IM AN ORC?

Orrin’s Ford was next. But before Ruk could take another step the warehouse door burst inward.

The iron bar Grasha had wedged across it snapped in half. Three men emerged from the smoke with hooked river knives and wet scarves tied across their mouths. Behind them, the market was no longer fleeing the fire. It was fleeing toward it.

“Get the people clear,” Ruk shouted.

Zira and Lenna sprang into action. They pushed through the front doorway into the street and began yelling at everyone to move south toward open road. Their voices were drowned out by shouts, breaking crates, and the terrible crackle of a roof beam burning in the fish sheds.

Karg met the first attacker before he cleared the threshold. She caught his wrist, smashed her forehead into his face, and shoved him backward into the two men behind him. Grasha stepped past her, axe gripped low, and severed the hook from another man’s hand without taking his arm. The blade clanged against the warehouse floor.

“Who sent you?” Grasha demanded.

The man spat at her boots.

Karg punched him in the ribs. The reply came out wheezing.

“The boat.” He gasped. “Stop the boat.”

Nym was already moving.

She crossed the warehouse floor and vaulted up onto a stack of grain barrels. Pulling herself through the roof hatch, Sorn followed without even touching the ladder. Ruk watched through the broken doorway and saw the river beyond the market sheds.

A low barge was clearing away from the dock.

The hooded figure stood at its stern.

His left hand gripped the black metal core that had been stolen from the crate.

His right rested on a pole anchored in the riverbed.

“The mark is not finished,” Zree hissed. She was still kneeling beside the sealed crack with both palms pressed to the floor. “But that core can wake another one.”

“Then it does not leave the river,” Ruk replied.

He sprinted for the dock.

The street had turned into a vortex of smoke and bodies. Fish baskets spilled out beneath his boots. A cart horse screamed and thrashed against its traces. Two children had stopped dead near a stall that was catching fire from one corner.

Ruk changed course.

The barge was already twenty paces away when he reached the river’s edge. The hooded figure raised the dark core above his head and white lines twitched across his face. The river beside the barge trembled.

He reached the children. Grabbed one under each arm, and began carrying them through the crowd toward Zira. She saw him coming and shoved a merchant out of her way with enough force to make him stagger.

“Take them to the south road.”

“The barge—“

“Sorn and Nym have it.”

He didn’t know if that was true. He needed it to be true.

He turned and ran back toward the dock.

The market’s wooden awnings were already catching fire. The smoke hung low over the water, turning the barge into a silhouette with white light crawling around it. Ruk reached the end of the dock just as the hooded figure slammed the core into the pole anchored at the barge’s stern.

A crack formed in the river.

Not across the surface of the water. Beneath it.

The boundary sense recoiled in his mind. A false hollow note buzzed up through the current, distorted by water and wood and the black metal core that touched it. The river began pulling toward the barge like someone had reversed the flow upstream.

Boats tore from their moorings. Lines snapped. A ferryman stumbled from his deck and disappeared under the brown water.

Ruk leaped from the dock.

He landed on the nearest overturned skiff and drove it away from the dock with one solid kick from his heel. Grabbed the ferryman’s sleeve as he surfaced. Both of them were being dragged by the current now. The false hollow hadn’t formed into a feeder yet but it was trying. At full power a feeder could tear a five story building from the ground.

Karg landed behind him, gripping a coil of rope. She tied one end around a wooden piling and threw the other end over her shoulder.

“Do not let go.”

The river tried to take them anyway.

Ruk wrapped the rope around the skiff rail. Karg leaned back, feet planted on the dock. Grasha joined her and then Brek, their weight anchoring the pull into a vibrating line of resistance.

Ruk heaved the ferryman into the skiff.

By now the barge was far out into the river. Nym leaped from the warehouse roof and dropped onto it behind the hooded figure. Her first knife slashed the rope attached to the pole. Her second slit a guard’s shoulder before he could twist away.

Sorn stepped onto the bow, nowhere near where anyone had seen him board. He jabbed a blade into the barge pilot’s hand and kicked the steering oar askew.

The barge swung perpendicular to the current.

The hooded figure spun around toward Nym. Underneath that hood was the narrow face of a human. Pale and indiscernible in the smoke. He moved with a short black blade that trailed pale light every time it cut through the air.

Nym blocked his strike. His second cut ripped across her coat. She stepped back, bumped into the edge of the barge behind her, and smiled without humor.

“You people always want expensive knives.”

He slashed at her.

Sorn stepped behind him.

