Guarionex completes the warning window

The cutting takes a single morning. Guarionex’s chisel is iron. The pale man has been at his shoulder for the last six days, not speaking, watching the chisel’s depth.

The window is the size of a small fist. The window opens through the ridge at a precise angle. The angle, looking through from the seaward side, aims at a small flat disc set into a cay two miles downstream, which the behiques’ apprentices have been carving for the last twelve years. The disc is the size of a saucer. On its face, in eleven worn marks that read as marks only, is a date.

The date is wrong. The date is wrong on purpose. The date is the Pleiades heliacal-rising offset that the cohoba-8 apprentices have been calculating for the last four generations, using the precession constant the pale man taught their teachers’ teachers in the conversations of 1000 AD. The date will, when the Spanish arrive and try to read it, look like a date eight years before the date of arrival the Spanish will themselves declare. The date will look like the Taíno are saying they were there eight years before Columbus.

The date is a trap.

The trap is not for the Spanish. The Spanish will not read it. The trap is for the colonial chroniclers who, two centuries from this morning, will read everything the Spanish missed and conclude that the dates the islands carved must be carbon-dated by a method that has not yet been invented. The trap is for the careful epigrapher who, five centuries from this morning, will read the wrong date with the right precession correction and see what was actually being said.

The careful epigrapher will be Iris Lettsome. She will be sixty-three hours old, in the canonical chronology of Book 1’s first scene, when she reads the window and the disc and the wrong date.

Guarionex sets down the chisel. The last mark is the eighth on the disc, the eleventh on the window-frame, the deepest on either. He looks across at the pale man. The pale man has not aged in a generation; the pale man will not age in the next five centuries.

The pale man says — in the Taíno of cohoba-8, in the language they have shared since 1000 AD —

Now they’ll never know we were here first.

The sentence is the closing line of the cold open of Book One.

The sentence is also true. The Spanish will not know. The Portuguese will not know. The French, the Dutch, the British, the Casa de Contratación, the Casa Verde Heritage Trust, the official record of every empire and every successor state and every museum and every reputable chronicle of the discovery of the Americas — none of them will know.

What will know — what will, in 2026 October, finally read — is the Codec.

The Codec runs from this window. It runs through the disc on the cay. It runs through windows cut at Annaberg, at Mary Point, at Privateer Bay, at Salt River. It runs west-northwest to Cayo Hueso and on at 312°T to Vicksburg. It runs south-southwest to Natal. The chain is hemisphere-spanning. It is older than every empire that will, in five centuries, claim to have discovered the hemisphere.

Guarionex puts the chisel in his bag. He turns east toward the village.

The sails appear on the eastern horizon in three years.

His son Hayuya will be at Salt River when they arrive.