Chapter 155: The Last Procession (2)

The fourth hour began with the road descending.

Dorian had warned them about this section before they entered Floor Twelve. He had described that under good conditions, the Bell House was roughly five hours from the starting point. That estimate assumed the procession maintained pace, nobody triggered the Hushers, and the funeral cart did not need to stop for anything more complicated than a carrier rotation.

"Under good conditions."

Misha had already decided those words belonged in the same category as minor complication and routine procedure. It was technically reassuring but... usually followed by disaster.

As of that moment, the Bell House itself was still not visible. Instead, the ceremonial road sloped downward into a shallow valley between two ridges of black stone. Dead grass disappeared almost completely here. Even the pale stones changed, growing darker beneath their feet as though something had seeped into them long ago and never washed out.

DUM

The drum continued.

Alaric had been playing for nearly half an hour after his last rest, and even now the beat landed with maddening precision.

DUM.

At the front, Hiiro lifted a closed fist.

The signal passed backward, one person then another, until Dorian saw it beside Misha and immediately raised his own hand.

The procession stopped, the drop did not. It could never stop even while everyone stood frozen in the middle of the road.

Misha shifted just enough to see beyond the people ahead, and finally understood why Hiiro had signaled.

Two massive stone walls rose from either side of the valley. Black blocks had been stacked nearly twenty meters high, their surfaces uneven from age. Both structures leaned inward slightly, narrowing the strip of gray sky overhead until the road seemed to disappear into the throat of something enormous. The ceremonial pathway passed directly between them.

The Wall of Death.

Dorian had described them before they left the Crematorium. He had also said the name was old enough that nobody in Blackthorn knew who originally gave it to the place.

Misha initially thought the title sounded needlessly dramatic but now that she stood in front of it, she was willing to withdraw that criticism.

She could already see loose stones scattered through the entrance, lengths of rusted chain hung from cracked arches overhead. Broken wooden frames leaned out from the walls, and small metal ornaments dangled from hooks at shoulder length.

DUM.

This was where most groups failed. It was not at the beginning of the Floor, while fear still kept everyone alert. It happened hours later, after shoulders had begun burning beneath the weight of the funeral cart, injured legs had stiffened, children had grown too tired to understand why they were not allowed to cry, and the same drumbeat had repeated for so long that the mind started treating it as background noise instead of the only thing keeping hundreds of corpses still. By then, fatigue had turned rules into habits, and habits had made people careless.

’Four hours teaching us not to make noise, and now you give us a hallway full of things specifically designed to make this. This is bullshit.’

DUM.

Two Blackthorn scouts moved first, slowly.

One entered the passage and immediately stopped when a chain hung across the path at chest level, its lower links close enough to the wall that even a weak swing could make metal strike stone.

Thankfully, the scout caught it with both hands. The cloth wrapped around his palms prevented the links from clinking together.

Another moved underneath and secured it higher, then they advanced.

It was one hazard at a time. One loose stone nudged aside with a padded pole, and one rusted hook turned away from the path.

Then the scouts reached the first alcove. One of them stopped so abruptly that the person behind nearly walked into him.

His hand rose, palm out. "Wait."

The people ahead shifted just enough for Misha to see, and immediately wished she remained ignorant.

The Hushers here were not kneeling outside the passage, they were inside it. Dozens of shallow recesses had been carved directly into both walls, and the corpse occupied nearly every one.

Some were less than an arm’s length from the road, and knelt exactly like the corpses outside... except for their mouths.

Every Husher inside the Walls of Death had its jaw stretched wide open. Some had broken jaws hanging crookedly beneath the cheek, others had their lips pulled so far back that dried gums showed above the teeth.

Yet none moved.

DUM.

Misha’s fingers tightened around Twinfang’s hilt. Then she met Dorian’s gaze so she raised two fingers toward her eyes, then pointed toward the walls.

"You knew?"

Dorian’s answer came immediately, a small shake of the head. "No."

