Five swords lay across his bed, and Rayleigh looked at them the way a man looks at a bill he already knows he can't argue down.
'A proper Shinigami carries one. Just one. Kyōraku carries two and half of Soul Society thinks he's compensating.'
He picked up Senbonzakura first, because it had the manners to sit still.
The wrappings were cool against his palm, and the pressure that answered his grip was unhurried, faintly smug, a blade that had already decided how the fight ended and saw no reason to rush the middle.
Left hip, where it lived.
Ruri'iro Kujaku next. Holding that one always felt like shaking hands with a snake that had agreed, for the moment, not to bite.
Good for going underground.
Vines didn't care about a corpse's dignity, and after last night, dignity was in short supply down there anyway.
Hyōrinmaru's cold bled through the sheath before he'd fully lifted it, so he tied it high on his back and out of the way. Sakanade went over the opposite shoulder.
That left the newest one, humming its low red hum at the bottom of the row like it resented sharing the mattress.
He weighed Benihime a moment before he strapped it to his right hip. The pressure off it was a woman's smile with a knife somewhere behind it, and he still hadn't decided whether the two of them were partners or just hadn't gotten around to the argument yet.
He turned to the mirror.
Five sheaths, none of them balanced and all of them pulling a different direction!
He looked like a market stall that had learned how to walk.
"This is the first time you carried all five of them at once."
Alfia hadn't looked up from her book.
She sat in the good chair by the window with one leg crossed over the other, silver hair loose down her back, a bar of thin grey morning across the page.
The update medicine had dragged her up to a Level even the dead legends would have flinched at, and not one soul in the city knew she was breathing.
He meant to keep it that way until hiding her stopped being smarter than the alternative, which would be roughly never.
"I'm being thorough," he said.
"You're stalling." She turned a page without any particular interest in his suffering. "You carried four to the war. Four when you flattened Rakia. Now you want all five to look at whatever crawled out of the canal."
'And there it is.' He kept his face flat.
It bought him nothing.
Behind his sternum, on the thin red thread that had run between the two of them ever since he'd shoved a piece of his own soul through her chest and refused to let her finish dying, her attention shifted.
A light, cool weight against the inside of his ribs, the sensation of being read through a wall he'd have sworn was solid.
Her expression didn't move, but she set the book face-down on her knee, which from Alfia was practically shouting.
"You already know what it is," she said.
He thought about last night.
The shrine floor peeling open over black water. The girl bound in cord who kept ledgers for a trade office and couldn't understand why she'd been worth taking. The corridor that wore people's voices and called them by name. He thought about Karz and Lott in Airmid's ward, still flinching at their own reflections.
Whatever moved under Orario had spent the whole investigation being coy, and coy things did not suddenly get loud to say hello.
"I've got a guess," he said. "It's the kind of guess where five swords feels reasonable."
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
She watched him and he pretended to check a strap that didn't need it.
A gull started up over the roof, and a cart clattered by three streets down, and he tightened a buckle that was already tight.
Then Alfia picked her book back up, which was how he knew they were done.
"Don't die," she said, to the page. "I've gotten used to the chair."
'The chair. Of course. The chair!' He almost gave her the smile and stopped himself, because handing her that would keep her warm a week and unbearable for two.
She felt the near miss anyway.
The thread carried it before he could shut it down, and one corner of her mouth moved, and she let him watch her decline to mention it.
Someone hammered on the front gate hard enough to rattle the frame.
Rayleigh was already moving.
'And there's the louder.'
...
The runner was a Ganesha rookie who'd sprinted the whole way and was paying for it, bent double on the step with one hand flat on the stone.
He got out three words before his lungs revolted: "Vyasa,""Benen Street,""the sick one."
Rayleigh didn't wait for the rest.
He laid a hand on the boy's shoulder, said, "Breathe, you'll live," and was gone between one blink and the next, the doorstep registering his absence a full second late.
The wrong thread found him before he found the plaza.
Among the thousands of Reiraku streaming over the eastern market, one ran a color no living person's should: grey at the core, going black where it frayed.
...
The fish market off Benen Street had become a cordon.
Ganesha's people had thrown a wall of shields across every mouth of the square, civilians shoved back behind them and craning anyway, because a crowd would always rather see the thing that might kill it than walk away.
In the cleared space at the center, something that had been a man an hour ago was screaming without a mouth.
There was still an apron. Still one boot. From the ribs up, the rest of him had opened like a fist going slack, and out of the opening a viola had bloomed, thick fibrous petals the wet dark red of a lung, threaded through with pale roots that had driven down into the cobbles and split them apart.
Where the face should have sat, the flower had a hollow, and the hollow was making a sound.
This time the sound was a little girl's voice.
"—big brother, it hurts, why won't you look at me, please look—"
Half the shield line was leaning toward it without knowing they'd moved.
Of course they were, that was the whole trick.
You built something that sounded like the worst moment of a stranger's life, and you aimed it at people who couldn't hear that and stay put.
At the front of the line, one person stood absolutely still.
"HOLD!" Ardi's voice cracked across the square, and the line held, because when the captain's little sister used that tone even the veterans forgot she was the gray-haired girl who apologized for bumping your elbow.
She was a Level 4 with a title and a Zanpakutō and both arms flung wide to keep a shaking rookie in rank.
Her chin was up, her eyes bright and wet, and she looked ready to bite, because she'd worked out what the voice was, and she despised it, and she was not going to let it herd her men into a flowerbed made of a person.
She saw him, and for half a heartbeat the captain-face slipped and something younger and enormously relieved surfaced before she crammed it back down.