Casvar took him to the eastern wing on the twenty-eighth day, and did not tell him why until they were already there.
The walk took twenty minutes through corridors that grew progressively less maintained — less swept, less lit, the coldlight bowls spaced further apart and some of them dark entirely, the liquid dried to a dark residue that smelled faintly of something metallic and old. The guards at the corridor junctions were fewer, and the ones that remained stood differently — not the alert stillness of active duty but the particular stillness of people assigned to a post no one expected to become relevant.
Then there were no guards.
Then there was a door. Stone, like everything in the citadel, but marked differently from the others — symbols carved into the frame that Kael recognized from Seren's early cloth strips as something between a warning and a designation. He read what he could: the word for old, the word for do not enter, and a third word he did not know that he had not seen anywhere else.
Casvar opened it without ceremony.
The eastern wing was a ruin.
Not rubble — the structure still stood, the walls and ceiling intact. But the stone was black. Not the natural dark of Valdrek's stone, which was the color of slate left in shadow for a very long time. This was burned black, the kind of black that spoke of an event rather than a material, the kind of black that had a story embedded in it.
The alcoves along the corridor walls were empty. Not merely empty of their dead — empty of the niches themselves, the carved recesses that held them. The stone where the niches had been was smoother than the surrounding wall, as if something had passed over it at tremendous heat and pressed it flat.
Kael walked the corridor slowly, reading the walls. He had gotten better at reading the world as text — at understanding what a surface told you about what had happened to it.
Casvar walked beside him and said nothing.
At the corridor's end was a chamber. Larger than any other room Kael had seen in the citadel. Circular. The ceiling was intact but dark, and in the center of the floor — inlaid in the same material as the alcove niches, now fused together by heat into an unreadable mass — was a circle.
He recognized the spacing. The same equidistant arrangement he had seen in the field of ash. The same center-outward pattern from the courtyard.
But this one was large enough that three hundred people could have stood within it.
He stopped walking.
Casvar stopped beside him.
He said, slowly enough for Kael to follow: "Four hundred years ago. A Kaer stood here."
Kael said: "The last one."
Casvar said: "He was not taught carefully enough. Or he was taught, and did not listen carefully enough. The two are not always distinguishable."
Kael looked at the circle. At the fused stone in the center, where the Kaer had stood.
He said: "What happened."
Casvar said: "He died. And when he died, what he had been holding — what had been pulled toward him, accumulated over twelve years, every dead thing he had ever touched with his will — all of it released at once."
Kael said: "Three hundred dead."
Casvar said: "Three hundred dead, and everything they carried with them. Twelve years of gathered soul energy, uncontrolled, discharged through the Fractures of the dead into the walls and the floor and anyone standing nearby." He paused. "The eastern wing has not been used since."
Kael looked at the burned walls. He thought about the animal in the courtyard, which had died from fifty feet away without his awareness. He thought about eleven bodies in a field of ash. He thought about the three dead in the alcove who took a step forward when he commanded them to stop.
He said: "You are showing me this as a lesson."
Casvar said: "I am showing you this as a fact. What you do with it is the lesson."
Kael stood in the center of the burned eastern wing and felt the pull in his chest — steady, constant, the outward tide that never entirely stopped — and thought about what it meant that it was growing. The dark thread on the second instrument had confirmed it. More than expected, faster than expected.
He was accumulating something.
He did not know yet how to stop.
He said: "What do I do."
Casvar said: "You learn to hold it deliberately, so that when you release it, you choose where it goes."
He said: "And if I can't learn in time."
Casvar looked at him. The Fractures on his skin moved slowly in the dark of the eastern wing.
He said: "Then we will have a second burned wing."
He said it without inflection. It was not a threat. It was the same thing it had always been with Casvar.
An assessment.