The wolf was chained to a post in the middle of the training yard.
It was a greyback, Level 12, with a ridge of bristling hair along its spine and a muzzle wrapped shut with leather straps. Its back legs were tied together. It lay on its side in the sand, panting, its yellow eyes rolling.
"Go on, Mori," said the Church knight with the clipboard. "We've got thirty more before lunch."
Mori Daiki raised his hand.
The spell came easily now. Six weeks ago, he couldn't make anything happen at all. Now the words were just there, sitting in his mouth, and the fire came out of his palm in a tight white spear and hit the wolf in the side.
It didn't even yelp. It couldn't, with the straps.
Experience gained.
"Next," said the knight, and made a mark on his clipboard.
Two Church servants dragged the body away. Two more led in a thornback boar on a heavy chain, its legs hobbled, its tusks capped with iron. Daiki looked at it. It looked at him.
Mori Daiki · Sage (Epic) · Level 26
He killed it too.
***
The heroes ate lunch together in the guest wing, at a long table under a window full of colored glass. Most days, nobody talked much.
Today, everybody was talking.
"Two thousand men," Kenta was saying. He'd gotten even bigger since the summoning. He was Level 32 now, and he ate like it, shoveling roast meat into his mouth with his hands. "Two thousand. And he held them off with what, three hundred? With criminals?"
"With the Ashen Ninth," said Rina, quietly. She'd gotten thinner. She didn't eat much at lunch anymore. "That's what the messenger said. A penal battalion."
"And then he dropped the bridge with forty Radiant Knights on it." Kenta slammed his fist on the table, and the cups jumped. "And captured Brannoc. Brannoc! The guy was Level 31!"
"He was a traitor anyway," said Yui.
She sat at the head of the table, where nobody had ever told her to sit. She wore white silk now, all the time, embroidered with gold thread, and a thin silver circlet that the High Seraph had placed on her head herself in front of the whole city. Aoyama Yui, Level 30, Holy Maiden. The Saint of Solenne.
"Brannoc defended him at the hearing," Yui said. "Everyone saw it. If he got captured, it's what he deserved."
Daiki looked down at his plate.
"Ren's a monster now," Yui went on. She said it calmly, the way she said everything now. She'd gotten good at calm. "Halden's Ford. Greywater. He's killing our soldiers, he's working for the Empire, and the Church says he's getting stronger every day." She took a small bite of bread. "Good."
Everyone looked at her.
"It makes it easier," said Yui. "Doesn't it?"
Nobody answered.
At the far end of the table, Hasegawa Tetsuo set down his fork. He hadn't said a word all lunch. He didn't say anything now either. He just looked at Yui, for a long time, with an expression Daiki couldn't read.
Then he looked at Daiki.
Daiki looked away first.
Across the table, Sho was eating soup and staring out the window. He'd come back from the south two weeks ago and said he couldn't get close to the Demon Hero, too many guards, too many soldiers. Ilvane hadn't been happy. Sho hadn't seemed to care.
He seemed different, Daiki thought. Since he came back. Quieter. Like he was listening to something far away.
***
Kanzaki Shuhei had been in the Church archives for nine days.
They were under the Hall of Radiance, in long low rooms carved out of the old gray stone, lit by lamps that the archivists refilled every hour. Shelf after shelf of ledgers, letters, scrolls, records going back centuries. Most of it was dull. Tithes. Land grants. The birth and death records of priests.
Kanzaki had read a lot of it. Reading things carefully was what he did.
He'd started down here because of the river. Because of what he'd shouted across the water at Kuroda, when the raft spun away around the bend. He'd needed to be sure. If he was going to tell a lie like that, a lie that size, he'd needed to know the man he'd told it to deserved it.
So he'd started at the beginning. The Calling.
It had taken him a week to find the first real record. A ledger from four hundred years ago, written in the old tongue, which he'd taught himself to read in three days. It recorded a small Calling. Three heroes. And under it, in the same careful hand, a list of names.
Three names. Not priests. Prisoners from the city jail.
Kanzaki had found eleven more ledgers like it since. Eleven Callings. Every one of them followed by a list of names. Always one name for every hero. Always prisoners, or beggars, or soldiers of whatever enemy the Holy Kingdom was fighting that year.
This chapter came from the author's publication page without approval, and the published posting is where readers support their work.
He'd found the ledger for this spring yesterday.
Twenty names.
He hadn't slept since.
"Inquisitor."
"The High Seraph sent me," the knight said. "The priest you asked about. Brother Ferren. He's ready to talk."
***
Brother Ferren was twenty years old, and he was crying before Kanzaki even sat down.
They had him in a small stone room off the Inquisition offices. No windows. A table and two chairs. Someone had already been asking him questions before Kanzaki got there. His lip was split, and one of his eyes was swollen shut.
Kanzaki looked at the knight standing by the door.
"Who did this?"
The knight shrugged. "He wasn't cooperating."
"Get out," said Kanzaki.
The knight hesitated, then left.
Kanzaki sat down across from the young priest. He folded his hands on the table. He looked at Ferren's swollen face for a long time.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "I'm going to ask you some questions, and I want you to answer them truthfully. Do you understand?"
Ferren nodded, sniffling.
"The night the Demon Hero escaped," said Kanzaki, "someone gave him a map of the vaults. A map that led him to the river gate. We found the paper it was drawn on. It was torn from a prayer book. Your prayer book."
Ferren started crying harder.
"Did you draw that map, Brother?"
"Yes," Ferren whispered.
"Did you give it to him?"
"No." Ferren shook his head. "No. I gave it to her. The old woman. The lawyer." He looked up at Kanzaki with his one good eye. "I was there. At the ritual. I saw what they were doing to him. I saw the High Seraph's face. And I went to the guest wing after and I was sick in the courtyard, and she came out and asked if I was all right, and she asked me..." His voice broke. "She asked me if I thought it was right. And nobody had ever asked me that before."
