodged by nothing more than its own accumulated decision to go.
*The math:* Blood Curse suppressing forty percent. Endurance forty means twenty-four effective. Strength twenty-four means approximately fourteen. He was, functionally, the weakest person in this keep, including the kitchen boy who looked about twelve.
He thought about the compass in his coat pocket.
Then he went to find the east corridor.
---
He spent two hours on the wall.
Not trying to open it — he wasn't ready for that yet, didn't know what was on the other side or who might be using it and when. He was reading it. The way you read a structure: what it was designed to do, how it was built, where the decisions had been made, what those decisions implied about the person who'd made them.
The false plaster section ran approximately four meters along the east passage, starting just past the servant stair junction and ending near the lamp alcove. The access point — he found it on the third pass — was at the south end, a door-width section where the plaster was marginally thicker, the kind of thickness that accommodated a frame behind it. It would open inward, away from the corridor, which meant the mechanism was on the other side.
*No handle this side,* he noted. *One-way entry, or entry requires advance knowledge of the trigger.*
He pressed his palm flat against the surface. Cold. Colder than the rest of the wall, which meant the space behind it wasn't heated, which meant it wasn't inhabited but was accessible. A maintenance space. A listening space. Or a through-corridor to somewhere below.
Three floors down from this point, roughly: the lower east corridor where Mira had been grabbed.
He stepped back and looked at the wall the way he'd look at a structural drawing — the whole thing, not just the section he was focused on. The east wing of the keep was original construction, older than the rest, the first thing built when House Voss had claimed this territory three hundred years ago. The walls here were thick. Thick enough, easily, to accommodate a narrow passage running vertical.
Somebody had put it here deliberately. Somebody with access to skilled labor, time, and enough influence over the household that the work had gone unnoticed. That narrowed it considerably.
*[I should mention,]* the System offered, *[that Roran Voss's signet ring carries a suppression curse. Minor variety. Placed approximately four years ago, based on the curse density's rate of decay. It has been reducing his Strength, Focus, and Will attributes by approximately 15% for four years. He doesn't know it's there.]*
Kael stared at the text for a moment.
*Four years.* Roran had been walking around for four years with something quietly dampening his capabilities, and nobody — not a single person in this keep — had identified it.
Including Roran.
He thought about the man in the courtyard. The barely-contained frustration, the sense of a person who knew he should be more than he was and couldn't understand the gap. The resentment of being passed over for a position he probably could have handled, if his attributes hadn't been quietly strangled for four years.
*Not a traitor,* Kael thought. *A target.*
Someone had been building this for a long time. Longer than the passage, longer than the correspondence with House Cavren — four years at minimum, and that was just what the System could date.
"Can you tell who placed the curse on the ring?" he asked quietly.
*[Curse signatures are not fingerprints. I can tell you the type: low-density suppression curse, external placement, requires physical contact with the object for approximately thirty seconds. It was placed on the ring, not the wearer, which means whoever did it had access to the ring when Roran wasn't wearing it.]*
*[That is not a short list of suspects in a noble household. But it does eliminate casual contact.]*
He didn't confront Roran. Not yet. Confronting Roran now — with a half-formed picture, no names, no chain of cause — would accomplish nothing except making Roran defensive and closing off whatever he might say if approached differently later.
He went downstairs instead. He was going to the lower city and he was going to start building a picture of what House Voss looked like from outside the walls.
---
Valdenmoor in winter had a specific smell.
Coal smoke and animal and cold mud and the particular mineral sharpness of iron-ore dust that had been settling into the city's surfaces for a century, embedded so deeply it had become part of what the place smelled like even in the years when the trade had slowed. The streets were narrow in the old district, widening into something approaching a proper boulevard near the market square, then narrowing again on the other side toward the frontier quarter where the guards and the laborers and the people who worked the dangerous edges of empire lived in buildings that were functional rather than comfortable.
Kael walked without escort, which was apparently unusual enough for a Voss lord that two people did visible double-takes as he passed. He didn't acknowledge this. He was watching, the way he'd learned to watch new construction sites — not for what was obviously wrong but for what the ordinary surface told you if you paid attention.
What the ordinary surface told him: House Voss had a reputation problem that preceded the financial problem by about a decade.
