Solomon worked at night.
Not exclusively — the substrate embedding required daylight hours for precision alignment, the rune-equations needing visual reference to the terrain's physical geometry before they could be written into its energy layer. But the verification work, the calibration checks, the fine-tuning of each anchor point after embedding — that he did at night, crouched on the mountain road with his forearms glowing and the cold irrelevant to a man whose rune-script ran hot enough to keep hypothermia at bay.
He had ten kilometers of road to prepare.
He worked section by section, moving south from the Prussonian Pass toward the expected engagement corridor, embedding the suppression architecture into the stone and earth substrate at intervals of forty meters. Each anchor point took approximately ninety minutes to write correctly. A wrong equation in a single anchor would compromise the coherence of the whole field — the architecture was only as strong as its weakest link, and Solomon was not interested in weak links.
He slept four hours a night.
He ate while walking between anchor points.
He did not complain about this to anyone because there was no productive reason to.
---
By day seven he had covered six of the ten kilometers.
Day eight.
He found it at anchor point forty-three.
He was crouching on the road surface, both hands pressed flat against the stone, rune-script running at reading-intensity rather than writing-intensity — the diagnostic pass he ran on every completed anchor before moving to the next. The equations embedded in the substrate responded to his diagnostic like a call and answer, each one returning confirmation of structural integrity in the specific resonance pattern that meant this is correctly written and holding.
Anchor forty-three returned something different.
He held the diagnostic open and read it again. And again. Then he pressed harder, pushing the reading deeper into the substrate — past the top layer where his own architecture lived, past the geological strata of four-hundred-million-year-old Prussonian granite, into the energy substrate that underlay all physical matter in DEVAS.
There.
A burn-mark.
Not his. His architecture burned cold — a characteristic of suppression work, which operated by introducing delay rather than consuming energy. This burn was warm. Recent — three days by the thermal signature. Moving from south to north.
A line of it, thin and precise, running along the energy substrate of the road at walking pace.
Someone had walked this road three days ago.
Someone whose presence left burn-marks in the substrate at walking pace — not because they were attacking the substrate, not because they were using any power at all. Simply because they were present, and their presence was the kind that left marks in the world the way a brand left marks in skin.
---
Solomon sat back on his heels.
He looked at the road. At the perfectly ordinary surface of mountain stone, dark and cold in the pre-dawn.
He walked here, Solomon thought. Three days ago. Moving north.
He looked south — toward the direction the burn came from. Then north — toward where it went, toward the Prussonian Pass, toward the fortress where Solomon had been sleeping four hours a night and building for eight days.
He walked the road we're preparing, Solomon thought. Before we started preparing it.
No. Check the timing — he'd been embedding for eight days. The burn was three days old.
He walked the road we were already preparing. While we were preparing it. Moving toward our position.
Solomon was quiet on the mountain road in the pre-dawn cold for exactly as long as it took him to run the implications.
· One: Yogiri knew the engagement corridor.
· Two: He had scouted it personally, which meant his intelligence on the terrain was first-hand rather than reported.
· Three: The burn-mark moved at walking pace and went all the way north — which meant he had walked to the edge of visible range of the Prussonian fortress before turning back.
· Four: He had done all of this openly, leaving a substrate trace he knew a competent mage would find.
He left it deliberately, Solomon thought. He's not hiding that he walked the road. He's telling me he walked the road.
Solomon stood.
He looked north toward the fortress.
Then he activated a relay crystal — the secure channel, the one that only reached Kane — and held it to his ear.
"Kane," he said, when the connection opened.
"Solomon. It's—" A pause. A rustling. "—four in the morning."
"He walked the road," Solomon said. "Eight days ago, three days after we began the preparation. He walked the full engagement corridor from south to north and stood within visual range of the fortress. The substrate has his burn-signature." A pause. "He left it visible. He wants us to know."
Silence on the channel for five seconds.
"Does it compromise the architecture?" Kane said.
"No," Solomon said. "He didn't touch the suppression anchors. He walked over them without disrupting them." He looked at the road. "Which is the other message."
"He could have disrupted them," Kane said slowly.
"He could have burned every anchor point I've placed in eight days of work without breaking stride," Solomon said. "The fact that they're intact means he chose to leave them intact." He was quiet for a moment. "He's letting us build."
"Why?" Kane said.
Solomon thought about the folded document in a desk drawer three hundred kilometers south. About a man who had spent forty-six days governing a fourteen-province empire with total precision and had written a contingency anyway. About the specific quality of intelligence that calculated its own deficits honestly.