Kanzaki didn't move.
"Ogawa Sumiko," he said.
"Yes."
Kanzaki sat there for a long moment. Then he stood up. He walked to the door, and opened it, and said to the knight waiting outside, "Get him a healer. Now."
He walked back up through the Hall to the High Seraph's study.
***
Ilvane listened to him without interrupting. She sat at her desk with her pale hands folded, the morning light coming through the window behind her and catching in her silver hair.
When he finished, she nodded.
"Arrest her," she said.
"High Seraph..."
"She aided the escape of the Demon Hero. The same Demon Hero who has since burned Halden's Ford and murdered forty Radiant Knights at Greywater." Ilvane's voice didn't rise. It never did. "She will hang at the Festival of Light, in front of the people. They need to see that the Church protects them."
The Festival of Light. Kanzaki had seen the preparations in the streets. Twenty two days from now.
"There should be a trial," he said.
Ilvane smiled at him. It was a kind smile, gentle and a little sad.
"This is the trial, Inquisitor," she said. "You have heard the evidence. You have judged. That's what your class is for."
Kanzaki stood in front of the desk with his hands at his sides.
He thought about the river. About what he'd shouted across the water. He'd made it up on the spot, because Ilvane had told him, quietly, before they rode out, that if all else failed, Kuroda's weak point was the lawyer. He'd hated saying it. He'd told himself it didn't matter, because it wasn't true.
Now he was being asked to make it true.
"Is something wrong, Inquisitor?"
"No, High Seraph," said Kanzaki.
He bowed and went out.
In the corridor, he passed Judge Moriyama coming the other way. The old judge stopped.
"Kanzaki-kun," Moriyama said. "I heard they had the young priest in a room downstairs. Is it true?"
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
Kanzaki didn't answer. He didn't need to. Moriyama read it on his face. He'd been reading faces on the bench for forty years.
"Ogawa-san," the old judge said quietly. "Is there going to be a trial?"
He kept walking.
***
Ogawa Sumiko was in the library when Tetsuo found her.
She was there most mornings now, at a long table by the window, with three of the lay judges and a stack of children's primers. Teaching them the common script one letter at a time. It gave her something to do. It kept her where people could see her, which she'd decided was safer.
Tetsuo waited until the lay judges had gone. Then he came and sat down across from her.
He was a very big man now. Level 29. His Guardian class had put muscle on him like armor. But he moved quietly, and he sat very still, and his voice was low when he spoke.
"You can tell when people lie," he said.
Ogawa set down her pen.
"I've watched you for six weeks," Tetsuo said. "Every time someone speaks in front of you, your right hand does something. It closes, like you're holding something. Or it opens. I watched you in the Hall of Judgment. When Mori was talking, your hand closed so hard your knuckles went white."
Ogawa looked at him for a long moment.
"Yes," she said.
Tetsuo's jaw tightened. "Tell me the truth, then. About my wife."
So she told him.
She told him all of it. The stone in her palm. Daiki's testimony, every word of it heavy as lead. Yui's. The prosecutor's, light, because Kanzaki had believed it. And Ren's. Every word Ren had said in that hall, light as air. *He got drunk, drove my car through a red light, and killed a woman named Hasegawa Emi.* True. *Then he pulled me into the driver's seat.* True.
Tetsuo didn't move while she talked. When she finished, he sat there with his big hands flat on the table, staring at them.
"I want to see it," he said finally.
"See what?"
"I want to watch your hand when he says it."
***
They found Daiki in the courtyard, sitting alone on the edge of a dry fountain.
He looked up when they came. He saw Tetsuo first, and his face went pale. Then he saw Ogawa, and it went paler.
"Mori," Tetsuo said. He didn't sit down. He stood in front of Daiki, a head and a half taller, and looked down at him. "I'm going to ask you one question. Was Kuroda driving the car?"
Daiki stared at him. His thumb started rubbing against his first finger.
"Yes," he said.
Ogawa's right hand clenched into a fist so tight her nails cut into her palm.
Tetsuo saw it. Ogawa saw him see it. She saw his face change, and she would remember it for the rest of her life. It wasn't anger. Anger would have been easier. It was something much worse. It was a man watching the last thing he'd been holding onto for a year crumble to dust in his hands.
He didn't hit Daiki. He didn't shout. He just turned around and walked away across the courtyard, slowly, like he'd forgotten where he was going.
Daiki put his face in his hands.
Ogawa started to follow Tetsuo. She'd taken three steps when the courtyard doors opened.
Kanzaki came through them first. Six Radiant Knights came behind him.
He walked across the courtyard toward her. He didn't look at Daiki. He didn't look at Tetsuo, who had stopped walking and turned around. He stopped in front of Ogawa and looked at her with an expression she'd never seen on his face before. On Earth, Kanzaki had always looked certain. Now he just looked tired.
"Ogawa Sumiko," he said. "By order of the High Seraph and the Holy Inquisition, you are under arrest for aiding the escape of the Demon Hero."
Ogawa looked up at him.
"You told him this would happen," she said quietly. "At the river. Kenta told everyone. You said I'd been arrested. You said I'd hang." She held her right hand open between them. "Did you know then?"
Kanzaki looked at her open palm for a long moment.
"No," he said.
Her hand stayed light.
"Take her," said Kanzaki.
The knights stepped forward.
Something big moved between them.
Hasegawa Tetsuo walked back across the courtyard and stopped in front of Ogawa with his arms at his sides. He didn't have his shield. He didn't need it. He was a wall all on his own.
The Radiant Knights stopped.
"Move, Guardian," said the lead knight. His hand went to his sword.
Tetsuo didn't move.