Chapter 174: Before Dawn

The bell did not stop tolling, and nobody in the chamber could think over it.

Selene knelt on the glass with her father’s head against her shoulder, one hand flat on his chest, her face as white as the roots overhead. Black ran from his nose in a thin steady line. Ryuji crouched on his other side and did the only thing he knew how to do. He counted.

Voldranis’s pulse was slow and ragged. Hers was ninety-six.

"Stop looking at me like that," Voldranis said, hoarsely. "I have lasted four hundred years. I will last until sunrise."

"You will last until I say," Selene said.

"That is very like your mother."

"I know. Do not speak."

Above them, a crash like a falling tree shook the stairs. Dust sifted from the ceiling. A voice came down the spiral, enormous, outraged, and breathless.

"WHERE IS SHE."

"Alexei," Selene said, closing her eyes. "He has broken something."

"A medium thing," said Kaelith, faintly.

Alexei came down the last turn of the stair at a dead run with half a door in his hands. He had ripped the garden gate off its hinges rather than squeeze through it. His armor was askew, his crimson eyes were blazing, and his left eyelid was twitching so hard it looked like a trapped moth.

He saw his mother.

He stopped. The door slid out of his grip and clattered across the glass. For a moment the largest man Ryuji knew simply stood at the edge of the chamber with his arms hanging, breathing like a bellows, looking at a woman in a dark gown who had died when he was a boy.

"You were taller," he said, in a small, strangled voice.

"You were shorter," said Kaelith, and held out her arms.

He went down on both knees and put his forehead against her shoulder, and his whole back shook. Kaelith wrapped herself around his enormous pauldrons and stroked the back of his head, and said something very low into his hair that Ryuji did not try to hear. His eye twitched against her collarbone, once, twice, and then went still.

[System Log: Day 172, continued]

[THE VANGUARD HAS REUNITED WITH HIS MOTHER. HE BROKE A DOOR TO DO IT]

[I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN HE WAS A SENTIMENTAL MAN. I NEVER HAD THE EVIDENCE]

[DAWN IS IN FOUR HOURS. I AM CONSIDERING NOT LOGGING THEM]

It took about ninety seconds. Then Alexei lifted his head, wiped his face with a gauntlet, and turned a face of terrible military calm on the rest of the room.

"What is the situation."

"The master is in the Void Sanctum’s lowest vault," Selene said. Her voice was steady, though her eyes were still red. "It has the fifth guardian in chains. It will begin to take it apart at dawn unless Father opens his end of the lock. Father cannot. It would open the seventh door."

"So we kill it."

"We cannot kill it. We have tried."

"We refuse it, then." Alexei looked at Ryuji. "Tell me how."

And Ryuji, for the first time in his life, did not know.

The quiet was there, wide and bare. In the old days he would have laid it out like a ledger. Their numbers, their risks, the guardian’s value, the likely cost. A cold, clean list, and he would have chosen the line with the smallest loss and called it a plan.

Now there was nothing on the page. Only faces.

"I don’t know," he said. "I used to know how to do this. I can’t tell what anything costs."

Nobody said anything.

"I can ask, though," he said slowly. "I can ask what each of you can do, and what you’re afraid of, and what you’d rather not. And we can start from there."

Selene’s eyes lifted to his. Something moved in her face, quick and bright.

"That," she said softly, "is the first sensible thing anyone has said since the bell."

So they asked.

Voldranis, propped against the wall with a cloth to his nose, told them the Sanctum had three gates, that the glass passage opened only from the vault side and would drop them straight under the master’s feet, and that Zarthan stood watch at the upper gate with forty picked guards. Kaelith said the master could not enter a place where a lily had been planted by a grieving hand, and that Ryuji’s door could not open inside the vault, which was warded against everything except the lock. Alexei offered, tersely, to break whatever was in front of him. Tetsu, who had come down the stair behind Alexei in a dead man’s jacket with a saucepan in one fist, said he could probably hit something with it.

"You can’t fight that thing with a saucepan," Ryuji said.

"Keiko did."

"Keiko is different."

"Hm," said Tetsu. "Fair."

Ryuji listened to all of it. Somewhere in the middle he felt the plan come together, not as a sum, but as a shape, the way a meal comes together in a kitchen. This for that. Salt before sweetness. He had always known how to cook. He had just forgotten it was the same thing.

"We open a door to the Sanctum’s archive," he said. "Upstairs. Quiet. We go down the long way, through the stairwell, and come up behind Zarthan’s guards. Alexei, Tetsu, and Voldranis take the upper gate. Selene and I take the vault."

"Not a bad plan," Alexei said.

"It’s a terrible plan," said Kaelith.

"It’s the one we’ve got."

"I did not say it was a bad terrible plan." She smiled at him, tired and approving. "Go."

Voldranis caught Ryuji’s sleeve as the others turned to the stairs.

