Cassandra's warning had a shape now, and the shape was down.
She'd stood in the treatment room that morning with her sword across her hands and her face grey from the dream, and she'd told them what she'd seen.
A stair with no bottom.
Water that ran the wrong way.
A woman waiting in the deep who thought of the tall thing as hers.
She'd said it plainly, without apologizing once, and when Rayleigh had asked if she was certain, she'd only tightened her grip on Yumeutsutsu and said.
"I stopped closing my eyes. So no. I'm not certain, but I'm looking."
That was good enough for him. It was more than most people offered.
So they went back down, and this time they pushed deeper.
He'd picked the party for what the dream promised.
Cassandra had said water ran wrong down there, so he'd brought Ardi and left Alise and the rest up top with Finn to run Corvin and the stolen deeds to ground.
If the water was real, no one in Orario answered to it the way the captain's little sister did.
Ryuu took the front with her ash spread thin ahead of them, reading the corridors.
Kaguya walked at Rayleigh's shoulder. Ardi came last, and she'd been quiet since the stair, which wasn't like her, and he thought he knew why.
The last time they'd stood over one of the taken together, it had been in a market with a whole city watching.
The flowers thinned as they descended, the stone grew wet. Then the corridor ended at a lip of old rock, and below it the passage simply drowned.
A flooded level opened in front of them, black water from wall to wall, its surface flat and black as oil.
Broken pillars stood up out of it.
Somewhere far across, a green light flickered under the surface and threw slow, sick ripples of color up the walls.
The air was cold and close and smelled of rot and rust and standing centuries.
"The mechanism's under the water," Rayleigh said. "That's why it kept beating my markers. Water carries the signal better than stone."
Ryuu crouched at the edge.
Her ash drifted out over the black surface and came apart, useless, sinking into the wet. "I can't read it. Not through this."
"Then this floor is ours." Rayleigh looked at Ardi.
She met his eyes, and the tightness went out of her, the quiet lifting. She'd been made for a place like this, whether she knew it or not.
"Try not to freeze me into it," she said, and stepped up to the water's edge, and drew.
"Rankle the Seas and the Skies, Nejibana!"
The trident came free in a spray of blue, and the dead water woke.
It rose to her the way a dog rises to a familiar hand, curling up around the broken pillars, lifting into slow ropes and coils that answered the turn of her wrist.
Where the surface had been a flat black sheet, now it moved, and it moved with her.
"Show me the floor," Rayleigh said.
Ardi swept the trident low, and the water hauled itself aside, parting down the center of the drowned hall in two climbing walls, and for a moment the old stone floor lay bare and streaming between them, and the green light was a cluster of violas growing up out of a cracked seal at the far end, roots spread wide under where the water had been.
And in the middle of the bared floor, cord-wrapped and slumped against a fallen pillar, was a person.
Ardi's breath caught. "There!"
They crossed fast, the water held back on either side by Ardi's will, the footing slick and treacherous.
Kaguya swept ahead and cut down two altered things that came thrashing out of the retreating water, half-drowned monsters threaded with root, and Rayleigh put himself at the captive's side and dropped to a knee.
It was a man.
Middle-aged, soft-handed, a shopkeeper or a clerk, the kind of person who was never meant to end up anywhere near the deep.
The cord had wrapped him tight, and it had been on him a long time.
"Sir. Can you hear me?" Rayleigh cut the first loop with care.
The captive's eyes opened.
And they were still there. That was the worst of it.
There was still a person behind them, aware, frightened, looking up at Rayleigh's face and the swords and the parted water with a dawning, drowning hope.
"You," he breathed.
His voice was his own, raw and cracked and real, nothing like the stolen wails in the walls. "You came. I knew someone — I told them someone would come—"
Rayleigh's hands didn't stop working the cord, but he let his senses sink into him as he did it, and what he found there closed a cold hand around his chest.
'No.'
The cord hadn't just bound him.
It had been drawing on him this whole time, drinking the deep channel of him the way the viola drank the fishmonger, and it had already taken almost everything.
The body still breathed. The eyes still saw.
But the soul-thread that ran through a living person was frayed down to a last few strands, and it was unraveling faster now that the cord was coming off, and there was nothing under Kaidō's whole art that could weave a soul back once it had unraveled this far.
He was awake, he was hopeful.
And he was already gone, and only his body hadn't been told yet.
"Am I — I'm alright now?" He tried to smile. "You'll take me up? My daughter, she — she doesn't know where I—"
"Rayleigh." Ardi had come up beside him, water held in both walls behind her, and she'd seen his face.
