The reconnaissance report arrived on a Wednesday.
Mort brought it with the morning correspondence — filed between a grain surplus adjustment from the province of Aragon and a petition from the eastern merchant guild regarding road maintenance. He set the stack on the desk the way he always set things, with the precision of a man who had learned that everything placed in front of Yogiri would be read in the exact order it was placed, and that order mattered in ways he had stopped fully understanding after the second week.
Yogiri read the grain surplus adjustment. Approved the road maintenance petition with a marginal note reducing the requested budget by twenty percent and redirecting the difference to a bridge repair in Iberia that the petition hadn't mentioned but that three other documents had referenced obliquely.
Then he reached the reconnaissance report.
He read it once.
Set it down.
Picked it up and read the third section again — the section titled SUBJECT: UNIDENTIFIED TRAINING ACTIVITY, CALEDONIAN RANGE, HYPERBOREA, DAYS 11-30 OF OBSERVATION.
Then he read it a third time.
Then he set it down and was quiet.
---
Mort, who had been standing near the door reviewing his own notes on the morning's scheduled meetings, became aware of the quality of the quiet. He had become, over thirty days of employment under the new administration, reasonably accurate at reading the qualitative differences in Yogiri's silences. There was the working-silence, which was the standard baseline. There was the reading-silence, which was similar but slightly more still. There was the assessment-silence, which occurred after complex information and lasted precisely as long as the assessment required.
This was a fourth kind.
He was not sure he had a name for it yet.
"The report," Yogiri said.
"Yes," Mort said.
"The scout unit — how many saw the training directly?"
Mort checked. "Four observers in rotation. The unit commander and three operatives. They maintained observation distance throughout, as instructed."
"And the Lance description." Yogiri looked at the report without picking it up. "The section on day thirty. The detonation."
"They described it as—" Mort found the line. "'A secondary force release at the point of impact, distinct from the initial Lance signature, operating on a different — they wrote frequency, sir, though they noted they weren't certain that was the correct technical term.'"
"It's correct enough," Yogiri said.
He stood.
He moved to the window. The one that faced the central plaza — the plaza that was, at this hour, running its normal morning business, the petition queue already forming along the left colonnade, two merchants arguing cheerfully about something involving cabbages near the fountain. A normal morning. His seventeenth consecutive normal morning in this office.
"The Sage King's suppression field ran ninety seconds," he said.
"Yes," Mort said, though it was not a question.
"In the Prussonian engagement, the Lance drove four meters through suppression-depleted fire at three-hundred-meter range. Rank 4." He was looking at the plaza but not watching it. "If the Lance now carries a dual-formation — primary signature on entry, secondary on impact — then the fire has to address two sequential force applications instead of one. The dissolution process runs twice." He was quiet for a moment. "It costs time."
"How much time?" Mort said.
Yogiri turned from the window.
He looked at Mort with the golden-green eyes that had been looking at everything for thirty days with the same comprehensive calm, and Mort had the specific sensation — familiar now, if not comfortable — of being read the way the documents on the desk were read. Fully. Precisely. Without mercy or malice, simply completely.
"Enough to matter," Yogiri said.
---
He returned to the desk. Pulled a blank document toward him. Picked up the pen.
He wrote for approximately four minutes — not the quick decisive strokes of routine correspondence, but the slower, more deliberate marks of something being constructed carefully. He stopped twice, held the pen, continued. When he finished, he folded the document in half.
He wrote two more lines on a second blank document — shorter, thirty seconds — and handed that one to Mort.
"Send this to the SCYTHIA division," he said. "The scout unit is recalled. They've seen what they need to see."
Mort took the document. "And the other one?" He indicated the folded paper still on the desk.
"It stays here," Yogiri said.
Mort waited to see if more information was forthcoming. It was not. He left.
---
The folded document sat on the corner of the desk for the rest of the morning.
Yogiri worked around it — reviewing provincial assessments, signing three garrison redeployment orders, meeting with a delegation from the province of Navarra that had sent a new governor to replace the one who had fled the country, all of it conducted with the same precision and economy that had characterized every working day for the past thirty.
