The dye-canal warehouse was dark, but not empty.
Rayleigh saw the lantern light leaking under the loading door before they reached it, and heard the low voices of men who thought they had the night to themselves.
He held up a hand, and Kaguya stopped beside him without a sound.
"They started early," she murmured.
"Corvin's people, taking the keys." He glanced at the two shapes coming up the towpath to meet them.
"Right on time, though."
Alise reached them first, red hair loose, already grinning like the fight was a gift someone had left out for her.
Ryuu came a step behind, quiet as ever, one hand resting near the sword at her hip.
They'd been on standby with Finn's people since the market, and it showed in how fast they'd come.
"Please tell me we're not just here to watch," Alise said.
"There are men inside stealing a door," Rayleigh said. "Try not to burn the whole building down around it."
"That was one wall."
"It was a city wall, Alise."
"And it's fine now!"
Ryuu spoke over the top of them, calm and low. "How many inside?"
Rayleigh let his senses widen.
Blue threads, ordinary adventurers, nervous ones. "Six. Low level. And behind them, at the back of the floor, a cold spot in the stone where there shouldn't be one." He drew a slow breath. "That's the door. They've already opened it."
Eleonora came up last with Lulune, her ledgers clutched to her chest.
She took one look at the warehouse and pointed to the far corner. "There. The old dye vats. If there's a hidden stair on this deed, it's under them."
"Then you found it." Rayleigh nodded to Lulune. "Hold the surface. Nobody in or out, and get word to Finn that we're going down."
He looked at Eleonora. "Stay up here. I mean it."
She lifted her chin, but she didn't argue.
She wasn't a fool!
...
They went in fast.
The six men barely had time to shout.
Alise was among them before the first one drew, and she didn't even release her blade for it, just cracked the flat of the sheath across a jaw and put him on the floor.
Kaguya took two more with a pair of clean, bored strokes.
The rest broke and ran for the dark corner and the black gap in the wall behind the dye vats, exactly as Rayleigh had known they would.
"Let them go," he said, when Alise moved to follow. "They'll run straight to the thing we're looking for."
The gap was a doorway that had no business existing.
The stone had slid aside on a track worn smooth by years of use, and past it a stair dropped down into cold air that smelled of wet rock and something sweet and rotten underneath.
Ryuu's hand tightened on her hilt. "That smell."
"Flowers," Rayleigh said. "The kind that eat people. Stay off the walls."
He went first.
The others followed, and the warehouse light shrank to a square above them, and then the passage turned and swallowed even that.
...
The route did not behave.
The stair let out into a corridor that leaned wrong, longer than it looked and pitched at an angle that made the eye slide.
Lantern stones threw light that clung close and left the far end thick with dark.
The walls weren't only stone.
Pale roots ran through the cracks, and here and there a bloom pushed out of the rock, wet and red and slowly breathing.
Rayleigh drove one of Welf's markers into the wall and fed it a thread of power.
It answered, steady in his senses, a fixed point in a place that wanted to move.
'Good. At least we'll know if the way out starts wandering.'
"The dust won't sit still," Ryuu said. She had her blade out. "Growl, Haineko."
The sword came apart into a fine grey ash that spread out ahead of them along the floor and up the walls, feeling the shape of the corridor better than any lamp could.
Ryuu closed her eyes, reading it.
"The passage forks twice before it opens up," she said. "The left fork is false. The floor's thin. And there's a nest ahead, a big one. The blooms are thicker there, and something's moving behind them."
"How many somethings?"
"More than I'd like."
They took the right fork.
The corridor widened into a low chamber, and the walls here were nothing but violas, dozens of them, packed root to root, their hollows all turning to face the light at once.
In the middle of them, hauling itself up out of the floor, was a thing that had been a monster once.
A war shadow, maybe, but wrong now, its body threaded through with the same pale roots, its movements a half-beat behind themselves.
Then the flowers began to sing.
A dozen stolen voices at once, children and mothers and men, all crying for help in a wet, layered wail that filled the whole room.
Alise's jaw set.
Her charm stayed cold at her wrist. "None of them are real."
"None of them," Rayleigh agreed.
"Good." She drew, and fire ran down the steel before the name was even out of her mouth.
"Burn, Engetsu!"
The flame came off the blade in a wide, roaring arc and went into the nest.
Violas don't scream, but they curl, and these curled and blackened and came apart, and the wet chorus choked off row by row as the fire ate through the wall of them.
The heat rolled back over the team, and Rayleigh felt Ryuu's ash pull tight around their feet to keep the flames from spreading where they weren't wanted.
The altered war shadow came through the burning nest anyway, half on fire and not caring.
Kaguya stepped past Alise like she had all the time in the world. "Katen Kyōkotsu."
Her two blades came free, and she moved into the thing's reach instead of away from it, ducked the long slow swing of a rooted arm, and opened the monster from hip to shoulder in one pass.
It came apart at the seam.
She was already stepping back before the pieces hit the ground, flicking ash and worse off her steel with a small grimace.
"It didn't even bleed properly," she said. "Everything down here is spoiled."