He could see it in the quality of attention. The merchants in the market square clocked him and then clocked away — not the active avoidance of people with something to hide, but the dismissive non-engagement of people who'd already decided something wasn't worth their consideration. The Voss crest on his coat. The thin face, the careful walk. They'd seen the type. They'd made their assessment.
One grain merchant saw the crest and nodded with the specific warmth of a man determined to be seen being respectful to a dead house's heir. Too warm. The warmth of someone who didn't expect the warmth to cost him anything.
A woman running a textile stall looked at him once and then back at her work without any change in expression. That was different. That was someone who'd formed no opinion because she hadn't been watching him closely enough to form one.
*Those are the useful ones,* he thought. *People who don't know what to think about you yet.*
He stopped at her stall. Heavy wool cloth, good quality, practical rather than fine.
"The Voss house crest," he said. "You supply the keep?"
She looked up. Assessed him without apology. "Not in three years. Payment schedule went irregular."
"Who handles it now?"
"Merchant consortium out of Caldenveil. They extended credit." She picked up a fold of fabric and smoothed it. "Better rates than I could offer, but they charge interest that compounds monthly, so." She shrugged. "Different kind of payment schedule problem."
He hadn't known about the consortium credit. It wasn't in the ledgers he'd read — either it predated the current ledger period or it had been recorded somewhere else. Either way: the keep was running on credit with a Caldenveil consortium that charged compounding interest, and nobody had mentioned it.
"How long ago did the consortium extend the credit?"
"Three years, give or take."
Three years. Approximately when the reserves had begun accelerating their decline, if his ledger math was right. Somebody had bridged the gap. Somebody in Caldenveil, extending credit on compounding terms to a house with eight months of operating capital remaining.
*[Trade-Instinct passive would flag this as predatory structured dependency,]* the System noted. *[You don't have it yet. But you can see it without the passive.]*
He could. It had the shape of a structure designed not to be repaid but to be foreclosed. Like a foundation deliberately built with insufficient support — it would hold long enough for the building to go up, and then it would go at exactly the moment when the building was too heavy to move.
He thanked the textile merchant and moved on.
---
The trouble was in the frontier quarter.
Not dramatic trouble — no shouts, no drawn weapons, just the specific compression of a street when something is happening that everyone is watching without looking directly at. He felt it before he saw it: three people standing too still near the wall of a tavern that hadn't opened yet, and across from them a fourth person whose body language had the very particular quality of someone who had already decided how the next thirty seconds were going to go and was waiting for the other parties to catch up.
She was tall. Dark skin, short hair, wearing frontier guard leathers that were off-duty but not off-duty enough to leave the sword at home. She was standing with her arms loose at her sides, not threatening, which was somehow more threatening than threatening would have been.
The three men were explaining something. He was far enough away that he couldn't hear the words, but he could read the shapes: one of them was doing most of the talking, the other two had the posture of people ready to do the not-talking part if the talking didn't work. The woman was listening. Her expression suggested she found their explanation adequate in the way that a building inspector found a contractor's paperwork adequate — technically present, wholly unconvincing.
Then she said something. Three words, maybe four. He couldn't hear it from here.
The man doing the talking stopped.
The other two looked at each other.
All three of them left. Not quickly — quickly would have been too obvious — but with the purposeful pace of people who had somewhere they urgently needed to be that wasn't here.
She watched them go, then looked down at the street-cart they'd apparently been in the process of upending, and began methodically straightening the goods that had been knocked off it. The cart's owner, an old man who'd been standing a careful distance away throughout all of this, came forward and started helping. She said something to him. He laughed, which seemed to surprise him.
Kael stood and watched this from across the street and thought: *that's useful.*
Not the outcome — the mechanism. The way she'd resolved a three-to-one confrontation without escalating it, without drawing the sword, without performing anything. She'd said something specific enough that three men had decided their time was better spent elsewhere, and then she'd helped straighten the knocked-over goods. Complete transaction. No residue.
She didn't look at him. He was, to her, someone standing on the street. She shouldered a small pack and walked south, toward the frontier gate, moving like someone with somewhere to be and enough time to get there without hurrying.
He filed her — the movement, the economy of it, the particular quality of someone who'd learned their capabilities accurately and operated within them without pretending they were larger or smaller than they were. He didn't know her name. He didn't need it yet.
