They came for him at the fourth bell of the morning.
Six Radiant Knights, with Kanzaki at their head. They unchained him from the wall and chained his shackles to a long silver lead and walked him out of the cell, up the stairs, through the white corridors of the Hall of Radiance, toward the light.
Kanzaki didn't say a word. He didn't look at Ren once.
Ren didn't know what that meant. He'd lain awake all night thinking about it. *No one. Yet.* Then the footsteps had walked away, and nobody had come, and the morning had come instead.
He pressed his tongue against the little steel pick between his teeth. Still there.
They came out through the great doors at the top of the steps, and the noise hit him like a wall.
***
The Square of Saints was full.
Not crowded. Full. Every inch of the white spiral pavement was covered with people. They packed the square from wall to wall and spilled out into every street that led into it. They stood on rooftops and hung out of windows and sat on each other's shoulders. Gold banners everywhere. Children with candles. Old women with prayer beads. Soldiers in silver. Merchants in silk.
Fifty thousand people, Brannoc had said. Maybe more.
When they saw him come out, the whole square went quiet. Fifty thousand people holding their breath at once. It was the strangest sound Ren had ever heard.
Then somebody shouted *demon*, and the noise came back twice as loud.
They walked him down the steps to the wide landing where the scaffold stood. Behind it, the Great Lamp waited on its white pillar, an empty gold bowl as tall as a man. In front of it, the three ropes hung from the crossbeam, swaying slightly in the wind.
Up on a high balcony at the side of the Hall, King Aldric sat on a gilded chair. He looked older than Ren remembered. Gray and shrunken. He didn't look at the scaffold. He looked at his hands.
On the steps below the landing, in rows, stood the dignitaries of the city. Nobles in jewels. Church elders. And among them, in white envoy robes, Mori Daiki, his face the color of chalk.
Further down, in the front of the crowd, an old man with a deep, steady face stood very still with his hands folded. Judge Moriyama. He met Ren's eyes and didn't look away.
They stood Ren on the scaffold, under the left rope.
He looked out over the square and did what he'd done on the very first day, kneeling on the cold stone of the Hall of Radiance with a gold circle fading under him.
He counted.
Radiant Knights at the foot of the steps. Forty, in a double line, facing the crowd. Twenty more on the landing behind him, around the lamp. Archers on the roofs of the buildings to the left and right, he couldn't tell how many. Priests on the steps above. Twelve. Fifteen. Every one of them a source of white light that would hurt anyone but him.
Exits. The great doors at the top of the steps, into the Hall. The Street of Saints, straight down the middle of the square, packed solid with people. Four smaller streets at the corners. The roofs.
Old Hob had spent a week teaching him how to look at a battlefield before a fight. *Don't look at the enemy first, Captain. Look at the ground. The ground decides more battles than swords do.*
Ren looked at the ground. White stone. A spiral. Fifty thousand people standing on it.
And under it, a chamber. He couldn't see it. But he knew it was there.
He looked at the great doors behind him one more time, and fixed them in his mind.
***
They brought Ogawa out a minute later.
She came down the steps between two knights in a plain gray dress, with her hands tied in front of her. No glasses. Someone had taken them. She was squinting, walking carefully, feeling for each step with her feet. Her gray hair was loose around her shoulders.
She didn't look frightened. She looked tired.
They stood her under the middle rope. She turned her head, squinting, and found him.
"Kuroda-kun," she said.
"Ogawa-sensei."
"You came back." She almost smiled. "That was very stupid."
"Probably."
Her right hand twitched, in the ropes. Closing loosely, the way it did when she was about to weigh something. Then it opened again.
"Is everything going to be all right?" she asked quietly.
Ren thought about the question. He thought about the chamber under their feet that Sable had told him about, through a feeling in the dark, with no words. He thought about the gold box. Two hundred people in chains.
He didn't lie. He never had.
"Trust me," he said.
Ogawa looked at him for a long moment. Her hand stayed open.
"All right," she said.
