Chương 20: The Long Way Up

The quiet lasted three steps. The prisoner pulled him out of the red chamber, around the dead Warden's hanging arm, and through a gap in the back wall he hadn't seen until the light found it. Kaito went with it, because his hand was in its hand and there was no version of stopping that made any sense. The red light came off the thing and lit the way. His own key was dead in his fist now, dark, every line in it gone out the second the seal broke. He'd already worked out he wasn't getting that light back.

So he followed the glow of the thing he'd just let loose, because the only other thing on offer was the dark. There was another road behind the chamber. Narrower. Going up.

"This way," the prisoner said. It moved easy in the black, sure of every step, a thing that had walked this stair before there was a Helvast or a guild or a man named Kaito.

"Mind the third step. It was loose when they cut it." He minded the third step. It was loose.

'It remembers a loose stair from ten thousand years ago,' he thought.

'Great. Wonderful. I'm taking the basement tour with the oldest thing in the world.' They climbed. The prisoner got steadier the higher they went. Down in the cell it had been thin and folded and barely able to lift its head, and now it walked like a man who'd just remembered he had legs, the red running off it brighter with every turn of the stair. It was feeding on something. Kaito didn't ask what. He had a short list of things he didn't want answers to yet, and that was near the top of it.

"You went quiet on me," he said instead.

"The god. The second I took your hand it stopped talking. It's been on my back for two weeks and now there's nothing. That's worse, isn't it. The nothing."

"Much worse," the prisoner said, and didn't slow down.

"When it talks at you, it's still deciding. When it goes quiet, it's decided." It took a turn in the stair without looking.

"It can't follow us down here. It never could. That's the whole reason this road exists. But it doesn't need to follow you, Architect. It only needs to know where a hole in the ground comes back up. And then it can simply be standing there when you do." Kaito's stomach dropped a notch.

"You said this way had no map it knew."

"The road has no map it knows. I'm the only thing left that remembers the road." The prisoner's voice stayed easy.

"The door at the top is a different question. Doors come up into the world. The world is the one thing the god can see all of." A pause.

"We'll find out together how much has changed up there since I last used it. That's the part I can't promise you."

"That's reassuring. Love that for us."

"You wanted the truth. That's what it costs. It's never the comfortable size."

"Then give me something now," he said.

"On account. You're getting feet and a road out, so pay a little up front. Something small. Something I can check, so I know you're not just a mouth that learned my face on the way out of the box." Red went quiet for a few steps.

"All right. Something small. The Warden you broke." It didn't turn around.

"The makers didn't build it blind by accident, and they didn't do it to be cruel. They did it to be kind. A thing that stands over a door for ten thousand years, never allowed to open it, never told what's behind it or why — leave that thing able to wonder, and you haven't built a guard. You've built a prisoner that thinks it's free. So they took the wondering out of it. It bothered you, down there, how blind and loyal it was. It should have. You were right to feel it." A beat.

"That one's on the house. The rest isn't." It was a small thing. It was also true, and he knew it was true the moment he heard it, because he'd stood in front of that construct and felt exactly that and never found the words for it.

'It read that off me,' he thought.

'Or it knows. I still can't tell which, and that's the whole game with this thing.' He let his free hand close around the dead key and made himself keep climbing. Then the hum came back. It came up out of the stone around them as they climbed, low and broken, the sound he'd lived inside his whole time in this world and lost the second he fell off the map. The System.

Getting closer to the surface meant getting back into the part of the world the god had built, and the god's world had a sound, and the sound was coming back. And riding in on the front of it, thin at first, then sharp, then all at once, came a voice he knew. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

'Kaito.' Sable. Hard and fast and frightened in a way he'd never once heard her.

'Kaito, where have you — what is that. What is that next to you. What did you do.' He nearly missed a step.

'You're back.'

'Answer me. The thing holding your hand. What is it.'

'I don't know,' he thought.

'That's the honest answer. It was in a box under the world and the box had a god's lock and a maker's lock and I opened it.' He kept his face flat, because the prisoner was a step above him and he didn't trust it not to read his face the way it had read the shard off it.

'It says it has answers. It says it knows what you are.' The silence that came back from Sable was the loudest thing she'd ever not said.

