SSS Awakening: I Become The Strongest Breeding Knight

Chapter 107: 107. They Built the Factory Under the Houses, So Nobody Could See It From Above

The hum grew louder as we went. It had started as something I could only feel in my teeth, but by the time the culvert began to slope upward, it was a low, steady drone that came up through the soles of my boots and made the water shiver on the floor.

Garrick stopped.

”That’s the sound,” he said.

He didn’t turn around. ”It’s what I felt under the ruins, the first night...”

”I thought I’d imagined it.”

”You didn’t.”

”No.” His voice was flat. ”I know.”

At the end of the tunnel, a ladder of rusted rungs led up to a wooden hatch, and through the cracks I could see a faint blue glow.

Dessa climbed first and pressed her ear to the planks. Then she held up two fingers, then one, then a closed fist, and slid the hatch aside by about an inch.

The first guard post was a plain stone room at the head of the ladder, with a table, a lamp, and a single black-armored knight sitting with his back to us and his boots up on a crate.

He was reading a book. I’m not making this up... It had a very lurid cover.

Alicia took a pebble from her pocket and tossed it across the room, where it clattered against a barrel.

The knight lowered his book and frowned and stood up.

As he turned, Laura came up out of the hatch, light as a cat, and brought the pommel of her sword down on the back of his helmet with a precise, ringing tink.

He folded like a wet sack.

”Good book?” she asked, picking it up.

”It’s got a dragon on the cover,” said Dessa, peering over her shoulder.

”I’m going to borrow it.”

Holt and Wynn tied the man with his own belt and a length of curtain cord and stuffed a rag in his mouth.

I noticed that Garrick was standing at the edge of the room, with his hand tightly around the crutch, watching the knight on the floor.

”He’s alive,” I said. ”We’re not killing anyone who’s down.”

”I know.” Garrick’s voice was rough. ”I wasn’t thinking about killing him...”

”I was thinking I used to be that man... Standing at a door, doing as I was told.” He looked up. ”I’ll fight them, Roland.”

”But I won’t be the one to end them while they can’t fight back... I did enough of that when I didn’t know better.”

”Nobody’s asking you to.”

”Good.”

”I mean it... If anyone gives you a hard time about it, send them to me.”

”I’ll send them to Sharon,” said Garrick. ”She’s scarier.”

That got a short, tired laugh out of everyone, and we went on.

Site Nine was built on top of a village.

I understood that as soon as we climbed out of the guard room and into the corridors beyond. The passages were low and square, with blue crystal lamps bolted every ten paces along the walls, and for the first minute, I thought we were walking through some kind of ordinary mine.

Then I noticed the doorways. Wooden frames, with iron hinges, set into the rock at regular intervals.

A threshold stone worn into a shallow dip by a hundred years of boots. A child’s chalk mark by one of the lintels.

”These were cellars,” Laura whispered. ”The old village cellars...”

”They’ve knocked through the walls and connected them to the mine tunnels.”

”They built it under the houses,” said Alicia.

”That’s why nobody saw it from the surface... There was nothing to see.”

Garrick didn’t say a word. He walked at the head of the column with his lantern held low, and his face was a flat, closed door.

The corridor ended in a pair of heavy iron doors, standing half open, and the hum that had been following us all this time was suddenly everywhere. I eased one door wide, and the six of us stepped through into the refinery.

It was a long gallery, three or four times the size of the biggest hall in the Citadel, with a vaulted ceiling braced by black timber and a floor of grooved stone.

Rows of iron racks ran down both sides, stacked floor to ceiling with crystals. Hundreds of them.

Blue ones, mostly, the clean cold blue of a healthy energy crystal, each the size of a loaf of bread and each tagged with a small brass plate. Laura walked to the nearest rack and read the plate, and her face went white.

”Elarion Eastern Ward, Lamp Station Twelve,” she said. ”Brightwater Mill. Fenwick Crossing.”

”These are... real. These are all from real places.”

”Every one of them is labeled with where it was taken.”

”Taken,” I said.

”Stolen... Out of their foundations. And out of the lamps that keep the villages warm.” She turned, and I saw her hand shaking. ”There must be two hundred of them in this rack alone.”

At the far end of the gallery, a row of huge glass tubes stood in a cradle of copper pipes, each taller than a man and full of pale light.

In each tube, a crystal hung suspended, slowly going gray as its glow drained down into a coil of wire at the base.

Next to the tubes stood a long iron furnace, red-hot and roaring, and from its mouth a stream of glowing shards poured into molds and came out as small, hard, brilliant stones.

Some were blue. Some were red.

I recognized the red ones. I’d seen one embedded in a dead man’s chest.

”They empty the crystals,” Laura said slowly. ”They drain them, and they melt down what’s left, and they recast the pieces into something else.”

”Resonance crystals... That’s how they make them.”

”That’s how they’ve been making the ones they put in people.”

”How do you know that?”

”Because I can read a process diagram, and somebody was kind enough to hang one on the wall.”

She was right. A large sheet of paper was pinned to a beam above the nearest furnace, covered in neat arrows and tidy labels, as if the whole thing were a bakery.

There were people in the gallery, too. I’d noticed them without really seeing them, because they weren’t soldiers.

About a dozen men and women in gray smocks moved between the tubes and the racks, carrying trays and adjusting valves and writing in ledgers.

Scientists and technicians.

They looked exhausted. One of them had a clipboard and no shoes.

When they saw us, they froze, and I watched the same expression cross twelve faces at once: not anger, or alarm, but a kind of dreadful, weary relief.

”Don’t shoot,” said the barefoot man, in a shaky voice. ”Please... I’m just a clerk.”

Alicia stepped forward with both hands open and empty, palms out, and the rest of us lowered our weapons.

”We’re not here to hurt anyone who isn’t hurting people,” she said. ”If you put down what you’re holding and come over here, nobody will touch you.”

”I give you my word as a Royal Knight.”

For a long second, nobody moved.

Then the barefoot man set down his clipboard, and a woman beside him put down a tray of tongs, and one by one the technicians walked over and stood against the wall with their hands up.

Three or four of them didn’t. I watched them turn and bolt for a side door, and I took a step to go after them, and Alicia caught my sleeve.

”Let them run,” she said quietly. ”I’d rather have the ones who stay.”

”They’ll warn the others.”

”They’ll warn the ones who can’t hear us anyway!”

”Look at the ones who stayed... They’re not afraid of us!”

”They’re afraid of what’s behind that door.”

She was right, of course. She was always right, which was one of her most annoying qualities.

Garrick hadn’t moved.

He was standing in front of an empty tube in the far corner of the gallery, a tall glass cylinder, dark and dry, with a brass plate bolted to its base. I walked over slowly and read the plate over his shoulder.

’HARROWMERE BARRIER CRYSTAL.’

’Collected: Year of the Red Moon, 3rd month.’

”A month before,” Garrick said.

”Before what?”

”Before the monsters came.” His voice came from a very long way off. ”I remember the night it went dark... We thought it was a storm.”

”The crystal guard stood watch on the old ward stone, and one minute it was shining and the next it wasn’t, and we all just stood there looking at it.”

”Corvane said it was a malfunction... He said the Order would send a repair crew.” He laid his palm against the cold glass. ”They sent a crew, all right.”

”They sent the one that took it.”

He stayed there for a long time.

Nobody tried to hurry him.

I put my hand on his shoulder and felt the muscle under it, rigid and trembling, and I didn’t say anything.

After a while, the trembling stopped.

”All right,” Garrick said. ”Where are the people?”