***
The author's posting is the proper source for this chapter, but someone copied it here without permission.
They dragged Sho out last.
He couldn't walk. Two knights carried him between them by the arms, his feet trailing on the steps. His shirt was gone, and the gray burn on his chest stood out against his skin for the whole square to see. The crowd made a sound when they saw it. Disgust, maybe. Or something else. Enjoying the story? Read on at NovelPing.
They held him up under the right rope.
His head rolled toward Ren. His eyes were open. He looked at Ren, and then, very slowly, so slowly that only someone standing right next to him would have seen it, one corner of his mouth went up.
"They came," Sho whispered. "Last night. I made them put me back. If my cell was empty, they'd know."
Ren didn't trust himself to say anything. So he didn't.
***
The bells rang the half hour before noon.
High Seraph Ilvane came out of the great doors at the top of the steps.
She wore white and gold, the same as always, but more of it. A long white robe that trailed on the steps behind her, embroidered so thickly with gold thread that it caught the sun and threw it back in every direction. A tall gold circlet. Gold rings on every finger. She walked down the steps slowly, smiling, with her hands spread a little at her sides, like she was blessing everything she passed.
Behind her came Aoyama Yui.
The Saint of Solenne. White silk, silver circlet, golden hair ornaments. She walked a step behind Ilvane with her hands folded and her eyes lowered, and the crowd went wild for her. People wept. People reached out toward her as she passed. She didn't look at them.
She looked at Ren once. Just once. Her face didn't change at all.
Ilvane stopped at the edge of the landing, between the scaffold and the Great Lamp, and raised her hands.
The square went silent.
"People of Solenne," she said.
Her voice filled the whole square. Every corner of it. It came from everywhere at once.
"For eighty years, we have bled," said Ilvane. "For eighty years, we have prayed. This spring, the light answered our prayers and sent us heroes. And among those heroes, it sent us a test."
She turned and looked at Ren.
"He murdered the Sword Saint on his first day among us," she said. "He fled to our enemies. He has burned our towns and slaughtered our knights. He has killed the Hero Fujii Kenta, and the brave Captain Aurelian, and a hundred others whose names we honor." Her voice was soft and full of sorrow. "And today, by the grace of the light and the wisdom of our king, he stands before us in chains. With the woman who freed him. With the hero who betrayed us for him."
She smiled at the crowd.
"Today," she said, "we give the people justice."
The square roared.
Ilvane let it roar. Then she raised one hand again, and it stopped.
"It is the custom," she said, "that the condemned may speak. Demon. Have you any last words for the people you have wronged?"
Fifty thousand faces turned to look at him.
Ren looked out over them. All of them. Children on shoulders. Old women with prayer beads. Soldiers. Merchants. Farmers who'd walked days to be here. Judge Moriyama, very still in the front row.
"The circle that brought me here," Ren said, "was paid for with twenty lives."
He didn't shout. He didn't have Ilvane's voice. But the square was so quiet that it carried.
"Twenty prisoners from the jail under the Hall. Their names are written down in the archives." He looked at Ilvane. "Ask her whose names they were. Ask her what the Calling costs."
A murmur went through the crowd.
"And ask her," said Ren, "what's under your feet right now."
The murmur got louder. People looked down. A few looked at each other. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman laughed nervously.
Ilvane smiled at him. A gentle, patient, pitying smile.
"The demon lies," she said softly. "As demons do."
On the scaffold beside him, Ogawa's right hand clenched shut.
***
They put the ropes around their necks.
The executioner was a big man in a black hood. He did Sho first, because Sho couldn't stand. Then Ogawa. She lifted her chin to make it easier for him. Then Ren.
The rope was rough. It scratched his throat.
Kanzaki stood at the foot of the scaffold with his hands clasped behind his back, watching. His face was perfectly still.
The bells began to ring noon.
One. Two. Three.
Ilvane turned to the Great Lamp. A priest handed her a long golden rod with a flame burning at its tip.
Four. Five. Six.
