The registration took ten minutes.
A guard clerk at a long table, a ledger, a set of questions about combat classification and intended role. Albert answered non-combat participant, vendor, field supplies. The clerk wrote it down, gave him a participant number, a departure time, and a supply weight limit, and moved to the person behind him.
He spent the next two days preparing.
The preparation was simple. He was not packing inventory because he did not need to. Everything he would sell in the field he could produce through the Engine on demand, which meant carrying stock into a canyon for four days was unnecessary weight. What he needed was coin and a way to display what he was selling.
He counted out thirty five gold from the strongbox and divided it between his coat's inner pocket and a reinforced money belt he had produced through the Engine for three silver. Then he packed the collapsible stand, a lightweight folding frame that assembled into a serviceable display surface in under a minute, the kind of setup that market vendors used when they needed to move between locations without losing selling time.
That was the pack. Coin, stand, personal supplies for eight days, and the map folded in his inner coat pocket.
Reynold watched this from the doorway of the study with the expression of a man who had arrived at a decision.
"I will accompany you," he said.
"You will not," Albert said, without looking up.
"Young master, eight days is a considerable—"
"Reduced hours. Front shelf stocked, prices on the board, shutters open four hours in the morning. Anyone who wants to buy will buy. Anyone who does not can wait." He closed the pack. "I need someone I trust at the property. That is you."
"You are taking bodyguards," Reynold said.
"Two people I know from the shop. Capable and familiar with the Maw." Albert lifted the pack and checked the weight. "You are more useful here. That is not a discussion."
Reynold gave the single small nod that meant he had accepted a situation he did not prefer.
"Breakfast before the seventh bell," he said, and withdrew.
---
The departure point was the southern gate.
Albert arrived with the pack on his back and found the assembly already in progress. The space in front of the gate had been cleared and the gathered expedition was organizing itself in the loose but purposeful way that groups with internal structure organized, clusters of people with matching equipment gravitating toward each other while the unaffiliated found their own space at the edges.
The major powers of Crestfall had turned out in force.
Most groups ran around twenty members, kitted in matching colors with coordinated equipment that marked them as organized outfits. The guard contingent was the most uniform, city colors throughout, weapons standardized, moving with the efficiency of people who drilled together regularly. The merchant guild teams were slightly less uniform but considerably better equipped, the kind of gear that came from having money and knowing where to spend it.
The mayor's contingent was the largest single group Albert could see. Thirty members at minimum, probably closer to thirty five, arranged around a core of senior fighters with younger members at the edges who had the look of people on their first serious operation managing their nerves with varying degrees of success.
Around the organized groups, the freelancers. Smaller clusters of two, three, four people, some solo operators who had registered individually. They had the look of people who had been doing this long enough to have their own systems and trusted nobody they had not personally chosen.
Doss found Albert near the gate with Cara behind him. Cara had been operating in and around the Maw for six years and had looked at Albert's hiring offer with the specific assessment of someone who was evaluating not the money but the likelihood of returning. She had asked three questions, received answers that satisfied her, and agreed to the contract without further discussion.
"You are really going in with just a money belt and a folding stand," Doss said, looking at the pack.
"People run out of things," Albert said.
Doss shook his head.
The senior figures were easy to identify even in a crowd of capable people. Two Gold ranked martial artists stood near the front of the assembly, their presence distinct in a way that was not visual. Albert had felt something similar standing outside Coran's studio watching the master move through forms, that recognition of something operating in the same physical category as himself but not subject to the same constraints. The Gold ranked felt like that amplified, the Ten in them dense enough that standing within fifteen meters registered as a faint pressure, a subtle wrongness in the air that his body noted before his mind did.
The first was a broad man in his fifties, built like something that had been forged rather than grown, carrying no visible weapon. His name moved through the crowd in quiet exchanges, Harren, said with the specific tone people reserved for things they respected and did not want to antagonize.
The second was a woman, lean and unhurried, with close cropped hair and the particular quality of stillness that came from someone who had nothing left to prove to anyone including themselves. Her name was Voss. She carried a single blade at her hip that looked unremarkable and probably was not.
Standing apart from the martial artists was the third senior figure, a man in robes with the insignia of the Fourth School of Magic embroidered at the collar. Rank 4. Albert had read enough about the magic classification system by now to understand what that meant in practical terms, which was that this man could level a city block if the situation called for it and the situation was unlikely to call for it but everyone present was quietly relieved he was on the same side as them.
