The screaming came up through the stone.
Faint, at first. Muffled. Then louder, as the gold light in the cracks of the pavement grew brighter, until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. Two hundred voices under fifty thousand feet. The crowd in the square heard it. Ren saw them hear it. Saw the faces change, one after another, as people stopped running and looked down at the ground they were standing on.
"Sable!" he shouted. "The storeroom! Take them down!"
Sable already had Sho over her shoulder. She grabbed Ogawa's wrist with her free hand and ran for the great doors.
Ren went after them, swinging the halberd with the black hood tied to it, and the knights on the steps fell back from him.
He made it to the top of the steps.
Kanzaki was standing in the great doorway.
He'd drawn his sword. A plain Church blade, held the way a man holds something he's practiced with in a yard but never really used. He stood in the middle of the doorway with his black coat open and his feet planted, and he didn't move as Sable ran past him with Sho and Ogawa. He didn't even look at them.
He was looking at Ren.
"I have to stop you," Kanzaki said. "That's what the description says."
"Then try."
Kanzaki came at him.
He wasn't good. His Strength was low, and his footwork was stiff, and he swung like a man reading the moves off a page. But his Will was enormous, and Ren couldn't Kneel him, and Ren didn't want to kill him. So it took longer than it should have.
Four blows. Five. On the sixth, Ren caught Kanzaki's blade on the haft of the halberd, twisted, and tore it out of his hand. It clattered down the steps. He swept Kanzaki's legs out from under him, and the Inquisitor went down hard on his back on the white stone.
Ren stood over him with the halberd.
Kanzaki looked up at him. He didn't try to get up.
"Do it," he said.
"No."
"I lied to you. At the river. About her."
"I know." Ren looked down at him. "Listen to me. You said you found the names. In the archives. The twenty names."
Kanzaki stared at him.
"You've got a voice skill," said Ren. "Inquisitors proclaim judgments. I read your class too." He pointed the halberd back down the steps, at the square. At fifty thousand people standing on top of the screaming. "Go proclaim one."
For a long moment, Kanzaki didn't move.
Then he got up.
He walked to the edge of the landing, past the Great Lamp, past Ilvane, who turned to look at him with her golden rod still raised. He stopped at the very edge of the steps, above the whole square.
He reached into his black coat and took out a small leather notebook.
"People of Solenne," said Kanzaki Shuhei.
His voice rolled out over the square like thunder. Not Ilvane's soft voice that came from everywhere. A hard, flat, courtroom voice that went straight to the back of the crowd and hit the walls and came back.
"I am the Inquisitor of the Holy Kingdom," he said. "It is my duty to judge the truth. These are the names of the twenty people who were killed this spring, in the chamber under this square, to summon the heroes you were told would save you."
He opened the notebook.
"Aldo Greaves, aged sixty seven, a beggar," he read. "Marta Linn, aged nineteen, a thief. Tomas Brede, aged forty, a prisoner of war from the Empire."
The square had gone completely silent.
"Hensel Varr," Kanzaki read. "Aged seventy one. He sang hymns."
Ilvane's smile had disappeared.
"Inquisitor," she said. "Stop."
Kanzaki kept reading.
"He lies!" A voice from behind Ilvane, high and shrill. Yui. She'd come forward to the edge of the landing, her face white, her hands clenched. "He's been with the demon! He's under its spell! Don't listen to him!"
"Silence."
It wasn't Kanzaki. It came from the front of the crowd. A deep, steady voice that everyone in that square had heard before, on the first day, when it asked to be sent home. Judge Moriyama stood at the foot of the steps with one hand raised, and the voice that came out of him was something more than a voice.
Skill activated: Order in the Court.
Yui's mouth closed. So did everyone's. The whole square, every person in it, went still.
"Let the witness speak," said Judge Moriyama.
And Kanzaki read the names.
***
Ren didn't stay to hear the rest.
He ran through the great doors and into the Hall. He knew the way to the vaults. He'd escaped down them once before. Sable was ahead of him somewhere with Ogawa and Sho. He could feel her candle moving down, down, into the dark.
He found the storeroom with the old black banners. The rack was already pulled aside. The stone door stood open.
He went through it and ran down the long dry tunnel toward the screaming.
***
Gold light, pouring down from the ceiling in a solid column, straight from the Great Lamp far above. It hit the floor in the center of the circle and spread out through every line of the carving, so that the whole enormous circle blazed like a sun set into the stone.
