The stairs to the Undercroft did not creak; they sighed. It was the sound of paper fibers compressing under the weight of sins that had been buried for too long.
Inquisitor Valerius descended the spiral, his boots slipping on the stone steps. He wasn't walking; he was hauling. His left arm was wrapped around the waist of the Lord Arcanist, while his right hand pressed a cloth against the weeping burns on Sterling's side.
"You are… heavy," Valerius grunted, the strain tearing at the stitches in his own shoulder.
"I am substantial," Sterling wheezed. The once-pristine Lord of the Guilds was now a grotesque sketch of a man. His white suit was ash; his golden tattoos were dim, flickering like dying embers in a wet grate. He smelled of ozone and cooked meat.
"Drop me, Inquisitor. I can walk."
"You have one leg working and half a lung," Valerius snapped, dragging him down another step. "And if I drop you, I might accidentally step on your neck. Don't tempt me."
They reached the bottom. The cavernous library of the Excommunicated stretched out before them, a chaotic sprawl of forbidden knowledge illuminated by glowing moss and suspended jar-lights.
Mother Verdigris was waiting.
She stood behind her desk, her blindfolded face turned toward the entrance. She wasn't knitting this time. She was holding a jar of alchemical fire in one withered hand, poised to throw.
"I smell gold," Verdigris rasped. Her voice was dry leaves skittering on pavement. "Rotten, burned gold. You brought him here, Valerius? Into my house?"
"I brought the manual," Valerius said, dumping Sterling onto a pile of leather-bound grimoires. Sterling groaned, clutching his stump. "Vance is gone. The copy took her."
Verdigris tilted her head. "The Passenger drove the car away?"
"Hijacked," Sterling corrected, spitting golden ichor onto the floor. He tried to sit up, summoning a shred of his old arrogance. "And it wasn't a car. It was a tank."
Verdigris set the jar down. She navigated the clutter of her lair with the surety of a spider in its own web, stopping inches from Sterling. She reached out, her fingers hovering over his ruined face.
"Sixty years," she whispered. "I warned the Council. I told them ambition was a parasite. And look at you now. A creator eaten by his own design."
"Spare me the lecture, hag," Sterling coughed. "We have a problem. The entity—my… successor—has the Peacekeeper. And he has the girl's potential. He isn't just going to open the Door to the Void. He's going to invite the Void to dinner."
"He already summoned the Mud-Larks," Valerius said, leaning against a bookshelf to catch his breath. "He turned them. He has an army."
"Mud-Larks are bottom feeders," Verdigris dismissed. "Scavengers."
"Not anymore," Sterling said grimly. "He fed them my blood. He elevated them. They are kinetic batteries now. If he marches them to the surface… Obolus won't just fall. It will be consumed."
Valerius looked at the map of ley lines still pinned to the table. "How do we stop a Mindsink who is piloted by an Arcanist? Kaelen was dangerous enough when she was just hungry. Now? She's a weapon of mass destruction with a god complex."
"She's not gone," Verdigris said. She tapped her own temple. "I checked her eyes before she left. The sclera was stained. She metabolized the Dreg. That kind of corruption doesn't just wash out because a new tenant moves in."
"She's repressed," Sterling argued. "I designed the Cipher to overwrite the host's ego. It's a clean-room installation. She emptied her mind to save the city, and in doing so, she removed the only thing protecting her: her trauma."
Valerius froze. He looked at the empty spot on the table where the Peacekeeper had lain.
"Trauma," Valerius whispered.
He looked at Sterling. "You said she survived the upload because she blocked the shot. But then she purged the library. She became tabula rasa. That's why he could take over."
"Yes," Sterling said. "A vessel must be empty to be filled."
"Then we fill it back up," Valerius said. His grey eyes, usually so cold and flinty, burned with a desperate heat. "We don't exorcise the Passenger. We make the room uninhabitable. We make the host toxic again."
"Re-infection?" Verdigris cackled, a terrible, delighting sound. "You want to give the girl her ghosts back?"
"I want to give her a riot," Valerius said. "Sterling, you said you keep the memories of everyone you kill. You don't digest them."
Sterling stiffened. "My collection is… extensive."
"And Kaelen is a Mindsink," Valerius pressed. "She eats memories. If we can force-feed her—if we can dump a psychic payload into her that is so loud, so chaotic, and so painful that it shatters the Passenger's concentration—she might be able to take the wheel back."
"You want me to act as a psychic blood-bag?" Sterling sneered. "I am a Lord Arcanist!"
"You are a spare part," Valerius grabbed him by the lapels of his ruined suit. "And right now, you are the only ammunition we have. Can you project? Can you transmit your collection?"
Sterling hesitated. He looked at his stump. He looked at the darkness of the Undercroft.
"The Cipher is a receiver," Sterling admitted. "Verdigris was right. If I broadcast on the right frequency… I can upload. But the volume required… it would kill me. To transfer that much psychic weight without a physical connection? It will burn out my core."
"You're already dying," Verdigris pointed out helpfully. "Might as well go out making a noise."
Sterling looked at the blind woman, then at the Inquisitor. For a moment, the mask of the arrogant god slipped, revealing just a tired, broken old man.
"Fine," Sterling whispered. "But we need to get close. The signal degrades over distance. We need to be in the same room."
"He's going to the surface," Valerius said, checking his revolver. "To the center of the web. The Curtain Call."