"Because he wants a real engagement," Solomon said. "Not a rout. A real one." He crouched again over the burn-mark. Looked at the precise thermal trace, the exact walking pace of it, the absolute calm that the signature communicated — a man walking a road he was studying, leaving no more trace than his presence inevitably produced. "He's not afraid of what we're building. He's — " He searched for the word. Found it. "—curious."
"Curious," Kane said.
"About whether it works," Solomon said. "He wants to know if what we've built actually closes the math." He stood. "Which means he's uncertain. Somewhere in his calculation, there's a variable he can't fully resolve." He looked south. "That's why he left the burn-mark. It's the most honest thing he's done in this entire situation."
"What do we do?" Kane said.
"We keep building," Solomon said. "Exactly as planned. Every anchor, every equation, every calibration." He started walking north toward the next point. "And we tell Straze. In person. Tonight."
"He won't like it," Kane said.
"No," Solomon agreed. "But he'll understand it."
He closed the crystal and kept walking.
---
Straze was awake when Solomon arrived.
Of course he was.
Solomon told him everything in the order it needed to be told — the burn-mark, the thermal signature, the dating, the trajectory, the intact anchor points. He told it without inflection, the way you reported a measurement. Facts in sequence.
Straze listened without moving.
When Solomon finished, Straze walked to the window.
He stood there for a long moment.
"He could have burned everything," Straze said.
"Yes," Solomon said.
"He didn't."
"No."
"He walked north, stood outside the fortress, and walked back."
"Yes."
Straze turned from the window. His expression was the same as it always was — carved, still, built from thirty years of not letting his face carry information he hadn't decided to send. But Solomon, who had been reading people for sixty years, caught something moving underneath it. Not fear. Not anger. The specific quality of a man who had received information that confirmed a belief he'd been carrying for weeks without evidence.
"He's coming to the engagement honestly," Straze said.
"That appears to be the case," Solomon said.
"Not because he has to. Because he wants to know." Straze looked at the map. "He wants to know if the math closes."
"Yes," Solomon said.
"Then we make sure it does." He moved to the table. "Two changes to the final configuration. First — the anchor corridor. If he's already walked it and left the anchors intact, he knows their positions. He'll know the field's geometry when it activates." He picked up the marking rod. "We add eight additional anchor points in non-standard positions. Not within the walking-corridor. Off the road — in the ridge face, in the drainage channels. The field's activation pattern will be asymmetrical from what he mapped."
Solomon was already writing. "That extends my preparation by four days."
"Can you do it?"
"Three days if I stop sleeping entirely," Solomon said.
"Three days," Straze said. "Second change: Ervalen's approach vector."
"He's not back yet," Solomon said.
"He will be in four days," Straze said. "Which is what I need." He drew a line on the map — not the same approach corridor they'd designed in the original configuration. A different angle, steeper, coming off the ridge rather than along it. "In the Prussonian engagement, he approached from the eastern ridge at two-hundred-fifty-meter distance. That position is now known and will be monitored." He drew a second line. "He needs a new angle. Closer, off the northern ridge face. A hundred and seventy meters."
Solomon looked up. "That's inside the suppression field zone."
"Yes," Straze said.
"If the fire recovers before the Lance arrives—"
"The Lance is dual-formation at Rank 5," Straze said. "The fire is running at one-third response speed. At a hundred and seventy meters with kinetic approach, the Lance is inside the fire's recovery window even if the field collapses earlier than anticipated." He set the marking rod down. "We stop planning for the field to last. We plan for the Lance to work without the field."
Solomon was quiet for a long moment.
"If Ervalen is inside the field zone," he said, "he's also inside the engagement's primary combat area."
"Yes," Straze said.
"He'll be visible. He can't run an outside-pattern approach from inside the zone."
"I know," Straze said.
"Then it's not an outside-pattern strike anymore," Solomon said. "It's a direct approach under fire. Against a target who will see him coming."
"It was always going to come to that," Straze said. "At some point, the Lance has to be thrown at someone who knows it's coming. What we're testing is whether that matters when the architecture is right." He held Solomon's gaze. "Does it matter?"
Solomon looked at his calculations. At the penetration numbers. At the response-delay tripling. At twenty-seven meters against twenty-five required.
"With the field holding," he said slowly, "the Lance penetration is sufficient even against a target who is watching for it. The dissolution process is mechanical — it runs the same regardless of whether the fire is positioned to intercept." He paused. "The variable is whether Yogiri can physically move out of the Lance's path before impact. The Lance travels at— "
"At Rank 5, dual-formation, full kinetic approach," Straze said. "What's the flight time at a hundred and seventy meters?"
Solomon calculated. "Approximately six-tenths of a second."
"Can he clear six-tenths of a second?"
