I Loaded the Occult Panel

The lord of the hunt knew the stakes better than anyone—after all, this counter-trap had been its own design.

Normally, when the Wild Hunt descended into the Deep Realm, tens of thousands of riders were tethered to a single rope; even if undercurrents scattered them along the way, there was nothing to fear.

Tonight, however, they had dropped into a sack. In this place, climbing up demanded a solid enough reason, whereas falling required nothing at all—plummet all the way to the bottom, and that waiting maw would swallow them whole.

The Anchor was a solid chunk of iron. Once it slipped into the sack, it sank faster than anything else, dragging all those tens of thousands of riders down with it.

Simply put, unless they cut the rope, even if someone figured out a way to climb, they would first have to play tug-of-war against that iron weight—a match nobody could ever win.

The lord of the hunt understood the logic perfectly well, yet its mouth was as stubborn as ever. Without missing a beat, it barked, ”Just two pieces of junk! Cut them loose, then—what’s there to ache over!”

The moment the words left its mouth, the rope lurched violently downward, yanking the few dozen riders at the very front so hard that they all pitched backward together.

The Old Scholar shouted at the top of his lungs, ”You can’t tell lies in this place!”

The lord of the hunt stayed silent, holding its breath in a sullen stew.

Earlier, when the Star Map Virtuoso brought her hands together, every thread had gone slack at once. The three stars of Orion’s belt had slid down the loosened lines, and even Sirius had tumbled right after them.Only now did it truly dawn on the lord of the hunt: something had to fall tonight no matter what, and the harder it clung to what it had, the more it would lose.

”Fine, I admit it—I can’t bear to part with them,” it muttered in a muffled, sulky voice. Immediately, the knot binding the Anchor at the end of the rope came undone.

That bronze ring had been pried off the Vasa, and the lord of the hunt had counted every single streak of green verdigris upon it.

On sunny days it took the ring out for a polish, and on overcast days it took it out for a polish too, muttering all the while about Stockholm in 1628.

When that warship left port that day, every gunport stood open, and the painted lion on the stern had its jaws stretched wide—as grand and imposing as could be.

As for the part where the ship sank not far outside the harbor, the lord of the hunt always skipped right over that.

Thoughts could not be hidden in the Spirit Realm, and every bit of the lord of the hunt’s rambling mental chatter drifted out into the open.

All tens of thousands of riders heard it loud and clear. Someone in the back rows truly couldn’t hold it in and let out a muffled snort of laughter.

The lord of the hunt couldn’t be bothered to care who was laughing. Looking up at the endless column of riders stretching out of sight, it gritted its teeth and said, ”Lost trinkets can always be collected again. These tens of thousands of riders are my real capital, and I don’t do losing business.”

The instant the knot gave way, the two supernatural items plummeted down the sack.

With a heavy gulp, that tongueless maw swallowed them down, loud enough for all tens of thousands of riders to hear.

Watching its treasures vanish into the dark before its very eyes, the lord of the hunt still didn’t forget to keep the ledger: ”One ship’s ring from the Vasa, half an iron nail—put the whole tab on the old priest’s account later.”

The rope was gone, yet the column kept sinking, only a fraction slower than before.

The Spirit Realm had always been this sort of place; going up was never easy.

Worse still, tonight happened to be the winter solstice, the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere.

From Shetland to Sicily, from Brittany to the foothills of the Ural Mountains, tens of millions of people across the Western Continent had fallen asleep beneath the same blanket of darkness.

Sleeping people shed dreams. On ordinary nights those wisps fell sparsely, drifting down a few strands at a time before scattering.

Tonight the night was long, and the dreams fell thick and heavy, drifting into the Spirit Realm strand after strand like falling snow.

Those wisps of dream were warm.

One settled on the cuff of a Lobsterback—inside was a baker dreaming of a room full of snow-white flour, the pre-war kind without a single speck of bran mixed in; another caught on the beard of the charcoal-hauling fellow—inside was a little girl dreaming of a talking goose that was telling her when her big brother would come home; and another landed on the Old Scholar’s roster—a quartermaster whose ledgers had finally balanced in his dream, leaving him weeping with joy in his sleep.

