Sable had broken into a lot of places in her life.
Merchant houses in Kharos. A duke's summer palace. The Imperial Mint, once, on a bet, though she'd only gotten as far as the second courtyard before she had to climb back out over the roof with half the city watch on her heels. She'd been doing it since she was eight years old, and she'd been good at it since she was ten.
She had never broken into a holy city with a Varenhal knight, a giant Korean woman with a sword as big as a door, and a man the size of a wardrobe who didn't talk.
"Left," whispered Brannoc.
They went left.
It was the third hour after midnight. The night before the Festival of Light. Above them, Solenne was still singing. Sable could hear it through the stone, faint and far off, like a party in somebody else's house. Down here, it was black and wet and cold, and it smelled like mud and moss and old water.
They'd come up the river from the south in a fishing boat Brannoc had bought from a man in a village whose name she'd already forgotten. They'd tied it up under the cliffs below the Hall of Radiance, in the dark, next to a little stone ledge Brannoc had found without even looking. Then Brannoc had walked straight up to the iron river gate and knocked on it three times, slow.
And somebody had opened it.
"Sergeant Corwin," Brannoc had said quietly, to the frightened fat man with a lantern on the other side of the bars. "You still owe me for the dice."
The fat man had stared at him like he was a ghost. Then he'd looked at Hana, and at Hana's sword, and at Tetsuo. He'd gone very pale.
"I didn't see you, Commander," he'd whispered.
"No," Brannoc had agreed. "You didn't."
Corwin had gone back to his post at the top of the stair and sat down and started drinking from a flask, very fast, with his back to them. They'd walked right past him.
Now they were inside. Deep inside. In the old gray stone under the Hall, where the Church kept the things it didn't want seen.
Sable felt the warmth in her chest again. The candle. Ren. It had been there for days now, faint and steady, somewhere north and east. Tonight it was very close. Right above them, almost. She could feel it like you can feel someone standing behind you in a dark room.
Last night, it had spoken to her. *Sable. Still with me?* She'd nearly fallen off her horse.
She hadn't told the others. She didn't know how to explain it.
***
They'd ridden hard to get here. Five days through the western hills and then the Thornwood, where Brannoc said no Church patrol would follow. He'd been right. They hadn't seen a single soldier. They'd seen a lot of other things, mostly at night, mostly with too many teeth, and Hana had dealt with every one of them without even getting off her horse.
On the fourth night, they'd camped by a stream under the black thorn trees, without a fire. Sable had lain awake listening to the forest. That was how she'd heard the other two talking.
Hana and Tetsuo, sitting on a fallen log by the water, a little way off. Speaking Japanese, slow and careful, because it was the only language they had in common besides the one this world had put in their heads.
"You lost someone," Tetsuo said. "I can tell. The way you look at the dark."
Hana didn't answer for a while.
"My brother," she said finally. "Six years ago. The old Emperor took him. I don't know where. I don't know if he's alive."
"I'm sorry."
"You lost someone too."
"My wife." Tetsuo's voice was very low. "A year ago. In our world. A man in a car." He was quiet for a moment. "For a year I thought I knew who it was. I was wrong."
"Kuroda."
"Yes."
Hana picked up a stone and turned it over in her hand.
"Does it help?" she asked. "Knowing the truth?"
Tetsuo thought about it for a long time.
"No," he said. "But it's better than hating the wrong man."
"I've been hating the wrong people too, I think," she said. "For a long time."
They didn't say anything after that. They just sat on the log by the dark water, two people from another world, until Brannoc woke up and told everyone to saddle the horses.
Sable had pretended to be asleep the whole time. She wasn't sure why. It had felt like something that wasn't hers to hear.
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***
"Cells," breathed Brannoc, stopping at a corner. "Down this passage. The deep ones. If they have your boy, he's here."
Sable slipped past him and went first. That was her job.
***
The deep cells were nothing like the ones above. No white stone. No cots with blankets. Just holes cut into the old gray rock, with iron doors and tiny barred windows, and the sound of water dripping somewhere.
Most of them were empty. Sable checked each one, quick and silent, lifting herself on her toes to look through the bars.
The seventh one wasn't empty.
At first she thought it was a pile of rags on the floor. Then it moved. It turned its head toward the little window, and in the light of Hana's shuttered lantern, Sable saw a face. Young. Thin. Too thin. Hollow cheeks and dark smudges under the eyes, and a mouth that hung a little open.
She'd only seen him once, in the dark of the Warden's tent, a long time ago. But she'd heard the Captain talk about him.
"Sho," she whispered.
The eyes in the face focused, slowly. They found her through the bars.
"Who're you?" The voice was a dry croak.
"Friend of Ren's."
Something happened to the face. It crumpled.
Sable got the lock open in four seconds. She'd never done it faster. She went in and knelt down beside him on the wet stone floor, and Hana came in behind her with the lantern, and they both looked at him and didn't say anything for a while.
He'd been chained by the ankle to a ring in the floor. His wrists were raw. His clothes were filthy. And on his chest, where his shirt had been torn open, there was a mark.
It looked like a burn. A circle the size of a palm, right over his heart, with lines running out of it like cracks in ice. The skin inside the circle was gray and dead. The lines were still red.
