IM AN ORC?

"Sit down, Ruk."

Lira’s voice cut through the damp hush of the cavern like a blade drawn slow. She had not spoken since they found the crack in the mountain’s foot and slipped inside, since Nym had traced her fingers along the strange lichen-scrawled walls and pronounced the place safe. Ruk had been standing at the mouth of the hidden chamber, watching the fog roll and coil against the stone teeth outside, watching it move like a thing that thought.

He turned. His shoulder was still weeping through the linen Jara had bound around it, and every time he flexed his hand a pale blue thread of light stitched itself through his knuckles and then vanished, as if something inside him was breathing.

"I’m fine standing."

"You’re bleeding on my floor." Lira did not look up from the flat stone she had claimed as her workbench. She was grinding something to paste; the pestle rasped in a small, patient rhythm. "Sit."

He sat.

The chamber was not large. A hollow gut of the mountain, older than any of them, with a ceiling that dripped in three places and a natural chimney that let a thin blade of grey daylight through. Karg had built the fire in the exact spot where the daylight touched, so that its smoke would rise straight and clean and not betray them. That was Karg all over — cold in the way a knife was cold. Useful. Sharp. Never wasted.

Nym sat cross-legged near the fire, running a whetstone along the edge of the strange curved dagger she had taken off the tall one on the ridge. She had not spoken about it. She had not spoken about much since the mountain. Her small green face was drawn tight around the eyes, and when she looked at Ruk it was as if she were trying to see something behind him, or under him, or inside him.

Mek was asleep already, or pretending to be, his back against a lump of rock, his broad chest rising and falling too evenly to be honest. His axe lay across his knees like a lover. Blood was crusted along the haft.

Jara knelt at Ruk’s side and began unwinding the linen from his shoulder. Her fingers were quick, warm, and she did not flinch when the wound came into view, though it was bad enough to make Ruk himself glance away.

"Hold still, chief."

"I’m holding."

"You’re breathing. Breathing is moving."

"Then I’ll stop."

That got the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth. It was more than he’d earned in the last two days.

The wound was a long ragged bite along the meat of his shoulder where one of the pale hunters had clipped him before the change had risen up out of his chest and thrown the creature back into the rocks. He remembered the feeling of it more than the moment itself — a great heat behind his sternum, like a second heart trying to shove its way out, and then the world going bright and slow, and the hunter’s body coming apart in a way bodies were not supposed to come apart.

He remembered the look on Karg’s face after. That was what he remembered most.

Karg was sitting across the fire from him now, sharpening nothing, cleaning nothing, doing only the one thing Karg did when he had a decision to make: staring at the wall as though the wall had wronged him.

"Say it," Ruk grunted.

Karg did not turn his head. "Say what."

"Whatever’s crawling behind your teeth. Say it and be done."

The fire popped. A drip fell from the ceiling and struck the flat stone by Lira’s elbow with a soft musical tap.

"You almost killed Mek," Karg said.

Mek’s eyes did not open, but his breathing changed. So he had not been sleeping. Ruk had known.

"The blast," Karg went on, still to the wall, "went wide. If Mek had been half a pace to the left he would be paste on the mountain now. You didn’t see. You had your eyes closed. You had your eyes closed, Ruk, and you were laughing."

"I wasn’t laughing."

"You were making a sound."

"That wasn’t laughter."

"Then what was it?"

Ruk opened his mouth and found nothing in it. He looked down at his hand instead. The blue thread pulsed once between his knuckles, slow, like a fish turning in dark water. He closed his fist.

"I don’t know," he said finally. The words felt small and stupid in his mouth. "I don’t know what it was."

Jara’s fingers paused on his shoulder. She resumed a heartbeat later, and pressed the paste Lira had made into the wound with a firm, businesslike push that made his vision go white at the edges.

"Talk while I work," she murmured. "Keeps you from thinking about it."

"About what."

"About the fact that I’m putting crushed beetle into your arm."

"Ancestors."

"Chew this." She pushed a strip of bark into his mouth. It tasted the way mold smelled. "Karg. Ease up. He got us off the mountain."

"He almost got us buried on the mountain."

"He got us off." Jara’s voice did not rise, but there was iron in it. She had a way of laying words down like stones in a wall. "The Ethereal Lords opened their eyes and looked at us, Karg. At us. Six of us, on a rock, in the dark. And we walked away with our tongues in our mouths. That’s Ruk. Not the mountain, not luck. Ruk."

"Ruk," Karg said, and now he did turn, and his eyes were the flat grey of river ice, "is not Ruk anymore."

The silence that came after was a physical thing. It pressed on the fire and made it duck.

Nym stopped sharpening the dagger.

Lira did not stop grinding, but her rhythm changed by a hair — the pestle came down a little slower, a little heavier.

"Say that again," Ruk said quietly.

Karg’s jaw worked. He was a big orc, broader across the shoulders than Ruk even, and he had followed Ruk out of the pit-fights and across three warbands and up onto this cursed mountain without once, in all that time, questioning aloud. He was questioning now.

"You heard me."

"Say it again anyway."