As the warm snow piled up, it grew heavy, much like a dream itself—making eyelids sting and necks go weak until all anyone wanted was to lie down inside that warmth.

A young man from Bergen had the thickest layer piled across his shoulders.

A wide patch of dream-fluff unfolded before him and pushed open a door.

Beyond the door lay a kitchen with a soup pot sitting on the stove, and a woman dozing beside the hearth.

Her husband had died in Champagne three months ago, and she was dreaming that he had come home.

In the dream her husband had no face. Coming through the door, he first stamped his feet twice on the mat; he walked with uneven shoulders, heavy on the left foot, light on the right.

What remained in the dream was just that empty outline of a body, standing in the doorway waiting for someone to step into it.

The shape fit the young man’s build to perfection. He took a step forward.

The rider beside him reached out to grab him and missed; he had already stepped inside.

He stamped his feet twice. The woman by the hearth looked up with a smile, and the saddle behind him stood empty. At the very tail end of the column, Lillian had been forcing herself not to look toward the flank ever since the sack first gaped open.

In the Spirit Realm, thoughts tended to drift outward.

The abyss had taken away her sense of cold and warmth, which in turn kept her thoughts from dispersing quite so fast.

Outside the sack, the Bronze Mirror was nearly finished recovering from the chaos wrought by the Smoking Mirror.

Richard kept his eyes shut, his eyeballs darting rapidly beneath his lids as [Speculation: Structural Formulation] was pushed to its absolute limit.

The reason needed to climb upward had to be found on one’s own.

A lie had no roots. The lord of the hunt had called those two items junk, when they were anything but.

To tell a lie here was to jump downward of one’s own accord.

A truth, however, rested on something that had genuinely happened; when a speaker stepped onto those words, they had solid ground beneath their feet.

He thought back to the night of the wedding banquet, to the poem he had recited to Matthew beneath the seven lamps.

Richard dropped the meaning straight into every mind, not missing a single one of the tens of thousands of riders.

”Listen closely. If you want to climb out, grab the belt of the person in front of you and speak one truth—the truer, the better. Every truth you speak will take you one step higher.”

A brief commotion rippled through the column as tens of thousands of hands reached forward.

Some grabbed belts, some grabbed horsetails, and one fellow grabbed the scabbard of the rider ahead of him, earning himself a fierce glare.

In all, tens of thousands of dead men and forty-some living souls hung suspended in midair as they slid downward, a noisy tangle of thoughts swirling around them.

Richard knew he had to go first so everyone could see that the method actually worked.

He glanced down into the depths of the sack and said, ”...If that nail that just fell was the cheapest thing in the lord of the hunt’s treasury, then let me rise.”

The Shadow floated upward.

The entire column froze for a beat, and a great sheet of frost shook loose from the lord of the hunt’s antlers. ”That nail had real history to it!”

No sooner had it snapped those words than it sank a little further itself. That live demonstration sent the tens of thousands of riders into even louder laughter, erasing the last of their doubts.

Lillian, at that moment, felt a quiet swell of shared pride.

Out of the tens of thousands of riders in the whole column, she alone knew why telling the truth worked here—it was the little game the two of them had played beside the lake.

First came pride, and right behind it came fear. By giving that prompt, the Honored Envoy had just placed himself in the most conspicuous spot of all.

Among this crowd of roughnecks, the Old Scholar had the sharpest head on his shoulders and was the first to follow suit.

Every dead person possessed the truest fact in the world: how they had died.

Tucking his roster under one arm, he gripped the belt of the rider ahead with his free hand and declared, ”If I died in my own bed in the winter of 1817, complaining that the porridge the maid boiled downstairs was too thick, then let me rise!”

He floated upward at once, and all tens of thousands of riders caught the scent of that pot of porridge.

Because the peculiar nature of the Spirit Realm bound their senses together, the Old Scholar—who belonged to the group that had died most peacefully—caused no real trouble yet.

Right after him, however, things took a nasty turn when the axe-wielding youth opened his mouth.

”If in 1066, I was holding Stamford Bridge...”

He gritted his teeth, the veins bulging on the hand clenched around the belt ahead of him: ”...and some Saxon bastard came floating down in a wooden barrel and drove a spear right up through me between the bridge planks...”