He turned back toward the market. He had a forge to do before dark.
---
The merchant's scale was in the vault's second crate from the left, which he'd identified yesterday.
He'd been thinking about the sequence on the walk back from the lower city. The compass was too powerful for his current base — the *Wayward Curse's* density would likely knock him sideways for days at his current Endurance. The seal-ring was the same problem. The border-ward stone — the Fear Aura curse — was moderate, viable, but Intimidation and Presence weren't what he needed right now.
What he needed was information.
The merchant's scale was an old thing, pre-empire by the look of the metalwork, the kind of precision instrument that had been used to weigh trade goods back when Valdenmoor was a proper commercial hub. The scale itself was fine. What made it a relic was the curse layered into it over decades of use by a merchant who'd apparently been conducting unfair exchanges for long enough that the instrument had absorbed the pattern.
*[RELIC: Merchant's Scale, origin unknown. Curse type: [Imbalance Curse] — absorbs awareness of weighted exchanges, distorts carrier's perception of fair value over time. Density: MODERATE.]*
*[Forge yield: Perception +14. Trade-Instinct passive — carrier reads unfair exchange structures at a glance; compound interest schemes, hidden costs, imbalanced agreements become immediately apparent.]*
*[Forge cost: 6-7 hours. Pain classification: moderate. Significantly less than the Iron Rot forge. You've already established baseline pain tolerance; this should be more manageable.]*
*[Also: this is a good choice given what you learned today. I'm noting that you're sequencing well.]*
"Don't compliment me," Kael said.
*[Noted. I was simply observing that—]*
"I know what you were doing."
*[...Confirmed forge?]*
"Yes."
---
The System had been right — it was more manageable.
Still six hours. Still the kind of pain that required the cloth between his teeth and the bedpost within reach, the kind that arrived in waves and then in something more continuous and then in waves again. But the attribute flux from the first forge had given him a frame for it. He knew now how to breathe through the peaks, how to ride the in-between spaces, how to treat the whole thing as a structural event with phases rather than a continuous emergency.
He thought about patterns while it happened. It was better to have something to think about.
The passage behind the east wall: built within the last decade. Requires inside labor, inside access, money for materials. Calibrated concealment — staged plaster, feathered edges. Purpose: access to lower east corridor without being seen in the main halls. Currently in use.
The suppression curse on Roran's ring: placed four years ago. External, requires thirty-second physical contact with the object. Placed by someone with access to Roran's ring when he wasn't wearing it — his quarters, or somewhere the ring was stored, or a moment of close contact casual enough not to be remembered. Result: Roran running at eighty-five percent capacity for four years, resentful, increasingly susceptible to being told that his failures aren't his fault.
The consortium credit out of Caldenveil: three years old. Compounding interest. Structured to foreclose, not to be repaid. Someone in Caldenveil decided it was worth extending credit to a dying house. That decision didn't happen without a return arrangement.
The grab on Mira's arm: four days before Kael had arrived in this body. Not a response to anything he'd done. Maintenance of an existing situation. A demonstration to someone — Mira, or through Mira to whoever else might be watching — that the keep was porous, that night access existed, that there was no safety in these walls that the outside couldn't reach.
And the voice through the wall. *Won't survive the winter anyway.* Past Roran's partial deafness, muffled by stone, but landing clean in that one phrase.
He held all of it in his head and turned it like a load-bearing diagram. Looking for the point of convergence. The single failing column that, if you could identify it, explained why everything above it was tilted.
The passage. The ring. The credit. The grab. The voice.
They required different capabilities. One required labor and materials and access. One required proximity to Roran and knowledge of curses. One required Caldenveil connections. One required physical entry to the keep after dark. None of them felt like independent actors.
*This is organized,* he thought. *Someone is coordinating multiple approaches to the same objective. Like an engineer.* He almost smiled at that, which was probably not appropriate given the current pain situation. *Like an engineer who's decided to bring a building down without anyone noticing the demolition.*
He thought about House Cavren. The trade route diversion, eleven years ago. The pattern of steady pressure with no single dramatic act — nothing that could be pointed to, nothing that could be litigated. Just removal. Just the slow withdrawal of the things that held House Voss up, one by one, until it fell under its own weight.