"That's the theme." Rayleigh raised two fingers at the far wall, where the roots had begun to writhe and pull, trying to drag the chamber's shape sideways and close them in.
He didn't have the patience for it. "Bakudō #63: Sajō Sabaku."
Chains of golden light burst out and lashed the shifting wall in place, pinning the mechanism mid-move.
The grinding stopped, the chamber held its shape.
For a moment there was only the crackle of burning flowers and four people breathing hard in a room that stank of smoke and rot.
Then, from the dark past the dead nest, something tapped the wall.
Two knocks. A pause. Three more.
Every viola root in the chamber went still at once.
...
It came out of the far wall as if the stone were a curtain.
Tall, too thin, one arm hung longer than the other, and cloth or skin or something between the two draped off it in the dark so you couldn't tell where the thing ended.
It had no face that Rayleigh could find.
It didn't need one.
It simply stood there, exactly as Vess had said, and at its feet, wrapped in black-red cord.
And slumped against the base of the wall, was a person.
Alive but barely.
A young woman, chest moving in shallow jerks, eyes half open and seeing nothing.
Rayleigh's charm was stone cold against his wrist, so was Alise's.
There was no soul-thread in the tall thing at all, no warmth, no breath, nothing a living creature leaves in the world.
But it turned its head to look at them, and the movement had a patience in it that no dead thing should own.
"That's the captive." Alise's voice had dropped, fury held on a short leash. "And that's the thing that keeps them."
"Get her out," Rayleigh said. "I'll keep it busy."
The Knocker lifted its long arm and tapped the wall beside it.
The floor bucked.
A section of the chamber wall snapped open behind the team, and a fresh wave of roots whipped out toward Ryuu and Alise.
Ryuu's ash met them, thickening into a wall of grey that caught the lashing tendrils, and Alise burned what got through, and the two of them fought their way toward the bound woman while Kaguya covered their backs.
Rayleigh crossed the chamber in a single step of Shunpo and put himself between the Knocker and the captive.
It struck at him.
The long arm came around faster than its slow, tilting walk had any right to promise, and the end of it wasn't a hand, it was a knot of hardened root and old metal, and it came for his head like a flail.
"Benihime."
The blade was in his hand and red before the blow landed. He caught it, and the shock of it ran down his arm, heavier than it looked.
'Not alive, but it hits like it means it.' He turned the arm aside and stepped in.
The Knocker tapped its own chest.
Rayleigh felt the air fold.
The corridor behind the thing twisted, and for half a breath his sense of the room lied to him, the walls sliding, the exit somewhere it wasn't.
An old Daedalus trick, the same one that had wrecked the survivors' bodies. It would have taken a lesser man off his feet.
He was not a lesser man.
"Chikasumi no Tate."
A shield of blood-red light bloomed off the blade and hardened in front of him, and when the folding pressure hit it, it broke against the shield instead of against his mind.
The room snapped back into place. Rayleigh grinned without any warmth at all and drove forward.
"Nake, Benihime!"
The crimson slash left the blade and caught the Knocker across its thin body, and for the first time the thing reacted.
It didn't cry out, it had no voice for that, but its whole frame shuddered, and a long crack opened down its side, and out of the crack spilled not blood but a dry rush of grey dust and snapped cord and a whisper of a dozen stolen voices scattering into nothing.
But it didn't fall.
The crack was already knitting shut, root pulling to root, metal grinding back into place.
Whatever held it together wasn't in the part he'd cut.
'It's not a body. It's a mechanism wearing one. I can carve it all night and it'll keep standing.'
Behind him, Ryuu's voice cut through the noise. "We have her!"
The last cord came away from the bound woman, and the moment it did, the Knocker went still.
It turned its faceless head from Rayleigh to the freed captive and back, the way a man checks a ledger and finds a line missing.
Then it lifted its long arm one final time and tapped the wall.
The whole chamber began to close.
"Out," Rayleigh said. "Now."
He threw one more slash to buy the second he needed, and the Knocker took it without flinching and stepped backward into the wall it had come from, the stone folding shut over it like water closing over a dropped stone.
They ran for the marker's steady pulse in Rayleigh's senses, Kaguya carrying the freed woman, the corridor grinding narrow behind them, the false fork collapsing into the dark.
They came up the worn stair and out past the dye vats into the warehouse just as the stone door ground shut at their backs and sealed itself smooth.
Eleonora was on them at once, Lulune a step behind.
"You're all—" She saw the woman in Kaguya's arms and went pale. "Is she—"
"Alive." Rayleigh slid Benihime home.
His arm still ached where the thing had hit him. "Get her to Airmid. And send word to Finn."
He looked back at the blank wall where the door had been, where an hour ago there'd been nothing at all.
They'd freed one captive and learned the shape of the enemy.
But he'd cut the Knocker clean through, and it had simply pulled itself back together and walked away, and that meant every honest thing he knew how to do with a sword was going to come up short.
'Cutting won't finish you.' He filed it away, cold and certain. 'I'm going to need a different kind of blade for that.'