The castle wanted a new room.
Lucas felt it in the stone—an itch along the ribs of the Lower Ossuary, a pressure behind the altar like a tongue testing a broken tooth. The banners in the Red Gallery had tightened their stitches after the morning's trick at the gate; the archers slept in pieces, their dreams filed into quivers. The alliance had pulled back to count and curse and promise. That left space for craftsmanship.
"Below," he said.
The path opened. Steps chewed themselves out of black rock, dropping past the Resonant Forge and the trough where bone ran like water. The air cooled and thickened. Light dimmed to a red that did not help sight; it helped decisions.
Selena drifted at his shoulder, a pale seam of malice in the gloom. Her eyes were bright enough to read by. "You're building a box," she said, pleased. "For a question."
"For an answer," Lucas corrected.
He stopped where the new itch concentrated: a blank wall, flush as a denial. He set his palm against it. The mutation in the system purred—a low, hungry engine—and the wall learned how to change.
Stone split. Not with a roar; with a patient sigh, as if it had always planned to be doorway. Runnels of faint light crawled along the edges—veins finding a heart. Beyond, a chamber yawned: round, low-ceilinged, its floor sloped in a long shallow dish to a drain that had not tasted anything yet. Chains hung from the ribs like punctuation waiting for clauses. Hooks rested in the walls, polite as folded knives. At the center, a pedestal of red-veined crystal stood chest-high, an altar's smaller, meaner cousin.
The system arrived with its new voice—too smooth, blue letters smelling faintly of iron.
[Ding!]
[Room Unlocked — Red Vault (Inquisitorial).]
[Features: Suffering Resonator, Truth Lattice, Mercy Ledger (experimental).]
[Modifiers: Vile Spark yield ×2 (named target), Cruelty Index synergy (interrogations).]
[Warning: Prolonged use increases Audit Event probability.]
Selena laid a hand on the crystal pedestal. It pulsed under her touch, as if embarrassed to be caught eager. "Suffering that pays for itself," she murmured. "You have invented banking."
Lucas moved around the chamber, taking inventory without speech: floor-slope, drain-mouth, chain-angles, ceiling's curve—the way sound would pool and return to its source. He traced the circle carved into the floor around the pedestal. Its sigils were not ornamental. They offered bargains.
"Truth Lattice," he said.
The Forge's heartbeat hummed through the rock. The lattice woke, invisible until it wasn't: a net of thin red strands stretched from rim to rim at ankle height, waist, throat, crown. Not thick enough to impede flesh—thick enough to insist on a price when crossed.
Selena watched like a connoisseur. "We'll need a voice to paint the room with. Preferably one with titles."
"Deyra," Lucas said.
Her smile widened, sharp and clean. "Hollow Flame. The Lady who swore to burn our home down and forgot to ask the wind."
He didn't ask how. Selena had already left when he turned, a blur through the stair's red hush, bone dogs padding after her like polite nightmares. Vicarius unhooked himself from a shadow in the gallery without a sound. Mirk and Var clattered ropes over shoulders with the reverence men reserve for icons. The castle heard Lucas's choice and adjusted the timing of its breath.
Bring her, the Command Link carried, a simple verb with teeth.
Twilight lowered like a lid. The alliance had retreated into a triangle of firelight and orders. Deyra of Hollow Flame stood in the largest tent with a map and a belief in incineration. She wore ash as ribbon. She spoke in flint.
Selena came through the back seam of the night.
No sound. Just cold air replacing hot. Bone Dogs flowed under brazier-smoke, tails ticking like patient clocks. A hand—pale, elegant—sealed Deyra's mouth before the tent cloth remembered to shiver. A second hand slid under the Lord's elbow, finding the angle between bone and pride with a lover's accuracy. Selena whispered against her ear, voice a soft ribbon that even knives would envy.
"Don't fuss. You'll like the room I picked."
Deyra clawed for the knife at her belt. A Bone Dog's jaw took her wrist, not to break, but to refuse ownership. She kicked—good form. Vicarius stepped through the front with the calm of inevitability and exchanged her momentum for stillness. Mirk's rope found her throat; Var's found her ankles. By the time the tent guards remembered to ask a question, there was only brazier-smoke and an impression of laughter.
They brought Deyra down the new stair gagged, bound, furious without the clumsy decoration of fear. She saw the Red Vault and hid the way her eyes widened. The bonds came off except at wrists and throat. The gag came out.
She spat on the floor, and the floor drank.
"Crypt butcher," she said. Her voice deserved better than the room. "You hide under ground and call it empire. Show me the courage to meet fire."
Selena's chuckle slid around the curve of the ceiling. "Fire is such an obedient metaphor. Watch."