"A word," he said, very low. "Alone."

Ryuji looked at Selene. She was bent over her mother, whispering something, one hand on her cheek. He went with Voldranis to the far wall.

"I have asked your opinion of nothing," the old king said. "I will ask you a favor instead. My daughter will want to go down into the vault. She will insist. You are the only person she listens to. Keep her out."

Ryuji’s chest went tight.

"Why?"

"Because if the master takes her, it has the blood the door answers to, and the Architects’ mark. There is no seventh door without it. It is the only thing that matters." His eyes were steady. "I would ask you to give her an errand. A reason to wait at the top of the stair. I would ask you to promise me."

"No."

Voldranis blinked.

"I’ll go with her," Ryuji said. "I’ll stand beside her. I’ll count her pulse the whole way down. But I won’t promise to keep her out of the room, because I’m not her keeper, and neither are you."

"Ryuji."

"She’d never forgive either of us."

A sound came from behind them. A very small one, a breath, a step on glass. Both men turned.

Selene stood three paces away with her hands in her sleeves.

"I heard," she said.

Voldranis went the color of paper.

"Little moon..."

"Do not." Her voice was very quiet. "I asked my husband at the pier whether he would ever decide for me. I asked him in a letter’s worth of words. He answered. And you stand there, in front of my mother, and try to bargain him into it." She turned to Ryuji. "Tell me what you said."

He told her. She listened with her chin lifted and her eyes bright, and when he finished she let out a breath that was not quite a laugh.

"I am jealous," she said.

"Of what?"

"That my father asked you. Not me." Her mouth wobbled. "He has never once asked what I want. He asks you, and you say no, and I stand there like a fool and am grateful. I do not know whether to hit him or to thank you."

"You can do both."

"I intend to." She turned to her father. "You will not choose for me. You will not choose around me. If I am to go into that vault, I will go because I decided to, with my eyes open, and my husband will walk beside me." She drew a breath. "And you will sit at the top of the stair and bleed, and I will be furious, and you will bear it."

Voldranis was silent a long moment. Then, slowly, he bowed his head.

"Yes," he said. "I will."

"Good."

"I am sorry."

"I know." Her voice caught. "It is a start."

Ryuji put his hand out. She took it without looking, and they stood there, a little ragged, a little raw, as the bell tolled again.

He opened the door at the foot of the stairs.

It took both halves of the key and a long steady breath. The air folded, silver, and on the other side stood the Void Sanctum’s archive, dark and enormous and smelling of dust and cold stone. The reading lamps were out. Not a sound came from the long rows of shelves.

Tetsu went first, saucepan raised. Alexei followed with the broken door in one hand. Voldranis leaned on Kaelith’s last, wordless look and limped after him, and Selene took Ryuji’s arm and stepped through.

"Fifty-six," Ryuji said.

"You may stop saying the number."

"I’m not going to."

"I know."

They crept across the archive and through the long stone corridor beyond. At the upper gate, the great obsidian doors stood open, and forty Dominion guards lay along the floor in neat rows, as if they had lain down to rest, and every one of them was sound asleep.

At the head of the line, propped against the wall with his massive hands folded on his chest, sat General Zarthan.

He was snoring softly.

Beside his knee, on the stone floor, a paper cup stood upright. It was still steaming.

Ryuji felt the key go cold under his collarbone.

"It was here an hour ago," Voldranis whispered. "He would not have drunk it. He is not a fool."

"He is a good man who was offered something kind," Selene said, very low. She knelt and touched the General’s wrist, and her breath caught in relief. "He lives. He is only asleep."

"It spared him."

"It spared everyone." Ryuji looked down the corridor, at the open stair spiraling into the dark below the Sanctum. "It wanted us to see them. It wants us to know it can do this to anyone, anywhere, and chooses not to."

They went down.

The stair was long and cold. The torches along the wall had burned to stubs. The bell that had tolled all night grew louder with every turn, until it stopped being sound at all and became a pressure on the chest. At the bottom, a vast round vault opened, black stone and silver light, and at its center a long table had been laid with a white cloth.

There were seven cups on it. Seven, in a neat row.

At the far end, in a high-backed chair, with a pale face and a quiet smile, sat the master.

Behind it, in a lattice of dark chains, hung the fifth guardian. It had been cracked down the middle like an egg. Light leaked from the split, faint and dim, and its voice, when it spoke, was no louder than a thread.

Keeper. Do not listen to it. Do not open anything.

"We are five," said Ryuji, very quietly. He had counted the cups twice.

"Seven," said the master, pleasantly. "I always make extra."

It lifted its own cup.

"You are late. Sit. I will tell you where the Architects went, because the guardian has been very good, and told me an hour ago." The pale face tilted. "They never left. The seventh door does not open outward, keeper. It opens inward. And your mother-in-law has been holding it shut from the wrong side for four hundred years."