But between documents, his eyes went to the folded paper.
Not often. Twice, maybe three times over the course of the morning. Brief — a glance, a return to work. But the glance happened.
Mort noted it because Mort noted everything. He filed it without a category and kept working.
---
At midday, Yogiri went to the training courtyard.
The palace had one — behind the administrative wing, a stone-paved square used by the guard rotation for drills. At midday it was empty; the guard shifts changed at noon and the fifteen minutes between departure and arrival produced a predictable vacancy.
He stood in the center of the courtyard.
He raised his hand.
The black-and-white fire came — lazy, patient, the familiar orbit around his arm. He looked at it for a moment. Then he directed a small tongue of it at the courtyard wall. It touched the stone and burned — not fast, not dramatically, but thoroughly. The stone didn't crumble. It consumed cleanly, layer by layer, the Hellfire eating through three inches of palace wall in under four seconds.
He stopped it.
Looked at the hole.
Four meters, he thought. Through suppression-depleted fire. Rank 4.
He generated the fire again, this time at a lower intensity — the level it had been operating at in the Prussonian engagement, the level after Solomon's field had cost it energy. He directed it at the opposite wall, not to burn, just to maintain the state.
Then he threw a compressed force-strike into the fire at full output.
He was, he understood, running the same calculation the young soldier was running from the other direction. The soldier was asking: how far can I drive the Lance into this resistance? Yogiri was asking: at what Lance strength does the residence time inside my fire become long enough to constitute a problem?
The force-strike dissolved in under two seconds.
He generated a second strike — imagined the dual-formation structure the scouts had described. Primary impact, secondary detonation from inside. He ran both forces simultaneously at the same target point in the fire.
The fire addressed the first. Then the second.
The combined dissolution time was approximately three and a half seconds.
He stood in the empty courtyard and thought about three and a half seconds.
In the Prussonian engagement, Straze's SOVEREIGN CLEAVE had held contact for approximately one second before the fire recovered from Solomon's suppression field and pushed back. The window Straze had exploited was one second.
Three and a half seconds was not one second.
Three and a half seconds was enough time for the sword to go further.
He was quiet in the courtyard for a long moment.
The guard shift change happened around him — soldiers arriving through the far gate, the departing shift filing out the near one, a sergeant calling a formation count, the ordinary noise of a working garrison. None of them came near him. They had learned, in thirty days, the geography of where to be and not be without being told.
---
He returned to the office.
The folded document was still on the corner of the desk.
He sat down. Looked at it.
Then he pulled it toward him, unfolded it, and read what he had written.
He had spent four minutes writing it, which was longer than anything else he'd written in thirty days of running an empire. It was three paragraphs. The first paragraph acknowledged the current trajectory of the Lance development. The second paragraph described two specific countermeasures he could develop against dual-formation assault. The third paragraph—
He read the third paragraph twice.
Then he folded it again.
He put it in the desk drawer.
He picked up the next document in the stack and returned to work.
---
In the Prussonian Pass, Solomon received a message.
Not through the relay crystal. In person — a courier, which meant it had originated somewhere that didn't want the communication on any network, which meant it had originated somewhere that was concerned about interception.
The courier handed him a sealed envelope, confirmed the delivery, left without waiting for a response.
Solomon read it.
He read it twice. Sat down, which was not his habit — he thought better standing. He sat anyway.
Kane found him twenty minutes later and read the room accurately enough not to ask questions. He waited.
"The Lance changed," Solomon said.
Kane was quiet.
"Dual-formation. Primary on entry, secondary detonation at impact." Solomon set the letter on the table. "I don't know who sent this. The seal isn't a coalition mark."
Kane looked at the letter. "If it's not from our network—"
"It's from Hyperborea," Solomon said. "Or relayed through someone in Hyperborea." He stood. Moved to the strategic map. His rune-script, always present but usually quiet, was running slightly brighter than normal — the physical indicator of his mind accelerating. "Dual-formation changes the dissolution time. The fire has to run two sequential processes." He was already calculating, the equations moving across his forearms in living light. "If the dissolution time increases to three or four seconds—"
"You need the suppression field to last longer," Kane said.
