SSS Awakening: I Become The Strongest Breeding Knight

Chapter 108: 108. The Quietest Crying I Have Ever Seen Came Through the Bars of a Root Cellar

The cells were two levels down, at the end of a long, damp passage with a floor of beaten earth.

They weren’t proper cells.

They were old root cellars, with iron grates bolted over the doorways and a lamp at the end of the row that gave off a thin, sickly blue light.

I smelled them before I saw them: stale sweat, old blood, and under it, the faint metallic stink of crystal.

A row of faces watched us through the bars, gaunt and unshaven and dull-eyed, and for a second I thought they were dead.

They weren’t... They were just very tired.

There were seventeen of them, I counted later, men and women in the torn remains of knights’ uniforms, with the Order’s badge still stitched on their sleeves.

Every one of them had a thin band of dull crystal strapped to the chest and another to the upper arm, and a thin cord ran from each band to a small box at the foot of the cell.

They were conductors, Laura said later.

Test subjects.

The bands pulled a little power out of the person wearing them every hour, so the people running the experiments could see how long it took them to run dry.

A few of the prisoners couldn’t stand.

One was lying on the floor with his eyes open, breathing in tiny shallow sips, and when I knelt by the grate and said his name, he didn’t turn his head.

”Holt,” I said. ”Keys.”

”Already looking.”

A hoarse whisper came from the next cell. ”Is that the tally stick?”

I turned.

A thin, gray-haired man in a storekeeper’s apron was gripping the bars with both hands, and he was staring at the object in Holt’s belt, a half of a split wooden rod with notches cut into it, the kind that clerks use to keep honest accounts.

Holt had carried it all the way from Greywater, and I’d forgotten it was there.

”Bram?” said Holt. ”Bram the storekeeper?”

The old man didn’t answer. He just pressed his forehead against the bars, and his shoulders began to shake, and no sound came out at all.

I’d never seen anyone cry so quietly.

Holt drew out the tally stick, and the old man reached through the grate and closed his fingers around the other end, where a matching notch was cut, and held it as if it were something alive.

”Alder sold me,” he said at last, in a scratchy whisper. ”Two weeks ago... He came into the stores, and he looked at me, and he said, I’m sorry, Bram... It’s nothing personal.”

”And he handed me to the Black men like a sack of oats.” He swallowed. ”I’d worked for that man for twelve years.”

”We’re going to get you out,” I said.

”I know you will.” He raised his eyes. ”I wasn’t sure anyone would.”

In the next cell, a young woman in a captain’s tabard had risen to her feet and was standing very straight with her chin up.

She was perhaps twenty-three, tall, with dark braided hair and a cut across one eyebrow that had scabbed over badly. Her uniform was filthy, but she wore it like armor.

”Captain Maren Doyle,” she said, in a voice that cracked at the edges. ”Third Northern Auxiliary... Is Lady Sanford with you?”

”She’s at the front gate, making a lot of noise,” I said.

Something flickered across Doyle’s face. It might have been a smile. ”Then she got my message.”

”You sent her a message?”

”Eleven days ago... a pigeon, from the depot.”

”I didn’t think it would arrive.” She leaned her forehead against the bars. ”She taught me the sword when I was seventeen.”

”I’d know that kind of noise anywhere.”

At the end of the row, in the last cell, a thin young man in a knight’s tabard sat with his back to the wall and his arms wrapped around his knees.

He lifted his head when we came near. He had a split lip and a bruise the color of an old plum around one eye, and he regarded us with the exhausted, patient interest of a man who has stopped expecting anything.

”Ser Tobias Wren,” said Doyle quietly. ”He investigated a depot in the south last spring.”

”Same sort of thing. Missing stores, forged ledgers...”

”They reassigned him three weeks later, and a month after that, he stopped answering letters.”

”I’m still here,” Tobias croaked. ”Mostly.”

”Can you walk?”

”I can crawl... Walking’s a different question.”

”We’ll work on it.”

Bram had been silent for a long time.

Now he reached out through the bars again and caught my sleeve, with fingers like dry twigs.

”There’s something else,” he said. ”You should know... They had a mirror upstairs.”

”A black glass one, hung on the wall in the director’s office...”

”I heard Director Varn speaking to someone through it...”

”At night, when they thought we were asleep.” His voice dropped. ”She never spoke to anyone like that...”

”She was respectful... She called him my lord T.”

”Who is he?”

”I don’t know... I never saw a face.”

”Only the glass, and the way it glowed, and her voice going quiet and careful. Like a girl talking to her father.”

I stored it away, along with Ledger and Phase Two and the signatures that didn’t match. It was one more piece in a puzzle I couldn’t see the shape of, and I didn’t know yet which pieces mattered.

Holt had found the keys. He took them off a hook beside the lamp, and the first lock clicked, and a gray, shaky man in a torn tabard stumbled out of his cell and burst into tears on the floor.

”Wait,” said Alicia.

She had come up beside me without a sound. She stood with her arms folded, studying the row of grates, and I could see her counting.

Seventeen people. Four who couldn’t stand.

A hundred and fifty yards of passage between us and the culvert, a dozen black-armored knights somewhere overhead, and a bell that was still ringing faintly through the rock.

”We take the ones who can walk first,” she said. ”Wynn and Dessa go with them back through the culvert.”

”The rest of us stay, and we keep the others calm, and we don’t open another door until the passage is clear.”

”They’re injured, Alicia.”

”I know.”

”Four of them can barely breathe.” I took a step toward the nearest cell. ”We can’t just leave them in there.”

”We open every door right now, and we carry them if we have to.”

”And when someone upstairs hears seventeen people shouting and crying and falling over each other in a stone tunnel?” Her voice was cold, very even, and I recognized it.

It was the voice she used when she was holding something very heavy and didn’t want anyone to see. ”We free them without losing them.”

”That’s the rule, Roland. Not just the ones we can reach the fastest.”

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it, because she was right, and because I’d been about to say something stupid, and because the man on the floor was looking up at me with an expression I didn’t want to see on anyone’s face ever again.

”I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

”Don’t be.” Her expression softened, just a fraction. ”I wanted to do the same thing.”

Wynn and Dessa were already moving.

They helped the first walkers out of the cells, three at a time, and led them back down the passage in a slow, shuffling line.

Bram went with them, clutching his tally stick, and stopped at the end of the row to look back at Garrick.

The two men didn’t say anything. Bram just touched his chest twice, over the heart, and Garrick nodded.

Doyle stayed. She had refused to leave until Sharon arrived, and nobody had the energy to argue with her.

I stood at the bars, listening to the footsteps fade. The hum beneath my boots had grown deeper. It was no longer in my teeth.

It was in my bones now, a slow, heavy, rolling pulse, like the heartbeat of something very big, asleep beneath the village, with its mouth slightly open.

”That’s the core,” said Garrick, very quietly, behind me. ”It’s right under us.”

I turned toward the stair at the end of the passage, a narrow iron spiral that descended into a darkness lit only by a pale violet glow.

Somewhere above us, a bell was still ringing, and somewhere in the mountain, two people I cared about were fighting their way down toward the same place.

I took a deep breath.

I checked my sword.

I told myself that I was ready.

’Hang on, Eveline,’ I thought. ’We’re coming.’