He shot upward fast—and then the icy gleam of a spearhead genuinely rammed straight up from between everyone’s legs. Several of the newcomers shrieked on the spot, and more than one clutched his belly and slumped sideways in the saddle.

The axe-wielding youth himself didn’t let out a peep, though he cursed as he climbed: ”Next time anyone tells me to cross a bridge, I’ll hack him down first.”

On his bed in the Imperial Capital, Richard’s leg twitched.

The wisp of spirit inside the Shadow was linked to him, so he had taken half the brunt of that spear at Stamford Bridge himself.

The Lobsterback straightened his collar and was just about to speak when the rider beside him yelped, ”Why have you got another face on top of yours?”

The Lobsterback reached up to feel his cheek; sure enough, another face was layered right over his own.

It was older than his, with a knife scar across the chin.

That face opened its eyes and began recounting an affair from 1658: the Lord Protector’s funeral, how they had placed a crown upon the Lord Protector’s effigy for two shillings a day...

”This is my granddad,” the Lobsterback blurted out, cutting in ahead of it. His voice was quiet, but his face flushed red—not a bit dignified.

”I listened to my granddad’s stories my whole life, and after enough telling, they started feeling like mine.”

The old face layered over his slowly closed its eyes.

The Lobsterback shot up a good distance. He let out a breath before speaking his own line: ”If at Fontenoy in 1745, our captain stood before the line, tipped his hat to the Francs, and invited them to fire first...”

He paused for a beat.

”...and they really did fire first, and a round of grapeshot tore right through my gut.”

All tens of thousands of them stood together in a wheat field shrouded in morning mist, facing a line of white uniforms across the way.

Then the grapeshot truly blossomed inside their bellies—a pain so fierce this time that several veteran riders doubled over in their saddles.

Now it was the turn of the charcoal-hauling fellow, his hand clenched tight around that charred piece of wood.

All tens of thousands of riders were waiting on him; the man usually had the loudest voice and the loosest tongue in the column, chiming in on everything along the way.

”If in 1666, the oven at the bakery in Pudding Lane...” He stopped short, then started over.

”The master went to bed early and told me to rake out the ashes.

”I’d had two pints that night, and the moment my head hit the pillow I was out cold.

”In the middle of the night a fire broke out downstairs. The master and his family only got out by climbing across the roof to the house next door.

”The maid was too scared to climb, so she stayed inside.”

He rocketed upward a massive distance, vaulting past several dozen riders ahead of him in a single bound.

At the same instant, tens of thousands of people found themselves standing before an attic window.

The floorboards grew hotter and hotter until the soles of their feet ached with the burn, yet the maid still didn’t dare climb out, watching helplessly as the smoke billowed up behind her.

Once that wave passed, nobody in the column spoke for a long while.

The charcoal-hauling fellow raised his head, his face smeared with black ash.

”Afterward, the city burned for four days, and even St. Paul’s Cathedral burned down and collapsed.

”Everyone said the fire started at that bakery. Not a single soul said it was the hired hand who raked the ashes.”

Among the newcomers was the youngest of the lot, a boy who hadn’t even shaved the peach fuzz off his lip yet.

Dazed and rattled by so many gruesome ways to die, his lips trembled as he began to speak: ”I died on Stamford Bridge.”

”I died at Fontenoy... I died in the bakery... I didn’t dare climb...”

He slid downward and was quickly swallowed by the blackness below.

At the very tail of the column, Lillian remained motionless while the rider in front of her howled in agony.

The spear at Stamford Bridge, the grapeshot at Fontenoy, the floorboards growing ever hotter by the attic window—when they reached her, nothing remained of any of them but a passing breeze.

The price exacted by the abyss had once driven her to hold her hand over a flame and prick her fingertips with needles on purpose; now, that very price was helping her instead.

While the riders ahead howled with pain, she alone stood amid the flames without even the hem of her skirt curling.

Fighting down a faint urge to laugh, Lillian tightened her grip on the belt ahead and kept her eyes forward.

The higher they went, the harder truths became to find.

When the living told the truth, they only had to rummage through their own lives; when the dead told the truth, they had to dig into whatever scraps remained after centuries of being ground down in the Wild Hunt.

