Its broken note hung over Valdyr like a held breath while Neris, Maelin, and Sella climbed toward the central tower. Every stair shifted beneath them. The academy had begun rearranging itself around the sound, closing corridors behind them and opening others into darkness.
“Left,” Sella said.
Neris caught her before she fell. “The tower is straight ahead.”
“The tower is where the bell wants us.” Sella pressed a bloodless hand to the wall. Red-gold light moved beneath her skin in thin, frantic lines. “The lower lecture halls are being drawn upward. If we take the tower directly, the channels will use the students below as weight.”
Maelin looked toward the passage on their left. From behind its sealed doors came pounding. Then a voice cried, “Please! We’re still here!”
Neris closed her eyes for half a heartbeat.
The bell trembled above them. Something answered from beneath the foundations with a slow pressure that lifted dust from the steps.
“We free the halls,” she said. “Then we ring the bell on our terms.”
Maelin gave her a crooked look. “That sounds dangerously like a plan.”
“It’s mostly an objection.”
They turned left.
The lecture hall doors had been fused together by bands of gold script. The writing was not a command in the usual sense. It was a measurement: eight stable, three unstable, two unclaimed. Beneath the numbers ran a narrow channel of light, carrying the students’ magic toward the tower.
Neris touched the first band.
The door opened its attention to her.
For an instant, the academy showed her what it believed. The students inside were not frightened children or exhausted apprentices. They were quantities. Reservoirs. Possible vessels waiting for a use.
She unmade the word possible.
The gold script spasmed. A crack split the doors from top to bottom, and the students on the other side shoved through in a tangle of robes and bloodied hands. Some carried younger pupils. One girl had a broken wand strapped to her wrist. Another stared at the black mark burning over his heart.
“Get to the western stair,” Neris said. “The cistern. Follow anyone wearing a red thread.”
“Who are you?” someone asked.
Neris almost answered with her name. The unfinished door beneath her throat burned before she could speak.
Next
With the Court cut off and the lower channels collapsing inward, Neris must descend toward the ancient stair to rescue the remaining students before the unfinished door completes around her.
The black-marked boy staggered. His mark had become a hook, pulling him toward the tower. Neris seized his sleeve and laid her palm over his chest. The hook resisted. It was deeper than the dormitory’s selection ward, rooted in a channel that had already tasted his magic.
“Don’t let go,” he gasped.
“I’m not.”
Neris reached past the mark and found the academy’s hidden name for him. Not his birth name. Not even his student name. A harvest designation, folded around his identity like wire.
She pulled.
The boy screamed. The hook came free in a spray of dull gold and vanished beneath her fingers.
Far above, the bell gave a sudden, angry shudder.
The other students saw it. They began running.
Maelin turned to the broken doors and lifted both hands. Stormlight filled the hall behind them, not striking but forming a wall of blue-white pressure. “I’ll keep the channels from following,” she said. “Go.”
Sella caught Neris’s wrist. “Now.”
They left Maelin holding the passage.
The tower stair had become a spiral of exposed stone and open air. Through the gaps between steps, Neris saw the academy’s lower levels: lecture halls split apart, corridors flooded with red-gold light, students dragging themselves toward exits that shifted farther away each time they reached them.
The bell was not merely calling.
It was counting.
One pulse for every channel still connected. One tremor for every student the residual machinery could reach.
Sella climbed with her jaw clenched. “The bell was built after the lock.”
“You said the harvest channels were later additions.”
“The bell too. But it was made to imitate the lock’s voice.”
“To fool the Court?”
“To fool whatever listens below.” Sella’s breath shook. “The academy taught the gods to answer hunger. It taught the thing beneath us to answer a key.”
Neris looked at the symbol beneath her throat. The unfinished lines had lengthened while they climbed. One curve now crossed her collarbone, seeking another point to close against.
“What happens if it completes?”
Sella did not answer.
That was answer enough.
They reached the belfry.
The chamber had no roof. Snow blew through the open arches and vanished before touching the floor. The ritual bell hung from a framework of black iron, immense and green with age. Its surface was covered in names. Some had been carved deep into the metal. Others appeared only when the bell trembled.
Neris recognized one of them.
