The fourth anchor point was in a riverbed.
Not under the river — the river had shifted since the working's original placement, the specific geological movement of a watercourse over four centuries having moved the surface expression of the point from the original dry-ground location to the current riverbed. The anchor point itself was unchanged. The geological substrate did not move at the timescale of rivers. But the surface access was now three feet of cold water and river stone.
He waded in.
He knelt in the river with the water at his chest and the current pressing against him and pressed both palms against the riverbed.
Dain stood on the bank.
The contact was different again — the water's movement above him producing a specific quality of ambient resonance that was neither the mountain formation's depth nor the river valley's shallowness but something in between, a mobile quality, the void layer's frequency present in the geological substrate below the riverbed but arriving through the medium of moving water which carried its own resonance and layered it over the substrate's deeper signal.
He filtered the water's resonance and reached for the substrate.
Found it.
Worked for six hours in the river.
He came out with the point at eighty-five percent and the cold of the water settled deep in his body in the honest physical way of prolonged cold-water immersion. He sat on the bank with a fire Dain had built and did not speak for an hour.
The fifth point was in the coastal formation north of Carenfall — not the lighthouse, the secondary coastal point that Vera's map showed as the lighthouse's geological neighbor, the same coastal substrate but a different depth and a different character.
He had not expected to be back near Carenfall so soon.
Dain had mapped the sequence to minimize travel time and the coastal secondary point fell before the lighthouse in the optimal order — less degraded, less entity-dense, a preparatory contact before the lighthouse's more demanding work.
He contacted it in four hours.
Ninety-two percent.
He came out on the coastal rocks above the sea and looked north toward the lighthouse, visible as a pale shape on the promontory two miles distant.
The lighthouse point was next.
He looked at it for a long time.
He thought about Vera's maps and the fifteen years of degradation assessment and the thirty-one overflow events in four months and the two-week timeline Aleth had given him.
He thought about what the lighthouse point would feel like — the most degraded coastal point, the thinnest section of the Veil, the specific quality of a working running on the remnant of itself for seventeen years.
He thought about what would be waiting there.
He went to find Dain.