"Against a target moving at full speed?" Solomon said. "Yes. Possibly. If he recognizes the approach vector early enough." He paused. "But if the suppression architecture has already introduced a four-tenth-second delay into his dissolution response, and the Lance is on a trajectory that requires him to simultaneously dissolve it and physically relocate—"
"His processing splits," Straze said.
"His processing splits," Solomon confirmed. "Conceptual fire management and physical movement are separate demands. Under normal conditions he handles both simultaneously without apparent cost. Under a four-tenth delay—" He was quiet. "I don't know. That's the variable I can't resolve from here."
"That's the variable he can't resolve from there either," Straze said. He looked at the map — at the new approach line, the asymmetrical anchor pattern, the convergence of every element they had built over sixty days into a single engagement corridor. "That's why he walked the road. He's trying to resolve it."
He picked up the marking rod again.
"Two more weeks," he said. "Then we move."
---
Ervalen came back on day twelve.
He walked into the fortress at dusk without announcement — no relay message, no advance word, simply the man himself appearing at the gate looking like sixty days of Caledonian training in a body that was carrying it differently than before. Not bigger. Not visibly changed in the superficial ways. Just — denser. The way good iron was denser than ordinary metal. The same mass, a different kind of weight.
The gate guard passed him through without asking twice.
He found Straze at the map. Kane was there. Solomon was there — forearms wrapped, the new anchor work still visible in the fresh rune-script running along his hands.
Ervalen looked at the map. At the new approach line drawn in red.
"That's not where I was in Prussonia," he said.
"No," Straze said. "He walked the road. He knows that position." He indicated the red line. "Hundred and seventy meters. Northern ridge face."
Ervalen studied the angle. Calculated the approach geometry — the kinetic run available from the ridge, the trajectory, the time of flight at Rank 5 output.
"He'll see me coming," Ervalen said.
"Yes," Straze said.
"All the way from the ridge break to the throw point."
"Approximately four seconds of visible approach at full speed," Straze said.
Ervalen looked at the line for a long moment.
"What's my penetration at full approach, one-seventy meters, against suppression-delayed fire?" he said.
"Twenty-seven meters," Solomon said. "Against fire at one-third response speed."
"And if the field collapses during my approach?"
"Full response speed, same approach parameters—" Solomon paused. "Twelve meters. Dual-formation adds perhaps fifteen percent. Fourteen meters."
"You need twenty-five," Straze said. "The field has to be holding when you throw."
"How confident are you in the field?" Ervalen said. He was looking at Solomon.
Solomon met his eyes. Sixty years old. Carrying ten days of insufficient sleep and three days of no sleep in the lines of his face. The most sophisticated magical mind in DEVAS, wearing the evidence of what it cost to build something worthy of the problem.
"More confident than I was in Prussonia," Solomon said. "Less confident than I'd like."
Ervalen looked at the red line for another moment.
"When do we go?" he said.
"Two weeks," Straze said.
Ervalen nodded.
He straightened. Turned for the door.
"Ervalen," Solomon said.
He stopped.
"The approach vector," Solomon said. "Four seconds of visible approach. He'll have four seconds to read your trajectory and position his fire."
"I know," Ervalen said.
"He'll know the Lance is dual-formation," Solomon said. "The scouts' report — the one he received — described the secondary detonation. He's been calculating against it for three weeks."
"I know that too," Ervalen said.
"Then you know," Solomon said carefully, "that the variable isn't whether the Lance reaches. The variable is whether he moves."
Ervalen turned around.
He looked at Solomon with the level amber-pressure eyes of a Rank 5 soldier who had spent sixty days in Caledonia learning the difference between what was impressive and what was interesting.
"He won't move," Ervalen said.
Solomon looked at him. "How can you be certain?"
"Because moving is admitting the Lance can reach him," Ervalen said. "And he doesn't do that." He turned back to the door. "He'll try to dissolve it. He'll stand there and he'll try." He paused at the threshold. "That's what Fenris said. He doesn't concede ground before he has to. He stands and he answers."
He walked out.
---
The three men at the map looked at the threshold where he had been.
Solomon looked at Straze.
"Twenty-seven meters," he said quietly. "Against a target who stands still."
"Against a target who stands still with four-tenths of a second dissolution delay," Straze said.
"Two weeks," Solomon said.
"Two weeks," Straze confirmed.
He looked at the red line on the map.
Outside, the Prussonian wind moved through the fortress. The army waited. The road waited, its substrate carrying the equations Solomon had written into it, carrying the burn-mark Yogiri had left three days into the preparation and the forty additional anchor points added since.
The road waited for what both sides had been building toward.
Two weeks.