Chapter 368: Bodies, Bodies, Bodies [3]

The Stone-Mother watched him.

"What does it mean?"

Kane closed his hand on Mjoldr’s haft and rolled his shoulders once, feeling the bruise where Ragnar’s kick had landed and the residual burn of Rage that had not fully settled.

"I know how to take care of him. Leave it to me."

He stretched his fingers, checked the axe’s weight, and started toward the ridge where the scrape of bone on stone still echoed from the secondary mouth.

"That bastard kicked me. Gotta pay the debt."

Firlia stood in his path a few strides from the hall’s outer cut, medical kit still open from the hurt elf, green hair tied back for work.

She didn’t reach for him.

She only blocked the line of his walk long enough to be seen.

Kane didn’t slow down.

"Go hide."

Firlia held his eyes for a heartbeat, then nodded once.

"Be careful."

She stepped aside and was already moving toward the lower-tier cover the Stone-Mother’s runners had marked for non-combatants.

Kane didn’t watch her go.

He walked to the lip of the secondary mouth, past warders who looked at him as if he had lost the thread of the morning, and stopped at the edge of the five-hundred-metre throat.

Yellow light still flickered on the lower holds.

Dry scrapes.

The feeder’s sullen hum.

Kane raised Mjoldr and threw it.

Not at a skull.

Into the dark: full arm, full shoulder, the red edge waking as the axe left his hand and fell through the throat like a dropped star.

It hit the landing far below with a sound too small for the distance, then lay there pulsing, a hard red heartbeat on the bone-strewn floor.

Ragnar’s attention turned.

Even from the lip, Kane felt it: the shift of that patient, yellow regard from the sky to the light that didn’t belong to the pit.

Other shapes turned with him.

Empty sockets fixed on the red.

The dead that had been climbing for the children’s paths forgot the children’s paths.

They gathered around the axe the way moths gather around a lamp that has learned how to burn cold.

Then Mjoldr rose.

It lifted from the floor without a hand on it, spinning once, red light carving a circle in the dark, and began to climb the throat the way it always came back to Kane’s palm, only slower, deliberate, a lure drawn upward on a string of will and old binding.

The dead followed.

Hundreds of them.

Bone and scrap and half-wrapped ruin, light trailing like a second rope, pouring up the handholds and the sheer in a dry, rattling flood that made the secondary mouth sound like a bag of stones poured down a well in reverse.

Kane caught the axe at the lip and was already running.

"With me!" he shouted, not at the household, at the warders, at the Stone-Mother’s line, at anyone still holding a hammer near the edge.

"Don’t hold the lip—open it! Let them climb! Stay off the path I’m taking!"

He ran the lower-tier paths toward the sea.

The old route the empty-handed Giant had used from the quay, the cuts that led down through mist and waterfall-spray toward the harbour’s grey water and the deeper green beyond.

Mjoldr stayed in his hand, red edge bright, a moving banner the dead wouldn’t refuse.

Behind him the secondary mouth spilled its years of thrown enemies onto honest stone in a tide of yellow-eyed bone.

Kessa’s voice carried from somewhere near the hall, sharp with understanding and fury:

"He is leading them—Stone-Mother—!"

Kane didn’t look back to answer.

He cut a climber that got too close to his heels, vaulted a low wall built for Giant children, and kept the red light high enough that the dead would see it through the mist.

Ragnar was climbing too.

Not with the mindless hunger of the bone-drift.

With the steady, scarred certainty of an Elder who had watched food leave the table and decided the shore was still the table.

The Stone-Mother saw the direction of the run from the hall’s outer cut.

Her eyes widened once, calculation, not panic, and then she was moving, hammer in hand, along a parallel path that would intercept the line of the dead without stepping into Kane’s wake.

Warders peeled after her.

The quieter Giant from the feeder descent bellowed something that might have been a warning and might have been a prayer and followed the land-walker’s red light toward the water.

Kane hit the lower switchbacks at a hard pace.

Mist soaked his shirt.

The waterfall’s thunder covered some of the chatter of bone.

It didn’t cover all of it.

A half-assembled torso dragged itself out of a side cut.

He put Mjoldr through the spine without breaking stride.

Another shape, taller, a warrior’s set to the remaining shoulder, came in from the left. He let the axe take the skull and kept running.

"Shore!" he called to anyone close enough to hear.

"Don’t fight the column—herd it! Red light is the bait—stay off the bait!"

The quay opened below him, the same oversized stone where the boat had bumped, and the Hydra’s eye had regarded them from the deep.

Kane didn’t stop at the first wet slabs.

He ran to the edge where the colour of the water changed—from clouded grey over rock to the deeper green the leviathan preferred—and then he stopped.

Mjoldr’s red pulse held steady in his grip.

Behind him the path was a river of the dead.

Yellow light in the mist.

Dry limbs and wet memory.

Ragnar’s bulk among them, engraved hammer still in hand, yellow eyes fixed on the barbarian who had broken his seat and stolen a piece of his core and then had the nerve to ring a dinner bell.

The Stone-Mother reached the last cut above the quay and halted hard enough that the warders behind her nearly piled up.

She saw the water. She saw where Kane stood.

Her face went through shock and into a grim, reluctant understanding.

"Land-walker—what are you—"

"Debt," he said, loud enough to carry over the waterfall and the chatter of bone.

"He kicked me. The sea has been hungry since we arrived. I am introducing them."

The water rippled.

Not from the waterfall’s distant slap.

A long, dark displacement moved under the surface outside the cut, the same shield-sized attention that had regarded the boat and wounded a lesser head and then sunk with the patience of a domain tool.