"She pulled it out," Sho whispered. He looked up at Sable. "The oath. She pulled it out of me. It took so long." His voice broke. "I tried to hold on. I tried so hard."
"I know," said Sable. She didn't know. She said it anyway. "It's okay."
"Is he here? Ren?"
"He's here."
"They're going to hang him." Sho grabbed her sleeve with surprising strength. "Tomorrow. With me. With the lawyer. They told me."
"He knows."
Sho stared at her. Then, slowly, something in his face changed. Not a smile. He was too far gone for that. But something close.
"Of course he does," he whispered.
Tetsuo came in and picked him up like he weighed nothing. Sho didn't fight it. His head fell against Tetsuo's shoulder, and he closed his eyes.
"Where's the lawyer?" Hana asked him. "Ogawa. Is she down here?"
Sho's eyes opened again.
"Not here," he said. "Up in the Hall. In the tower. They took her up yesterday. To get her ready." He swallowed. "But you have to see the other thing. Before tomorrow. You have to."
"What other thing?"
"Under the square." His eyes found Brannoc in the doorway. "They took me there. Every night. That's where they did it. To my chest." He shuddered. "There are people there. So many people."
It took them almost an hour to find it.
Sho couldn't remember the way. He'd been dragged there in the dark, half conscious, night after night. But he remembered stairs going down, and a long tunnel that went north, and the sound of the city right over his head.
Brannoc found the stairs. He'd never been down them. He'd never even known they were there. They were hidden behind a rack of old Church banners in a storeroom, so old the gold thread had gone black, and when Sable pulled the rack aside, the stone behind it swung inward on silent hinges.
"Thirty years I served in this Hall," Brannoc said softly. "Thirty years."
The tunnel was long and straight and dry. The walls were smooth, cut by careful hands, and there were little lamps set into them every twenty feet, burning low. As they went further, Sable started to hear the city again. Louder now. Right overhead. Singing. Footsteps. The rumble of carts.
"We're under the square," Brannoc whispered.
Then the tunnel opened out, and they stopped.
It was a chamber. Round. Enormous. As big as the Square of Saints above it, Sable thought, and maybe it was. The ceiling was a great dome of gray stone, held up by a ring of pillars. In the very center of the floor, carved into the stone, was a circle. Not a small one, like the one Sho had described. This one was huge. Hundreds of feet across, filled with lines of script so dense and so many that they looked like the rings of a tree.
And around the circle, in rings of their own, chained to iron rails set into the floor, were people.
Sable couldn't count them. There were too many. Two hundred, maybe more. Men and women and old people and children. They were sitting or lying on the stone in neat rows, the way the Halden's Ford prisoners had been in their wagons. Their eyes were open, but they didn't move. They didn't make a sound. They just stared at nothing.
"Drugged," whispered Hana. "Look at their eyes."
At the edge of the circle, on stone pedestals, sat crystals. The same clear, humming crystals Sable had seen in the crates at Halden's Ford. Dozens of them. Their hum filled the whole chamber, low and steady, so deep that Sable felt it in her teeth.
And in the very center of the circle, on a pedestal of white marble, sat a single box. Gold. Covered in tiny sunbursts. About the size of a loaf of bread.
Tetsuo set Sho down very gently against one of the pillars. Then he stood there with his huge hands hanging at his sides, looking at the rows of people.
"This is under the square," he said. His deep voice was barely a whisper. "Where they'll all be standing tomorrow. Fifty thousand people. Dancing. Singing. Right on top of this."
"Footsteps," hissed Sable.
They pulled back into the dark of the tunnel.
Two priests came in through an archway on the far side of the chamber. They were young, in white robes, carrying lamps. They walked along the rows of prisoners, checking the chains, bending down every so often to look into someone's eyes. One of them carried a clipboard. He made marks on it as he went.
"Two hundred and eight," the one with the clipboard said, when they'd made it all the way around. "One died in the night. The old woman in the fourth ring."
"High Seraph says two hundred is plenty," said the other one. "She only needs one door."
"One door, for two hundred lives?"
"For this door." The second priest walked over to the white pedestal in the center and stood looking down at the little gold box. "She says the Calling follows the blood you give it. Most Callings, you give it nothing. You just open the door and see who falls through." He reached out and touched the lid of the box with one finger, very carefully, like it might be hot. "This time, she's giving it the Sword Saint's heart."
The one with the clipboard made a small sound.
"Tomorrow at noon," the second priest went on. "When she lights the Great Lamp up on the steps. The light goes down through the stone, into the circle, into the blood, and the blood calls out across the worlds to whoever it belongs to. And whoever it belongs to..." He spread his hands. "Comes."
They walked back out through the archway, and the chamber was quiet again except for the hum.
Nobody in the tunnel moved.
"Whoever it belongs to," Sable whispered. "What does that mean? Who are they calling?"
Brannoc was staring at the little gold box in the center of the circle. His face was gray in the lamplight.
"The boy's heart," he said slowly. "Saionji's." He turned to look at Tetsuo, and at Hana, and finally at Sho, slumped against the pillar with his eyes half closed. "Who does his blood belong to? In your world?"
Sho's eyes opened.
He stared at the gold box for a long moment. And then, slowly, his face went white.
"His father," he whispered.