Recovered from the Sealed Lab beneath the Luddenbrock Mines of Uthodurn.
Kaspien,
Your last note arrived through the usual channel, intact. I burned it after reading, as we agreed. I am writing this one in the afternoon, in the council library, surrounded by people. No one looks twice at a woman writing letters in a library. They look twice at a woman who hides.
The Forum convened again this morning on the matter of the Ghor Dranas prisoners. Velorin spoke for two hours and said nothing. Aldric for one hour and said less. I voted with the majority, as you would expect of me. I think of you every time I do.
The work continues. The fourth phase is more delicate than your projections allowed for, but I think the projections were generous to begin with. You always were generous in your estimates and miserly in your conclusions. I miss arguing with you about it.
The garden behind the Eastern Tower is in bloom. I walked there at dusk and thought of nothing in particular for almost a quarter of an hour. It was the longest quarter of an hour I have had in months.
Stay where you are. Do not write back through Brennan’s channel - he is being watched. Use the Garten Weitsicht location.
—Margrethe
Kaspien,
Two pieces of news, one from each side of the veil.
From Zemniaz: the Forum has authorized a third round of “interviews” regarding the Ghor Dranas debate. They are not calling them interrogations yet. They will. Aldric thinks he is safe because he voted on the prevailing side. I have not had the heart to tell him that the prevailing side is exactly where they are looking. Velorin has begun sleeping in the council annex. He says it is for convenience. No one sleeps in the annex for convenience.
From the other side: I went up. You know what one goes to the Astral for—not to be there, but to stand on its silver and step from it to somewhere else. The Astral is the hub the academies refuse to teach properly because they do not understand half of what hangs from it. Halas understood. We have always understood. I stood in the silver for the better part of a day and read the currents until I found the thread I was looking for, and then I followed it down into one of the unmapped demiplanes that drift loose in the eddies near the edge of Limbo itself. The kind of place that does not have a name because nothing in it stays still long enough to be named.
I came back with the second-to-last component on your list—the petrified tear, the one I said was apocrypha. It is not apocrypha. It is sitting on the writing desk in front of me as I write this and it is cold, Kaspien, the kind of cold that does not belong to any temperature. I will route it to you through Garten Weitsicht next sennight when the courier rotation favors us.
The thing I will not write down is what I saw inside the demiplane. There was a moment when the geometry of the place flexed and resolved into something almost like a room, and something in that room noticed me. Not a creature—a condition. A weight in the air that turned its head. I climbed back to the Astral so quickly I left an afterimage of myself behind. The walk across the silver to my anchor point was the longest hour of my life and I am writing those words as a woman who has had a great many long hours.
You always said I was the cautious one of the two of us. You were wrong about that, but I was glad you thought it.
Your sketches of the binding chamber arrived a week ago and I have read them four times. The proportions are exactly what you said they would be when we first talked about it, in the room we are not going to talk about in writing. You remembered the curve. I did not think you would.
—Margrethe
Kaspien,
The component arrived; the courier confirms the handoff at Garten Weitsicht. Use it sparingly. There is no second tear and I will not be making the crossing again until the work on this end is further along.
I have read your latest notes on the fourth-phase resonance and I think you are too close to the problem to see the shape of it. You are correcting for harmonic drift in the binding lattice as if the lattice is the source of the drift. It is not. The drift is coming from the room. Those caves you found are older than any of our schools and the stone in them was worked by something — you said so yourself when you first wrote me about them. Whoever cut those walls was doing something we do not have a name for, and whatever they did, the stone remembers it. Your circle is sitting on top of an instrument that is still tuned to a song you cannot hear.
The remedy, I think, is not to fight the drift but to fold it into the ritual itself. Treat the ambient resonance as a sixth-phase carrier. I have sketched a possible adjustment on the back of this letter. Tell me where I am wrong. You always could.
A piece of news from the city: Halas’s old students have begun publishing again, openly, under their own names. The Forum is letting them. Either the Forum has stopped caring or the Forum has decided that the noise of the old guard’s heresy is useful cover for something quieter the Forum is doing itself. I do not yet know which. I will know within the month.
I dreamed of you last night. You were standing at the edge of a cliff and you were laughing about something I could not hear, and the wind in your hair was the wind from the gardens behind the Eastern Tower, even though the gardens are nowhere near a cliff. I do not know what to do with a dream like that. I never have.
Be slow. Be slow. Be slow.
—Margrethe
Kaspien,
It has been seven sennights since your last letter and I am beginning to invent reasons. I tell myself that the courier rotation is slow this season. It is not. I tell myself that you are deep in the work and have not surfaced. You always surfaced. I tell myself that the Garten Weitsicht channel has been compromised and your letters are being held somewhere safe until we can establish a new one. There has been no sign of any such compromise. There is no sign of anything.
Write to me. Even one line. Even one word in your hand on a scrap of vellum so that I know the hand is still moving.
They came for Aldric this morning. They were polite about it. He went with them without speaking. I watched from a window on the third floor of the archive and I did not move and I did not breathe and no one looked up. I do not think they will come for me. I have been very careful, and I am very close now to the place beyond which they could not touch me even if they did come.