She pointed toward him, then toward the passage once more, only to have his mouth tightened.

DUM.

The Tower had changed something, or Dorian’s information had been incomplete. Neither possibility made Misha particularly happy.

<First Mourner Beneath Creation> This is where the first procession broke.

Misha frowned beneath the mask. ’First procession?’

Her gaze moved automatically toward the funeral cart. The Quest had been explicit, it wrote:

| The Last Procession. |

Did the Observer mean the first Raider party? No, that didn’t seem to be like it. He had commented about this as though he remembered it.

Her eyes returned to the walls. Could he mean the original procession then? The funeral these Floor mechanics had been built around, the one that had happened before the Tower turned grief into a repeatable objective.

Misha did not know whether that conclusion made anything better.

<The Saint Buried Upside Down> These weren’t here before, were they?

The First Mourner did not answer the Saint.

DUM.

The scouts signaled that the route could still be passed, so everyone prepared for it.

Parents adjusted sleeping children higher against their shoulders, the wounded tightened support bindings, and the current car carriers rolled their shoulders once, and fresh replacements stepped closer in case someone lost strength inside the passage.

At the front, Caius looked back.

Even across the length of the procession, Misha caught his eyes.

He raised his thumb. "Ready?"

Misha stared at him. There was unfortunately no standardized gesture for: "This entire Floor is bullshit."

So she replied with a nod.

DUM.

The procession entered the Walls of Death.

Hiiro passed the first Husher close enough that its dead fingers were perhaps thirty centimeters from his shoulder, and yet it did not move.

Caius ducked beneath a chain while a Blackthorn member held the links perfectly still.

The funeral cart crossed the threshold next, and six people bore the weight, and the rest followed.

Misha entered near the end with Astrid and Dorian. There, she noticed the atmosphere changed the instant the walls surrounded them.

The drum changed too. Every strike returned as a faint echo.

DUM.

—dum.

Then silence followed.

Children who had been allowed to sleep openly along the road were handled differently here since parents covered their mouths with padded cloth and hands–not smothering them, just controlling whatever startled sound might slip out if one woke suddenly because of the sound.

Everyone followed instructions exactly, and the discipline should have reassured her. Instead, it made Misha more nervous.

Three hours without trouble had been suspicious, and four hours without disaster felt like the Tower had been saving up.

Then—

click.

Metal touched stone.

One hanging hook had slipped from a person’s cloth-covered grip and tapped the wall. It was just a tiny sound, barely actually, not even enough to echo properly.

After four hours of listening to nothing but the drum, however, it might as well have been thunder.

Every person in the passage froze, but the drum continued.

DUM.

Nobody spoke, nobody turned their entire body. Only their eyes moved.

Misha’s gaze shifted toward the nearest Husher. Its eyes remained closed, its hands remained clasped. Then, its head turned rather slowly toward the.

Her blood went cold when she saw this.

Another moved, one after another, heads rotated toward the living and no other part of them moved.

DUM.

The rhythm continued.

Alaric had not missed even half a beat despite what happened.

Nobody panicked just yet. They were all still clinging to the hope that the corpses would be forgiving enough to let such a small sound pass unnoticed. So they waited.

Ten seconds, then it turned to thirty. Nothing lunged, and no fingers unclasped. The Hushers merely faced them.

Perhaps the drum had contained the reaction, or perhaps the sound had been too weak. Maybe they had just received a warning?

Minutes passed as the group remained still while the drum continued.

Then, Hiiro’s posture changed at the front as he titled head.

Something stood in the road, a Husher with its hands clasped. It stood perfectly upright in the middle of the passage approximately twenty meters ahead.

The corpse had moved there while nobody else was watching.

DUM.

Hiiro and Caius exchanged a glance.

The Husher did not react to them looking directly at it so they waited another full minute, and nothing else moved.

After receiving a signal from Dorian, the front had no choice but to resume movement.