One veteran rider opened his mouth several times, yet not a sound came out.

He could not remember his own name, much less what year he had died.

He looked down at his hands, rough and covered in calluses, and said, ”The lines I planed were straighter than any machine’s.”

That single truth set him floating upward; his craft was the last piece of himself he had left.

Several other veteran riders did not even have that much remaining.

Gaping silently with nothing left to say, their hands slowly faded where they gripped the belts ahead, dissolving like drops of ink in rushing water until they vanished altogether.

The Old Scholar flipped open his roster and wrote the word ”Dispersed” beside those names.

Turning back toward the front pages, he saw the tiny word ”Shattered” still sitting beside the Honored Envoy’s entry, the ink long since dry.

What was shattered might still be pieced back together; what was dispersed left nothing to gather at all.

The barefoot old fellow who had forgotten his name for six hundred years kept his head bowed. ”If the day I drowned... I was on my way to bring my daughter a pair of sheepskin shoes...”

The man had a pair of new shoes tucked inside his coat—sheepskin, with a ring of red thread stitched around the opening.

He was walking across a frozen river while a little girl stood in the doorway of a cabin on the far bank, stamping her bare feet against the biting cold.

”Maud!” The old fellow’s voice suddenly cracked with excitement. ”Her name was Maud!”

He shot upward a huge distance, vaulting right past the Lobsterback in a flash.

”Maud!” he shouted again, his eyes brimming with tears.

”Her name was Maud! She was seven that year! I measured her shoe size with a piece of straw rope!”

”We heard you, we heard you,” the Lobsterback grumbled from behind him, though his own throat sounded a little hoarse. ”Quit yelling and keep climbing.”

The old man kept shouting all the way up: ”Maud! Maud...”

Just then, the massive thing at the bottom of the well rolled over.

Richard had glimpsed it once before; back when he was working as an automatic scribe, his Inspiration had veered slightly too deep and been stung with sharp pain. Tonight the dream-fluff had piled up too thick, and with all the shouting overhead, the creature had been stirred awake as well.

Tens of thousands of sleeping faces were crammed tightly together across its bulk, eyes shut, lips opening and closing as they murmured in their sleep.

Tens of millions of people had fallen asleep tonight, and half the dream-fluff drifting down had been licked up by this thing, imprinting all those sleeping faces onto its hide.

One of the newcomers, born to a fisherman’s family in Aarhus, spared it a single glance and instinctively thought: ’That’s a whale.’

The moment that thought landed, it amounted to giving the creature a name.

Rule three on the back of Loki’s receipt: Do not name anything.

When the man first read that line, he had even let out a laugh, asking why anyone would bother writing down a rule like that.

Now, however, a fisherman’s instinct cost him his life—the massive creature’s attention had been drawn straight to him.

On its flank, one of the faces slowly opened its eyes and turned into his own face.

In that single heartbeat, his saddle stood empty; he had been swapped right into its hide.

The undercurrent kicked up by the monstrous whale’s roll tore loose anyone whose grip wasn’t tight enough.

One rider barely started to glance back before his fingers slipped, and he was swept away like a fallen leaf. The Old Scholar’s warning hammered into everyone’s minds:

Keep your eyes fixed on the back of the person in front of you! Don’t look to the side, don’t look down... don’t look at it!

All tens of thousands of riders dropped their heads at once, pinning their eyes to the backs directly ahead of them.

The monstrous whale’s flank brushed right past them, those sleeping faces murmuring dream-talk beside their ears.

Not a single soul dared raise their head, Richard included.

Once the undercurrent passed, the human chain climbed another stretch higher.

One newcomer had barely spoken a word the entire time.

He came from a fishing village near Stavanger, and before stepping into the mystical side he had spent three years gutting and slicing sardines in a cannery.

Clenching the belt ahead of him until his fingers went numb, he had only one thought turning over and over in his head.

”If I want to go home.”

The words were undeniably true, yet in the Spirit Realm, ”going home” already had an owner.

Last Christmas, across hundreds of miles of Flanders from the North Sea to the mountains, hundreds of thousands of living men had ceased fire at the same time, sung the same song together, and thought of going home all at once. The dead buried in the mud had stirred awake with them, floating up to gaze toward their homelands.

