Chapter 367: Bodies, Bodies, Bodies [2]

The first skeletal hands found the higher holds.

Warders met them with hammers.

Bone shattered and spilled back into the throat.

More climbed behind it.

Yellow light flickered in the shade of the secondary mouth like a second, wrong dawn.

Kane put Mjoldr through a skull that had almost cleared the lip, kicked the remains into the dark, and did not waste breath on orders the Stone-Mother was already giving.

"Edge only! Nothing gets a knee over the stone! If it has a face you knew, it is still the pit—end it!"

They held.

It wasn’t a battle so much as a grim, repetitive refusal.

The dead climbed with the patience of things that didn’t need air. The living broke them at the lip and stepped back when the scrapes came too close. The hurt elf sat against a rock with his shin bound and a spear across his knees, white-faced, still watching the mouth. The quieter Giant worked beside Kane without speaking.

Every time a familiar mark showed on a scrap of wrap, his hammer fell harder.

After a time, the climbing thinned.

The wet hum in the throat dropped a register. Yellow light sank deeper. Ragnar’s patience, or the feeder’s, had decided the table could wait for the next sitting.

The Stone-Mother raised a fist.

Hammers lowered.

Breathing returned in ragged pieces.

"Hold a watch on the lip," she said.

"Rotate every hour. Anything with gold in the sockets dies before it learns the path to the children’s ledges. The rest of you—lower hall. Now."

They regrouped under the cliff roof where the banquet tables still held cold meat and the smell of fermented green liquor.

No one sat at the head slab as if the meal were continuing.

Giants stood.

The household stood with them, Thora’s bracelet still ticking a slower warning, Kessa’s ears flat, Griselda’s hands on the containment case, Misha’s brief finally open, Firlia already working the hurt elf’s shin with clean wraps and a face that did not allow panic room.

Kane set the warm fragment on a cloth on the stone between them.

It pulsed once, weak and sullen, cut off from the seat that had held Ragnar.

The Stone-Mother looked at it, then at the escorts’ faces, then at Kane.

"You went into our dark with my fighters and your elves," she said.

"You came out carrying a piece of the thing that has been teaching our dead to stand. You saw Tovi’s mark. You saw Root-Binder open his eyes after sixty-five years and speak. My people watched land-walkers bleed on the same rope as Giants. That is not a favour. That is a debt paid in both directions."

She set her hammer-butt on the floor.

The hall’s weather settled around the sound.

"When the sky cracks, this island will not sit behind the sea and pretend the water is a wall. You will have bodies for a southern line. Not all of us. Enough. Written terms, not banquet promises. That is the word of the lower halls. Stone-Watcher will hear it from me before the next post-change. The coalition you asked for at this table is real."

Kessa exhaled through her teeth, something between relief and unfinished hunger.

"About damn time."

Misha’s pen had already moved.

"I will have the short form before night. Numbers. Corridors. What ’enough’ means in counts your posts and our maps can both read."

Thora’s gaze stayed on Kane’s blood and the fragment.

"And the hole under our feet?"

Kane nodded at the cloth.

"Secondary is not closed. We broke the seat. We took a piece of the core. Ragnar is still down there, awake, armed, watching. He called himself a door the pit taught. He did not chase us up the throat. He let us leave. That is worse. He knows we have to come back."

The escort’s voice was rough.

"He used our dead like coats. If we leave the feeder open, every night is another chance for the lip to learn Givan’s climb with better numbers."

Griselda’s yellow eyes were fixed on the fragment.

"This is the same family as the Sylvander stone and the Berakamon. Same patience. Same hand. The secondary is a guardian post, not the heart. Ragnar was left on the feeder to hold it. The primary shaft, the one Root-Binder walked into first, is where the tap actually drinks. If we only seal the secondary, we put a lid on a side wound and leave the artery open."

Firlia finished the elf’s wrap and looked up.

"Lists do not care which hole we prefer. They care which hole is still feeding the ridge. If the primary is the source, every day we spend arguing about the feeder is another day of gradient under the posts."

The Stone-Mother’s mouth tightened.

"Root-Binder’s primary is deeper. Meaner. The maps stop being maps past a certain ledge. We threw Givan’s remaining carriers into that dark when fire and hammer failed. If Ragnar is what the feeder made of an Elder, I do not care to name what the primary made of the stones and the men we fed it."

Kane met her eyes.

"Then we name the job instead. Secondary stays under watch and hammer. We do not pretend we closed it. We go to the primary with a proper line, your warders, your escorts who already paid, my people who can cut and ward and not answer when the dark uses a familiar voice. We find the actual tap. We cut it or collapse it or both. If something larger than Ragnar is sitting on it, we find that out with open eyes instead of waiting for it to climb the children’s ledges on its own schedule."

Silence held for a breath.

Kessa’s tail flicked once.

"I am not staying on the lower tier for the primary. My nose does more good in the throat than on a door."

"You go," Kane said.

"Griselda goes—the case and the comparison. Firlia stages the mouth; she does not rope into the primary unless the line breaks. Misha holds terms and signals with the Stone-Mother’s runners. Thora—"

He looked at her bracelet, at the careful way she still stood.

"Lower hall and lip command with the elven officers. If the dead climb again while we are under the primary, you are the reason the paths stay clean. Same argument as before. Same answer."

Thora’s jaw worked.

She didn’t waste the hall’s time on a fight she had already lost and already understood.

"Signal if the bracelet spikes the way it did for Givan. And bring everyone back. Including the nose and the wings."

"That is the plan."

The Stone-Mother glanced toward the high cuts, toward the posts where her husband still hadn’t come down, where a fine sheen of sweat and a maybe still lived in Kane’s private arithmetic, then back to the fragment.

"We will burn the entire ridge to keep them down forever."

"That won’t work," Kane said.

"There is another way."