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“Noted.”

I seat the crystal in its ring. I set the cone and the spindle and the rod into the three slots I've now identified along the ring's outer edge, and the bowl beneath, and the flattened piece from the well behind, and the lens I balance on top because there's nowhere else it fits and because my hands have started shaking.

Then I turn it.

The house disappears.

It's not four meters this time. It fills the front room and keeps going, out through the walls and the roof as though neither exists, and we're standing inside a galaxy that reaches past the boundaries of the building and does not care about them. Stars stack behind stars behind stars. Joren lowers himself onto the floor without appearing to notice he's done it. Edda says something in a language I don't know.

And the path is there. The one I saw as a single line in the ruin at Sedge End, running from edge to edge.

Except it isn't one line. With eight pieces in, it's forty. Fifty. They start at scattered points across the whole projection and they converge, and converge again, and narrow, and all of them end at the same place.

A small world on an unremarkable arm, third from a yellow star, with a marsh belt across its northern hemisphere.

“That's here,” Tilda says. “That's — hang on. That's us.”

I follow the convergence down with my hand and the projection reads the movement and answers it, and the whole galaxy contracts, world after world falling away, until we are looking at Castus, then a continent, then a coastline, then a marsh.

And then at a point beneath the marsh, forty kilometers south of where I'm standing, marked with a glyph I have seen exactly twice in forty years of my uncle's handwriting.

“Oh,” I say.

“Clara.”

“It isn't a treasure map and it isn't a chart.” My voice has gone somewhere odd. “It's an index. All those lines are entries. Every single one of them starts somewhere out there and finishes down there, which means whatever is under this marsh isn't a vault, it's a⁠—”

“A record,” Draeven says.

“It's a library.”

Nobody speaks for a while. The galaxy turns quietly through Edda's kitchen chairs.

Here's what I understand, standing inside it, and it takes the ground out from under me more thoroughly than the shrine roof did.

My uncle knew. Not at the end — early. Decades ago. He found one cache, and then another, and somewhere around the third or fourth he worked out what the assembly was pointing at, and he made a decision that cost him his marriage to the world.

He could have reported it. He'd have been famous. There'd be a research station, a supply line, a town with his name on it.

He looked at that and he looked at what a frontier does to anything valuable, and he took the entire thing apart with his own hands, and buried the pieces one by one across four hundred square kilometers of swamp, and spent the next forty years lying to everyone he loved so that no one could put it back together except somebody who was willing to do forty years of work to earn it.

“He wasn't hiding treasure,” I say. “He was custody. He appointed himself custody of the thing and he never once told anybody, because telling anybody was the whole risk.”

“He told you,” Edda says.

“He left a hinged floorboard for a niece he hadn't seen since she was eleven.”

“That's telling you, girl.”

Draeven has been quiet through all of it, standing near the door with several thousand stars going through him, and when I look over I find he isn't looking at the projection at all.

“There's a problem,” he says.

“I know.”

“Say it anyway.”

So I put my hand into the convergence and pull it apart, and there, at the very end, where forty lines come together into one, the last four hundred meters of the path simply stop. Not faded. Absent. A clean-edged volume of nothing, waiting for a piece that isn't on this table.