Chapter 155: The Hollow

The horn sounded across the Sector Two ruins at exactly the third hour.

Gareth Vance heard it from the top of the entrance steps, with his arms folded and two junior marshals at his back. Cell One’s banner never rose over the gate. Nobody came up the stairs.

"Forfeit," the proctor muttered, tapping his slate. "They’re out of time. Should I send a team down for them?"

"No." Gareth watched the black mouth of the gate for a long moment. "The lower gallery’s unstable. A slab came down in the third arch an hour ago, and the drone’s dead. Seal it."

"Seal it? With the cadets inside?"

"Their time’s up. That makes it a closed trial, and closed trials get closed gates. Their escort’s with them, and she’s a Sanguis." He smiled thinly. "If she’s half as good as the committee says, she’ll dig them out herself."

The proctor hesitated, then waved two guards toward the gate and its heavy iron grille. It dropped with a clang.

On the steps, Gareth took a folded note from his sleeve. It had come that morning, sealed in wax with no crest. He had read it twice and burned it once. He read it a third time.

*The Representative goes below. Do not follow.*

He tucked it away and walked off without looking back.

---

The stair went down a long way.

I counted two hundred and ten steps before the salt crust thinned and the walls opened out. Behind us, very faint through the stone, I heard the horn go, and a few minutes later the grind and clang of an iron gate dropping into its seat.

"That’s the exit," Casper said. "Somebody just shut our front door."

"Somebody’s been waiting for us," Solene said.

Nobody argued.

"Two hundred steps," Casper complained somewhere behind me. "Whoever built this had a grudge against knees."

"Whoever built it didn’t want visitors," Castor said, and that shut him up.

Solene dropped back beside me for three steps. "You’ve gone quiet."

"I’m always quiet."

"Not like this." Her hand hovered near my sleeve, then dropped. "If you know what’s down here..."

"Later."

"Later’s getting crowded, Valen."

She went back to the front. She was right.

Mirain walked just ahead of me the whole way down, close enough that I could have touched her mantle. She didn’t look back once. She didn’t need to.

*She’s counting your steps,* Aurelix murmured. *Out loud, in her head. Listen.*

I didn’t need to listen. I just made them uneven.

The stair ended in a hall so wide my lantern couldn’t find the far wall. Pillars the size of old oaks marched off into the dark. Salt lay across the floor in drifts, white and fine as snow, and it crunched under our boots.

Lyra lifted her staff, and blue light spilled across the walls.

The murals up in the gallery had been bad. These were worse. Rows upon rows of worshippers, tall and thin and bowing, every face scraped clean off with a chisel. Not worn away by time. Scraped, deliberately, one by one, until nothing was left but flat stone.

"Who does that?" Pollux said quietly.

"People who got tired of being looked at," I said.

*Or people who were forgotten,* Aurelix murmured. *And decided they wanted it that way.*

At the far end of the hall stood an altar. It was a block of black stone as long as a cart, carved with script in no alphabet I knew, stained dark and wet, and on the ground in front of it, stacked three high, sat barrels.

DO NOT OPEN — INFIRMARY.

I stopped walking.

"Those are infirmary stamps," Lyra said. She’d gone pale. "Why would infirmary stock be down here? Valen, those are..."

"Yeah."

Mirain hadn’t said a word since the stair. Her hawk was perched on her shoulder, tight and trembling, and she was staring at the altar like she’d heard her name called.

"Representative?" I said.

"It’s nothing." Her voice was too even. "Keep moving."

Something breathed.

It wasn’t loud. It was low and slow and very large, a sound I felt in my teeth more than I heard. Salt drifted off the altar like dust from a sleeper’s coat.

*Valerian,* Aurelix whispered. *Whatever’s under there is old. It’s older than the Lords.*

"I know."

"Behind the pillars!" Castor hissed. "Left side!"

Two figures stepped out of the dark.

They wore grey wool and ash smeared under the left eye. One carried a cleaver. The other carried nothing at all, and that was the one I watched, because his hands were wrong. Black veins crawled up his arms from the fingers, thick as rope, and the skin split at the knuckles and wept something dark and oily that smoked when it hit the salt.

