The change in Ren Vale’s ears didn’t happen with a sudden thunderclap. It happened with the terrible, creeping finality of a tide turning in the dark.
For thirty-four days, ever since he had broken the seal of the Black Gate and entered the upper crypts of Val-Khorat, the Phantom Murmurs had been an unceasing, jagged loud noise. Five million dead creditors had screamed into his skull day and night—an overlapping, wild chorus of weavers demanding back-wages, merchants shrieking for grain receipts, bishops reading old family debt-warrants, and legionnaires demanding their blood-money. It had been an iron collar around his thoughts. That grinding migraine forced him to sleep with his head pressed against cold granite to dull the pain.
Now, as they stood upon the rim of the Hadal Shaft, the screaming was stopping.
One by one, the wild, high-pitched voices were winkling out. The millions of freed commoner souls dissolved into the upper rock strata and returned to the great cosmic cycle. Then, their accounts in Ren’s spirit ledger dropped to zero.
Tomas the Cartwright’s blunt, timber-scented voice was the first to fall silent. That left behind only the memory of forty-two settled pennies. Then the seamstresses of the dye-works went quiet, their coughing fading into the soft rustle of clean linen. The mutinous pikemen of the Sixth Legion lowered their spectral voices, their demands for back pay dissolving into the silence of honorable discharge. Finally, the shrill, arrogant screams of the five hundred dead patricians of the Senate evaporated…