When the artillery roared again at dawn the next day, those awakened souls had been shoved straight back down into the mire.

Souls forced back down carried a far deeper grievance than souls that had never woken at all.

The instant the words left his mouth, hands reached up out of the blackness beneath his feet.

Thousands upon tens of thousands of them, all stretching westward with trembling fingertips.

One of those hands caught hold of him, turning him into just another hand reaching toward the west, his own fingertips trembling too.

Among the newcomers, the simple, thickset fellow who had blurted out his full name and background earlier had been holding his tongue the whole way.

Something had weighed on his heart for years, and he figured that if he let it out now, it would probably send him shooting up a huge distance.

Back then, his brother had fallen into the water; he knew how to swim, yet he had hesitated and never jumped in to save him.

Before he could even open his mouth, a voice in the dark pressed right up against his ear and asked, ”Why didn’t you go in the water?”

He froze for a split second. ”I was too scared to go in.”

Those words buoyed him upward by a huge margin, startling even himself.

Yet that had been an answer.

Rule two on the back of the receipt: Do not answer questions.

To answer was to consent.

A few seconds later, the voice returned.

This time it changed its tone—young, carrying a Lofoten accent, identical to the way his brother had called out to him from the stern right before going under: ”Big brother, save me!”

The man went rigid from head to toe.

His mouth fell open, the reply in his throat already pressing against the root of his tongue.

Right then, someone halfway up the human chain began humming a tune.

The voice was faint and off-key, the sort of thing a soldier might hum casually while crouching on a trench fire-step over cold rations: ”One call, don’t answer; two calls, don’t answer...”

It was Coleman. In the weeks before he died, a one-penny chapbook had been passed around his company until its corners were curled and dog-eared.

A sergeant who had worked the mines read it out the loudest, slapping his thigh afterward to swear that those were proper underground rules.

Coleman had probably picked it up back then.

”What’s wet, don’t claim; what’s cold, don’t claim...”

On May Day Eve, hundreds of thousands of people had sung that song.

Sung by so many voices, it had worn a deep groove into the Spirit Realm.

The moment Coleman started, the entire human chain fell into that groove and hummed along together.

Tens of thousands of dead men and dozens of living souls—some remembered the lyrics, some only knew the tune, and some couldn’t even carry the melody, yet they all hummed along in a low, steady drone.

”Big brother, come down into the water!” the voice called a second time.

Riding along that worn groove, the cry slid harmlessly past the man’s ear.

He kept humming as tears rolled down his cheeks, and the ”aye” caught in his mouth never came out.

”Big brother...” That was the third call, and it slid right past him too.

The voice lingered for a moment and did not call again; unanswered three times, it went off to find the next target.

Weeping like a child, the man climbed upward, the hand clutching the belt ahead of him shaking nonstop.

Lying in bed, Richard heard the lyrics he had written himself sung back to him by his dead friend, and his fingers closed tightly around the corner of his quilt.

After humming the song through once, Coleman hummed it all over again from the beginning before finally remembering that he needed to climb too.

He thought for a moment, then said, ”If I held my breath for two minutes and eleven seconds...”

Up he went—forcing all tens of thousands of riders to hold their breath right along with him until their lungs ached, their noses filled with the sickly sweet stench of rotten pineapple and pepper.

Several newcomers couldn’t hold out and gasped their breath out at once.

Coleman thought a moment longer, then added, ”If someone still owes me a meal, let me rise.”

He rose again. Over on the other side, the Old Scholar had promised the Honored Envoy that he would keep an eye on the recruits.

Having already reached the top himself, he flipped open his roster and began calling out the names written there one by one toward the abyss below.

”John Svensson!”

No one answered. The bearded man kept his head bowed; that wasn’t his real name.

”Peter Larsen!”

The skinny deserter with the bayonet scar behind his ear twitched his lips.

He wanted badly to answer, yet something seemed to gag his mouth—that name didn’t belong to him at all.

The Old Scholar called out nine names. Not one of the nine answered, and one after another they slid downward.

The bearded man clung to the rider ahead of him in a death grip, dragging the man down a little with him.

That rider glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes full of helpless regret.

