Chapter 176: Whispering Voices of the Lake

Chapter 176: Chapter 176: Whispering Voices of the Lake

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Heavy boots hammered the stone floor of the corridor, each stride landing harder than the last. The sound bounced off the walls and chased the figure down the passage like a pack of hounds. A lantern swung wildly on its hook as he tore past it. Another guttered out in the wind of his passing. He did not slow, and he did not look back.

Ahead, a pair of iron banded doors stood shut. The figure hit them with both shoulders.

BANG!

The doors flew open and slammed against the walls, and gray daylight flooded the passage. He burst out of the chamber and onto the academy grounds, his cloak snapping behind him and his hood pulled low over his face. Gravel sprayed from under his heels. Crunch, crunch, crunch. His breath tore in and out of his chest in ragged bursts, and his heart pounded so hard that he could feel it in his teeth.

The courtyard was a storm of frightened people. Students dragged trunks across the paving stones. Servants shouted at horses. A carriage wheel groaned somewhere, and a child was crying. The figure plunged straight into the crowd without slowing.

"Out of the way!" he roared. "Move! There are monsters! There are monsters!"

The crowd split before him like water around a blade. A girl clutching a satchel stumbled aside with a gasp. Two boys jumped back against a stone wall to let him pass. Someone dropped a stack of books, and the pages scattered across the ground like startled birds. The figure ran through all of it, his boots pounding on, thud, thud, thud, and his voice cracking on every word.

"There are monsters!"

Against the wall, one of the boys stared after him with his mouth open. "What is he running from?"

"No idea." The other boy bent to pick up a fallen book and shrugged. "Some crazy stuff has been going on in the academy lately, so maybe it got to him too."

"Yeah." The first boy swallowed and watched the cloaked back shrink into the distance. "Maybe that is what happened."

The figure left the courtyard behind and ran on. He crossed the training fields, where abandoned wooden dummies stood like silent guards. He passed the orchard gate, then the long wall of the library, and with every step the noise of the crowd grew fainter. The gravel under his boots gave way to packed dirt, and then to soft, wet earth that squelched and sucked at his heels. The air turned cool and damp. A thin mist curled around his ankles and clung to his cloak.

At last the trees fell away, and the ground sloped down to the edge of the Whispering Lake.

It lay perfectly still beneath the gray sky, wide and dark and flat as a sheet of black glass. Reeds stood along its banks in tall, pale clusters, and when the wind touched them they rustled together with a soft hush, hush, hush, as though a thousand voices were murmuring secrets at the water’s edge. The students said the lake whispered back whatever you told it. Nobody liked to test the claim.

The figure stumbled to a stop at the shore. His legs gave out first. He braced both hands on his knees and bent double, and his breath came out in great, shuddering gasps.

"Haah... haah... haah..."

Sweat ran down his face and dripped from his chin onto the mud. His hands were shaking. He stared at his own trembling fingers and could not make them stop, because behind his eyes the memories would not stop either. A snap of a girl’s fingers, and a spell the size of a city block shattering into a million pieces of light. An army of demons wrenched out of the world like weeds. A general with horns like a crown flung across the field like a rag. A forest that had stood for a thousand years, dying leaf by leaf beneath a single boot. And in the middle of it all, a boy standing on a balcony with a tired face and an ordinary coat, watching it happen as though it were weather.

*He isn’t human anymore,* the figure thought. The words came again and again, louder each time. *That boy is not human. How can anyone have that much power? How? What is he? What is going on?*

His grip tightened on his knees until his knuckles went white.

"What exactly is going on?" he screamed.

The cry rolled out across the water. The reeds hissed it back to him, going on? going on? going on? and then faded into silence.

The silence did not last.

Something brushed the inside of his ears, soft and cold, like a fingertip drawn across glass. Then a voice spoke, and it was not coming from the lake, or the trees, or the sky. It was coming from inside his head.

Kill the seventh prince.*

The figure froze.

Kill the seventh prince. Kill the seventh prince.

He jerked upright, and his hood fell back. His eyes darted left and right across the empty shore. There was no one there. Only the mist, and the reeds, and the black water.

"Who is that?" His voice came out thin and raw. "Who is there? Show yourself!" He spun in a circle, his boots churning the mud. "Who said that? Answer me!"

The voice came again, patient and flat and absolutely certain.

Kill the seventh prince. If you do not, he will destroy this world.

The words struck him like a hammer. For a moment he could not breathe. He thought of the boy on the balcony, of the army that vanished with a snap, of a power that could erase a forest and an empire and everyone in them. He thought of the faces in the courtyard, the children crying beside their carriages. Everything the voice said fit perfectly into the fear already sitting in his chest, and that was what frightened him most.

Something cold slid into his body.