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And the people in the rings were screaming.
They were awake now. Whatever drug had kept them quiet had been burned out of them by the light. They pulled at their chains and screamed and screamed, and Ren could see why. The gold light was coming up out of them. Out of their chests, their mouths, their eyes. Thin golden threads, rising from every one of them, drifting toward the center of the circle like smoke drawn up a chimney.
Toward the white pedestal. Toward the little gold box.
Above the box, in midair, something was opening.
It looked like a crack in the world. A thin vertical line of white light, taller than a man, hanging in nothing. Every golden thread that touched it made it a little wider.
A door.
On the near side of the circle, Tetsuo knelt with his tower shield planted in the stone. The gray dome of Bulwark spread out from it, over the nearest ring of prisoners. Inside the dome, the golden threads had stopped. The people under it were still screaming, still pulling at their chains, but nothing was coming out of them. Tetsuo was holding it with his whole body. His face was gray. Sweat ran down it in streams.
On the far side, Hana was fighting.
A dozen priests had come through the archway, and Radiant Knights with them. Hana stood between them and the circle with her huge sword, and every time she swung it, something fell. But there were more coming. Ren could hear boots on the stairs.
"Hana!" he shouted.
She didn't turn. "The box! The light protects it! I can't get close!"
Ren looked at the circle. At the golden threads. At the door in the air, getting wider.
He walked into the light.
***
It hit him like a hand closing around his heart.
He felt it reach into him and pull. Gently, patiently, the way the Seal of Grace had pulled, the way Ilvane did everything. It wanted the light in him. His life. It wanted to draw it up out of him in a golden thread and feed it to the door.
His Will was over a hundred now. He pushed back.
The thread that had started to rise out of his chest snapped back into him like a broken rubber band. He kept walking.
Every step was like walking into a river. The light pressed on him from every side. The screaming filled his ears. He could feel the door pulling at him, and something beyond it, very far away, through the crack. A cold, dark, open space between worlds. And on the other side of that space, something answering.
He reached the pedestal.
The gold box sat on top of it, blazing. When he reached for it, the light around it went white and hot, and he felt his hand start to burn.
Oathbreaker of Radiance. It stung. It didn't stop him.
"Bloodrage," he said.
He picked up the box and crushed it in his fist.
Gold metal folded like paper. Something inside it, something soft and dark and wrapped in silk, burst with a sound like a wet slap.
The door screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was something deeper than sound, a tearing that went through the stone and through his bones. The crack of white light in the air shuddered, flexed, and then folded in on itself, and snapped shut.
The golden threads fell. All at once, like cut strings. They drifted down over the screaming people and faded into nothing.
The column of light from the ceiling flickered. Went out.
The chamber was dark.
***
Forty one of them were dead.
Ren learned that later. In the dark, in the minutes after, with Tetsuo's shield light the only glow in the chamber, all he knew was that some of the people in the rings had stopped screaming and weren't moving. Some of them were old. Some of them weren't.
The ones under Tetsuo's dome were all alive. Every one.
"Get them up," said Ren. "Everyone who can walk. Now."
Hana had come back from the archway, breathing hard, her sword black with blood. "There are more coming. A lot more."
"I know." He looked at the chains. Two hundred locks. "Sable."
He didn't shout it. He sent it.
She came back down the tunnel two minutes later with her roll of picks open in her hand, and she started at one end of the first ring and went down it like she was playing a piano.
***
They got out through the vaults.
All of them. A hundred and sixty seven, stumbling, half carried, through the old gray tunnels toward the sound of the river. Tetsuo carried two at a time. Hana carried one under each arm. Ren had Sho on his back again, and Ogawa walked beside him with her hand on his shoulder because she couldn't see well without her glasses.
Brannoc was waiting at the last corridor before the river gate.
He'd been there all along. Holding it. The corridor was narrow, maybe three men wide, and it ran straight up from the gate into the heart of the vaults. Anyone coming down from the Hall would have to come through it.
The old knight stood in the middle of it with a sword in his hand and a Radiant shield on his arm. Behind him, at the bottom of the stair, the river gate stood open, and Ren could see the black water and the shape of the fishing boat tied to the ledge.
One boat. A hundred and sixty seven people.
"Go," said Brannoc.
Ren stopped beside him.
Behind them, far up the corridor, he could hear boots. Many of them. Torchlight was flickering on the walls around the last bend.
