The box opened on a Tuesday night.

  He had not planned for it. Had not performed any sequence or said anything or done anything differently from the twenty or so nights he had sat at the table with it in front of him. He had simply been sitting there with his hands around it and the warmth of it low and steady against his palms when the warmth changed.

  Deeper. More deliberate. Moving up through his hands and into his wrists and settling in his chest the way it had settled the first time in the building on the Row, except this time it kept going, spreading outward slowly, and the carved text on the surface began to glow.

  Both lines. Then the third. Then a fourth line beneath all three that he had not seen before, appearing last, the deepest one.

  He read it.

  It said: you are ready.

  The box opened.

  No seam. No hinge. No mechanism he could identify. The stone simply was no longer closed, the material of it drawing back in a way that had no name in any text he had read, and the glow faded as it opened and he was left looking at the inside of the box in the dim lamplight of the kitchen at 37 Arbor Street.

  He looked at it for a long moment.

  Then he reached in.

  A handkerchief.

  White, or it had been white once, the fabric gone slightly ivory with age. Small, folded into quarters, the kind of plain folded square that went in a breast pocket. He lifted it out and held it in both hands and felt the weight of it, which was the weight of cloth and nothing else.

  He unfolded it.

  Clean inside. No markings, no symbols, nothing written on the interior. He turned it over.

  On the corner, in small neat embroidery, two letters.

  Y.C.

  He sat with that.

  He sat with it for a long time.

  The box on the table, open, empty now, the warmth completely gone from it, just stone. The handkerchief in his hands, ivory with age, two embroidered letters on the corner in thread that had once been a color and was now just slightly darker than the fabric around it.

  Y.C.

  He folded it back into quarters.

  He put it on the table.

  He looked at it.

  He had expected something.

  Not something specific, he had been careful not to build specific expectations about the box because specific expectations about unknown things were a way of making yourself wrong before you started. But something. Something that justified three years of Hedral Stillson searching. Something that explained why a man working for a king had spent years in the Underlayers looking at buildings and moving carefully through the Middling Ring and arranging lending operations and holding companies and all the patient infrastructure of a long search.

  A handkerchief.

  With initials on it.

  Y.C.

  He turned it over in his mind the way he turned everything over. Y.C. Two letters. The first one the same as his father’s name, the first letter of Yegmet, which could be coincidence and which he did not believe was coincidence in the same way he did not believe anything that appeared twice in proximity was coincidence.

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  Challots. Y. Challots.

  Yegmet Challots.

  His father’s handkerchief.

  He sat with that.

  A god’s handkerchief, folded into quarters, sealed inside a stone box with his father’s name on it, hidden under the floorboards of a building on Canner’s Row in the Underlayers of Luren, which Hedral Stillson had been hunting for three years on behalf of a king who consumed the artifacts of dead gods.

  The handkerchief was not decorative.

  It was not a keepsake.

  It was something, he did not know what, that was important enough that his father had hidden it and Amalak had sent someone to find it and future Zelig had placed training stones in a purple desert to make sure that the version of him standing here tonight was the one who found it first.

  He did not know what it was.

  He looked at it on the table.

  He had more questions now than he had before he opened the box and the box had been shut for weeks and the weeks had been full of questions and he had more now than at any point since the beginning.

  He picked the handkerchief up and held it.

  The cloth was soft. Old. The embroidery slightly raised under his thumb.

  Y.C.

  He folded it carefully and put it in his jacket pocket.

  Then he sat back and looked at the empty box and the lamp throwing its small light across the table and listened to the building settle around him and the Row outside doing its nighttime thing.

  Marie appeared in the doorway.

  He did not know how long she had been standing there. She had the look of someone who had been awake for a while and had come downstairs for a reason and was now reconsidering whether the reason was necessary.

  She looked at the open box on the table.

  Looked at him.

  “Well.” She said.

  “It was empty.” He said.

  She came in and sat down across from him and looked at the box from this angle.

  “Empty.” She said.

  “There was one thing.” He said. He took the handkerchief out of his jacket and put it on the table between them.

  Marie looked at it. At the initials. Back at him.

  “Y.C.” She said.

  “Yes.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “Your father’s.” She said.

  “I think so.”

  “You think so.” She said it in the tone that meant she was not sure whether to find this funny or alarming and had not decided yet.

  “I don’t know what it is.” He said. “I don’t know why it was in there. I don’t know why Stillson was looking for it or what Amalak wants with it or what it does.” He paused. “I don’t know anything more than I did before I opened it.”

  Marie looked at the handkerchief on the table.

  “But you have it.” She said.

  “But I have it.” He said.

  She was quiet again.

  Outside the Row was quiet. The building was quiet. The lamp on the table threw its small steady light across the handkerchief and the open box and the two of them sitting on either side of them.

  “Zelig.” Marie said.

  “Yes.”

  “You opened a stone box that required your specific blood to open.” She said. “That a man has been hunting for three years. That was hidden in a building on our street.” She looked at the handkerchief. “And what was inside it was a handkerchief.”

  “Yes.” He said.

  Marie looked at him.

  He looked back.

  The corner of her mouth moved.

  “Your father.” She said. “Is strange.”

  He looked at the handkerchief.

  “Yes.” He said. “He is.”

  He did not sleep for a long time.

  He lay on his back in the dark with the handkerchief on the table downstairs and the box beside it and the Metarealm somewhere behind his eyes waiting for him to come back and the pyramid in the sand with more of itself above the surface than ever before and his father’s name carved into the side of it in a language he had been teaching himself without knowing why.

  Y.C.

  He thought about the pyramid and the son carries what the father cannot and the door that opened from one side.

  He thought about Ervan on the Row and the crack in the framework and what grew in cracks.

  He thought about Flint building something with his name on it and where that road went and how far Flint would be along it by the time Zelig needed him to be further along it than he currently was.

  He thought about the Shining Place and the glow that breathed and what was breathing inside it and why.

  He thought about all the things he did not know yet and for the first time in his life did not find the not knowing intolerable. It was just the current state of the picture. The picture would develop. It always did.

  He thought about Part 2 and what it would require and whether he was ready.

  He was not ready.

  He was closer to ready than he had ever been.

  He closed his eyes.

  Somewhere in the Underlayers the Row went on being the Row and the Shining Place went on glowing and the distance between here and there had a number on it and the number was smaller than it used to be.

  Not small enough yet.

  But smaller.

  He would get there.

  And after that, wherever came after there.

  He was going to find out what the handkerchief was.

  He was going to find out what his father could not carry and why it was his to carry instead.

  He was going to find out everything.

  Not tonight.

  But he was going to find out everything.