Chapter 235: Inside
They gave the survivors the one thing none of them had felt since the hill went dark: somebody else deciding what happened next.
Xinhua did it without seeming to try. She knelt to the child first, said something that put a wobbling smile on a filthy face, and by the time she’d risen the whole ragged huddle had oriented on her like plants finding a window. She didn’t demand the room. She became its center, and everyone in it was grateful to let her.
They moved the survivors deeper into the undercroft, to a storeroom with one door and good sightlines, and posted two Pavilion men on it. Steward Ma refused to sit until the others were seen to, which told Xuan most of what he needed to know about the old man.
"Tell me how it went," Xinhua said to him, low, once the worst-off had been fed from their packs. "All of it. I’ve been guessing for days."
Ma’s hands knotted in his ruined coat. "The Second Prince stripped us, Highness. Every soldier worth the name, marched south. He left a token guard, a magistrate’s watch, boys and old men to hold the gates and keep the peace." His jaw worked. "Then, the night before he rode, he went down to the old vault himself. With your fourth brother."
Xuan went still. Beside him he felt Yan Wuji do the same.
"Tianlong," Xinhua said slowly. "Tianlong opened it?"
"No. Your fourth brother opened it. But the Second Prince stood beside him and let it be done, and took his army and left before the sun came up, as though he wanted to be a hundred miles gone before anyone asked him about it." Ma’s voice cracked. "He knew, Highness. Whatever came out of that door, your second brother knew it was coming, and he chose to be somewhere else when it did."
"Of course he did." Xinhua’s face had gone very quiet. "He didn’t have to fight me for the throne if the thing under the palace emptied the capital for him. Let the Fourth open the door, let the city eat itself, march back in a month to rule the ashes." She exhaled. "He didn’t set the fire. He just walked out and left the lamp burning next to the drapes, and made sure everyone saw the Fourth strike the match."
"That’s a man who’d sell his own house to win an argument," Qingyue said.
"That’s my brother."
Xuan let them have the moment before he pulled it back to ground. "Who’s left, Steward? In the city, in the court. Who held, and who ran to the Second?"
Ma counted them off on shaking fingers, a man who’d rehearsed this grief in the dark. Half the court had gone over the moment Tianlong looked likely to win, chancellors and treasurers who could smell a throne changing hands.
A handful refused, and paid for it. And the token guard, what was left of it, had pulled back to the old drum-tower in the second ring under a commander named Bo Ren, barricaded the streets, and were holding one block of the lower city against the dark by sheer stubbornness.
"Bo Ren." Xinhua almost smiled. "He taught me the sword when I was six. Broke two of my fingers and told me to grip properly next time." Something eased in her, a first thread of a plan. "If Bo Ren’s alive and holding, then I have men in this city after all. We reach him, we have a hammer to go with the knife."
"You’d have to cross half the lower rings to get to him," Ma warned. "In the dark. Through them."
"One problem at a time." Xuan was already looking past the survivors, down the long throat of the undercroft, to the thing he’d been avoiding since they arrived. "First I want to see the door."
They took torches and went, leaving the survivors behind their guarded threshold, and the vault door grew out of the dark as they approached until it filled the passage end to end.
It was worse up close.
Imperial iron, black with age, every span of it carved with sigils cut deep enough to lay a hand flat inside the grooves. Everything about it, the mass, the cartwheel lock, the seven seals ringing it, screamed one intention across the centuries: this stays closed.
And it hung open on its hinges, and the dark inside it went back further than the torchlight would follow.
Xinhua stopped at the threshold and did not step through.
"They tell you about this door when you turn sixteen," she said quietly. "A warden brings you down, alone, shows you the seven seals, and makes you swear to add nothing to what’s inside and take nothing out. You’re not told what it holds. Only that the first Emperor sealed it with his own hand, and judged whatever’s behind it worse than any war his blood would ever fight." Her torch lifted, throwing light a little way into the dark of the vault. "I always thought it was a story. A thing they told children to keep them obedient."
Xuan stepped past her to the threshold and looked in, and his stomach dropped.
The vault wasn’t a room. It was a shaft, a throat of worked stone going down into the hill further than light could reach, and its walls were lined, floor to vanishing point, with alcoves. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Each one sized to hold one of the grey things Xuan had been killing since the way-station.
Most of the alcoves near the top were empty.
’Mira. Tell me I’m reading this wrong.’
[ You’re not. ] Her voice had gone very flat. [ Those aren’t cells, Xuan. Look at the sigils on the alcoves. Those are wards, the same imperial work as the door, all facing inward. The beasts weren’t what the first Emperor sealed down here. The beasts were what he set to guard it. ] A pause. [ They’re the wardens. And your prince walked past a thousand guardians to reach whatever’s at the bottom of that shaft, which means whatever he actually came for is worse than the things that were built to keep people away from it.]
Xuan stared down into the dark of a shaft that went down and down, past empty alcove after empty alcove, and felt the true scale of it settle onto his shoulders. They hadn’t come to fight the monsters in the streets. The monsters in the streets were the fence. The Fourth had climbed over the fence for whatever waited at the bottom of this hole, and he’d taken it up into the palace above their heads.
"He didn’t loose a plague on the city," Xuan said slowly. "He robbed a vault, and the monsters are just what got out when he opened the lid."
"Then we’re standing at the bottom of the one place in the empire I was raised to fear," Xinhua said, "looking up a hole my brother climbed down. Wonderful."
That was when the torches guttered.
All of them, at once, bending flat toward the vault as though something at the bottom of the shaft had drawn a long, slow breath. The graveyard cold rolled up out of the dark in a wave that put frost on Xuan’s collar, and from far down the throat of the vault, from somewhere deep beneath the palace, came a sound.
Not a beast. Beasts didn’t make this sound.
It was the grinding, unhurried scrape of something very large beginning to climb.
And behind them, back toward the storeroom where a dozen frightened people huddled behind two swordsmen, the survivors began, one by one, to scream.