Demon power. Borrowed, stolen, or bought, I didn’t care which.

Every muscle in my body wanted to kill him.

I knew that feeling. I’d learned it in the first life, on a cold morning with a blade at my neck, when a whisper in the right ear had signed my death warrant. My hand closed around the rod so hard that the brass tick marks bit into my palm.

*Easy,* Aurelix said, and for once she wasn’t teasing. *Not here. Not with them watching.*

"I know," I said, through my teeth.

"Cell One!" Solene shouted. "Wedge formation!"

They moved like they’d trained for it. Castor took the front with his mattock, Pollux slid in beside him with his shield, Casper went wide on the left, Lyra planted her staff and threw a binding circle across the floor, and Solene came up the center with her rapier low.

The man with the cleaver went down in four seconds. Castor’s mattock broke his arm, Pollux’s shield broke his jaw, and he hit the salt without a sound.

The other one smiled.

"Little cadets," he said, in a voice that wasn’t quite his. It had a second voice under it, a hiss, like two people talking out of one throat. "Little blessed cadets. You came all this way."

He lunged at Casper.

Casper got his swords up in time. He blocked the first claw, and the second, and the third, and then the black-veined hand caught his forearm, and Casper screamed.

It wasn’t loud. It was the kind of scream a person makes when they’ve decided not to make one and failed. Smoke rose where the fingers clamped down. His sleeve burned through. The skin underneath went grey, then black, and the veins crawled up his arm like roots.

"Casper!" Solene yelled.

Mirain was already moving.

Her net burst out of the floor and wrapped the cultist from the ankles up, red thread winding tight around his chest, his arms, his throat. Her hawk dove and clawed at his face. He thrashed, laughing, and the threads smoked where they touched his skin.

"Hold him!" Mirain gasped. "I can’t hold him long, he’s burning through it!"

I was already moving.

I didn’t draw anything. I didn’t shift the staff. I stepped behind the cultist, put the rod across his elbow, and leaned, and his arm folded the wrong way with a sound like a snapped branch. Casper dropped. The black hand let go.

The cultist twisted his head around to look at me.

"You," he said, in both voices, grinning with a mouth full of ash. "The Hollow knows you, Seventh. It knows what you smell like. It’s been waiting."

Then his eyes rolled up, and salt poured out between his teeth, and he collapsed.

Nobody said anything.

I crouched beside the body and pulled back his lip. Salt, packed to the gums. Same as the clerk. Same as the archivist. Somebody had put a leash in these men’s mouths, and I didn’t think it was a demon’s.

Casper was on his knees in the salt, gripping his forearm. The black veins had stopped at the elbow, but they pulsed, slow and steady, like a second heartbeat.

"It’s not poison," Lyra said, kneeling beside him, her voice shaking. "It’s not a poison. It’s *drawing* something. Out of him."

"Get it off!" Casper’s teeth were clenched. "Get it off, get it off—"

Lyra drew a circle in blue light around his arm and pressed her palm to it. The veins flinched, then crawled on regardless.

*I could burn it out,* Aurelix said, very quietly. *Phoenix fire is good for exactly one thing besides vanity. One touch. Three seconds.*

"Not here."

*He’ll lose the arm, Valerian.*

"Not *here.*" I could feel the guard on my forearm, cold and heavy. Opening it in front of Mirain meant telling her everything. Not opening it meant telling Casper to keep his arm.

I hated that arithmetic. I hated that I knew the answer.

Behind us, the altar breathed again, deeper this time. Salt rained off the black stone.

And Mirain, who hadn’t moved from her spot at the edge of the net, went white to the lips.

"It’s talking to me," she whispered. "It just said my name."

Her hawk’s wings were shaking.

"It says it’s dying. It says it wants to leave something behind for someone worth it." Her mouth twisted. "It says I could finally be *first*."

Nobody moved.

*Valerian,* Aurelix said softly. *That is the oldest trick there is.*

I looked at the altar. Under that salt-crusted stone, something that had once been a god was starving.