"You’re not Ruk anymore. Not all the way. Something climbed inside you up there and it’s still in there and you don’t know its name and neither do we, and you want us to bed down in a hole and pretend we do." Karg leaned forward. The firelight cut his face into planes. "I’ve followed you into worse than that mountain, chief. I’ll follow you into worse than that mountain again. But I want to know what I’m following. That’s all. That’s the only thing I want."

Ruk looked at him a long moment.

Then he opened his fist.

The blue thread was there, of course. It had been there since the summit. But now he let it out, the way you let out a held breath — not much, not enough to frighten anyone who wasn’t already frightened, just enough. A soft pulse rolled up his forearm, glowing under the skin like a coal seen through paper, and settled in the palm of his hand as a small trembling knot of light. It smelled of ozone and of something else, something older, like wet stone that had never seen sun.

The fire dimmed while it was out. Even the drip from the ceiling seemed to slow.

Nym drew in a sharp breath.

"I don’t know its name," Ruk said. He said it to Karg but he said it also to the light in his hand, and to all of them. "I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know what it wants, if it wants. I know it wasn’t there before the peak and I know it is there now. I know when I called on it, up on the ridge, I meant to hit the tall one and instead I hit everything I was looking at. That was not skill. That was not aim. That was a thing bigger than me trying to fit through a door my size."

He closed his hand. The light guttered.

"I nearly killed Mek. I know. I’m sorry, Mek."

"S’fine," Mek grunted, without opening his eyes. "Been killed worse."

"That doesn’t make sense."

"Doesn’t have to."

Karg had not looked away. "Sorry isn’t a plan, Ruk."

"No. It isn’t." Ruk rested his good arm on his knee. The wounded shoulder throbbed under Jara’s fingers. "Here is the plan. I don’t use it. Not until I know it. Not unless there is no other rope in the well. You have my word. My word, Karg, mine, the old one, before the mountain. That one still works."

Karg watched him. Watched him a long time. Ruk did not look away.

At last Karg let out a slow, tired breath, and something in his shoulders loosened by a finger’s width.

"Fine."

"Fine?"

"Fine, chief."

"Ancestors, don’t scare me like that."

"Don’t scare me like that."

Nym made a small noise that might have been a laugh, if any of them had remembered how those sounded.

Lira set the pestle down.

"Now that we’ve all cried on each other," she said, "will one of you tell me what an Ethereal Lord is."

The silence came back, but it was a different silence now. Not brittle. Held.

Ruk chewed the bark. Swallowed. His mouth tasted of moss and blood.

"You saw them the same as we did."

"I saw shapes in the sky, Ruk. Tall as towers. Faces where faces shouldn’t be. I saw one of them turn and look at us and I felt my heart forget its job for three beats and then remember it wrong." Lira’s fingers were steady on the flat stone but her eyes were not. Her eyes were doing a thing they never did. They were afraid. "I saw. I want a word for what I saw."

"That is the word," Nym said. She was still holding the curved dagger, but she was not looking at it. She was looking into the fire. "That’s what the tall one called them. The one Ruk broke."

They all looked at her.

She swallowed.

"When we were coming up over the shoulder, before the mist, before you all caught up — I was ahead. You know I was ahead. The tall one was talking to someone. Not to me. Not to any of us. He was talking to the air. He was speaking a language I don’t have, but there were three words in it I did have. He said them like a name. Ethereal. Lords. Return." She paused. "That last one, he said with joy. Like a child saying supper."

"Return," Lira repeated.

"Return."

Jara finished her work on Ruk’s shoulder and began binding fresh linen around it. Her hands were slower now, thinking hands.

"They were sleeping, then," she said. "Or gone. And they’re coming back."

"Or being called back," Ruk said.

"Or being pulled back," Nym said. "By what happened on the peak."

Ruk’s hand throbbed with its new light.

He tried not to feel what he was feeling, which was that the thing inside him had turned its head, slightly, when Nym said pulled.

"Then we need to leave," Karg said. He stood, the way he stood, all at once, one motion. "Now. Tonight. As soon as the fog lifts we —"

"We can’t," Lira said.

"We can and we will."

"We can’t, Karg." Lira was looking at the wall. Not at the door. At the wall. At the far wall. "Because we are not alone in this hole."

Every one of them went still.

Even Mek opened his eyes.

Ruk followed Lira’s gaze. The far wall of the cavern was uneven, patchy with the pale lichen Nym had traced on the way in, and in the low firelight it looked, at first, like nothing but rock.

Then his eyes adjusted.

The lichen was arranged. Not grown. Arranged. In a spiral, wide as a man is tall, with a hollow at its center that was not a hollow at all but a shape, a suggestion of a shape, the way a footprint in a snowbank suggests the foot. It was a face. Or the memory of a face. Or the place a face had once rested against the stone, and left an outline behind, the way heat leaves an outline on cold glass.

And it was pulsing.

Faint. Once every few heartbeats. The lichen dimming and brightening in a rhythm that matched — Ruk realized with a lurch — the pulse of the blue thread in his own hand.

"Oh," Nym said, in a very small voice.

"How long?" Ruk asked.

Lira’s throat moved. "It started when you sat down."

"Ancestors."

"It got stronger when you opened your hand for Karg."

"Lira —"

"I didn’t want to say while you and Karg were —"

"Lira."