He found the door on the third day.
This was later than he might have expected of himself, but the Grand Temple was large, and the first two days had been occupied with orientations, formal introductions, and three separate ceremonial meals that had lasted longer than any meal had a right to last. There had also been a briefing from Aldren Veth about the Translator's ritual obligations, delivered in the tone of a man outlining duties he found sacred and which Kael was expected to treat with commensurate gravity.
Kael had listened and asked two questions, both precise, both answered with slight hesitation that told him the answers were rehearsed rather than known.
On the morning of the third day, when his schedule showed two hours of unallocated time described as "contemplative preparation," he walked the temple.
He had learned buildings the same way he learned texts: systematically, starting from the structure and working inward. The Grand Temple had been built in four distinct phases over three centuries, and the seams showed if you knew what to look for, slight misalignments in the stonework, doorways that had been widened or narrowed, passages that ended at walls that were clearly later additions. The northeast tower, where his chambers sat, was the oldest section. The floor plan he had been given showed it as largely residential: the Translator's chambers, a small chapel, a preparation room for ritual objects.
The floor plan did not show the staircase.
He found it by noticing an absence: a section of the corridor on the third level where the wall was faced with newer stone than its surroundings. Someone had filled in something. Not recently, the work was decades old at least, but the texture of the infill was different from the original, lighter in color and finer in grain. He pressed along the seam and found nothing for two minutes.
Then he found the mechanism. Not a latch or a lock but a pressure point, two stones that had to be depressed simultaneously, positioned precisely far enough apart that it required two hands and was therefore unlikely to be triggered accidentally.
The door opened inward. Behind it, a staircase going down.
He stood for a moment in the doorway.
The rational assessment was straightforward: the Grand Temple had hidden passages. This was architecturally unremarkable for a structure of this age and political importance. Hidden passages served multiple purposes over a building's history, escape routes, private communications, storage, mechanisms that later generations had simply ceased to maintain or remember. The staircase almost certainly led to an old storage room or a defunct passage connecting to another section of the temple.
He went down.
The staircase was twenty-three steps, each worn smooth in the center by use that had ended some time ago. The walls were undressed stone with no inscription or decoration. At the bottom, a small landing and a second door, this one unlocked, the mechanism corroded open.
Beyond it: a room.
Not large, perhaps four meters by five. The ceiling was low, the air close and dry in the specific way of spaces that had been sealed for a long time. There was no window. The light from the corridor above him reached only the first meter of the space, so he stood at the edge of darkness and waited for his eyes to adjust.
When they did, he saw the shelves.
Floor to ceiling on three walls, and on them: books, ledgers, folded documents in protective cases, stacked with the organized density of an archive rather than the haphazard accumulation of a forgotten storeroom. Someone had built this deliberately. Someone had stocked it deliberately. And the dust on every surface was uniform, undisturbed, which meant no one had been here in years, perhaps decades.
He crossed to the nearest shelf and lifted one of the ledgers.
The handwriting on the cover was cramped and formal, the dating system that of the previous century. The name on the inside cover was unfamiliar to him, but beneath the name, a title: Translator, Twelfth Appointment.
He set it down and took the next. Different handwriting, different era. Translator, Ninth Appointment.
He moved along the shelf. Eighth. Eleventh. Sixth. They were not organized in order.
At the end of the first shelf, he found one without a number. The cover was unmarked. He opened it.
The handwriting was different from the others, looser, and the ink had faded unevenly. He read the first page.
Then he read it again.
The entry was dated roughly a century and a half ago. It began with a description of a ritual, technical and precise, the kind of notes a Translator might keep for professional reference. The second page continued the technical detail. The third page broke from it entirely.
"I have written in these pages what I was told to write," the unknown Translator had written. "The record that will be examined by the Temple Council shows the proper words in the proper places. This book is the other record. I do not know who will find it. I leave it because I cannot carry it any longer and because silence, I have decided, is also a kind of lie."
And then, at the bottom of the page, in a different ink, added later:
"I lied today. I will lie again tomorrow. Forgive me, whoever reads this."
Kael stood in the dark room with the ledger open in his hands, and the headache behind his eyes was suddenly sharper, though the staircase was far from the ritual chamber and he had not been near a god-speaking in three days.
He read for a long time. He read until the light from the landing above had shifted and the dust on his hands had dried to a fine grey coating over his fingers.
He did not yet know what he had found. He knew only that it was not nothing.