'See,' he thought, 'that's the trouble with you. I ask it a question and it says a thing. I ask you a question and you go quiet, same as the god. You've both got the same tell.'

'Listen to me.' Sable's voice came back low and urgent.

'I have never told you to do a single thing. I have asked. I'm not asking now. Get away from it. Whatever it offered you, the price is worse than not knowing. That thing was put down there by the only two powers in the world that agree on anything, and they agreed on that. Do you understand what it takes to make them agree.'

'Funny,' he thought.

'It said almost exactly that. Used it as a reason to trust it. You're using it as a reason to run.' He climbed another two steps.

'So which is it, Sable. Is it dangerous to me? Or is it dangerous to you, because it'll tell me the things you've spent two weeks not telling me?' She didn't answer that cleanly either. She never lied to him. He'd learned to listen to the shape of what she wouldn't say, and the shape of this one was an admission.

"The voice is back," the prisoner said from above him. It didn't turn around.

"I can tell. Your feet got clumsy and your face went somewhere else." It sounded almost kind, which was the worst it ever sounded.

"Let me guess what it's telling you. That I'm the monster. That you've made a terrible mistake. That you should leave me on this stair and run." A soft sound that might have been a laugh.

"Ask it something for me, since it won't talk to me directly. Ask it why, in two weeks of riding around in your skull, it never once mentioned there was a thing like me under the world at all." Kaito climbed in silence for a moment.

'He's got a point,' he thought, careful, aiming it at Sable.

'You knew the deep road existed. You sent me toward the mountain. You knew everything down here was sealed off from the god. Did you know this was here?'

'... Not this,' Sable said.

'Not exactly this.'

'But something.'

'But something.' And then, quieter, the closest to begging he'd ever heard out of her: 'Please. I am asking you. Not telling. Get to open sky, get away from it, and I will tell you more than I have ever told you. I promise you that. Just don't let it be the one that fills in the blanks first.' So there it was, plain. She wasn't scared he'd die. She was scared he'd find out.

And he filed that next to everything else he'd been filing, the long list of people and gods and dead things that all wanted to be the one who got to decide what Kaito Haruki was allowed to know about himself. He was so done with the list.

"What do I call you," he said out loud, to the prisoner.

"I'm not climbing a mile of stairs going 'hey, you.' And I'm guessing your real name's part of the later bill."

"It is."

"Then you're Red. Because of the glow. Don't make it weird."

"As you like, Architect." It didn't sound offended. It didn't sound like anything.

"We're near the top. Quiet now. Whatever's up there won't have heard us coming, and that's the only edge we've got." The stair ended at a flat landing and a door. It wasn't a door anymore, not really. It had been one, round and ringed in the fine-cut lines like the keep below, but the lines were dark and the stone around it had been broken into and patched over, more than once, by hands that weren't makers' hands.

Somebody up there had found the top of the deep road a long time after the makers left, and they'd built onto it. Mortar. Iron. Newer stone laid over old.

"Huh," Red said, and for the first time it didn't sound sure.

"That wasn't here."

"Yeah," Kaito said.

"World grew while you were out. Move." He put his hand flat against the patched stone and threw his Sight through it, the way he read a wall before he dropped it, to see what was waiting on the other side before he ever opened the door. The hum came through loud. Red came through loud too, real System red, the god's own light, a whole floor of it. Not a cellar. Not wilderness. People. Dozens of values, packed close, registered and counted, moving around above his head in a space the size of a hall.

And in the middle of all of it, standing close to the patched door, facing it, was one value he couldn't read at all. Not blank like the road-things. Not blue like the makers. It sat in his Sight as a hole with the god's red pouring into it and around it and through it, the heaviest weight of AXIOM he had ever felt gathered into one standing shape, and it was already turned toward the door, square to it, like it had been standing there waiting to see exactly where and when the stair would open.

He ran the options in about a second, the cold way, and hated all of them. He couldn't fight that thing. He'd watched something a tenth that heavy throw him around a tower. Behind him was a mile of stair and a dead end with a god's basement at the bottom of it. And the room past the door was packed wall to wall with counted, registered people, which meant the moment that door opened, every last one of them would see exactly what came up the stairs. Kaito pulled his hand back off the stone.

"Red," he said, very quietly.

"How fast can you put that light out."