'We forgive you.'
Now Alexander sagged forward completely and collapsed into his brother's arms; Jack guided his brittle weight gently down to the floor, knelt beside him, and cradled his brother's piteous broken body in his lap.
'We forgive you,' he whispered.
A heartrending wail rose from Alexander, a lifetime's mourning for a multitude of lost and stolen souls. He clung weakly to his brother as sobs jolted his fragile bones. The others in the room, despite their fears or anger at Alexander's crimes, could not look on with anything but pity.
With a grinding metallic ring, one of the grills above the center of the room lifted from its rim; Jacob looked up as Kanazuchi let himself down through the cavity and dropped to the floor beside them. The last of the blood flow followed and ran off into the pit. The rumbling from below rose again in pitch and power; wind from the hollow guttered the flames of the lanterns. Kanazuchi sat unmoving, stunned. When he weakly failed to lift himself to his feet, Jacob unsteadily walked the few steps to Kanazuchi.
'Come along, my friend,' said Jacob quietly.
He extended his hands to Kanazuchi and helped him slowly rise; leaning on one another they walked to Jack and Alexander. Jacob helped Kanazuchi down and then sat beside him next to the brothers.
Walks Alone nodded to Presto; he wrapped an arm around her. They moved forward and filled the last places in the circle. Walks Alone held Presto's left hand and extended her right to Jack. He grasped it tightly with his left, holding on to Alexander's in his other. While Kanazuchi held his right hand, Jacob leaned over and gently covered Alexander's right hand. Kanazuchi reached out to Presto and their hands completed the circle.
Alexander's sobs subsided; he looked up and his eyes found Jack's. Jack nodded to him, gentle and kind. Alexander nodded in return. Then Jack's eyes sought out each of the others and now a silent understanding, something pure and inexpressible, passed among them all.
Realizing there was no place for him among their number, Lionel stood up and moved deliberately around the circle, from casket to casket, removing each of the stolen books and securing them safely by the wall. When he completed this task and looked back at the circle, the sight that greeted him forced him to the ground, his back pressed against the wall in deep humility. Although he would never again be as certain of it as he was in the moments that followed, as the Six looked at each other Lionel thought he saw a penumbra of light extend into the air above them, a round transparent curtain that contained in the fabric of its weave a host of swirling forms and shapes and faces, each carrying within it the strength and beauty and compassion of a hundred thousand human souls.
In that moment this is what Lionel, a secular man, thought he had seen, but as the years passed he would never again be as sure.
As the light above the circle brightened, the deep rumbling in the pit below the chamber fell gradually away. No one in the circle moved.
When it was gone entirely, the light receded.
In the peaceful silence that followed, Alexander gave out a small cry and died quietly in his brother's arms.
Lionel helped his father to his feet, staring down in sympathy and horror at the broken, impossibly thin body of the brother still resting in Jack's arms.
'Whatever did he want the books for?' Lionel asked softly.
'He thought he wanted to destroy God,' said Jacob.
Lionel blinked back his astonishment. 'But he would have had to ... end the world.'
'He was mistaken,' said Jacob sadly. 'All he really wanted to destroy was himself.'
Doyle had searched for and found a rope in one of the corners of the church after Kanazuchi went below. When the rumbling stopped—an earthquake or some sort of related seismic disturbance, Doyle decided, and no one later contradicted him— he secured one end of the rope around his waist, let the other fall down into the chamber, and called out to them to take hold. Then his powerful arms lifted the survivors and then-rescued books, one by one, to the floor of the moonlit cathedral.
Jack Sparks was the last to ascend; after remaining below alone and committing his brother's body to the memory of their lost family, he grasped the line and Doyle pulled him up, up into the light.
