The second section of the stone record was shorter than the first.
Casvar read it to him in the same way he had read the first — with the careful translation of a man who had held the document for four hundred years and had been reading it in the original long enough that the translation required him to move through a second language before arriving at Valdrek. Kael asked fewer questions this time. His vocabulary was sufficient for most of it.
The second section described the translation function in practical terms. Not philosophical. Operational.
The crossing point required activation, which was different from opening. The opening was what the return had produced — the borderland membrane thinning at the specific point where the accumulated energy had concentrated. Activation was the deliberate step: the Listener entering into a specific relationship with the crossing point, establishing the connection that made translation possible.
The activation was not performed from the seat. It was performed at the crossing point itself.
He said: "I have to go to the third borderland region."
Casvar said: "Yes."
He said: "Which is in the living world's borderlands. Which is not the Ashenveil."
Casvar said: "The borderland is between. It is accessible from both directions. From here, through the seventh stratum's lower boundary. From there, through the thinning membrane at the crossing point."
He said: "The Deep."
Casvar said: "Below it. Below the thing that speaks."
He said: "I have been in this seat for approximately eight months. I have never gone below the seventh stratum."
Casvar said: "No."
He said: "Is it survivable."
Casvar said: "The second section describes it as the Listener's passage. It uses the word passage in the sense of — transit. Not destruction. The records Soa carries, which are older and which describe previous Listeners, indicate that all of them who performed the translation activation returned from it."
He said: "All of them."
Casvar said: "All of them whose records survive. Which is not the same as all of them."
He said: "No."
He sat with the distinction.
He thought: I have been here eight months and I have taken inventory of every significant thing that has happened and what it might mean for what comes next, and the thing that comes next is that I have to go somewhere I have never been in a world I am still learning, below the boundary of a thing that woke up long enough to call me by a name that is not a Valdrek name.
He thought: that is the kind of situation that, in the first weeks, would have required significant internal resources to approach without visible alarm.
He thought: I approach it with inventory. With the deliberate attention of a man who has learned that understanding comes before everything else. I am ready. Not in the sense of prepared for every outcome — that is never the sense. In the sense of being what I am in full, with full awareness, going into it.
He said: "When."
Casvar said: "When you are ready."
He said: "That is not a timeline."
Casvar said: "No. It is a question."
He looked at Casvar. He thought about a man who had been waiting four hundred years and had structured everything around the arrival of a moment he could not control.
He said: "Three days."