Ren moved his tongue. The little steel hook slid out from between his teeth and into his mouth.
Ilvane lifted the flame to the gold bowl.
Ten. Eleven.
The Great Lamp caught.
It didn't burn like a fire. It went up all at once in a column of pure gold light, straight up into the sky, so bright that the whole square went white. And then, a heartbeat later, the light went down. Into the marble pillar. Into the steps. Into the stone of the square. Ren felt it go past him, under his feet, like a wave rolling through the ground.
Twelve.
Ren reached inside himself, to the candles. Not all of them. Just one. Quick and bright and restless, somewhere in the crowd below.
"Now," he said.
He spat the pick into his hand.
The lock on his shackles was open before the executioner had even turned to reach for the lever. Six pins. One breath. The silver fell clattering onto the scaffold.
"Kneel," said Ren.
The executioner went down so hard the whole platform shook.
Ren tore the rope off his own neck. Then Ogawa's. Then Sho's. He caught Sho as he started to fall and threw him over his shoulder.
And out of the crowd at the foot of the steps, moving faster than anyone should have been able to move through that many people, came Sable, with a knife in each hand and a grin on her face.
"Morning, Captain," she called, and cut Ogawa's bonds in one stroke.
The square exploded.
***
People screamed. People ran. People fell and were trampled. The Radiant Knights at the foot of the steps drew their swords and charged up toward the scaffold, and the crowd surged away from them in every direction, and the whole Square of Saints became a single heaving, shrieking mass.
Ren set Sho down behind the scaffold steps with Ogawa and turned to meet the knights.
He didn't have a banner. He grabbed the executioner's black hood off the man's head and tied it around the haft of a fallen halberd and raised it over his head.
"Black Banner."
He had no soldiers here. But Sable was sworn, and Sable was beside him, and he felt her stand a little taller. It would have to do.
"Bloodrage," he said.
The red came up. The knights hit him.
He'd fought a lot of battles in two months. None of them felt like this one. He stood on the landing of the Great Lamp with the scaffold at his back and the gold light still pouring down into the stone around him, and he fought with a halberd in one hand and a knight's sword in the other, and he didn't think. He just read them. Every one. Every swing. Every weak spot in every guard. Sovereign's Instinct and Bloodrage together felt like a storm.
Priests on the steps raised their hands, and white light came washing down at him. He felt it hit and slide off. Oathbreaker of Radiance. It stung, like sun on a burn, and no more.
Level up. Level 32.
Level up. Level 33.
He didn't have time to read it.
Then he felt it.
Under his feet. In the stone. A deep, rising hum, like the hum of the crystals in Sable's feeling, but bigger. So big that it seemed to come up out of the ground and fill his bones. The whole landing was vibrating. The scaffold creaked. Somewhere in the crowd below, someone shrieked and pointed down.
The cracks between the paving stones of the Square of Saints were glowing.
Gold. Thin lines of it, running through the spiral pattern of the pavement, brighter and brighter, as if the whole square were a lid on something burning underneath. People were stumbling away from the glowing lines, screaming. Children were crying. The light spread outward from the foot of the steps in a great slow ring.
Ren looked up.
Ilvane stood at the Great Lamp, alone now, with her golden rod raised. She hadn't run. She hadn't moved at all. She was smiling.
He opened Read the Field.
For the first time since the summoning, it didn't blur. His level was high enough now. Every line came through clean.
High Seraph Ilvane · Caller (Mythic) · Level 74
STR 40 · AGI 52 · VIT 88 · INT 190 · WIL 201
Title: She Who Opens the Door
Mythic.
Ren stared at the word. In two months, he'd never seen another one. Not Hana. Not Iskra. Not Vex. Not one native of this world had ever shown him a Mythic class.
Ilvane met his eyes across the landing. She'd felt him look. She knew exactly what he'd seen.
"You're too late, child," she said, gently, in a voice meant only for him. "The door is already open."
Under the square, in the dark, two hundred people began to scream.