The stairs beneath Saint Orison’s were older than the chapel above them. That much was obvious before we reached the first landing. The stone steps had been worn smooth by decades of use, maybe centuries, yet the walls carried none of the usual stains of damp earth, careless torch smoke, or the scratches workers leave carrying crates through narrow passages. They were covered in lines instead, thin grooves carved into the stone in looping patterns, each one connected to another like musical notation stretched across a wall. Some had been filled with faded silver. Others were darkened with something that looked too much like dried blood for me to appreciate whatever artistic intent had gone into it.

The chapel above had been built to look welcoming. The stairway below had been built to listen.

"How charming," I muttered.

Captain Arthur walked ahead with his sword drawn, his broad shoulders nearly filling the narrow passage. Four Sonomi knights followed behind him, spaced carefully enough that no one could be taken from the rear without making a regrettable amount of noise. Abi walked beside me, and he’d stopped pretending to be relaxed some time back, which alone made the stairs feel colder.

"Don’t touch the walls," he said.

"I wasn’t planning to."

"I know. I’m telling the others."

One of the knights glanced at him, and Abi smiled brightly enough that the man looked away. Good instincts.

"Bernard remains above," I said. "He keeps the evacuation moving, maintains the record of everyone who entered the chapel, and sends word to my father if anything attempts to leave through the western routes."

"Yes, Your Excellency," Bernard replied from behind us.

"You are not coming down."

His pen paused above the small notebook in his hand. "Your Excellency, I can assist with documentation."

"You can assist by surviving."

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

"How persuasive," Abi said.

"I’m correct."

"That isn’t always the same thing."

"It is today."

Bernard bowed his head. "I’ll remain above."

"Good."

I stopped at the next landing. The sound below had changed. It was no longer a hymn, not exactly, the notes coming one at a time, spaced too far apart to be music and too deliberate to be accidental. Each one sank into the stone beneath our feet, and I could feel the vibration through the soles of my boots. One note. Silence. Another. Then a third. The pattern repeated, and something in the wall beside me whispered.

"Father."

My hand tightened around the hilt of my sword. The voice was Spiro’s, soft, frightened, too close.

"Father, it hurts."

Captain Arthur’s shoulders stiffened ahead of me, and one of the knights behind us inhaled sharply. Abi raised one hand, and the air went still, not silent, still, and the voice cut off halfway through the next word.

I looked at the wall. Nothing there but stone and silver filled grooves.

"Borrowed voices," I said.

"Yes," Abi replied quietly.

"Can they make anyone hear anything?"

"Not anyone. The sound searches for something it can use. Regret. Fear. Grief. Sometimes affection."

"How rude."

"It is."

I looked toward the knights. "No one answers anything they hear below this point. Not a child, not a friend, not a dead relative, not your commanding officer. If the voice sounds convincing, assume it’s lying. If it sounds desperate, assume it’s lying more."

The knights answered as one. "Yes, Your Excellency."

Arthur glanced over his shoulder. "What if it uses your voice?"

I considered that. "Then you should be especially cautious. I’m often unreasonable."

Abi laughed once, and it sounded wrong in the stairwell, too bright, too human.

The sound beneath us stopped, and for a few seconds the silence became so complete I could hear the small movements of everyone breathing around me. Then the wall to our right opened, not dramatically, no hidden mechanism groaning, no magical light flashing across the stairs. A narrow seam simply appeared in the stone, and part of the wall folded inward without a sound.

Beyond it lay a small chamber. Seven child sized chairs had been arranged in a circle, each with a strip of red cloth tied around one armrest. The cloth looked old. Too old.

I stepped inside. The room smelled of incense, dust, and something faintly sweet that made my skin crawl. A shallow brass bowl sat in the center of the floor, empty except for several thin threads trailing from it toward the chairs. No children were present, thank every ancient god who still had the decency to mind their own business, but the chairs had been used recently. One of them still held the faint warmth of a body.

"Someone was here," Arthur said.

"Yes."

"Recently?"

"Yes."

He looked toward the deeper passage. "We may still catch them."

"Perhaps." My attention stayed on the chair closest to the wall, where a name had been scratched into the wood, not carved with care but scratched hurriedly, as though someone had used a nail or a broken piece of metal.

Ansel.

I stared at it. Spiro had written that name. The child at the House of Gentle Mercy had remembered it, the name tied to the Crown Prince’s rite, the name buried in old ledgers and broken records and the frightened pauses of people who’d spent years pretending not to know what happened.

I touched nothing. "Bernard," I called.

He remained on the stairway outside the room. "Yes, Your Excellency?"

"Copy the name. Don’t write it anywhere exposed. Use the blue cipher."

His expression changed. He understood. "Yes, Your Excellency."

Abi stood near the doorway, his eyes fixed on the red cloth around the chairs. "The threads don’t lead downward."

"Where do they lead?"

He looked at the ceiling. "Up."

The bell tower. The sanctuary. The city. The sound network hadn’t been built only to carry a hymn through the aqueduct. It had been built to collect something from everyone who heard it. Fear. Grief. Prayer. Names.

How very disgusting.

I turned to Arthur. "Break the chairs."

His sword lifted, and Abi caught his wrist before it could fall. Arthur froze, and the corridor went quiet.

"Not like that," Abi said.

"Why?"

"The threads are tied into living echoes."

"Living children?"

"Not necessarily."

That answer didn’t improve anything. Abi stepped closer to the circle without crossing it, and the red cloth shifted slightly, though there was no wind to move it.

"Some of these are memories," he said. "Some are names. Some are pieces of people who heard the song too long and left something behind."

Arthur’s expression darkened. "So we can’t destroy them."

"We can," Abi said. "But we shouldn’t."

I looked at the chairs. A practical solution would have been to break everything, burn the room, and make sure no one ever used it again. My hand moved toward my sword, then stopped, not because I’d made some noble decision, but because I simply couldn’t bring myself to cut through those threads. They looked too thin and fragile, too much like someone waiting for a hand to pull them free.

How inconvenient.

"Untie them," I said.

Abi looked at me. "Brother."

"Do it carefully."

His expression turned unreadable for a moment before he nodded. "Of course."

Violet light gathered around his fingers, not bright enough to hurt the eyes, not violent enough to feel like an attack. It moved over the red threads slowly, separating them one by one from the brass bowl, and each time a thread loosened, a sound passed through the room. A child laughing. A woman humming. A man crying. A little voice whispering that it didn’t want to go downstairs.

The final thread came free, the brass bowl cracked, and the sound stopped. For one moment the room felt strangely warm. Not safe, not yet, but less crowded.

Abi lowered his hand. "That’s one surface anchor."

"How many more?"

He looked toward the lower passage. "Enough to annoy me."

"Then we have work."

We continued downward. The stairway narrowed past the chair chamber, forcing Arthur and the knights into single file, and the stone walls changed again, the old musical grooves giving way to script. Not temple script, not the modern ceremonial language used in royal documents and prayer books, but something older, the letters thin and curved, arranged in patterns that seemed to shift if I looked at them too long.

I disliked them. They felt familiar the way dreams sometimes feel familiar after waking, not because one remembered them, but because some part of the mind hadn’t finished forgetting.

Abi noticed me looking. "Don’t read those aloud."

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were trying to."

"I was examining them."

"You were mouthing the first shape."

I stopped. He was right. How irritating.

"What does it say?" Arthur asked.

Abi looked at the wall, then at me. "It says the same thing in several different ways."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s an honest one."

I stepped closer without touching the stone. The symbols repeated around a narrow archway ahead, one line carved deeper than the others.

The first receives. The second answers. The third opens.