By this point in the telling, a reasonable person might have formed their own assessment of how far Dante Caelum was willing to go in pursuit of a particular outcome. The more interesting question, the one that gives the full measure of the boy, was what that outcome actually was.
The answer was mana-gold. The concentrated, crystallized cultivation essence that the Deep People had been accumulating in their vaults since before human civilization had settled on the concept of written language. Mana-gold that, according to every serious source Dante had located in two years of methodical research, existed in quantities that made the combined reserves of every human cultivation sect look like a student practitioner's monthly stipend.
The research had started, as so many significant things do, with an idle evening and an unsupervised connection to the Deepvein Network.
Dante had been twelve years old, confined to the Caelum estate while his father attended an acquisition conference in the southern port cities, and he had done what he always did with unstructured time, which was fill it immediately with structured inquiry. He had moved through the Network's more obscure archival nodes, the ones that required cultivation-key authentication to access and existed outside the indexed directories that most users ever navigated, and he had found them populated with a persistent category of record that the academic establishment had consistently failed to take seriously.
The Deep People. The Veinborn. The shimmer-kin. The Old Walkers.
Every human civilization that had ever left a written record had left something about them. The names varied by geography and era and the particular inclinations of whoever was doing the documenting, but the underlying subject was consistent. A species of humanoid cultivators who had retreated from the surface world at some point in the distant past, who lived according to a strict codex of law and tradition, who possessed cultivation techniques of a refinement that human sects had been independently attempting to rediscover for centuries without success, and who had accumulated, over the vast span of their extended lives, stores of refined mana-gold that represented the single largest concentration of cultivation resources on the continent.
Dante had read everything he could find. Then he had built a database. Then he had cross-referenced the database against geological surveys, deep-cultivation resonance maps, and three centuries of Sect cartography until he had a picture of the Deep People that was more comprehensive than anything the academic establishment had produced, largely because the academic establishment had decided the Deep People were mythological and therefore not worth the research budget.
Their most consistent attribute across every source was the Codex. A compact volume carried by each practitioner of their kind, containing their complete cultivation history, their law, their foundational techniques, and the behavioral protocols that governed every aspect of their extended lives. Written in Deep Script, a character system that no human linguist had ever successfully decoded, because no human linguist had ever had a complete sample to work from.
Dante had understood immediately what a complete sample would mean. With modern translation methodology, with the computational tools available through the Caelum estate's research division, Deep Script was not an insurmountable problem. It was a problem with a solution that simply required the right input.
Know your subject thoroughly before you attempt to exploit them. This was not so much a motto as a foundational operating principle, the thing that separated sophisticated acquisition work from simple opportunism. Dante had immersed himself in everything available on the Deep People's characteristics, their vulnerabilities, their organizational structure, their known interactions with the surface world. He had built the database until it was the most comprehensive privately held research collection on the subject in existence.
And then, because the database was still not sufficient, he had posted an inquiry across twelve specialized nodes of the Deepvein Network: Caelum acquisition concern seeks verified contact with Veinborn practitioner, shimmer-kin, or associated Deep People representative. Substantial compensation. Discretion absolute.
Most of the responses had been fraudulent. He had expected this and had built screening criteria accordingly. The process of elimination had taken eight months and one dislocated wrist in the Saltmere Passage, but Ashenmere had eventually paid off in the way that persistent, methodical work tended to pay off when it was pointed in the right direction.
Dante Caelum was perhaps the only person in the contemporary surface world positioned to make full use of what was now sitting in the Caelum estate archive. He had retained, despite everything his life had made him, the quality of genuine wonder at things that existed outside the boundaries of documented knowledge. This was the part of him that had stayed twelve years old in the best possible sense, the part that had looked at the first references to the Deep People in an obscure archival node and felt the particular brightness that comes from a question that had never been properly answered. He had learned, over the years since, to dress that wonder in the clothing of methodology and professional purpose. The wonder itself he had not lost.
If anyone alive could locate the Deep People's mana-gold reserves, map their vulnerabilities, and construct an extraction plan that accounted for every known characteristic of a species that had been hiding from the surface world for centuries, it was Dante Caelum.
He was quite certain of this.
