Chapter 365: Into the Mouth [4]

The stone broke.

Not a clean split.

A sudden, inward failure, light cracking through the core in yellow veins, heat spiking, the patient’s pulse becoming a single hard shock that ran up Kane’s arm and into the floor.

Fragments of warm wrongness scattered across the rise.

The seal that had been a seat became an open mouth.

Elder Ragnar’s eyes opened.

Yellow.

A deeper, older yellow that seemed to come from behind the sockets, energy without iris, light without mercy.

The mouth that had been a flat line stretched.

What came out of it was not a word.

It was a scream.

"Fuck."

Horror given sound: high and wet and wrong for a chest that had not drawn air in sixty-five years, loud enough to slam against the pillars and the statues and the five-hundred-metre throat above.

The kind of sound that made the body want to drop the axe and cover the ears and run for a sky that had already forgotten them.

Around the rise, the bone drifts answered.

A finger closed.

A skull turned on a spine that should not have held.

Ribcages flexed with a dry, interlocking chatter.

From the walls and the floor and the places between the broken pillars, the years of thrown enemies and forgotten prisoners and the parts the dark had kept began to remember they had been shapes that could stand.

Yellow light, thinner than Ragnar’s but the same family, kindled in empty sockets and in the gaps of jaws.

The statues didn’t move.

Everything that had once been meat and will did.

The quieter Giant’s voice broke on a single syllable.

"No—"

Kane still held a fragment of the warm core in his left hand.

Mjoldr’s red light fought the yellow.

Elder Ragnar sat forward on the ruined seat, eyes wide with that terrible energy, the scream still pouring out of a throat that had learned how to wait in a chair, and across the landing, bone to bone and scrap to scrap, the dead of the feeder pit began to rise as if the scream were a roll call they had been holding their silence for.

"Back to the rope," Kane said, and his voice had to cut through the scream and the chatter of waking bone.

"Don’t fight the floor. Don’t answer if they use a name. Move."

The dark that had been patient was no longer patient.

It was standing up.

Kane turned within a second.

Mjoldr came up in a full-powered arc aimed straight for the Elder’s head, the kind of cut that had taken Givan’s neck on the lip and ended arguments in other dark places.

Ragnar was already rising from the ruined seat.

Standing close, he was thrice Kane’s height: shorter than Givan’s corrupted bulk had been, but worse in the way the scars spoke.

Old war-marks. Pit-marks. Lines that sixty-five years of wrong preservation had not softened.

Yellow energy burned in the open eyes.

The scream had become a continuous, wet pressure in the air.

The axe met stone.

CLANG.

Kane’s eyes widened.

Not flesh. Not bone.

A hammer, Giant-scale, head engraved with the old working-marks of the lower halls, had come up between them as if it had always been waiting in a dead hand.

Ragnar’s own weapon.

The impact travelled up Kane’s arms and into his shoulders.

Red light and yellow light flared together.

Rage answered.

Controlled output slammed open under Kane’s skin, not the suicidal hundred percent of an arena clock, a hard-working burn that put weight into the next motion and refused the pit’s pressure.

Ragnar was driven a step back by the force behind the bind.

Then the Elder planted, raised a leg the size of a man’s torso, and kicked for Kane’s chest.

Kane rolled.

The kick sheared air and grit where he had been.

He came up throwing.

Mjoldr left his hand in a red streak, met the hammer again in mid-air with another ugly clang, and curved back to his palm as if the dark had no claim on it.

Ragnar stood still and looked down at him.

"Impressive..."

The voice was deep, scraped raw by years of not needing air, and fully present.

Kane’s grip tightened.

"You can speak?"

"Why... not?" Ragnar’s head tilted a fraction.

Yellow light tracked him without blinking.

"You are a... barbarian. Why here?"

"Well," Kane said, "because of you."

"Hmm."

The hammer came around in a horizontal arc that moved the small particles of bone-dust and grit in its wake like a tide.

Kane dodged the first line of it, and the head changed direction mid-swing, as if the weapon and the arm had remembered a trick the living halls had forgotten.

"Shit—"

He got Mjoldr up to block.

Too late for a clean receive.

The hammer’s force took the axe and the man behind it and threw him.

BAM!

He hit a pillar hard enough to drive the breath out of his lungs, slid, and forced his feet under him before the dark could decide he was floor.

Rage kept the lights on.

Hybrid Lock sat closed against the overwrite pressure rolling off the broken stone and the seated-that-had-stood.

"You carry a door in your blood," Ragnar said, advancing one step.

The engraved hammer hung easy in a hand that should have been dust.

"The pit does not like doors it did not teach. It will learn yours, given time."

"It can wait in line."

Kane pushed off the pillar and cut low for the knee.

Ragnar checked with the hammer’s haft.

The clash threw sparks of red and yellow.

Around them the bone drifts were no longer drifts.

Shapes assembled, ribs locking to spine, skulls finding shoulders, yellow light kindling in empty sockets as the feeder’s years of thrown enemies answered their Elder’s scream.

Not fast.

Inevitable.

One of the elves shouted from the edge of the red light, voice cracking:

"The floor is standing up—Kane—!"

"Rope line!" Kane snapped, without taking his eyes off Ragnar.

"Don’t fight the whole landing—cut a path and climb!"