She snapped her fingers, and the Suffering Resonator woke—not visible, but there. The air itself learned how to return sound like a mirror returns a face: without distortion, without pity, larger.
Lucas set two fingers on the crystal pedestal. The room's light tilted toward him. "Your alliance dies," he said. "Sooner if you're stupid. Later if you're useful."
Deyra bared her teeth. There was a kind of royalty in it. "We burn your kennel. We pile your hounds against your gate. We stack you on top like a banner."
"Poetry," Selena said. "Lovely. Mostly because it won't happen."
Lucas gestured lightly. Chains rose—not to lift, but to suggest. Deyra's wrists moved and found their circumference. Above, the Truth Lattice thrummed, threads humming so softly that eventually the nerves would have to agree they existed.
[Ding!]
[Interrogation Protocol — Named Lord detected.]
[Bonuses applied: Vile Spark yield +, Truth Coercion efficiency +, Sovereign Presence synergy (Selena).]
[Options: Painweave (incremental), Mercy Ledger (debt conversion), Oathbrand (binding).]
[Caution: Subject will attempt to weaponize martyrdom.]
Lucas chose Painweave with a thought. It was not a lever; it was a loom. Threads of sensation unspooled from the pedestal, crawled up the chains, across the lattice, into skin. Not knives. Weight. Heat. Thirst. The ache behind the eyes when sleep is a rumor. The sting along a healing wound that isn't healing. It settled on Deyra's body with a craftsman's patience and hummed in a chord that remembered her spine.
She swallowed it with contempt. "You can build a pretty toy. Good. Now ask your question so I can laugh in the right places."
Lucas stepped closer, close enough to speak without the room's help. "Why three camps? Why now? Who taught you to stand so near and so far that your men's screams arrive on different winds?"
Deyra's eyes glittered. "We counted your arrows. We tested your dogs. We learned you like hallways. We plan to skip them."
"Not from the front," he said, without kindness. "From below."
Her pupils betrayed her—just a ripple, then still. He nodded to himself.
"Where?" Selena asked, idly. "And how many moles does the earth have that you think are loyal to you?"
Deyra said nothing. Painweave tightened—no cruelty yet, just that awkward pressure a body can hold for hours before it becomes inevitability. Her breath grew sharper at the edges. She shut her eyes, opened them, steadied. "My men don't trade. I don't barter."
"Good," Lucas said. "I dislike markets, but I adore ledgers."
He flicked to Mercy Ledger.
A new lattice bloomed around Deyra's throat—faint as an afterimage, the shape of a collar made of arithmetic. The system's letters turned from blue to a dry, liturgical red.
[Ding!]
[Mercy Ledger: open.]
[Offer: Withhold a cruelty now → accrue debt payable as truth later.
— Withhold: Painweave Level 2 (breath choking).
— Debt unit: 1 answer (unambiguous).]
[Confirm? Y/N]
Selena's eyes warmed dangerously. "You invented sin accounting."
Lucas confirmed.
The Painweave slackened away from Deyra's lungs. Air slid in easy. The relief was small, and therefore devastating.
He watched the moment it wrote itself into her, the way a crack chooses a path down glass. A question is a cruelty. Withholding it can be worse.
"What do you want from the ground?" he asked. "Tunnel mouths? Powder caches? Old things you plan to wake?"
She stared at him with clean hatred. Then away. Then back.
"Two," she said at last. It wasn't answer yet. It was concession to arithmetic. "Ridge hollow, half a league east, under a stand of dead-thorn. We rigged pitch below. We planned to bring your wall down when your archers looked west. The other…" She stopped. Her throat worked. The ledger's collar tightened a millimeter, not enough to be pain—enough to be prophecy.
"Speak," Selena said softly, and the room carried the syllable like silk carries heat.
"The other is not ours," Deyra ground out. "Old. A shaft. Our sappers found it and ran. There's a… wind. Down. I sent men who do not pray. They came back with new gods and no eyes for sunlight."
Selena's smile showed too much white. "Delicious."
Lucas filed coordinates in bone. He let the ledger hang where Deyra could feel it. Mercy had been granted; debt would come due. He resolved the next question against the throat of her breath.
"How many cavalry remain. What does Ramius have that he thinks is a trump."
She laughed without humor. "Pride."
The Painweave tugged the tiniest weight at the back of her tongue. The room enjoyed honesty. "And a spear," she spat. "Forged in an older place. It drinks orders. Men near it hear their fathers shout. They stop running."
Lucas felt the fortress tilt its head. The Resonant Forge below thrummed as if recognizing an argument worth answering.