She understood a beat before he did. "Rayleigh, can't you—"
"No," he said, very quietly.
The word cost him more than she knew.
He'd cut down five hundred of the Evilus and felt nothing.
He'd burned a kingdom and slept fine.
He did not, as a rule, let this reach him, because a man who let every death reach him would drown in it long before Orario ran out of ways to kill people.
But the shopkeeper on the floor was looking at him like he was a door out, and there was no door, and Rayleigh was the only one who could see the lock had no other side.
The armor slipped.
Just for a moment. His jaw tightened, and something moved behind his eyes that he didn't let anyone see, and his voice when it came was rougher than he meant it to be.
"What's your daughter's name?" he asked.
He blinked. "Sena. She's — she's seven."
"Then here's what you're going to do." Rayleigh got the last of the cord free and set his hand flat and gentle against his chest, and let a thread of Kaidō sink in, not to heal since there was nothing to heal, but to ease, to slow, to take the pain and the fear down to nothing while there was time to spare him that much
"You're going to think about Sena. Just her.... not any of this. You got taken, and you were brave, and you held on longer than anyone could ask, and now you get to rest. She'll know you didn't leave her on purpose. I'll see to it myself."
His frightened eyes went soft and far away.
The last strands of him were letting go, and Rayleigh's warmth met the fear and smoothed it flat, and the drowning hope on his face eased into something quiet.
"Sena," he said, to no one, to the memory of a small face. "Tell her I—"
He didn't finish.
He didn't need to.
The breath went out of him and didn't come back, and it went out easy, without terror, which was the only mercy left in the whole drowned hall, and Rayleigh had given it to him with his own hand.
For a moment nobody moved.
The water hung in its two walls. Kaguya stood with her blades lowered and her face carefully turned away, granting a privacy she rarely bothered with.
Ardi was crying, the tears running down on her face without a sound.
"That's worse," she whispered. "That's so much worse than the market. He was still in there! He was still—"
"I know." Rayleigh closed the dead man's eyes with two fingers and stood, and his hand was steady again, and his face was back behind the armor where it lived.
But he let her see, just once, that it had not been easy, because she of all of them had earned the truth.
"That's the one I'll carry. Not the fishmonger. This one." He looked at her. "You wanted to know how I do it. That's how. You carry the ones that were still in there, and you make the rest of them count for something."
Ardi wiped her face hard with the back of her wrist, and nodded, and stood a little straighter, and did not look away from him.
Then, across the drowned hall, someone started tapping.
But it wasn't the Knocker.
It was a man.
A living one, blue-threaded, frightened, crouched at the base of the far wall by the cracked seal and the violas, hammering a small iron rod against the stone in a fast, desperate rhythm.
Two of Corvin's people stood behind him with weapons half-raised, watching the water, watching the intruders, not sure which way to point.
The tapper struck out his pattern again. Two knocks. A pause. Three more.
The exact command that had opened walls for them from the start.
And the wall did not answer.
He struck it again, faster, sweat shining on his face in the green light. "Come on. Come on. Open, damn you—"
The stone stayed shut.
Rayleigh watched him, and the last piece of it turned over and settled.
'You don't control it.' He'd half-known since Vess.
Now he was watching it happen. The cell had the rhythms. They had the rod, the commands, the copied Daedalus knock.
And the labyrinth simply ignored them when it felt like it, because the knock had never been theirs to give.
It was Knossos's own old language, and Knossos answered whoever it pleased, which meant it answered the tall thing that belonged to it, and not the frightened men who thought they'd hired a monster.
Then the far wall opened anyway.
Not for the tapper but something beside him.
And the Knocker stepped through the stone, faceless and patient, one long arm hanging, and it did not so much as glance at the men who'd been calling it.
It looked across the drowned hall, past the two walls of held water straight at Rayleigh, the way a thing looks at the one piece on the board that matters.
The tapper scrambled back from it on his hands, all his commands forgotten.
One of Corvin's guards made a low, frightened sound and grabbed his companion's arm.
They weren't the masters here.
They never had been.
Rayleigh's hand settled on Benihime's hilt, and beside him he felt Ardi let out a slow breath and take a fresh grip on Nejibana, the grief folding down into resolve.
"Ardi," he said, eyes on the tall thing across the water. "Drop the walls."
"...What?"
"Drop the walls. All of it. On my mark." A cold, thin smile touched his mouth.
Alfia's voice was in his head, dry and certain. You take it apart.
"It doesn't like open water. And I've got a very cold sword and a very bad idea!"