The curtains in his mother's suite were triple-layered cultivation silk, and Dante had closed them himself four nights out of seven for the past eleven months.
He crossed the dark room now with the automatic confidence of someone who had memorized the furniture, threading between the low storage chests that his mother had always placed in locations that only made sense to her, and found the gap in the curtains with his fingers. For one moment — the same moment he always had, every time — he was tempted to simply pull them open. To let the pre-dawn grey come flooding in across the carpet and the four-post bed and his mother's pale arms and the whole carefully maintained architecture of comfortable darkness, and see what happened when the world was allowed back inside.
He closed the gap instead.
"Thank you, darling." His mother's voice came from the direction of the pillows, softened by the dark. "That new girl is hopeless, by the way. I want her replaced."
Dante held his tongue for a moment. Linn Kren had been working in the estate's household for three years, with the same diligence she applied to everything, and his mother had liked her well enough through most of that time. "You're right," he said, which was the most efficient response. "I've been meaning to address it. Sable has a cousin, I believe, who's been looking for a household position. Fennel, I think her name is. Shall I have her brought up from the gatehouse?"
His mother frowned in the dark, the sound of it present in the small pause before she spoke. "Fennel. Yes, that does sound familiar. Anyone would be an improvement. When can she start?"
"Immediately. I'll arrange it tonight."
"You're a thoughtful boy, Dante." A pause. "Come here."
He went to the bedside and let his mother fold her arms around him. She smelled the way she had always smelled, something floral and warm underneath everything the illness had layered over her, petals preserved in still water. But her arms had the cool, fragile quality of things that were not being used enough, and the embrace lasted only a moment before she pulled back.
"I hear them," she said. Very quietly. "At night. They move along the pillows and I can hear them getting closer."
Dante felt the familiar pressure in his chest, the thing he had never successfully classified into a useful category. "Hear what, Mother?"
"I don't know." Her voice was very small. "That's the worst part. I don't know what they are, but they come every night and I hear them in the walls and along the ceiling and I lie very still because if I'm still enough perhaps they won't—" She stopped. "We should open the curtains."
He reached for the drapes, something loosening in his chest. "I'll open them now."
"No." She pulled back further. "No, because then I could see them too."
The logic of it was impenetrable, and arguing with it had never once changed anything, and so Dante stood in the dark room and said nothing useful and eventually his mother retreated to the far corner of the bed and pulled the quilts around herself and looked at him from across the darkness with eyes that had gone somewhere he couldn't reach.
"Send the girl," she said.
"Yes."
"With cucumber and cold water."
"Yes."
A long moment. Her eyes moved across his face with the searching quality he had come to recognize as the beginning of the bad territory, the place where something in her navigation failed and she stopped knowing exactly where she was or who was standing in front of her.
"You're not my boy," she said. Not unkindly. Just as an observed fact. "You look like him, but you're not him. My Dante is younger. Smaller. He has a gap in his front teeth."
He had lost that gap at age nine. "I apologize for the intrusion," he said carefully. "I'll send the girl."
"My husband will want to know someone was in here." The crafty brightness in her eyes that came with this phase, the way she marshaled arguments she was quite certain of. "He's a very important man. He has people."
"Of course. I'll see myself out."
He found the door and closed it behind him with the same careful silence he'd used for eleven months and stood in the corridor for a moment listening to the muffled sound of his mother's voice continuing its conversation with the dark room, and then descended the stairs.
The Codex was proving more resistant than any translation problem Dante had previously encountered, which was saying something, because he had made a specific study of resistant translation problems.
He had printed every captured page and pinned them to the walls of his study in a grid arrangement, because physical scale sometimes revealed patterns that screen-based review concealed. The script covered every wall now, the estate's best-quality printing paper overlapping at the edges, and Dante stood in the center of it at two in the morning and turned slowly and felt the uncomfortable sensation of a problem that was not yielding.