The Forum is going to lose the war they refuse to admit they are fighting. I have been reading the dispatches from the southern front and I have been reading the things the Forum is not reading. The city is going to fall, Kaspien. Not in a generation. Not in a decade. Soon. The gods are coming for each other and we are in the way.
I will finish my own work in the next month. Perhaps less. I have stopped sleeping, which I am told is one of the signs that the body has begun to understand what is about to be asked of it.
The substitution you suggested — the one we argued about for an entire winter — I think you were right. I am going to use it. I would have liked to tell you that in person.
Write to me. Please.
—Margrethe
Kaspien,
I have it. I have what is wrong with the fourth phase and you are going to forgive me because I am asking you to and because you have always forgiven me when I asked.
It is the Caul. It is not the chamber. It is not the harmonic of the binding lattice. It is not the geometry of those old caves. It is the Caul, the cold thing I sent you in the velvet bag, the one I went to the silver place to find, the one I told you to suspend on the silver chain over your ritual table and feed from the Phasenlaternen at full draw. It is the Caul and I should have seen it before I sent it and I am writing this with my hand shaking.
The Caul is from the place I found it. I have not stopped to think hard enough about what that means until tonight. The thing was made — grown, perhaps, the verb is wrong in any language we have — in a demiplane that drifts in the eddies of Limbo. Its internal structure is not a structure. It is a refusal of structure. The matrix of it is irregular in the way only things from the chaos-edge planes are irregular: asymmetric, recursive, unbound.
And it does what it does because it is unbound. That is the entire principle of why we wanted it. The transition phase fails for everyone who has tried it because the soul, in the moment of moving from the body to the phylactery, is the most fragile and most fluid thing it will ever be and every containment vessel we have ever built tries to give it shape. The Caul does not give it shape. The Caul holds the soul in mid-transit by refusing to impose any geometry on it at all. It is a loose-mesh net for a thing that cannot tolerate a tight one. That is why we believed it would let us survive what no one else has survived.
And we are powering it with refined residuum. Refined residuum. The most lattice-perfect, lawful, ordered magical substance any of our schools have ever distilled. The very substance the Phasenlaternen were designed around. The reason your beacons are as efficient as they are. The reason mine are too. We did not pick residuum because we were sloppy; we picked it because for every other piece of arcane apparatus we have ever built it is the correct answer.
It is the wrong answer here. It is the wrong answer because the Caul does not want a clean current. The Caul does not know what to do with a clean current. Residuum’s lattice grates against the Caul’s matrix the way a perfectly-tuned string grates against a bow made of static. The Caul tries to receive a current that has no harmonic; the residuum tries to give it a harmonic; the Caul cannot accept a harmonic without ceasing to be itself; and the Phasenlaternen, sensing the resistance, feed more current to compensate. The compensation is the tremor.
It is not the chamber. It has never been the chamber. It is order grinding against unbound magic at the most fundamental layer your apparatus operates on, and you have been hearing it for months and you have been correcting for it in the wrong direction. We mismatched the impedance and we did it without knowing impedance was a thing one could mismatch.
The harmonic that has been singing under your hands for the last several weeks is the sound of the Caul saying no to the residuum, eight thousand times a second, in a language neither of us learned to listen for. And the moment your soul leaves your body and enters the Caul on the way to the phylactery — the moment when you most need the apparatus to be quiet — the harmonic will spike. It will pass through the Caul. It will reach the phylactery. It will crack the phylactery from the inside before your soul has finished crossing.
The fix is not difficult. The fix is attenuation. Throttle the Phasenlaternen during the transition phase — not all the way down, but to a quarter-draw, perhaps less. The Caul will hold on residual potential alone for the seconds the soul-transfer requires; the standing-wave does not need full power to persist, it only needs full power to form. Cut the current at the moment of transition. Let the Caul coast. The harmonic will flatten. The phylactery will not feel a thing.
If you have already attempted the transition and it has gone wrong — if the phylactery has cracked, if you are reading this from inside whatever fragment survived — I do not know what to tell you. I do not have a procedure for that. No one does. We were the first.
Kaspien, I should have seen it before I shipped the Caul. I had it in my hands for three days before the courier came. I held the cold thing in my own hands and I did not understand what I was holding. I am the one who went to the silver place and stood in the silver and read the currents and followed the thread down into the demiplane and I still did not understand the thing I came back with. I am writing this knowing that I sent you a tool that is going to kill you if you use it the way I told you to use it, and the only thing standing between that and the alternative is whether this letter reaches you before the fourth phase does.
The courier is leaving in an hour. Garten Weitsicht, the usual chain. I am pressing the seal with my own hand because I cannot bear to have anyone else touch it.
The other thing. It is done. I will not put the word in writing twice but it is done. The substitution you proposed in the winter we argued about it — you were right. I was wrong. You are wrong about a great many things and right about the things that matter and this was one of them. The original would have killed me. The substitution did not. I am on the other side, Kaspien. I am writing this letter from the other side and the hand is the same hand and the mind is the same mind and the love is the same love.
Find me afterward. I will be where we said. The garden behind the Eastern Tower is going to seed and I do not care anymore who sees me walk in it.
Always,
–Margrethe