He set thread one to primary and began the cleanup.
The dissolution spell ran faster than it had before — not because the spell itself had changed, but because the cognitive thread running it had access to the full pool without competing for attention from the other threads, and the pool was larger than it had been, and the combination produced an efficiency that turned what would previously have been a careful twenty-minute process into something closer to seven.
The field was cleared. Not a trace of organic material.
The armor and weapons came next. Lucius's personal guard had been well-equipped — the quality of a lord's military budget expressed in steel and iron and, he found as the mold spell sorted through the material, a small amount of silver in the captain's buttons and belt fittings and a modest amount of gold in a ring on one hand and a chain around another's neck, both of which had been in the absorbed memories as things of sentimental rather than monetary significance.
He held the gold chain for a moment before it went into the mold.
The absorbed memory that came with it was brief and vivid: a woman clasping it around a man's neck on the morning he left for his first deployment with a new employer, her hands steady, her face not. A gesture of safe passage, of return, of the specific hope that people gave each other when they could not guarantee the thing the hope was for.
He let the memory be what it was. He placed the chain in the mold.
The ingots came out clean and dense. Steel of excellent quality — he could feel the crystalline structure through the diagnostic sense, the precise alloy balance that produced the ideal combination of hardness and ductility, the mark of steel made with real skill and real materials. Iron ingots from the less refined components. A small quantity of silver and gold, modest in total but real.
He stacked them in the spatial pocket with the methodical efficiency of thread one running at full capacity while threads two through twelve continued their separate work without interruption.
Thread four — the agricultural knowledge — was already organizing itself into useful categories, cross-referencing with what he already knew about the Voss farm's soil composition and the specific limitations he had identified in the existing tool inventory. The steel could become new plough blades, could become the replacement for the old adze that his father kept using past its useful life out of frugality, could become a proper grain scoop to replace the cracked one that had been losing small amounts of grain at every harvest. The gold could become — he considered this with genuine pleasure — a small necklace for his mother and a hair ornament for each of his sisters, the kind of gift that communicated care rather than utility and that his family received too little of because their prosperity had always been directed back into the farm.
He was, he thought, never going to tell anyone where the raw materials came from.
The field was clean. The inventory was stowed. The parallel processes were running without friction. The moon had moved in its arc while he worked and was now lower, the night progressing toward the specific quality of dark that preceded dawn without announcing it yet.
◆ ◆ ◆
He stood at the field's edge and looked at the house.
Dark windows. Barrier steady at full capacity, maintained without effort, its layers running in the background process with the same quality of automatic function as his heartbeat. Shadow's network covering every shadow in the property's range, every copy in the tree line oriented toward the yard, hundreds of amber eyes in the dark that he knew were there without needing to look for them.
His family was asleep. His family was safe. The field was clean. His own capability had just expanded beyond any previous benchmark in a single evening.
He had not wanted this to be necessary. He had prepared for it anyway. Both of those things were true and neither one made the other smaller. And the night had given back, in the form of what twelve human lives carried into him, something he had not anticipated and could not have planned for and was not going to pretend he did not intend to use.
He turned toward the sky.
The flight construct formed without effort — not the labored assembly of a spell requiring active construction, but the immediate availability of something his background process already had ready, the wings already spread before he had finished deciding to fly.
He rose above the field and looked down at everything he had built.
The stone house with its good windows. The barn with the roof he had climbed. The east field he had reinforced. The garden. The fence lines that had expanded three times in seven years. The warm light still visible in the kitchen where his mother was awake because she loved him.
Mine, he thought. Ours.
He had been protecting this with everything he had. Now everything he had was considerably more than it had been an hour ago.
He turned north, toward the Cassel estate, and flew.