The chalk marks led them to the far side of the tomb chamber, to an archway cut with the same hexagonal precision. Beyond it, a corridor. At the end of the corridor, light — green, flickering, wrong.
Elias broke into a run. "Master!"
"Elias, wait—" Maximus caught his arm. "That's not lamplight."
The boy stared at him, wild-eyed. "It's his work-light. I'd know it anywhere. He always —"
"Listen to me." Maximus kept his voice low. "Your master walked in three days ago. Whatever's making that light has had three days. You stay behind me."
They went down the corridor in formation — Maximus first, Lyra at his shoulder, Seraphina's staff raised, Pip's light dimmed to an ember-glow, Elias shaking behind them with the journal clutched to his chest.
The corridor opened into a round chamber, and the green light resolved into a summoning circle — vast, intricate, burned into the basalt floor. And standing in its center, hands moving through the patterns of the art, was Alaric.
He wore a scholar's robes, torn and stained. His hair was white. His eyes were green fire.
Around him, the circle was working. Shapes were pulling themselves up out of the stone — skeletal hounds with jaws of broken basalt, ribs caged around nothing, eyes like coals. One. Three. Six. They turned their skulls toward the archway in perfect unison.
"Master," Elias whispered. "No. No, no —"
Alaric's hands didn't stop moving. His head turned, and the green eyes found his apprentice, and the mouth smiled.
"Elias," Morikk said through the dead man's mouth. "How good. The boy brought friends."
And then, from the shadows behind the circle, something enormous rose from a broken throne.
The Old King had been tall in life — the sarcophagus said so. In death he was taller. He wore a crown of blackened gold and armor of pitted bronze, and in his hand was a greatsword the length of a man. His eyes were green fire. When he spoke, his voice was the grinding of stone on stone.
"A queen," he said, looking at Lyra. "They send a queen to kneel in my hall."
Lyra drew her sword. Her crimson magic kindled along the blade. "I kneel to no one, dead man."
The King smiled. "We shall see."
It happened all at once.
The skeletal hounds came first — a wave of snapping jaws and basalt claws, flowing around the circle's edge. Seraphina's staff came up and golden fire sheeted across them, but they came through it, burning, mindless. Pip shot upward, her light flaring sun-bright, and dove — a streak of fury, tearing at eyes and joints.
Maximus went for the King. The greatsword came down like a falling tower and he moved — the world stuttering, violet light crawling up his arms — and Abyssalfang met bronze in a scream of sparks. The impact traveled up his bones like a bell struck underwater. The King was strong. Old strength. The strength of something that had been waiting a very long time.
Lyra was beside him, her crimson blade weaving shields of red light, turning the King's backhand strokes aside. "Elias!" she shouted. "The circle — can you break it?"
Elias stood frozen, staring at his master. Alaric's hands wove the patterns, and more hounds pulled themselves from the stone, and Morikk's voice came out of the dead man's throat: "The boy was always slow. I told him — watch the hands, boy, the hands tell you everything —"
"His hands," Elias whispered. "The pattern — that's the third binding of — I know that pattern —"
He moved. Before anyone could stop him, he ran into the chamber, straight toward the circle's edge, the journal abandoned on the floor.
"Elias!" Maximus roared.
The boy stopped at the circle's rim. His hands came up — shaking, but sure — mirroring his master's gestures in reverse. Speaking the words backward. The unbinding.
"You taught me," Elias said, tears cutting through the dust on his face, "that everything called can be dismissed."
Alaric's hands faltered.
The hounds — all of them, mid-lunge — stopped. Their green eyes flickered. One by one, they came apart, bones clattering to the basalt, the light going out of them like snuffed candles.
The circle's glow died.
Alaric stood alone in the dark. His hands fell to his sides. And for a moment — just a moment — the green went out of his eyes, and they were brown, and human, and his.
"Elias," he said, in his own voice. "My boy. Finish it."
Elias walked forward. He picked up his master's ritual knife from the circle's edge. He was crying openly now, shoulders shaking, but his hand was steady.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
He drove the knife into his master's heart. Alaric smiled — a real smile, the first real thing in that room — and came apart like ash on wind.
The Old King roared — stone grinding, the chamber shaking — and swung his greatsword in a killing arc at Lyra's head.
She didn't dodge. She stepped in, inside the arc, her crimson magic flaring up her arms like wings — and drove her sword up through the gap in his bronze armor, under the ribs, into whatever passed for his heart.
Monarch to monarch. Queen to king.
The green fire in his eyes guttered. He looked down at her, almost surprised. "The door," he ground out, "is open. He is already — through —"
He collapsed. The crown rang on the basalt like a struck bell.
Silence. Dust settling. Pip's light, low and warm.
Elias sat on the floor beside a pile of gray ash that had been his master. He didn't make a sound. Lyra went to him — the queen who had just killed a king — and put her arms around the boy, and held him while he shook.
They rested. Nobody spoke. Maximus cleaned Abyssalfang. Seraphina tended a gash on Pip's arm that the little fairy insisted was "a scratch, it's a scratch, stop fussing."
And then, from the shaft at the chamber's center — from far, far below — came a sound.
A child's voice. Singing. Cheerful. Bright.
"Hush now, Annabelle, the brave and the small, the dark cannot keep you, not you at all—"
Pip went rigid. Her light flared white, then died to almost nothing.
"That's —" Her voice was a thread. "That's her song."
Seraphina stared. "Pip —"
"I only ever sang that to her." Pip's hands were shaking. "On the road. Just us, on Devastator. Nobody else heard it." She looked at Maximus, her eyes huge. "How does she know it down here?"
Nobody said it. They didn't have to. The voice sang on, sweet and tuneless and happy, rising up out of the dark like nothing bad had ever happened in the world.
Maximus looked at the shaft. At the dark below. At Lyra, whose face had gone very still.
"Morikk's been listening," he said quietly.
The singing went on.
They went down.