gold. 'Look at this. It's a force binding. And this is ... no, that's not possible.'
'What's not possible?'
Silverdun looked closer. 'This bit here,' said Ironfoot. 'What does that look like to you?'
Silverdun shrugged. 'It looks like ancient High Fae that I was never particularly good at deciphering.'
'It's the binding for a fold,' said Ironfoot. 'This thing channels Folding.'
'That's ridiculous,' said Silverdun. 'Only Masters of the Gates can fold, and it takes years of training. No priest could channel anything useful into something that small.'
'What are you two talking about?' asked Sela.
'The Gift of Folding,' said Silverdun. 'It's what powers the locks to travel between worlds. It allows objects and energy to pass through the folded spaces.'
'But the Gift is extraordinarily rare,' said Ironfoot. 'Almost no one has it, and those that do are immediately snapped up by the Masters of the Gates.'
'And look here,' said Ironfoot, pointing again. 'These figures specify the target for a translation.' He paused. 'I think.'
Ironfoot separated a few more of the thin leaves from the device. At the center was a tiny mesh of silver, of threads so narrow that they were barely visible.
'And what is that?' asked Silverdun.
Ironfoot channeled Insight into the mesh. He couldn't believe what he saw there. It was the same sensation he'd gotten when Lin Vo had responded to Timha's attack. The same impossible, unchanneled essence. The music without pitch. Division by zero.
'Well?' said Silverdun.
'It's undifferentiated essence,' said Ironfoot.
'The Thirteenth Gift,' said Silverdun.
'It's not a Gift,' said Ironfoot. 'It's beyond Gifts. It makes the Gifts obsolete.'
'So?' said Sela. 'What does it mean?'
'I have an idea,' said Ironfoot. He'd never been more excited in his life. What Lin Vo had said to him in the Arami camp was beginning to make sense. You're all going to have to learn how to think things anew.
'Give me a little time,' he said. 'I think I understand. Everything.'
A little time turned out to be almost a full day. Ironfoot worked without stopping, writing notes and equations, muttering to himself, shouting, sometimes hurling things. He was so close! Everything was coming together: the map, Hy Pezho's falsified plans, the cynosure. He now understood how Hy Pezho had sent the Unseelie thaumaturges in circles. He'd simply removed all reference to the Thirteenth Gift, knowing that none of them would ever suspect its use. How could they? Almost nobody had ever heard of it, and those who had didn't believe that it existed.
A few times, Silverdun or Sela or Paet would approach, questioning looks in their eyes, and Ironfoot would wave them away, sometimes gruffly, sometimes angrily. He needed to be alone. It would take as long as it took.
Finally he had it. He checked and rechecked his figures. Translated the etchings on the gold and silver plates twice, three times. Reread every word of Prae Benesile's Chthonic history. Now that he knew what the hell Benesile was talking about, the book was practically a reference guide. Benesile's problem had not been that he was a lunatic; quite the contrary. He'd been so brilliant that he'd assumed too much from his readership, hadn't bothered explaining what to him had seemed obvious. There were no equations in the book because Benesile had believed them to be implied.
It was as though a great weight had been removed from his shoulders. The tension of this one problem had been pressing down on him for the better part of a year, coloring everything he'd done and thought and said ever since he'd returned to Queensbridge from Selafae. It had hung like a vulture over his head the entire time he'd been a Shadow, watching him, waiting for him, until he thought he might go insane.
And now it was over.
He called Silverdun, Sela, and Paet into the mission room.
'Do you have some news for us?' asked Silverdun. 'Or have you called us in to let us know that you have indeed gone stark, raving mad?'
'I know where Hy Pezho is getting the power for the Einswrath,' he said. 'The problem I could never understand is how he was able to condense so much re into such a small space. There's no way of doing it, and no way of binding it once it's done. And Hy Pezho must have sent the Unseelie thaumaturges who came after him into even
