The last time Jin had walked through the capital, he'd been sixteen, and he'd been in chains.
Not real chains. Just a line of conscripts roped together at the wrist so nobody would run, marched through the side streets at dawn on the way to the northern front, with a sergeant at each end and a priest at the front blessing them as they went. He remembered the smell of the tanneries, and a woman throwing a bucket of slops out of a window without looking, and not much else. They hadn't been allowed to look at the nice parts.
He looked now.
The streets were paved in pale stone and washed clean. Crystal lamps on every corner, still glowing in the morning light. Shops with glass windows as tall as a man, full of things he didn't recognise: little brass boxes that played music, boots with no laces, a cloak that changed colour as he walked past it. A carriage rolled by with no horse in front of it, purring like a cat, and a hundred people walked past it without even turning their heads.
Something from the other side. And nobody even looks.
And over all of it, at the top of the hill in the middle of the city, the cathedral of the Goddess of Abundance. White, with a dome that seemed to hold the sky up, and great bronze doors carved with sheaves of wheat and overflowing baskets and smiling, well-fed children.
There were beggars on its steps. Quite a lot of them. They sat in a neat line down one side, out of the way of the people going in, and the people going in stepped round them without looking down.
A faith about sharing, in the richest city in the Empire.
Some things didn't change.
* * *
Doyun walked him all the way to the Hunter Corps.
He'd barely spoken since the valley. He'd eaten breakfast in silence, paid for both of them in silence, and walked half a pace behind Jin through the streets, the way a servant walks behind a lord. Jin had hated every step of it.
The Corps headquarters was impossible to miss. The clerk had been right: it was the one with the flags. A great grey building on a square of its own, with banners hanging down its front, the Empire's sun and the Corps' crossed spear and sword, and over the doors, carved in stone, four figures Jin knew very well.
At the foot of the steps, Doyun stopped.
He straightened his coat. He set his spear upright beside him. And he bowed: properly, deeply, from the waist, the way commoners bowed to nobles in the street. The way Jin had bowed to men on horses his whole life.
"Doyun." Jin's voice came out sharper than he meant. "Don't."
Doyun stayed bent over.
"You bought me dinner," Jin said. "You gave me your stew. You stood in front of me at the ford with six men and a mage, when you thought I couldn't lift a sword. Don't you dare bow to me."
Slowly, Doyun straightened up.
He looked at Jin for a long moment. Then, shakily, the corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't quite the old grin. But it was close.
"You're the strangest blank I ever met," he said.
"I've been told."
"The Broken Spear. It's an inn by the east gate. Cheap beer, terrible beds." Doyun swallowed. "I'll be there a while. If you ever need a spear. Or a dinner."
"I'll remember," Jin said.
I will, too. That's the trouble with a thousand years of practice. I remember everything.
Doyun nodded, once, and turned and walked away across the square. Jin watched him go until he was lost in the crowd.
Then he went up the steps.
* * *
The inside was all marble.
Marble floors, marble pillars, a marble counter as long as a barracks, with three clerks behind it in grey Corps uniforms. Hunters crossed the hall in twos and threes, their tags flashing D and C and B. On the far wall, bigger than the one in the border town, bigger than a house, hung the poster.
THE FIRST GATE SURVIVORS.
Daewon's painted face looked down on the whole hall.
Jin went to the counter.
The receptionist was young, with neat hair and a neater uniform, and she looked at him the way you'd look at a muddy dog someone had let in by mistake. Her hand went to a small crystal on the counter beside her. It stayed dark.
"Yes?"
"I'd like to see Captain Daewon's squad," Jin said. "The First Gate Survivors."
"Do you have an appointment?"
"No."
"Then I'm afraid that won't be possible." She said it like she'd said it a hundred times, which she probably had. "The First Gate Survivors don't receive members of the public. If you'd like to leave a letter, there's a box by the door."
"I served with them."
Her face didn't change at all. She'd heard that one before too. "Of course. The box is by the door."
"Please." He leaned on the counter. "Is anyone here? Any of them?"