It was early morning before the skiff reached the Caelum estate's private canal dock, the water dark and still under the pre-dawn sky and the dock-lights reflecting in long gold lines across the surface. Dante was genuinely eager to get to his study and open the archive partition, but there was something he needed to do first.
His mother's rooms were on the second floor of the estate's north wing, overlooking the garden that had not been tended properly in eleven months because no one had been willing to tell the groundskeeping staff that their primary authority had stopped caring about it.
Petra Caelum, née Ashwood, had not left those rooms since his father's disappearance.
The physicians called it cultivation shock, an extreme and prolonged disruption of the personal mana network in response to acute emotional trauma, presenting as sensitivity to light, difficulty maintaining sustained wakefulness, and a general withdrawal from any input above a certain intensity threshold. The prescription was rest, low-mana environments, and time. They had been saying this for eleven months.
Dante climbed the stairs of the north wing quietly and found Linn Kren sitting at the landing, her back straight and her expression doing something complicated that her cultivation-jade mascara was not succeeding in softening. Linn Kren was seventeen and had inherited the Kren family's general architecture in a scaled-down configuration, and she had been assigned to the Caelum household as a domestic security presence while Sable traveled with Dante. She took the assignment seriously and had once put a delivery contractor through a full submission hold for failing to announce himself at the service entrance. The hold had been technically flawless. Dante had reviewed it afterward on the estate's security array and been professionally impressed.
"Difficulties?" he said quietly.
Linn straightened, which she had already been doing quite effectively. "My fault entirely. I left a gap in the north curtain when I came off the evening round. Mrs. Caelum noticed the light."
Dante made a small sound of acknowledgment and continued up the stairs to the double doors of his mother's suite. He knocked gently, two measured taps against the carved thornwood.
"Mother. Are you awake?"
Something struck the other side of the door with the distinctive impact of something that had been expensive before it made contact with a solid surface. "Of course I'm awake. The whole wing is like the middle of the afternoon in here."
Dante opened the door and went in.
The suite was dark in the way that rooms became dark when someone had invested serious effort in the project. The cultivation-silk curtains were layered three deep across every window, and the mana-lamps had been turned to their lowest possible output, giving the space the amber dimness of something underwater. The four-post bed dominated the room's center, its carved posts throwing elongated shadows across the ceiling, and his mother sat upright against the pillows with her pale arms wrapped around her knees and her dark hair loose around her shoulders and her eyes very bright in the low light, the way eyes became bright when they had been not-sleeping for a long time.
She looked at him for a moment.
"Dante," she said. The particular quality of relief in it, the way she said his name when she recognized him clearly, was a different thing from the way she said it on the days when she didn't. On the bad days it arrived searching, like a question. Tonight it arrived as a statement.
That was a good sign. He allowed himself to note it.
"I was traveling," he said. "The Ashenmere acquisition."
"Ashenmere." She repeated it in the vague, soft way she sometimes handled place names, as though testing whether they meant anything. "Was it successful?"
Dante settled into the chair beside the bed that he had pulled into precisely that position eleven months ago and left there. "Yes."
"Your father will want to hear about it." She said this with complete conviction, the way she always said it, and Dante felt the familiar pressure in his chest that he had long since classified, labeled, and set aside in a partition of himself that he did not open during working hours.
"Yes," he said. "He will."
She was already beginning to drift, the wakefulness that the gap in the curtain had forced on her releasing its hold now that the room was dark again and someone she recognized was nearby. Dante stayed until her breathing settled into the long, even pattern of actual sleep.
Then he rose quietly, closed the door behind him without a sound, and went down the corridor to his study to decode a language that no human being had ever read.
Before Sable graduated the Kren training program, he had never been between Caelum assignments. He had completed his training, arrived at the estate, and been handed a fourteen-year-old who needed a professional guardian and a research assistant and someone who wouldn't bother him with unnecessary conversation during working hours.
He had assessed the situation and accepted it without complaint.
In the four hours that remained before dawn, while his mother slept and Sable made his first circuit of the estate's perimeter, Dante sat at his desk with the archive partition open and began the work of reading what no human being had ever read.
The Deep Script resolved itself under his translation methodology with the patience of something that had been waiting a long time to be understood.