The Weepers avoided the eastern end of the Dock's second canal.
Kael had noticed it on the way in and held the observation without acting on it, waiting for the pattern to clarify. The Weepers the Lower Dock residents who had absorbed too much unrefined Echo-Blood over too many years, whose tear ducts had permanently activated as a secondary outlet for the excess moved through the district with a kind of loose, unhurried freedom that contradicted everything he'd read about Echo-Blood toxicity. They should have been erratic. Dangerous, or frightened, or both.
They weren't. They were simply present, moving through the Docks with the unhurried certainty of people who had found an accommodation with their condition.
Except in a specific corridor, perhaps forty meters long, running along the eastern wall of the second canal. That corridor, they gave a wide berth.
"Wait," he said.
Syrenne stopped. She turned to look at him with the expression she used when he did something she hadn't predicted not surprise, which wasn't in her repertoire, but a slight recalibration.
"Something's different here."
She looked at the corridor. "Echo-Blood concentration. You can see the grating in the floor overflow from the refineries. High saturation."
"The Weepers avoid it. They live in high saturation." He was already walking toward it. "They would avoid this for a specific reason. A different kind of saturation."
"Kael."
He kept walking. He heard her follow two steps back, which was the distance she maintained when she was covering rather than accompanying, which he had already learned to read as a specific configuration of trust.
The grating in the floor was standard Imperial maintenance issue, but the light coming through it was wrong. Not the flat violet of refined or partially-refined Echo-Blood. Something older, less processed light that moved with the quality of something still alive rather than refined to stillness.
He crouched at the edge of the grating and looked through.
Below the drainage level, caught in a crack in the foundation stone, a vein of pure Echo-Blood had been exposed. Not overflow from the refineries above this predated the refineries. This was what was always in the stone here, what the stone had been built on top of without the architects knowing.
The light it put out was different from everything he had seen. Violet but deeper, with something moving in it that was not movement but felt like it.
Closer.
The word arrived differently than usual. Not in the space behind his eyes but deeper, lower in his skull, as though the voice had moved.
Closer to a fragment of me. The Echo-Blood here it carries a resonance from my original domain. Not significant. Not a power source. But I can articulate more clearly here. There are things I've been trying to tell you since last night that I couldn't quite reach. If you stay close to this for a few minutes, I can tell you one of them.
"One," Kael said.
I'm conservative. Yes.
He crouched at the grating for six minutes. Long enough for the warmth to settle not in his hands, not on his skin, but inside somewhere, the specific warmth of a frequency he was learning to call his own. His handwriting, in the copy book held open on his knee, became slightly less regular. He noticed this and did not note it.
Vyrath told him three things.
First: the name Anomaly was a euphemism. The Empire's internal documentation, the kind he had never been allowed to access, called it Divine Interface Capacity the ability to maintain coherent contact with residual divine consciousness without dissolution. Every person who had demonstrated it in four centuries had been brought to the Bureau before they fully understood what they were.
Second: Hael Vorn had demonstrated it. Six hundred years ago. Before the Empire, before the Collector system, when the Echo-Blood was still falling freely and the ruins of the gods' civilization were still warm. He had lived with it his entire life without dissolution. He had written down everything he learned. Most of it was in the First Collector.
Third: three streets northeast, there was an exit from the Docks that the Empire's monitoring instruments could not see. An old servant's passage built into the original city wall, sealed from the inside with a mechanism Vyrath described precisely. Not because he had been there because he had watched Hael Vorn's hands build it six centuries ago, in a memory that had been sitting in the Echo-Blood of this vein for all the time since.
Kael wrote all three down in compact notation. Then he stood.
Syrenne was watching him with an expression he hadn't seen from her yet not assessment, not integration. Something more direct than either of those. Something that was asking a question without the mechanism to voice it.
"The voice gave you something," she said.
"Three things. Information about what I am, what built the First Collector, and a way out of the Docks that avoids the watch on the northern gate."
"From a grating in the floor."
"From the Echo-Blood below it. Apparently it stores memory. I didn't know that."
Silence. Then: "The old literature pre-Empire, what survived of it describes Echo-Blood as containing consciousness residue. Not memories precisely. More like the shape of thoughts that were thought repeatedly in a place. The impression." She was working through it, he could hear it in the cadence. "If you can read it"
"I can apparently read it at close range. In sufficient concentration."
More silence. The recalibration kind.
"The First Collector," she said finally.
"Is built on top of a vein like this one, but significantly larger, and containing six hundred years of deliberate impressions left by someone who knew what he was doing." He looked at her. "That's what Vorath read in Hael Vorn's research. That's what a Level Five Anomaly means not someone who can interface with divine consciousness by accident. Someone who can read what was deliberately left for them."
She was very still.
"He left a message," she said.
"He left everything," Kael said. "And he left it for someone with exactly my capacity."
He looked back down at the grating. The light had steadied less movement in it, the warmth fading as whatever had made it accessible exhausted itself or receded or simply waited.
"Northeast exit first," he said. "Then east. Three days to the Fracture Lands border. After that, we find the First Collector."
She turned northeast. He followed.
He noticed, and filed, and did not write down: she had asked a question and he had answered it fully and she had looked at him for two seconds after without looking away, and in those two seconds her face had done something small and uncontrolled that he didn't have a name for yet.
He was going to need more data points.