The bearded man let out a sigh and opened his hand.

Down he fell, and before long the sound of swallowing echoed up from the bottom of the well. The Norse table was bringing up the rear section of the column.

Loki spoke first—he had never come out the loser in a battle of tongues in his entire life.

”If what I am saying right now is a lie...”

That single sentence whipped the entire human chain violently from side to side, sending several hundred riders ahead and behind swaying wildly until the Lobsterback nearly threw up a breakfast that had stopped existing centuries ago.

”Loki!” Hela barked.

Loki shut his mouth, waited a moment, and switched to another line: ”If I’m afraid of dying.”

Up he went.

Looking down at his own hands, Loki spoke again: ”If I’m afraid of becoming useless, afraid of being replaced, afraid that one day the lord of the hunt will look at me the same way it looked at that nail...”

He shot upward a massive distance in one bound.

Right as his surge ended, an unguarded thought slipped out of his head as well: ’Those dozen or so newcomers who just fell in aren’t getting their ticket money refunded.’ A foul stench promptly burst open right above his crown.

”...Honestly, you,” Freyja muttered, pinching her nose with one hand while clutching the belt ahead with the other. ”Still counting coins at a time like this.”

”I told the truth,” Loki protested, sounding thoroughly wronged.

”Even a truth can stink.”

Freyja thought it over, then spoke up herself: ”In all the time I’ve run my pawnshop, I have never once offered a fair price.”

Up she went too; this place only cared whether the words were true, not whether they were good or bad.

Hela kept her head lowered. ”This gate of the Underworld is borrowed. I’m afraid of dead people.”

Tyr gripped Hela’s belt, his single hand clenched tight.

”I didn’t lose my right hand on a battlefield.”

He rose upward, jaw set, not uttering another word.

As for the remaining newcomers, the truths they came up with were none too respectable: ”If I stole pipe tobacco from the foreman back at the mine, let me rise.”

”If I only came here because I was drowning in debt.”

”If the thing I fear most in this life is my wife.”

The one who spoke that last line was a round-faced fellow, and he rocketed upward a huge distance—higher than several truths about dying had carried their speakers.

The tens of thousands of riders laughed again, climbing higher as they chuckled.

Lillian hung at the very end of the column.

When the newcomer ahead of her finished confessing to stealing tobacco and rose a stretch, his belt tugged her up a little way with him.

Now she had to speak for herself.

She opened her mouth, and the first thing that surfaced in her mind was the line printed on her passport.

For three months she had used that name to cross checkpoints, stay at inns, and fill out sanatorium forms until her tongue knew it better than her brain did.

”My name is Liese Haug...”

She sank fast.

The belt of the man ahead jerked taut, and he threw a panicked glance back over his shoulder. Biting her lip, Lillian swallowed that name back down and slipped her hand into her overcoat pocket.

Back when they had agreed to carry matches as a signal when they met, she had genuinely gone out and bought three whole boxes at once.

He had also told her one more thing: if a day ever came when she couldn’t remember her own name, she should strike a match and see.

She drew one out and rolled it between her fingers.

She could not speak her true name here.

To speak aloud in this place was to speak to tens of thousands of ears—and to the mirror waiting outside the sack.

Fixing her eyes on the matchstick, Lillian said, ”I am not Liese Haug, and I am not Danish.”

Up she went.

”I was born on the third of December.”

Rising a little further, she searched her memory and lit upon a very small thing: ”When I was fifteen, I filled out a library borrowing form and wrote my birthday backward once.”

This time, her ascent was steady and sure.

Everyone ahead and behind was moving upward, tens of thousands of people building a stairway out of one truth after another.

Climbing and watching all the while, she saw the rift overhead drawing closer and closer.

Right as she was about to reach it, the darkness pressed close to her ear and whispered a question: ”Who is he?”

Lillian’s fingers clenched tight at once.

Inside her frozen heart, longing spilled over beyond her control: ’He’s the one who knocks twice short and once long, the one whose mouth tasted of oranges beside the lake. Who he is, I no longer care to tell.’

She remembered the table by the window on the second floor of the library.

Afternoon sunlight fell across the desk where that person sat with his back to her and his head bowed, the tip of his pen rustling softly across the paper for a whole afternoon on end.