Aven Rusk.
His name was followed by eighty-seven short strokes, then a ragged empty space where the rest should have been.
The bell moved without wind.
A voice spoke from its bronze throat.
“Give one.”
The Starving Court appeared in the storm beyond the belfry. Their shapes were vast and indistinct, crowned heads pressing through cloud and snow. Their faces changed whenever Neris tried to focus on them: an old woman with winter in her eyes, a one-handed warrior, a bright figure with a mouth full of stars. All of them looked toward the bell.
“Give one,” they said together, and the stones beneath Neris’s feet answered.
The channels below surged. Neris felt them searching for the boy she had freed, for the students in the lower halls, for Maelin struggling behind her wall of stormlight.
Then they found her.
The unfinished door under her skin flared red-gold. A line shot from her throat to the bell’s lowest inscription. The Court leaned closer.
“There,” said the crowned shapes. “The door.”
Neris could not breathe. The bell’s claim entered her like cold water, not seizing her body but defining it. Door. Component. Passage.
Sella seized the line with both hands.
The lattice beneath her skin burst outward. Red-gold geometry wrapped around Neris’s shoulders and dragged the bell’s claim sideways. Sella screamed as the force tore through her.
“Unmake it!” she shouted.
“I can’t unmake a name I don’t have!”
“Then unmake what it means!”
Neris looked at the bell.
Not at the names. At the sentence beneath them, almost worn away by centuries of offerings.
HUNGER ABOVE.
A second line curved beneath it.
LOCK BELOW.
The academy had joined the two with a single word: offer.
Neris placed both hands against the bell.
The bronze was warm with stolen magic. It contained the last terror of hundreds of students, all reduced to tones and measurements. Aven’s eighty-seven strokes trembled under her palm.
Neris did not try to silence the bell.
She unmade the joining.
The word offer cracked.
The Court recoiled. Their shapes tore apart in the snow, their demand collapsing into overlapping cries. The harvest channels below went slack. In the lower halls, the red-gold light flickered out.
But the bell did not stop.
Without the word offer, the line beneath it brightened.
LOCK BELOW.
Something answered from the foundation.
Not the Court. Not the sleeper’s distant voice. The older presence pressed upward through the tower, and the bell’s iron frame bent around it. A black line opened across the floor, extending toward Neris’s feet.
The unfinished door beneath her throat pulled tight.
Sella’s lattice began to fail. Blood ran from her nose. “Neris, the seal is using you.”
“I know.”
“If it completes, it may open the lock.”
“I know.”
“Then move!”
Neris looked down through the open crack in the belfry floor. Far below, the ancient door waited with its hairline gap. Behind it, something turned a key that had no hand.
If she ran, the seal would follow. If she stayed, it would finish her.
Maelin’s storm flashed through the stairwell. She emerged at the edge of the belfry, staggering, with blue fire wrapped around one arm.
“Tell me where to hit,” she said.
Neris looked at the bell’s crown.
“Not the bell,” she said. “The framework.”
Maelin understood at once. She drove the storm upward.
Lightning struck the black iron supports. The bell dropped half a foot, its weight wrenching the remaining harvest lines free. Sella screamed and thrust her lattice into the gap. Neris unmade the final connection.
The bell cracked.
A sound escaped it—not a note, but a thousand voices exhaling at once. Below, the residual channels collapsed. The tower shook. The Court vanished from the storm, cut off from the academy’s call.
For one moment, Valdyr was silent.
Then the black line beneath Neris opened another inch.
The presence below spoke through the broken bell in a voice too deep for language, yet somehow clear.
“Door unfinished.”
The red-gold mark beneath Neris’s throat closed one curve.
Not enough to make a symbol. Enough to make a promise.
Across the tower, Maelin dropped to one knee. Sella sagged against Neris, conscious but barely. From below came the sound of students shouting in the darkened lecture halls.
The bell could no longer call the Court.
But the lower channels had not vanished. They had fallen inward, carrying their remaining light toward the ancient stair beneath Valdyr.
Neris stared into the opening.
“We have to get them out,” Maelin said.
Neris touched the unfinished door at her throat.
“No,” she said. “First we find out what it thinks I’m opening.”