It began at the back of his neck and spread outward through his shoulders, his arms, his fingers, like icy water poured into a cup. He tried to cry out, and the sound would not come. In the dark surface of the lake, his reflection stared back at him, and he watched his own eyes lose their color. The brown drained out of them. They turned pale and then paler, white as frost on a windowpane, until nothing human was left in them at all.

He wanted to fight it. A small, distant part of him was still screaming that this was wrong, that he did not know this voice, that no one should be trusted who whispered from inside another person’s head. But the part of him that was afraid was louder. The part that remembered the balcony and the snap and the forest dying. He told himself that the voice was right. He told himself that someone had to do it. And somewhere between the two, he stopped being able to tell which thoughts were his own.

His right hand moved without him. It closed around the hilt of the sword at his hip.

The blade had been sealed for years, wrapped in a thick cord of braided silver and held shut by a ward that glowed along its scabbard. His fingers found the knot and pulled. The cord snapped. The ward flared once, bright as a falling star, and died. With a long, low scrape of steel, he drew the sword from its sheath and let the scabbard fall to the mud.

The blade gleamed. Its edge caught the gray light and held it.

He turned from the lake and began to walk.

One step. Then another. Slow, even, heavy, the way a man walks toward a door he has already decided to open. His boots squelched in the wet earth, then thumped on the dirt path, then rang against the stones, and with every step, a whisper fell from his lips in time with his stride.

"Kill the seventh prince."

Step.

"Kill the seventh prince."

Step.

"Kill the seventh prince."

The courtyard was still crowded when he came back into it. The people closest to him heard the whisper first, and they stopped in the middle of what they were doing. A group of students pressed themselves against a pillar and watched him pass, pale faces turned toward the naked sword hanging from his hand and the strange, empty whiteness of his eyes.

"Who is he going to kill?" one girl whispered.

"Best not to get involved," said the boy beside her, and he pulled her sleeve. "Let us just get out of this academy. It is already strange enough with all the things that have been happening lately."

They hurried away and did not look back.

The figure kept walking. He climbed the wide steps of the Imperial dormitory, one at a time, and the whisper climbed with him. It echoed down the long stairwell and up through the carved ceiling. He did not need to read the doors. Some pull inside him guided each step, as if a hook had been set behind his ribs and something on the other end was reeling him in. At the top, he stopped in front of a door and laid his free hand against the wood.

It swung open at his touch.

The room beyond was empty. A tumbled blanket lay half off the bed, and a chair stood beside it. A thin film of damp covered the floorboards, as though a handful of snow had melted there, and the air still smelled faintly of winter. The window curtains stirred in the breeze. There was no boy.

The figure stood in the doorway for a long, silent moment. Then his head turned slowly toward the far end of the room, as if listening to something, and his pale gaze settled on a point far beyond the wall.

He turned away from the empty bed and walked on.

The pull led him down the stairs and out of the dormitory, across the grounds, and into the main building. Wherever he walked, the crowd parted. No one tried to stop him. Panic had already run through the academy like a fire, and everyone was caught up in their own flight, shoving toward the gates with their trunks and their children and their fear. A man in a fine coat saw the naked sword and turned his face away. A servant dropped to her knees to stay out of the path. The corridors rang with shouting and the scrape of luggage, and through all that noise, the whisper went on, steady as a heartbeat.

"Kill the seventh prince."

He followed the pull through hall after hall, up one stair and down another, until at last he stood before a wide door of dark wood at the end of a quiet corridor. The noise of the academy seemed far away here. Carved above the lintel was the crest of the academy, and beneath it a pair of brass handles gleamed in the lamplight.

The Headmaster’s chamber.

He could feel it on the other side of the door, the thing he had been sent to find. It was close now. Close enough to touch.

The figure stepped forward. His right hand lifted the sword high above his head, and the blade shone like a streak of moonlight in the dim hall. His left hand reached out for the brass handle.

His fingers had not yet closed around it when the door swung open from the inside.

A boy stood in the doorway. He was young, and he looked tired, and he was in the middle of an argument. Over his shoulder, he was dragging a tall woman wrapped in a cloak of living flame, and she was wailing something about wanting a hug. His mouth was open to answer her. Then he looked up and saw who stood in front of him.

The seventh prince.

The whisper stopped.

For one heartbeat the whole world seemed to hold still. The boy’s eyes met his, and in them the figure saw something that struck him cold, a flash of recognition and the first dawning of fear. The sword hung at the top of its arc, trembling.

Then it came down.

SHHK!

Steel ripped through the sleeve of the boy’s coat and drove clean through his arm. Blood sprayed across the doorframe in a bright arc. The boy gasped and staggered back, and the sound of that single choked breath rang through the corridor louder than any scream.

"Why did you.. do- this, Captain Voss?"