He had run the character set through every computational translation methodology in the estate's research suite. He had compared it against seventeen documented writing systems, including three that the academic establishment had never fully decoded. He had isolated the most frequently recurring symbols and attempted to build a frequency map. He had separated pictographic elements from character-based elements, because the script was clearly a hybrid system, and run each category independently.
Nothing had produced anything resembling a coherent output. The translation engine kept returning structured gibberish, which was the particular variety of failure that indicated a correct character match applied in an incorrect sequence.
Dante poured cold cultivation-brew from the pot on his desk and didn't taste it and looked at the walls.
The characters were right. He was certain of this with the confidence that came from genuine evidence rather than wishful thinking: the frequency distributions matched, the symbol categories aligned with what little comparative material existed, the structural markers were consistent. The content was in there. He was simply not reading it in the correct direction.
He tried right-to-left. He tried columnar reading, top-to-bottom. He tried bottom-to-top. He tried diagonal sequencing. The translation engine processed each attempt with the patient indifference of a tool that would work forever if you kept feeding it instructions and would never once tell you that you were approaching the problem incorrectly.
Moody with frustration in the specific way that came from having been almost right for several hours, he sent Linn away when she appeared at two-thirty with a tray of food he hadn't asked for and turned back to the walls.
Then he stopped.
He had been looking at the script as a linear system because every writing system he had studied was, at its foundation, linear. You began at a designated point and moved in a designated direction and the content unfolded sequentially. This was so fundamental an assumption that he had been applying it without examining it.
He looked at the pages again with the assumption suspended.
Each page was divided into sections by solid border lines, which he had assumed were paragraph markers. But the sections were not uniform in size, and their arrangement on the page was not the arrangement of sequential content. They were arranged around something. Each page had a center section, more prominent than the others, more densely marked, and the surrounding sections radiated outward from it in a pattern that was not linear at all.
It was a cultivation array.
Dante set down the bowl of cold brew and looked at the nearest page with the particular quality of attention that came from a correct hypothesis arriving after extended incorrect ones. Cultivation arrays were read from the center outward, following the meridian lines in the sequence of their activation order. Every practitioner learned this at the foundational level. He had simply never considered applying it to a writing system because no human writing system worked that way.
The Deep People were cultivators first. Their written language reflected their cultivation logic. Of course it did.
He sat down at the translation terminal and began rebuilding the input sequence from the center of the first page outward, following the border lines as meridian channels, reading each section in the order that a cultivation practitioner would activate the corresponding array nodes.
At four in the morning, the terminal produced its first coherent output.
It was a single line. Eleven words in contemporary surface-tongue, rendered slightly archaic by the translation mapping, but readable. Unmistakably readable. Dante stared at it for a long moment with the expression of someone who has just watched something impossible become possible and has not yet finished processing the transition.
He took a slow breath.
Then he pressed the key to decode the remainder of the Codex.
The terminal worked through the night while Dante read what emerged, page by reconstructed page, and by the time the estate's eastern windows began to lighten with the first evidence of morning, he understood three things with complete clarity.
The first was that everything his research had suggested about the Deep People's mana-gold reserves was accurate, and the actual scale of those reserves was considerably larger than even his most optimistic projections.
The second was that the Deep People's law, their behavioral protocols, their fundamental operational structure, all of it was encoded in the Codex he had just decoded, and all of it could now be studied, mapped, and anticipated.
The third thing he understood was that the Deep People had known humans would eventually find a way to read the Codex. There was a section near the end, its placement deliberate in the array structure, that addressed this directly. It did not express alarm. It did not express outrage. It expressed, in the measured and ancient language of a civilization that had been managing its relationship with human ambition for longer than human civilization had existed, something that translated most accurately as patient certainty.
Every generation produces one who finds the door, it read. The door does not lead where they believe it does.
Dante read this three times. He found it interesting rather than discouraging, which said something about him that he was aware of and had made his peace with.
He saved the decoded file to the archive partition, backed it to a secondary location, and sat back in his chair as the morning came through the study windows and the estate began its daily sounds around him.
He thought about the door.
Then he began planning what to bring through it.