They didn't need to push. They just needed to make sure nothing got repaired.
The forge crested.
He held the bedpost and breathed and waited for it to pass, and when it did he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling crack and thought about how you dealt with someone who'd turned your own house's entropy into a weapon.
*You don't fight the entropy,* he decided. *You repair faster than they can damage.*
He fell asleep before the System confirmed completion.
---
It confirmed it when he woke.
*[FORGE COMPLETE.]*
*[Perception: 61 → 75 (+14)]*
*[Trade-Instinct passive acquired — unfair exchange structures immediately apparent to carrier.]*
*[Attribute flux period: 36 hours. Lighter than the previous forge; Endurance integration has improved your processing baseline.]*
*[Twenty-one relics remain.]*
*[Also — you fell asleep during confirmation. First time I've seen that. I'm choosing to interpret it as efficiency rather than rudeness.]*
He lay still for a moment, taking stock.
Seventy-five Perception, blood curse suppression notwithstanding. He reached forty-five effective, roughly. That was still better than most untrained soldiers, if the numbers in Kael's memories were calibrated right. More importantly: the Trade-Instinct passive. He wanted to test it.
He was going back to the market tomorrow.
He got up slowly — the lighter flux manifesting as a faint visual shimmer at the edges of things, like the world had been very slightly resized — dressed, and went down to get something to eat.
The kitchen was quiet. One fire burning low, the smell of yesterday's bread and cold ash and the specific emptiness of a room that had fed fewer people than it was built for. He found bread and hard cheese and ate standing at the counter, and was almost done when he heard the sound.
Low. Coming from the north end of the keep. Not loud enough to be alarming from here — if he hadn't already been listening to this building, cataloguing its sounds and textures and the particular vocabulary of its settling, he might have missed it entirely.
He knew the sound.
He'd heard it in three buildings, across two countries, in a different life. The sound a structure made when something in its load path had given just slightly too much — not catastrophic, not yet, but past the point where the load was being carried correctly. A single low note, like a very large instrument played once and immediately damped.
He put down the bread.
---
The north wall of the keep was original construction — the oldest part of the structure, facing the approach road, built to be seen and to be solid. It was solid. Three meters thick at the base, dressed stone, old enough to have outlasted everything that had originally surrounded it.
He put his hands on it and felt it immediately.
The mortar was wrong.
Not old-wrong, the way mortar got wrong from time and weather. The kind of wrong that had direction to it — specific sections, not distributed. He moved along the wall with his palm flat against it and the wrongness resolved itself under his hands into a pattern: three sections, each about a meter and a half wide, spaced at irregular intervals that were actually, he realized, very regular if you knew what to look for.
*Load path intervals.*
Someone had identified exactly where the north wall carried the most weight from the structure above it, and those were precisely the sections where the mortar had been — not removed, that would be visible — treated. Something applied to it. Something that had degraded the binding over time while leaving the surface intact. He scraped at a section with his thumbnail and the mortar came away too easily, crumbling into powder rather than grit, the binding gone while the filler remained.
His hands went still against the stone.
He stood there in the dark with the cold coming through the wall and thought about someone who understood structural load paths. Who knew which sections, removed, would cause not an immediate dramatic collapse but a slow tilting — the weight redistributing to the remaining sections, those sections taking more than they were built for, the whole thing failing incrementally over months.
Over a winter.
*Won't survive the winter,* the voice had said.
He'd assumed that was about him.
He put his palm back against the treated section and felt the powder-soft mortar under his fingers and thought: *or it was about the building.*
Let the north wall go in deep winter — the freeze-thaw expansion alone would do the rest once the mortar was compromised enough — and you'd have a partial collapse. Maybe more than partial. North wall, original construction, three floors of keep above it. If the timing was right. If the weather was right. If nobody noticed until it was too late.
Accidents happened in old buildings.
Especially buildings that hadn't been properly maintained.
He stepped back and looked up at the wall in the dark, at the dressed stone face of it that looked exactly like what it should be, and felt the very specific anger of a structural engineer standing in front of deliberate, patient, professional-grade sabotage.
They hadn't needed to hurry. They'd had years.
They'd done good work.
He pressed his hand flat against the mortar one more time, feeling the soft give of it, and thought: *so will I.*
---