"Sir." She looked past him and lifted two fingers, very slightly. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
Jin heard the guards coming before he saw them: two sets of heavy boots on marble, from the doors behind him, unhurried. Men who'd thrown a lot of people out of a lot of halls.
I've been here ten minutes. That's a record, even for me.
Fine. I'll find another way in. I'll climb the wall if I have to.
He turned to go.
* * *
A side door banged open, and a young man came out backwards, dragging a sack.
It was a big sack, lumpy and stained and smelling strongly of yesterday's dinner, and the young man was swearing at it under his breath in a way Jin knew. He was tall, taller than Jin, with broad shoulders and brown hair cut short, and a good sword on his hip, and he was wearing the grey Corps uniform with something gold on the collar.
He hauled the sack round, straightened up, and looked straight at Jin.
And stopped.
Jin stopped too.
Shaun.
The boy who'd cried the night before his first battle, and pretended he hadn't. The boy who copied the way Daewon stood and the way Takumi talked. The boy whose voice used to crack in the middle of a shout, so that every warning came out half man and half goose.
He was twenty-one now. He had a jaw. He had a scar across one eyebrow that hadn't been there before, and the shoulders of someone who'd been swinging a sword every day for five years. He was taller than Jin.
You got old, Shaun.
No. Twenty-one isn't old. I'm the old one.
Shaun was frowning at him. Not the receptionist's frown. A different one: the frown of someone trying to remember a word that's right on the tip of their tongue.
"Have we…" Shaun said slowly. His voice didn't crack. It was deep and steady, and it was still, somehow, entirely his. "Have we met?"
Jin opened his mouth.
The floor jumped.
* * *
It wasn't a tremor. It was a blow, as if something enormous had dropped a hammer on the city. The marble floor bucked under their feet. Dust poured down from the ceiling in long white ribbons. The great poster on the far wall swung on its chains, and one of the pillars groaned, and somewhere outside, all across the city, people began to scream.
Then it came again. And again. Evenly spaced, like footsteps.
And in front of Jin's eyes, where nobody else could see, the window changed.
[Second Layer of Immortality: processing failed]
[All recorded actions took place inside the Trial]
[Tracking real-world actions and stats]
[Prove your worth]
Jin read it twice, standing in a falling cloud of marble dust.
Prove it?
Prove it to who?
The window didn't say.
* * *
Shaun had dropped the sack.
He'd gone very still in the shaking hall, head tilted, the way Elise used to stand when she was listening to the forest. Jin watched something move across his face that wasn't fear, quite. More like recognition. As if Shaun had felt this kind of thing before, a long time ago, in a forest, under a sky that was splitting open.
"That's not an earthquake," Shaun said quietly.
Then he turned to the counter, and his voice changed. It came out loud and hard and sure, a voice that had given orders before and expected them followed, and Jin heard Daewon in it so clearly that his chest hurt.
"Call the standby teams. All of them. Now."
The receptionist had gone as white as the marble. Shaun Aki was talking to her. Shaun Aki, off the poster, B-rank, the face on the wall, was talking to her, and for a second she just stared at him with her mouth open.
"Now," Shaun said again.
She grabbed a crystal from under the counter and started shouting into it, and her voice was coming out of crystals all over the building, and doors were banging open on every floor, and hunters were running.
Nobody was looking at the blank anymore.
* * *
Jin went out with them.
Nobody stopped him. Nobody even noticed him. He was just one more body in the crowd of hunters pouring down the steps into the square, all of them buckling armour and drawing weapons and looking north.
He looked north too.
Past the rooftops. Past the white walls and the lamps along the top of them. Out on the plain beyond the outer gate, where the road came in from the north, something was walking toward the city.
It was as tall as the cathedral.
Every step it took shook the ground under Jin's feet. Every step, the screaming in the streets got louder.
Beside him, a young hunter with a D on his tag was saying the same word over and over under his breath, like a prayer.
"B-rank. B-rank. That's B-rank, that's at least B-rank…"
Somewhere above them, on the wall, Shaun was already shouting orders.
Jin stood in the square and watched the giant come.
I just got here.
I didn't even get to say hello.