The second chamber was chewing.
Hundreds of teeth struck in the dark.
No. Thousands.
Ria raised her lamp. A granary appeared, but there were no sacks.
A beast crouched in every empty grain bin. Its ribs were barley heads. Its hide was stitched from ration tickets. Its head held only a mouth, and smaller mouths layered its inside.
The hunger of the Seventeen Houses cried out inside Viola's belly.
Every beast raised its head.
"Run," Cassian said.
He did not run first. He walked forward.
The hole left by Viola's knife remained in his right hand. His left was bound to his sword hilt.
His sword split the first beast's mouth. The head fell in two, spilling black barley instead of blood.
It did not die. Both halves bit Cassian's shadow.
Something vanished from his stomach—not last night's hard bread, but food he had yet to eat.
His next meal.
His tongue forgot first: bread, salt, warm broth passing down his throat.
The two heads joined again, larger than before.
"Cutting feeds them," Adel said.
Cassian cut again, this time into four pieces. Four mouths bit his shadow. Four more meals vanished. Hunger scratched the inside of his ribs, waking the famine sinmark. Another dry rib rose from his back.
"Why cut again when you knew?" Ines asked.
"To see how many meals it took."
"You spent four meals on that?"
"They were mine."
Six beasts dropped from the ceiling. Cassian raised his sword.
"Lower it," Derrick said.
Cassian did not. Derrick caught the blade barehanded, cutting through the old burn scar in his palm.
"Do not cut," the executioner said. "Those are not necks."
* * *
Derrick picked up black barley and weighed a handful in his palm.
It weighed about as much as the final bowl of porridge given to a condemned prisoner.
"Find the weights."
"Why?" Ines asked.
"What they starved was not grain. It was meals. The amount stolen once from one person."
A beast lunged. Derrick did not dodge. He threw a handful of straw into its mouth.
It chewed but could not swallow. Crumbs from final meals clung to execution-ground straw—the trace of a meal that had been given.
One unpaid meal stopped as it chewed the last paid one.
"Bind it now."
Ines moved. She did not cut its neck. She wound execution rope around its mouth twice and tied the condemned prisoner's knot her father had taught her.
The beast shrank to the size of one sack.
"Weights."
Ria lit the wall. A rusted scale hung there, with seventeen weights on the floor, each bearing a Red Table crest.
Viola lifted the smallest. Her arm buckled. A body carrying seventeen pains could not bear even one lump of iron.
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"Put it down," Adel said.
"Treating me without permission?"
"Only diagnosing. Your arm is about to come out."
"Then use it before it does."
Viola set the weight on the beast's back. Its body hardened at the exact weight of one meal.
Derrick nodded.
"Onto the scale."
Ines dragged it. Ria recorded the house crest. Adel held Viola's arm without setting it.
Only Cassian stood still.
Hundreds crawled from the dark. Measuring one at a time would take too long.
"Your method is slow," Cassian told Derrick.
"Yours fattens them."
"How many can you weigh?"
"More if you close your mouth."
Cassian smiled, splitting hunger-dry lips.
Derrick assigned the lanes with one finger.
"Ines, three bins on the left."
"Understood."
"Ria, record crest and number."
"One beast at a time?"
"One meal at a time."
"Isn't that the same?"
"What a person should have eaten was not a beast."
Ria's pen paused, then moved again.
"Adel, close the mouths so they cannot take another meal from anyone bitten. Viola, choose the weights."
"Giving orders?"
"They belong to your houses."
"Not my houses."
"Then your debt."
Viola lifted the second weight.
"That is true."
Derrick looked last at Cassian.
"You stand still."
Cassian stopped smiling.
"Is that how you speak to an executioner?"
"I am the executioner now," Derrick said. "You are a shovel."
* * *
The herd surged.
Ines struck mouths open with the back of her blade, stuffed them with straw, and tied the knots. Derrick placed each on the scale.
One meal. Two. Ten.
Ria wrote them back beside the names of the dead.
`Not received.`
`Not repaid.`
Each entry cracked one `repaid in full` stamp from the first chamber.
The twelfth beast broke its knot and bit the nearest shadow—Ria's.
