Chương 32: “What Tuesday Found”

Tuesday, the minion, not the day, found something on the eastern edge of the garden. Vorrath felt it through Tuesday's senses before Tuesday could report: a mark, scratched into the base of the garden wall, fresh, precise, a mark that was not decorative and was not accidental and was not made by anything human. A locating sigil. Something had marked the house. He removed the sigil and repaired the stone and sent Tuesday to patrol the perimeter and sat on the windowsill and thought.

The Seekers had been coming faster. He had handled each one. He had assumed this was because he was easier to find now, the bond strengthening, his resonance increasing, the natural consequence of growing back toward what he was. He had been treating each Seeker as a separate event. He was now reconsidering whether they were separate events. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Something was sending them. He had known this, technically, since the first one.

He had not let himself think about what that meant because thinking about what it meant required thinking about what could coordinate Seekers, what had that kind of reach, what would want a bound dungeon core specifically, and none of those thoughts led anywhere comfortable. He went down to the guardian on the ninth floor. It looked at him. He looked at it. He gave it new instructions and it received them and he went back up. He did not tell June. She was asleep. Gerald was in the wall.

Speck was in the washing machine gap. Tuesday was doing perimeter circuits in the garden like he had found its purpose after three hundred years of dormancy and was not going to waste it. He sat on the windowsill and watched the street and thought about what was sending the Seekers and decided he would think about it more tomorrow. He thought about it all night.