Chapter 363: Into the Mouth [2]

The landing was mostly dark.

It opened under them like a held breath that had never been released, the floor sloping away into a distance the eye could not finish.

Broken pillars leaned at wrong angles, some still holding fragments of a ceiling that had given up, others only stubs of carved stone.

Along the walls, half-swallowed by damp and time, stood ranks of figures cut in the old Giant style: warriors in formal stance, hammers and spears frozen at the shoulder, faces worn smooth by the pit’s slow weather.

Between the pillars and the statues, the floor wasn’t empty.

Bodies.

They lay in drifts and lines, almost bone to bone, the parts long since claimed by whatever the dark fed.

Some still wore scraps of wrap or harness.

Most did not.

Years had pressed them flat and pale.

The air that rose past the rope smelled of old mineral and older endings.

Kane’s boots found solid stone.

The three elves landed in careful sequence behind him, then the two Giant escorts, the last of them grunting as the handholds finally ran out and the drop became a short free step to the floor.

Kane looked along the nearest drift of remains.

"You threw your enemies here?"

One of the Giant fighters nodded once.

His voice stayed low, as if volume itself might wake something the years had only put to sleep.

"Prisoners. Traitors. The ones the halls wouldn’t keep under roof. It’s been years since anyone descended from above with a purpose. We sealed the mouths we could and told ourselves the dark would hold what we put in it. We never really considered this would bring death back up on us."

"Well," Kane said, "you should’ve."

He raised Mjoldr.

A red light woke along the axe’s edge, not a flare for battle, a steady working glow that pushed the dark back in a wide, hard circle.

Pillars jumped into relief.

Statues’ empty eyes caught the colour.

The nearest bones shone the dirty white of things that had been waiting without language for it.

"Stay close. No one wanders. No one answers a voice that isn’t one of us. Priority is the stone. We take what we came for, and we leave while the rope still answers. Everything else is secondary."

They moved.

The red light walked with them, a moving cell of visibility in a space that refused to admit edges.

Kane’s eyes kept returning to the bodies, checking the angles of limbs, the stillness of skulls, the places where a hand might decide to close after years of being open.

Nothing rose.

The only sounds were their own steps, the complaint of Giant joints in air that was already thickening, and the distant, irregular drip of water that never quite found a pool.

One of the elves spoke through a tight jaw.

"How many did you put down here?"

The quieter Giant answered without looking away from the dark beyond Kane’s light.

"Enough that we stopped counting. Enough that the lower halls slept better for a generation. Root-Binder, Elder Ragnar, when he still used the name, said the pit would keep them. Said a closed door was a closed door."

"And then he walked into the primary with a stone and the same sentence," Kane said.

"And then he did."

Ten more minutes of careful ground.

The air changed.

It compressed, pressure against the chest and the back of the throat, a weight that made each breath a negotiation.

The Giants felt it first and hardest.

Their strides shortened.

One of them put a hand to the wall and left it there for a moment, as if the stone might loan him space the air would not.

"This is wrong," the hammer-Giant muttered.

"Feeder air is foul. It is not supposed to press like a hand on the ribs."

"It is supposed to do whatever the tap taught it," Kane said.

He didn’t slow.

The system’s passive tags climbed in blunt increments at the edge of his sight, taint gradient rising, no immediate overwrite spike, something dense ahead.

"Stay on the light. If you cannot breathe, you signal, and you go up. You don’t prove courage by fainting in the dark."

The spear-Giant’s voice came out rougher.

"We can walk. We have walked worse for less reason."

"Then walk. And keep your mouths shut if the dark starts using familiar names."

They went on.

The red circle of Mjoldr’s light found broken tools, a snapped spear-haft large enough to serve as a yard on a human ship, a child’s charm of the old bone-circle pattern half-buried in grit: out of place, wrong scale, the same grammar as the belt and the Sylvander gate.

Kane didn’t touch it.

Firlia would have bagged it for the list.

Griselda would have refused to let it near the case without a ward.

Here there was only the note of it and the decision to leave it lying.

Then the air tightened another degree, and Kane raised his hand.

Fifty metres ahead, at the limit of the red light’s honest reach, something sat on a low rise of stone.

Not a random drift of the dead.

A shape that had been placed, or had placed itself, above a point of light that was not Kane’s.

The stone under that shape brimmed with energy.

Warmth rolled off it in a continuous wave, the same family of wrong heat Griselda had named on a courtyard table in Sylvander, the same grammar the belt charms and Givan’s carriers had carried in their quieter forms.

It pulsed without rhythm. It waited without hurry.

And above it, seated as if the warm stone were a chair and the years a minor inconvenience, was a Giant.

The escorts stopped hard enough that one of the elves nearly walked into a hammer-haft.

"Is that—"

The hammer-Giant’s eyes had gone wide in the red light. His mouth worked once before sound came.

"Who is it?"

The quieter Giant’s voice broke on the first syllable and had to start again.

"El... Elder Ragnar..."