She swallowed her scream but did not drop her pen.
"What did you lose?" Adel asked.
"I don't know. Something I meant to eat next."
Ria licked her lips.
"An apple."
Then she shook her head.
"No. What did an apple taste like?"
She remembered red skin and its hard shape, but not the sweetness on her tongue. Apple fragrance came from between the beast's teeth.
Ria drove her pen nib into its eyeless forehead. It laughed wider.
The pen was also a blade. Another future meal vanished—this time the warmth of soup her mother had made in childhood.
Her hand trembled.
"Can you treat it?"
"I can treat hunger," Adel said, sealing the beast's mouth with her palm. "I cannot return a stolen future meal."
Small mouths bit her hand and took one from her too.
Adel knew it at once: roasted onion stolen from the monastery kitchen before she became a saint.
Her eyes watered, not from the wound.
"Does it eat that expression too?" Cassian asked.
"Shut up."
Three beasts rushed Viola. She did not dodge. From her reversed apron she took a ration ticket bearing northern refugee names—the next winter's meals she held as interest.
One thrown sheet would turn the beasts toward the living.
Viola folded it in half, put it in her own mouth, chewed, and swallowed.
The beasts bit her shadow. Three meals vanished. Her belly, already carrying the hunger of seventeen houses, hollowed deeper.
"Why not use the refugees' ticket?" Cassian asked.
"It is collateral I took. If those things eat it without permission, that is theft."
It was not kindness. She starved to prove ownership.
Cassian laughed.
"You like that?" Ines asked.
"No."
"You laughed."
"She did evil in a more expensive way than I would."
Viola wiped ration paper from her lips.
"Still cheaper than your debt."
The beasts did not diminish.
The rear wall of grain rose as one enormous mouth made from thousands of meals. The winter ledger was nailed to its palate.
"How long to weigh that?" Cassian asked.
Derrick studied it.
"Until next winter."
"Too slow."
"This time, I agree."
Cassian reached into the condemned crown. Eleven sentences rang inside his throat.
Burning. Quartering. Drowning. Burial alive.
He chose burial alive and tore black earth from his neck. Dirt poured from beneath his nails and became a grave when it struck the floor.
One. Two. Ten. A hundred.
The graves of condemned prisoners who had failed to die overturned the granary floor. The giant mouth was buried from its feet upward.
Black barley teeth chewed soil but could not eat it. Graves held no next meal.
"The path?" Cassian asked.
Derrick pointed between two graves.
"Between the third and fourth."
Cassian ran. His broken right foot folded again. He did not stop.
Before the mouth broke through the earth and closed, he thrust his sword upward—not into its palate, but through the iron nails holding the winter ledger.
The ledger fell. Cassian did not catch it.
Ria threw herself forward and caught it against her chest.
The mouth closed around Cassian's left shoulder. It tore no flesh. It ate seven future meals.
His stomach collapsed inward. Darkness appeared beneath his eyes at once.
He climbed out over grave soil.
"Slow for a shovel," Derrick said.
"You dig next time."
* * *
Ria opened the winter ledger. This one held real numbers.
Grain meant for 312 people. Carts returned to the Seventeen Houses. Sack marks changed at military camps. Winter flour spent on noble feasts.
Not one line had been repaid.
"Found it," Ria said. "Every person who took it, and how much."
Adel turned the next page.
Living names were attached beneath the dead.
Marette Houn.
Interest on the unpaid portion owed to her husband, Havel Houn.
More family names followed. Wives. Husbands. Parents. Children.
Every surviving relative of the 312 dead had been registered as interest owed to the Debt Vault.
"Getting the ledger did not end it," Ines said.
"Evidence does not feed people," Cassian replied.
Ria looked at him.
"You are the last person who should say that."
"Which does not make it wrong."
Viola opened the final page.
It was a list of individual collateral from the day the Winter Debt Vault was first opened—what had been surrendered by the one who paid the debt with his body.
One name stood in the largest letters.
`Derrick Morn.`
Collateral:
`Right hand.`
Derrick looked down at his hand.
Its fingers were already looking up at him.