The hooded figure sensed someone behind him milliseconds before Sorn struck. He twisted sideways and slammed himself into the barge rail with his good hand. Smacked the black core into the deck boards so hard that—

The false note tore up through the river.

Every person who touched the water felt it. Ruk felt the seam underneath shudder. The wood of the barge warped. Between those planks of wood was now a wide ribbon of pale light where the river should have been.

Zree landed on the dock beside him through the smoke.

Her amber eyes were wide with agony.

“Ruk! The water... It’s making it worse. The river amplifies the false frequency farther than the ground could.”

He stared between his skiff and the barge. Halfway between them now. The ferryman was crawling around at his feet and Karg’s rope was all that kept him from being dragged downstream.

He picked up the artifact.

The translucent glow spilled across the river.

Ruk reached into the water’s mind. Searching for the true voice underneath that bastardized note. It was difficult, with the river surging around him, the boundary constantly moving since it was beneath the water instead of underneath earth. But it existed. Solid and steady and angry someone was trying to rip it in half.

He aligned himself with it.

The false pull staggered.

Everyone on the barge went still.

Nym shoved the hooded figure back away from the core. Sorn reached for it but was stabbed in the back by a guard who had ambushed them from behind a stack of cargo crates. He rolled out of the blade’s path but the guard twisted after him, hook knife buried deep in Sorn’s shoulder.

Blood soaked his coat.

Grasha saw it from the dock and screamed.

“Ruk, toss me a line!”

He understood before she finished shouting.

Ruk tied the loose end of Karg’s rope around the skiff rail and shoved away from the dock. The current swept him off his feet. He let it carry him for several seconds, guiding the artifact’s glow to keep the true boundary seam open under the river.

Grasha ran down the dock with Karg trailing behind her holding the rope tight. When she reached the last board she jumped.

She hit the barge like a missile.

The guard who had tackled Sorn sailed over the railing of the barge. Grasha’s axe bit into the deck beside the black core and tore into the boards around it. Nym took advantage of the distraction and twisted the hooded figure’s knife from his grip before slamming her knee into his gut.

He doubled over and laughed.

“You think this is a victory?” He spat. “Var... Var... Halven has the Ford. Sister Halven has the engine. You’re already too late.”

He reached into his sleeve and shattered a glass vial against the rail.

Gray smoke filled his lungs and consumed him.

It cleared and he was gone.

Black core remained where he’d fallen through the deck.

Ruk’s skiff collided with the barge hard enough to knock his fillings loose. He climbed aboard. Sorn sat on one knee scooping blood from his wound. Nym stood over the core panting, hooded blade pointed at the ground.

“Can you carve it out?” He asked Zree.

She refused to come near the water. Any answer she shouted would be useless.

“No.” She yelled back. “Not while it’s attached to the river! Tear the barge loose and carry it away.”

Karg and Grasha didn’t bother arguing. They began tearing apart the boards around the core without touching the metal itself. Brek snatched the steering oar and together they piloted the barge toward the shallows while Ruk kept the river’s true note quivering.

The false hollow fought them the entire way there.

Pulling against the barge. Pulling against the dock. Pulling against the people evacuating along the river road. But once they beached the barge and its wood scraped against the muddy bank the false hollow lost access to the water.

Zree crawled out from between the reeds, dropped to her knees, and listened.

“There.”

Ruk slammed the artifact into the core.

Darkness consumed all the pale lines racing across its surface.

The river let out a breath it had been holding. The flow reversed course. Boats stopped pitching. Karg’s rope went limp in her hands.

For a moment after the fight ended, Reed Market was silent save for fire and river.

Then it began moving again.

Zira reached the shore with the two children, and the ferryman’s wife following behind her. She waded into the water up to her knees and dragged her husband out of the skiff. Around them people gathered to stare at the wrecked barge. The smoke rising from the warehouse. Each other.

Ruk stared at the shoreline instead.

The hooded figure was long gone. Varn Osk still had Orrin’s Ford. Sister Halven still had an engine.

Nym joined him at the water’s edge, pulling rainwater and smoke off her face with one hand.

“We got something.”

She held out the stolen black blade.

Near the hilt, scratched beneath the pale glow the metal had left on her gloves, was directions written in a cipher Ruk recognized.

Nym memorized them and then handed him the blade.

“We know where to find Orrin’s Ford.”

Ruk looked downstream. Now that the current was finally flowing properly it had also begun to spread news of what happened here today.

“We find out where they’re going instead,” he said.