He found Casvar alone in the upper room. The wooden case was open on the bench. All three instruments were laid out. Casvar was looking at the teal one, whose thread had been still since the release, and his expression was the expression Kael had seen only twice before: the one where the assessment was not of a situation but of himself.
Kael stood in the doorway.
He said: "The living world borderlands. The discharge."
Casvar said: "Yes."
He said: "Did you know."
Casvar was quiet for long enough that the silence had its own answer embedded in it. Then he said: "I knew the working's collapse would release the accumulated Resonance outward. I calculated the primary discharge toward the working's center — the five who were killed. I did not — fully calculate the secondary discharge into the adjacent borderlands."
He said: "Did not fully calculate."
Casvar said: "I calculated it was possible. I did not calculate the scale."
Kael said: "Because the accumulation was larger than you estimated."
Casvar said: "Yes. More than expected, faster than expected — the phrase applied to the working as much as to you. I underestimated both."
Kael stood in the doorway and breathed slowly.
He said: "How many."
Casvar said a number.
Kael stood with the number for a long time.
He said: "Not soldiers. Not the people building the working."
Casvar said: "No. The border populations. The towns." He paused. "The kind of death that produces scattered, low-Resonance souls in volume. The kind the major Soul-Lords consider not worth the effort."
The kind, Kael thought, that would drift toward a territory whose occupant could hear what they had been trying to say.
He said: "They'll come here."
Casvar looked at him.
He said: "The souls from the border populations. If they're scattered Resonance, low individual weight, no specific Soul-Lord territory to anchor them — they'll drift. And the pull from this territory is the one that—" He stopped. He rebuilt the sentence. "I've been accumulating from the borderlands for forty-six days. My territory's signature is established in the scattered-death regions. They'll come toward the signature they recognize."
Casvar said: "Yes. I believe so."
He said: "That's not an accident."
Casvar said nothing.
He said: "You calculated that too. That even if the secondary discharge produced unexpected casualties, the resulting souls would accumulate in my territory. That the release would be self-replenishing."
Casvar said: "I did not plan the casualties. I did not—"
He said: "I know. I believe you." He breathed. "I also believe that you calculated the outcome of souls arriving here and did not tell me because telling me would have made me ask this question before the release rather than after, and you needed the release to happen."
The room was very quiet.
Casvar said: "Yes."
One word. The word for yes that had weight in it — the Valdrek equivalent of yes between people who have agreed to something that cannot be taken back. Except this time it was not an agreement. It was a confession offered in the same register as an agreement because it was the only register Casvar knew how to use for things that mattered.
Kael stood in the doorway of the upper room and looked at the man who had taught him everything he knew about this world and had withheld exactly enough to ensure the teaching produced the outcome the teacher needed.
He thought about Hareth's voice above him, administrative, completing a task.
He thought: this is not the same thing. But it is adjacent to it. And I need to understand the difference precisely or I will spend the rest of my time in Valdrek managing the wrong problem.
He said: "I am not going to leave."
Casvar looked at him.
He said: "I am not going to leave, and I am not going to stop accumulating, and I am not going to use the circle as a weapon again. Those are three different decisions and they are all final." He paused. "I need you to understand all three of them before we discuss what comes next."
Casvar said: "I understand them."
He said: "Good."
He left Casvar in the upper room with the three instruments on the bench and went back to his room and closed the door from the inside.
The three dead stood in the corridor.
He did not tell them to follow him. He stood on his side of the closed door and breathed and held the pull steady and thought about the number Casvar had said and what it meant that those souls were going to come here and what it meant that he was the one they were going to find.
He thought: I have been here forty-six days. I have one hundred and forty-three words. The number is too large and my vocabulary is too small and neither of those facts changes what I have to do next.
He opened the door.
He said: "Follow me."
He went to the reading room. He found the slate. He sat on the floor and began adding to his list.