"Then make more trips." Brannoc didn't look at him. He was watching the bend. "I'll hold the corridor."
"For how long?"
"Long enough." The old knight finally turned his head. His gray beard was wet with sweat. There was a cut on his forehead Ren didn't remember. "I know every one of those knights coming down that stair, boy. I trained them. I know how they fight. I know which ones are going to come first and which ones are going to hang back. I can hold them a long time."
"Not forever."
"No," agreed Brannoc. "Not forever."
The torchlight got brighter.
Brannoc looked at him for a long moment. Then he did something Ren didn't expect. He took his hand off his shield, reached out, and put it flat against the stone wall of the corridor, the way the Ninth put their hands on the ground.
"I'm too old to change sides," he said. "So I'll just do it badly."
Oath offered: Brannoc of Solenne, Knight Commander (Epic), Level 31.
Accept?
Ren's throat closed up.
"Yes," he said.
The candle lit. Old and steady and very bright.
"Black Banner," Ren said, and lifted the halberd with the executioner's hood on it, and planted it in the stone at Brannoc's feet. "It's yours. Hold the corridor."
Brannoc looked at the black rag. Then he laughed. A short, rough sound, the one from the training yard on the first day.
"Go on, boy," he said. "Get your people out."
Ren went.
***
The boats came from the north, ten minutes later.
Ren was standing on the ledge below the river gate with the first load of prisoners in the fishing boat, wondering how many trips they'd have time for, when he saw them coming down the river out of the dark. Barges. Six of them. Big flat river barges, the kind that carried grain to the city, riding low and fast on the current.
And standing on the front of the first one, with her hair whipping around her face and her hands raised, was Ishida Rina.
A wind came off her hands. Not a gust. A steady, roaring wind, blowing straight down the river, filling makeshift sails made from Church banners. The barges slammed against the ledge one after another, and Rina jumped down onto the stone, and stood there, looking at Ren.
She looked terrified.
"I saw what they did," she said. "At Corran's Field. I flew home and told them what happened. Tetsuo and the shield, and the hostages, and Aurelian breaking the terms. I told them everything, exactly how it was." Her voice shook. "They said I was lying. They said Tetsuo betrayed us. They said Aurelian died a hero. They said I must have been bewitched." She swallowed. "Then they locked me in my room. I climbed out the window last night."
"Why?"
"Because Tetsuo was right." She looked past him, up the river gate, toward the sound of steel echoing down the corridor. "And because I'm tired of being on the side that lies."
***
They loaded the barges.
A hundred and sixty seven freed prisoners. Ogawa. Sho. Hana. Tetsuo. Sable. Rina's wind filled the sails.
Up the corridor, the sound of fighting went on. And on. Ren stood on the deck of the last barge with his hand on his chest, feeling the old, steady candle burning there. He felt it hold. He felt it hold for a long time.
Then the barge pulled away into the current, and he felt it go out.
Sworn soul lost: Brannoc of Solenne.
He didn't say anything. He stood on the deck and watched the river gate shrink behind them until it was gone.
***
They were twenty miles south by midnight. The river was wide and black and fast. Rina's wind had died, and she'd collapsed asleep on a pile of grain sacks, and the barges drifted south on the current alone, under the stars.
On the deck, a hundred and fifty of the freed prisoners had sworn to him. One after another, in the dark, with their hands on the rough planks. He'd stopped trying to talk them out of it.
Ren sat at the stern beside Ogawa. She was wrapped in a blanket, squinting at the stars.
"Kuroda-kun," she said. "Was it worth it? All of it? For an old woman?"
He opened his mouth to answer.
And something tore through his chest.
Not one candle. Many. Far to the south and east, where the big warm cluster around Fort Calder always burned. Not there. Somewhere else, northeast of it, in the hills. A knot of candles he'd felt moving away from the fort days ago, and hadn't thought much about.
They were going out.
Not one at a time. Ten at a time. Twenty. A whole street of lights in his city, suddenly dark.
Sworn soul lost.
Sworn soul lost.
Sworn soul lost.
The lines stacked up in front of his eyes so fast he couldn't read them. He grabbed the rail of the barge. Ogawa was saying his name. He couldn't hear her.
He knew where they were. He'd felt them leave. He'd thought it was a supply march. A patrol. Vex, reassigning the Black Ninth's companies while their captain was gone.
To the north road.
To Hollowgate.