Selena slipped closer, until the back of her hand brushed Deyra's cheek. It was no caress. It was examination. "Next," she whispered. "Who else comes."
"Alliance," Deyra said. "Three banners behind ours. Ash Pike sent a runner to Harrow Fen. Hollow Flame asked the Dust Choir to sing. Ramius wrote to a Judge." She swallowed. "A Warden's dog."
The room cooled. Even the chains wanted to listen. Selena's gaze emptied of amusement. Lucas did not blink.
"Judge?" he asked, voice utterly plain.
Deyra's laugh cracked. "Not the Warden. A clerk with a knife. He will ask why the system's numbers have teeth. He will bring a scale and weigh your name. If it weighs too much, the world tilts."
[Ding!]
[External Vector: Judicant (minor Warden agent) — probability ↑.]
[Silence Ritual: 18h remaining.]
[Audit Event forecast: 31% → 39%.]
Selena's smile returned, slow and sunny as a plague. "Oh, good. An audience."
The interrogatory did not need length. Length wastes art. Lucas turned Painweave a degree—enough to make rest impossible, not enough to distract from usefulness. He circled the vault once, reading Deyra from shoulder to ankle, then stopped at a spot on the wall where the rock had learned to be mirror. It showed him not his face but the silhouette of the room's decision.
"We can burn her," Mirk volunteered from the threshold, eager, hands twitching just inside obedience. "Or cut. Or hang by knees. I learned new knots."
Var nodded. "Good knots."
Selena kept her eyes on Deyra. "Not yet. She's prettier full of answers."
Lucas lifted two fingers, and the ghouls obediently became furniture. The Bone Dogs lay down with their chins on paws, skulls cocked, listening to the ledger hum.
He stepped closer to Deyra until her breath warmed the space between words. "Tell me which of the three Lords will break first when the plan fails."
"Ramius," she said immediately. Then surprised at herself, bit blood from her tongue. The Painweave purred. The ledger glowed faintly—a banker's satisfaction.
"And which will run," Lucas asked.
"Torrhen," Deyra said. And, after a heartbeat: "He calls it 'regrouping.'"
Selena laughed.
Lucas cut the lattice off her throat. The collar cooled. He made the relief obvious—a gift with barbs. "You've earned water," he said.
Selena brought a cup that wasn't. The Grave Mold tinctured it just enough that thirst and truth would be difficult to tell apart. Deyra drank without taking her eyes off Lucas. When she finished, her breath came easier. She hated him more efficiently.
He looked around the Red Vault at his own craft. It pleased him. Not for the cruelty. For the exactness. The slope held blood where he wanted blood. The drain promised to tidy. The hooks didn't clank when they touched chain.
"Why did you come in fire," he asked, the last of the questions he wanted today, "when the ground had better ideas."
Deyra stared at him. Pride tried to answer and failed. Something else answered: exhaustion stripped of its armor. "Because fire makes men feel brave," she said. "And I needed them to cross your quiet."
Lucas considered that and found it true. He nodded, a courtesy.
He flicked the lattice off completely. Deyra sagged against the chains, sweat cold, pulse settling. He let her be a person for three breaths. Then he turned.
"Selena," he said. "Mark her without breaking form."
Selena's eyes lit. She drew a thin claw across Deyra's collarbone—just enough to cut, not enough to wound—a crescent that would scar into a word only the Red Vault could read. Deyra didn't flinch. The cup had done its arithmetic.
"Keep her," Lucas said at last. "Feed her enough to live. Teach her what silence costs. We will trade her back when trading ends a camp."
Selena's smile could have been mistaken for kindness in a worse light. "Of course. I'll make her very fluent."
They turned to leave. At the threshold, Deyra's voice followed, raw and hard and refusing.
"I will not beg," she said.
Selena glanced over her shoulder, amused. "You already did. You asked the ledger to breathe for you. It said yes." Her smile deepened, almost intimate. "That counts."
The Red Vault closed them out. Stone sealed with a hush that respected the room's appetite.
Above, the banners whispered. Outside, the alliance tried on courage again, found it tight at the shoulders, and kept it anyway. The castle adjusted its lungs to the shape of the coming day.
The system, muzzled and mutating, offered its last line like a prayer unwilling to confess it admired the blasphemy.
[Ding!]
[Red Vault calibrated.
— Interrogation success: High.
— Alliance destabilization: Ramius / Torrhen / Deyra → (crack vectors logged).]
Selena fell into step with Lucas along the corridor, their shadows stitching together and coming apart with the rhythm of bone.
"Next?" she asked, light as silk and heavy as gravity.
Lucas did not look at her. "We use her answers," he said. "Then we give them something new to scream about."