Therasia's city was nothing like the border settlement.
"This has changed significantly since my first time here," said Alistair.
The gate alone was twice the height of anything he'd seen since leaving the Black Mountains.
Dark stone, iron-banded, with guards posted at intervals along the wall above it carrying crossbows rather than bows.
The kind of fortification built by someone who thought seriously about what it needed to withstand.
The guards checked everyone entering. Not quickly.
Papers examined, faces compared against something the lead guard held in his left hand without showing it to anyone.
Alistair kept his hood up and let a merchant's cart pass between him and the gate before moving forward.
Due walked beside him with the ease of someone who had been through this gate many times before.
The guard looked at Alistair's covered hair, at his dark armor, at his face. Then at Due.
"Papers."
Due produced them. Clean and credible, the kind of documentation that existed in this region because Due had known it would be needed before Alistair thought to ask.
The guard examined them, looked at Due's face again, and handed them back.
He tilted his head slightly, directing them to enter.
They walked through.
Inside was different from the border settlement in every way that mattered.
Wide stone streets, organized market districts, a military garrison visible at the city's northern edge with banners hanging still in the cold air.
'How prosperous,' thought Alistair.
Prosperous the way places governed through control are prosperous.
The streets were clean and commerce was moving efficiently. However, the people were cautious. Too cautious.
They had learned over time which conversations were appropriate to have in public and which ones weren't.
Alistair watched a man stop mid-sentence when a pair of soldiers walked past, resumed after they'd gone, and finished what he'd been saying with only slightly less volume.
Nobody around him reacted. It was normal here.
He thought about Caldren.
A man who built something this functional, this ordered, and this quietly fearful at the same time.
That wasn't the work of someone who ruled through obvious cruelty.
Obvious cruelty was inefficient.
What Caldren had built here required patience and a very clear understanding of how people decide what to tolerate.
It made him more dangerous than Alistair had been treating him.
"Wanted boards," Due said quietly.
Alistair looked. Three of them were visible from where they stood, wooden boards mounted at street corners with paper notices pinned across them.
He couldn't read them from this distance, but Due was already steering them away from the nearest one.
They moved through a side street.
Due slowed near a wall where one notice had been partially torn, enough to read the description without standing directly in front of the board.
Alistair scanned it.
Male. Tall. Thorne clan hair, pale gold, feminine. Dark armor. Dangerous. Report sighting to the nearest garrison immediately. Do not engage. Unnamed.
'Feminine?' Alistair's face showed clear annoyance. He frowned and looked away.
However, his description didn't include his identity.
That meant Caldren was being careful.
A name on a wanted board created political implications with the Thorne Clan that a physical description didn't.
Cold calculation, even in something as routine as a wanted notice.
Due was looking at the board with a particular expression.
"Your face isn't on it," Alistair said.
"I noticed."
"Caldren's intelligence doesn't have you."
"Apparently not." Due's tone was neutral in the way that meant it wasn't. He turned from the board and kept walking. "It's fine."
Alistair's eyes narrowed. It was clearly not fine. Eventually, he decided to let it go.
His Equalizer ran its scan as they moved deeper into the city.
More Characteristic signatures here than in any settlement they'd passed through.
Not clustered, but distributed across the city's districts.
Seven distinct readings in the first ten minutes.
Two of them were strong enough to register as genuine threats.
Alistair clenched his fists. Caldren recruited Characteristic wielders.
Specifically, and deliberately. More of them than any regional power needed for standard military purposes.
Then his scan caught the one that didn't fit.
The same suppressed signature. It was here. Inside Therasia, with them.
"Due. Two streets east, moving parallel to us at a measured pace."
He kept walking, didn't change his pace, didn't look east.
Due's hand moved to his collar. "Same as the settlement?"
"Same signature. They followed us from the border."
"Can you get a direction on where they're going?"
Alistair widened the scan. The signature was angling northeast, toward the administrative district, toward the cluster of official buildings Due had identified as the likely location for the faction meeting.
Alistair clicked his tongue. "They're heading toward the meeting."
Due said nothing for a few seconds. Then, "So are we."
Due navigated without hesitation, moving through streets he hadn't walked in years.
Turn left at the ironmonger, right past the grain warehouse.
Straight through a covered arcade where the smell of spiced food replaced the smell of stone.
The administrative district opened ahead of them.
Wider streets, larger buildings, and the architecture of civic authority that looked the same in every city Alistair had ever entered.
Due stopped at the district's edge and looked at a building on the far side of the square.
Three stories, stone, with Therasia's gold insignia above the entrance and two guards at the door.
"That one," Due said. "The meeting is tomorrow morning."
"You're certain?"
"I know how Therasia arranges these things. The building, the wing, the timing." He looked at the guards, "Getting in is the problem."
"We'll solve that tomorrow."
Due looked at him. "You say that like it's easy."
"I'll think about it tonight."
Due accepted this with the expression of someone who had learned that Alistair saying he would think about something and Alistair actually thinking about it were not always the same event.
Alistair ran his scan across the administrative district one more time.
The suppressed signature was gone. Vanished the same way it had at the settlement.
He stood at the district's edge and looked at the building where Elara's meeting would happen tomorrow.
What Sable had said kept coming back.
Caldren needed her willing or controlled, whichever he could get first.
Whatever was in that building tomorrow, they needed to reach her before it concluded.
"Come on," Due said. "We need somewhere to sleep that isn't visible from a garrison window."
Alistair pulled his hood lower and followed him into the quieter streets, his scan running empty behind him where the signature had been.
It didn't comfort him. Something that didn't want to be found, and was this good at it, was still out there.
And tomorrow, they would all be in the same building.
It was going to be the point of convergence, whether ready or not.