Though there was neither a face nor a name in that thought, all tens of thousands of riders felt a sudden warmth wash over them at once. Lillian felt herself growing warm too.

Here in the Spirit Realm, inside this devouring sack, she felt warm again—as warm as his lips had been beside the lake that day.

Then she spoke a truth that belonged to her alone: ”If I like him.”

In a single bound she shot right past Loki, Hela, and the rest, practically brushing the mouth of the well.

At the same instant, the taste of orange peel rose in the mouths of all tens of thousands of riders—first bitter, then sweet.

The Lobsterback smacked his lips, then smacked them again as if trying to make sure of what he was tasting.

The charcoal-hauling fellow stared blankly for a long moment before turning to ask the rider beside him, ”What year’s oranges are these?”

The man next to him shook his head. The charcoal-hauler smacked his lips again and muttered, ”...I haven’t had an orange in over two hundred years.”

Loki craned his neck and looked all around, swiveling his head several times to see who had spoken that line.

The human chain was too long, offering nothing but backs ahead and behind; seeing nothing, he could only smack his lips as well.

That trace of warmth flowed along the human chain and drifted out to the flank, brushing against the mask inscribed with the Golden Snake Biting Its Tail.

The door of the mask was shut tight, so only the faintest tail end of it seeped through the crack. Lying in bed, Richard caught a very faint taste of orange on the tip of his tongue before it vanished in an instant.

Beside the bed, his maternal grandfather asked, ”Cold?”

”Not cold. Quite warm,” Richard said with a faint smile.

One after another, the riders climbed back out through the mouth of the well while the Old Scholar stood at the front taking roll.

Out of forty-some newcomers, fewer than twenty had made it back up.

The barefoot old fellow crawled out of the rift, took two steps forward, and suddenly stopped dead.

He looked back over his shoulder, tears still clinging to his cheeks, his expression utterly blank.

Turning to the Lobsterback, he asked, ”That name I was shouting just now—what was it again?”

The Lobsterback opened his mouth, then stopped.

”...It was a little girl,” the old fellow murmured, straining hard to remember. ”Seven years old. I measured her shoe size with a piece of straw rope.”

That was all he had left. Standing there for a moment, the old fellow looked down at his bare feet, then turned and walked on.

The lord of the hunt was the very last. In truth, it could have climbed out on its own without speaking a word of truth.

Even so, it hesitated for a moment before opening its mouth: ”If the thing I ache over most in this life is money...”

Like a rocket leaving the launchpad, the lord of the hunt shot straight to the top in a single breath, flinging a great shower of frost from its antler tips.

All tens of thousands of riders craned their necks to stare up at it.

”...What are you looking at?”

The charcoal-hauling fellow held it in for a long while before finally squeezing out, ”That one... was way too true.”

”Shut your mouth.”

Flipping to the very last page of his roster, the Old Scholar jotted down: Spoken by the party in question; truest of all.

Halfway up the ascent, the Shadow bent down, stuffed the Antler Tip Token wrapped in reins along with the slip reading ”The bearer of this acts on behalf of the lord of the hunt” into the little hound’s mouth, and pointed toward the column.

With the antler held in its jaws, the little hound gave him one last reluctant look before turning to dart back into the pack. His great-grandfather’s Bone Needle was still tucked inside the inner pocket of Richard’s real body, so it couldn’t be used tonight.

Reaching inside his cloak, the Shadow drew out the new-model ether grenades that Prometheus had delivered in mid-December.

If Prometheus and that Major Adept artisan ever learned that their grenades were being used to draw the attention of Virtuosos, they would have every right to be proud.

The Shadow pulled the stoppers, pushed a thread of ether from his fingertips to light the fuses, and tossed them down into the sack.

Four muffled blasts quickly detonated deep inside the sack.

A scorched stench billowed from the sack’s inner walls, and that tongueless maw twitched violently, like a man who had bitten into a mouthful of pungent raw ginger.

Both Virtuosos snapped their gazes toward the flank at the exact same instant.

Beneath the sack, that cavernous maw gaped wider than ever, while the gaze pressing out from behind the Bronze Mirror weighed so heavily upon the surroundings that the very light shifted color.