The city was called Aethelgard, which he read from the cartographic marker carved into the stone of the transit gate's arch — the same notation as the temporal anchors, which was the first interesting detail about the city before any other.
It was large in the way that things built across multiple centuries were large: not planned to be this size but accumulated to it, each layer of construction visible in the architectural style if you knew what to look for. The volcanic glass walls at the outer ring were the oldest, their construction predating the inner spires' solidified-mana engineering by what the geological integration suggested was several hundred years.
He stood on the ridge above the eastern lower wards and read the city with the Fate's Eye running.
The second interesting detail arrived about thirty seconds into the read.
He recognised the signature before he had consciously named it.
Not from documentation. From the specific hour he had spent in direct contact with Saylor Vane's channel system during the extraction — the particular quality of the corruption's mana architecture, the way it embedded in existing channel structures and began reorienting them toward its own propagation. He had been reading that signature at close range for an hour, and the pattern it had left in his spatial sense's memory was distinct enough to be identifiable on subsequent encounter.
What was in Aethelgard's lower infrastructure was the same class of thing.
Not identical in scale or maturation — what had been in Saylor was two years of deep structural integration in one practitioner's channel system. What the Fate's Eye was reading in the city's lower drainage leylines was distributed, extensive, operating at a lower concentration but across a much wider spatial distribution. Not a person. An environment.
He held this for a moment.
The same corruption that had been in Saylor. In the primordial world's primary metropolis.
Two possible explanations: the corruption had originated here and been introduced to the framework's side (through Vorash's gate harvesting operation), or the corruption had originated on the framework's side and found its way here. The directionality of the spread mattered enormously for understanding what it was and what it was doing.
He noted both possibilities without committing to either and added them to the documentation.
"What are you reading," Rosanne said. She had been watching him with the attention she brought to moments when his focus sharpened in a way that wasn't the standard survey mode.
"The same class of corruption that was in Saylor Vane," he said. "In the city's lower infrastructure. Distributed through the drainage leylines in the lower wards."
A silence.
"How distributed," she said.
"Significant coverage of the lower and mid sections, based on what the Fate's Eye can read at this range," he said. "I need to be inside the city to map it properly."
"Is it—" She stopped. Rephrased. "Will we be exposed just by being in the city."
"The Saylor exposure required sustained direct contact with the corruption source at close range over extended time," he said. "Ambient presence in an environment with distributed corruption at this concentration is different. The risk is not zero, but it's manageable if you're monitoring your own channel state." He looked at her directly. "The Ghost Sense training includes the body-awareness component that's relevant here. You've been doing it long enough that you'll notice a channel state anomaly before it becomes a problem."
"Monitor each other," she said.
"Yes," he said. "If anyone reads something that doesn't feel right in their own channels, we address it immediately. No pushing through." He looked at the team. "This is genuinely new information. I want to be honest about the uncertainty — I know the corruption's architectural signature, I know how it behaves in a single practitioner's channel system, and I know how I addressed it in that case. Whether what's in this city produces the same dynamics in a distributed environmental context, I don't know yet."
"So we're careful," Mika said.
"We're careful," he confirmed.
They split at the outer gate — not because it was the dramatically correct choice, but because the intelligence gathering the city required was best served by covering more ground.
Rosanne, Mika, Jessica, and Donna would work the commercial district and the lower and mid wards' public spaces. The primordial world's social architecture meant most useful intelligence moved through trade and mercenary channels, and four practitioners doing the kind of observational work the Ghost Sense made efficient would produce a better picture than one.
He would go to the Sovereign Adventurer's Guild at the city's core, register the Platinum credentials, and use the access to read the city's administrative underpinning from a position that the guild's information networks provided.
"Keep the channel monitoring running," he said, as they moved toward the gate.
"You also," Rosanne said.
He registered this as fair and went through the gate.
Aethelgard's interior was what the exterior had promised: a city that had been built by serious people across serious time, with the accumulated investment in physical infrastructure that genuine centuries of occupation produced. The leylines visible in the street-level architecture were not decorative; they were functional systems for thermal management, structural load distribution, atmospheric density stabilisation at the human-habitable level.
He moved through it at the pace of someone with business to do.
The spatial law's expression was kept at the background level — the functional minimum that his 100% comprehension maintained passively. Not invisible, not broadcasting. The equivalent of a practitioner who was very competent and not advertising it, which was a social category that functional cities had always had a natural space for.
The corruption in the lower wards was readable at pedestrian range. Distributed through the infrastructure the way contamination distributed through water systems — not everyone affected, not everything contaminated, but present in the mana-flow that touched everything and reached everyone.
The character of what it was doing was different from Saylor.
With Saylor, the corruption had amplified existing grief and isolation, driving the specific emotional vulnerability the grief had created. Here, across a population that had presumably been under sustained low-level exposure for some period, what the Fate's Eye read in the practitioners he passed on the street was subtler: a specific flattening of something, the specific emotional register that made people comfortable with the tribute system, comfortable with Vorash's territorial authority, comfortable not questioning the structures that organised their lives.
Not violent disruption. Gradual normalisation.
It was considerably more sophisticated than what had been in Saylor, which meant either it had developed further here or it had been intentionally designed for this purpose from the start.
He filed this and kept walking toward the Apex Spire.
The fourth page of the Time law tome, still locked, was something he was going to need before he fully understood what Vorash's citadel was building. The corruption in the city was a data point that fit the picture without completing it.
He needed more.
The Sovereign Guild's registration desk would be the next data point.
He walked toward it.