"I need the suppression field to do something different," Solomon said. "Not longer. Smarter. If I can target the fire's dissolution-response mechanism specifically — rather than suppressing the fire's overall output — the field becomes more efficient. It doesn't fight the fire's strength. It slows its reaction speed."
Kane was quiet for a moment. "Can you build that?"
"I've been building it," Solomon said. "I just didn't know if the Lance architecture would support it." He looked at the letter again. "Whoever sent this wanted me to know. They wanted us to know the Lance changed so we could build the suppression architecture around it." He was quiet. "Which means someone in Hyperborea with access to the training information is on the right side of this."
"Or," Kane said, "someone wants us to believe the Lance changed, for reasons we don't yet understand."
Solomon looked at him.
"You think it's false intelligence," Solomon said.
"I think it arrived through an unknown channel during a period when the enemy is running active reconnaissance in Hyperborea," Kane said carefully. "I think those facts coexist and require evaluation."
Solomon was quiet for a long time.
Then: "Get me everything the coalition scouts in Hyperborea have reported. Every observation. Every timestamp."
Kane went.
Solomon stood at the map and looked at the Caledonian range and thought about three-and-a-half second dissolution time and what it meant for a suppression field that targeted reaction speed rather than output strength.
He thought about it until Kane returned forty minutes later with a stack of scout reports.
He read for an hour.
Then he set the stack down and said: "It's real. The training is real, the Lance change is real, and whoever sent that letter saw it themselves." He picked up the letter again. "They want us to know because they need us to build around it."
"Why would someone in Hyperborea need us to build around the Lance?" Kane said.
Solomon looked at the letter.
"Because," he said slowly, "someone in Hyperborea is building the Lance. And they need the rest of the plan to be worth throwing it into."
---
In Byzantium, at the desk, the afternoon moved through its correspondence.
Yogiri worked.
He did not look at the drawer.
Once — once, at the end of the afternoon, when the light from the plaza window had moved to the wall and the day's last document was signed and the stack was organized for tomorrow — he opened the drawer and looked at the folded paper.
He did not unfold it.
He looked at it for approximately five seconds.
Then he closed the drawer.
He stood. Put on his coat. Moved toward the door.
"The afternoon's outstanding items?" Mort said, from his corner.
"Tomorrow," Yogiri said.
"The Iberia delegation—"
"Tomorrow," Yogiri said. He stopped at the door. "The dual-formation Lance. If the scouts' description is accurate — and it is — the dissolution window extends to approximately three and a half seconds." He was not looking at Mort. He was looking at the door. "Solomon will have received information about the change through a channel I allowed to remain open. He'll be building suppression architecture around the new Lance profile." A pause. "In approximately sixty days, possibly less, the Lance's operator will advance to Rank 5."
Mort was very still. "And then?"
"And then," Yogiri said, "the math of the original coalition plan gets closer to closing than it was in the Prussonian engagement."
He opened the door.
"Sir," Mort said.
Yogiri stopped.
"The document in the drawer," Mort said.
A pause. Two seconds. Three.
"It's a contingency," Yogiri said.
"For what?"
Another pause.
"For the possibility," Yogiri said carefully, "that the math closes." He walked out.
The door shut behind him.
---
Mort stood in the empty office for a long moment.
He looked at the desk. At the drawer.
Then he looked at the door Yogiri had just walked through.
In thirty days of watching the most powerful being he had ever encountered administer an empire with total, absolute, unshakeable confidence — in thirty days of watching that man handle every crisis, every complication, every challenge with the calm certainty of someone for whom not winning was simply not a category —
He had just heard Yogiri Augustus plan for losing.
Mort sat down heavily in his own chair.
He stared at the wall.
He had no idea if that was the most terrifying thing he'd witnessed in thirty days, or the most reassuring.
He sat with it for a long time.
He did not arrive at an answer.