"Then we go up," Verdigris said. She reached under the table and pulled out a long, curved blade made of black glass. It hummed with a low, hungry note. "And we bring the noise."
The Theater of the Mind
The ovation was deafening.
Kaelen sat in the front row, her hands gripping the armrests of her seat. The golden thread sewing her lips shut had been severed by the Mud-Lark projection, but she still couldn't speak. Her throat felt paralyzed, frozen by the sheer weight of the Passenger's will.
On the stage, the entity wearing her face was conducting a symphony. But there were no instruments.
The "music" was the sound of the city above being devoured.
The screen behind the stage showed the view through Kaelen's physical eyes. She was walking through the streets of Obolus. But it wasn't the city she knew.
The buildings were being dismantled.
The army of Golden Mud-Larks swarmed over the architecture like locusts. They were eating the mana from the streetlamps. They were tearing the warding runes from the walls. They were stripping the city of its magic, bite by bite, and feeding it back to the Passenger.
Every bite made Him stronger. Every bite pushed Kaelen further into the dark.
"Do you see, darling?" the Passenger boomed, turning to face the empty auditorium. "I don't need to sink the city. I am metabolizing it. Obolus will become me. And I... will become the Void."
Kaelen tried to stand. The Mud-Lark on her shoulder chittered, digging its claws into her velvet gown.
Move, she thought. Get up. Fight.
But her legs wouldn't obey. She was too light. She had no ballast. She had fired the Banker. She had fired her mother. She had fired the fear.
Without her trauma, she realized with a sickening jolt, she had no definition. She was just a ghost in a shell.
"You're fading," the Passenger noted, stepping off the stage. He walked down the aisle, towering over her. His golden eyes were filled with pity. "It's peaceful, isn't it? The silence? No more hunger. No more shaking. You can just... let go."
He reached out a hand to touch her forehead.
No, Kaelen thought.
She looked at the Mud-Lark. The scavenger. The bottom feeder.
It was ugly. It was dirty. It was hungry.
Kaelen closed her eyes. She didn't reach for a memory. She reached for the feeling she had suppressed for twenty years. The shame. The feeling of being a parasite. The feeling of being a rat in the walls of a golden city.
She grabbed the Mud-Lark. Not with her hands, but with her soul.
Sink, she commanded.
She didn't eat the Mud-Lark. She fused with it.
She embraced the rot. She embraced the slime.
The Passenger's hand stopped inches from her face. He frowned.
"Why do you smell like the river?"
Kaelen opened her eyes. They weren't violet. They weren't gold.
They were yellow. Reptilian. Savage.
She opened her mouth.
"I'm not fading," she rasped, and the voice was a wet, gurgling growl. "I'm evolving."
The theater shook. The velvet seats began to rot. Water—dark, brackish, and smelling of the Sump—began to seep up through the floorboards.
"What are you doing?" the Passenger hissed, backing away. "You are ruining the aesthetic!"
"I'm redecorating," Kaelen said, standing up.
She wasn't wearing the gown anymore. She was wearing rags made of river-weed and rusted iron. Her hands were claws.
"You wanted to eat the city?" Kaelen stepped forward, the water rising around her ankles. "You forgot one thing, Golden Boy."
She grinned, revealing teeth that were too sharp, too many, and stained with black ichor.
"I'm the one who eats."
CRACK.
The ceiling of the theater splintered. A beam of grey light shot down from the darkness above.
It wasn't the Void. It was a signal.
A broadcast.
Kaelen tilted her head. She could hear it. A screaming, chaotic, beautiful noise. It sounded like a thousand voices crying out in pain. It sounded like a library burning down.
And underneath it all, she heard a voice she recognized.
"Vance! Open the door!"
It was Valerius.
And he was bringing the baggage.
The Surface
Valerius stood on the roof of the Aqueduct, the wind whipping his torn coat. Below him, the army of Golden Mud-Larks was marching toward the Spire.
Beside him, Sterling was on his knees. The Lord Arcanist was glowing—not with health, but with the violent, unstable energy of a core breach. He was burning his own soul to fuel the transmission.
"Do it!" Valerius shouted over the roar of the wind.
Sterling threw his head back. His eyes burned out, turning to ash in their sockets. He opened his mouth and screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a psychic shockwave.
He didn't target the city. He targeted the Cipher.
He unleashed sixty years of murder. He unleashed the memory of Halloway turning to stone. He unleashed the screams of the experiments in the Deep Cisterns. He unleashed the guilt of a man who had tried to play god and failed.
He fired it all at Kaelen Vance.
The beam of psychic trauma hit the figure marching in the street below.
The entity stopped. It dropped the Peacekeeper. It clutched its head and shrieked—a sound of dual voices tearing each other apart.
Valerius watched, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"Catch it, Vance," he whispered. "Catch the nightmare."
In the street below, the figure fell to its knees. The golden light flared, flickered, and then...
It turned black.
Violet fire erupted from the figure's eyes, scorching the pavement. The Golden Mud-Larks stopped their march, sensing the shift in the alpha.
The figure stood up. It looked up at the roof of the Aqueduct.
It wasn't the Passenger.
"Valerius," the figure whispered, and the voice was amplified by the Dreg, booming across the broken city. "That tasted... terrible."
Kaelen Vance wiped a smear of black blood from her nose. She picked up the Peacekeeper.
She spun the cylinder. It clicked.
She looked at the army of monsters surrounding her.
"Seconds, anyone?"