The shaft went down past the reach of Pip's light.
They followed it — a narrow stair this time, not the grand spiral but a servants' cut, rough and steep. The singing rose to meet them. Closer now. Clearer.
"Hush now, Annabelle, the brave and the small..."
Pip had gone silent. She rode on Maximus's shoulder, her hands twisted in his collar, her light turned down to a faint ember. She hadn't said a word since the song started.
The stair ended at an archway. Beyond it, a chamber that made the tomb above look like a cellar.
It was round, and vast, and at its center stood a door — no, the frame of a door, the door itself shattered outward, great slabs of basalt strewn across the floor like thrown cards. And beyond the broken door —
Maximus stopped breathing.
It was a heart. There was no other word for it. A crystalline heart the size of a house, suspended in the dark, pulsing with slow violet light. Each pulse sent a ripple through the air, like heat off a forge. The stone floor beneath it was melted — not burned, not cracked, but flowed, as if reality itself went soft near it.
"That's it," Elias breathed. "That's what he was studying. The Heartstone." He grabbed Maximus's arm. "Don't touch it. Don't — my master said don't even look at it too long. It notices."
And sitting on the floor in front of the broken door, with her back to the Heartstone's light, singing to herself and braiding something into her hair —
A little girl.
"Annabelle," Pip whispered.
She was thin. Her dress was torn and filthy. Her feet were bare and cut. But she was alive, and she was singing Pip's song, and when Pip's light flared brighter she looked up —
And her whole face lit up like sunrise.
"Pip!" She scrambled to her feet. "Pip! You came! I knew you would, I told —" She stopped. Stared. "You're all here. You all came."
Pip was already moving — a streak of light across the chamber — and then she was on Annabelle, arms around her neck, both of them crying. "You stupid brave little — don't you ever —"
"I hid," Annabelle babbled, clinging to her. "When the green-eyed man came I hid like you told me, in the root cellar, and then he found me anyway, but he didn't hurt me, he said I was special, he said —"
"It's all right." Lyra was kneeling beside them, her hand on Annabelle's hair. Her voice was breaking. "You're all right now. We've got you."
Annabelle looked up at her. Smiled. "Your Majesty. You're crying."
"Don't worry about it."
Maximus couldn't move. He stood in the archway with Abyssalfang humming against his back, watching the little girl laugh through her tears, watching Pip hold her like she'd never let go —
Annabelle went still.
It was so sudden that for a heartbeat nobody understood. One moment she was laughing. The next her spine straightened, her hands fell to her sides, and her eyes —
Green fire.
"Pip," Morikk said through Annabelle's mouth. "How touching."
Pip recoiled as if she'd been burned. "No. No no no — Annabelle —"
"Shall I give her back?" The small face smiled. "No. I think I'll keep her a little longer. She's comfortable."
"Let her go!" Lyra was on her feet, sword drawn, crimson magic crackling. "Fight us, you coward —"
"Oh, I intend to." Annabelle's head tilted. "But first — introductions."
The air tore.
It didn't open like a door. It ripped, like cloth, a vertical gash in the middle of the chamber — and through it stepped a man.
He was tall. He wore black robes that didn't move right, as if the air around him flowed uphill. His face was handsome in the way statues are handsome — too still, too perfect. His eyes were green fire.
But if you looked close — and Maximus looked close — you could see the seams. At the joints. At the throat. The places where the pieces didn't quite meet.
Not flesh. A construct. A thing built to look like a man.
"Hello, brother," Morikk said.