A guard officer climbed a short platform at the front of the assembly and waited for the noise to settle.
The address was brief.
Single column movement to the Maw, rune carts provided, no independent scouting, no separation from the main body under any circumstances. The objective was the mana shard vein, extraction and return. All engagement decisions went through the senior figures. Vendors and non-combat participants stayed behind the main line at all times.
Nobody asked questions. The kind of people who showed up to something like this had either done enough of it to not need questions answered or were smart enough to understand that the time for questions was not now.
The rune carts were lined up outside the gate, heavy flatbed vehicles running on inscribed panels along their undersides, the runes glowing faintly with the particular blue-white light of active working enchantment. They moved without animals pulling them, the runic drive system handling propulsion, each cart capable of carrying twenty people and their equipment at a steady pace.
Albert climbed aboard with Doss and Cara. The cart filled around them with freelancers and support personnel, people who had not found a place in the organized groups or had not wanted one. The rune drive engaged with a low hum and the cart began moving.
The journey south took the better part of an hour.
Albert sat with the pack between his feet and watched the terrain change as Crestfall's buildings gave way to the scrubland south of the city, the dry grass and outcropping stone of the approach zone that had once been farmland and had given up. The other carts moved in a loose column beside and behind them, the whole procession carrying the specific quiet of people who were thinking about what was ahead and had stopped finding conversation useful.
The Maw announced itself before it was visible.
A drop in temperature first, subtle but definite, the air taking on a quality that was cooler than the open terrain around them and carried something underneath the cool that Albert's body registered before he could name it. A faint unease, low and persistent, the kind of sensation that in his previous life had been the reliable indicator that something in the environment was not right in a way that had not yet become specific.
Then the carts crested a low rise and it was there.
He had seen it from the city wall and from the rim during his earlier visits. He thought he had understood what it was. He had understood the dimensions and the geography and the practical implications of a canyon that contained more space than its exterior suggested.
He had not understood this.
The Hollowed Maw from the departure distance was a wound in the earth. The canyon walls rose forty meters on either side of a split that ran three kilometers across the terrain, and above the entire length of it, thick fog sat in a solid mass that did not move the way fog moved, did not drift or thin at the edges, simply occupied the space above the canyon as though it had always been there and intended to remain. The fog caught the morning light and did not reflect it, absorbing it instead, the whole mass carrying a gray-white density that made the air above the Maw look wrong in a way that was difficult to look at directly for extended periods.
The aura came off it in waves.
Albert had been in places that felt dangerous before. Battlefields. Installations classified as Extinction Risk. The ice tunnels on Europa in the dark with an enemy that knew the layout. Each of those places had their own quality of threat, specific and directional, something you could orient toward and assess.
The Maw's aura was different. It was not directional. It simply was, radiating outward from the canyon in all directions equally, a pressure that was not physical and did not come from any specific source, the ambient output of something vast and old and entirely indifferent to the three hundred people assembling at its edge.
Around him the carts were stopping and people were climbing down, and even the most experienced hunters among them were doing it quietly, the usual pre-operation noise of a large group reduced to low exchanges and the sounds of equipment being checked and rechecked.
At the rim, exactly as the registration documents had described, large platforms extended out over the edge of the canyon, each one capable of holding fifty people and their equipment, the platform surfaces inscribed with the same rune script as the carts, descent mechanisms built into the support structures. The fog began at the canyon rim and thickened as it went down, the platforms disappearing into it within the first ten meters of descent.
Albert stood at the edge and looked down into the white.
"First time seeing it properly," Cara said beside him. It was not a question.
"Yes," he said.
"Everyone has the same face the first time." She checked the grip on her spear without looking at it, the reflex of someone who had done it enough times that it no longer required attention. "You get used to the aura. The fog clears after the first fifty meters or so. The canyon floor is visible from there."
"And then," Albert said.
"And then you are inside," she said simply.
The first platform began its descent, carrying Harren and the guard contingent's senior fighters, swallowing them gradually into the white until they were gone.
Albert watched it go.
Then he picked up his pack, checked the coin belt, confirmed the map was in his inner pocket, and walked toward the next platform.