IM AN ORC?

The second shriek came from above, and it was not the seed’s voice. It was Mek’s.

Not a scream of pain — Mek didn’t do those, hadn’t since the flood — but the short, sharp bark he used when something had gone wrong in a way that required everyone else to immediately stop doing whatever they were doing and pay attention. Ruk knew that sound the way he knew his own heartbeat. He’d heard it in three different warbands and twice in burning buildings.

He was moving before the echo died.

Lira’s grip on his waist broke as he turned for the stairs. He heard her stumble and catch herself on the wall, heard Nym say something sharp and low behind him, heard Karg — Karg with the pale thread buried in his arm, Karg who should not have been able to move that fast — come up the stairs two at a time at his shoulder. Neither of them spoke. There wasn’t anything to say.

The stairwell was narrow and the torchlight from below made their shadows run ahead of them up the stone. The carvings on the walls blurred past — the eyeless faces, the hands, the burning things — and Ruk didn’t look at them. He was listening. He was trying to hear, under Mek’s voice and the sound of his own feet and the sound of Karg’s breathing, whether the second shriek had been answered.

It had.

He could feel it. Not with his ears. With the thing behind his ribs, the thing that had been quiet since he’d drawn it back from the seed, which was now pressing forward again with the insistence of a dog that has scented something it knows. It was pulling him up the stairs. He didn’t like that it was pulling him. He went anyway, because the direction it wanted was the same direction Mek’s voice had come from, and that was enough.

The upper level of the sanctuary opened into a wide low hall with four stone pillars and a shallow basin in the center that might once have held water or fire or something else entirely. Sorn was there, pressed flat against the far wall with her short blades out, her eyes tracking something Ruk couldn’t see yet. Rin was at the window slit, bow up, arrow nocked, not drawing, which meant whatever it was hadn’t given her a clean angle. And Mek was in the center of the room, between the basin and the door, with his axe in both hands and his feet planted, and at his feet was a shape on the floor that had not been there when they’d gone down to the reliquary.

A body.

Ruk crossed the room. The shape resolved as he got closer: a man, or something that had been a man, wearing the pale wrapped clothing of the Ethereal Vanguard’s lower servants. Not a hunter. Not one of the tall ones. A runner, maybe, or a scout. Small-framed, young, with the kind of face that hadn’t finished deciding what it wanted to be. He was breathing. Barely.

"Where did he come from," Ruk said.

"Window." Mek didn’t take his eyes off the door. "Dropped in. Didn’t fight. Just dropped and went down."

"He came through the window?" Rin’s voice was tight. "That’s twelve feet off the ground."

"Dropped," Mek repeated. "Like something threw him."

Ruk crouched. The young man’s eyes were open and moving, tracking the ceiling with the rapid, unfocused motion of someone whose mind was somewhere else entirely. His lips were working. No sound came out, but the shape of it was the same word, over and over, and Ruk watched his mouth for a moment before he understood it.

*Run.*

"He’s warning us," Lira said from behind him. She had come up the stairs quietly. She was always quiet when she was frightened; it was the opposite of what most people did. "He’s been sent to warn us."

"By who," Karg said.

"By whoever threw him through the window." She knelt on the other side of the young man and put two fingers to his throat. "He’s in shock. He won’t talk for a while. We need to move him somewhere warm and—"

"We need to leave," Karg said.

"Karg—"

"Lira. Something threw a man through a window twelve feet off the ground to warn us. Whatever that something is, it’s outside. We are inside. I would like to continue to be inside for as long as possible and then be outside somewhere else." He was holding his injured arm against his chest, the one with the pale thread in it, and his face was the color of old ash. He hadn’t said anything about the arm since the reliquary. He wasn’t going to. "Nym. Can you move him?"

Nym had come up behind Lira. She looked at the young man, at the way his eyes were moving, at the shape his mouth kept making. "I can move him. I don’t know if moving him will help."

"It’ll help us."

"Karg, that’s—"

"I know what it is." His voice was flat and tired and honest. "I know exactly what it is. I’m saying it anyway."

Ruk stood. The thing behind his ribs had gone quiet again, the way it went quiet when it was paying attention to something he couldn’t hear yet. He didn’t like that either. He was building a long list of things he didn’t like about it, and at the top of the list was the fact that it was, increasingly, more useful than he was.

"Sorn," he said. "What’s outside."

Sorn hadn’t moved from the wall. Her eyes were still tracking. "Fog. Same fog as before. But it’s moved. It was at the tree line when we came in. It’s at the door now."

"The door is stone."

"The fog doesn’t seem to care."

Rin, at the window slit, drew her bow back a fraction. "There’s something in it. I can’t see it. I can hear it."

"What does it sound like?"

She was quiet for a moment. "Like the seed."

The room went very still.

Ruk looked at Karg. Karg looked at him. Between them, without either of them saying it, a decision was made of the kind that didn’t need words — the kind that was less a decision than an acknowledgment of something that had already been decided by the situation.

"Everyone up," Ruk said. "Everything you can carry. Two minutes."

Nobody argued. That was the thing about this group, the thing he’d built over the years and the warbands and the bad decisions and the worse ones: they argued about everything right up until the moment it mattered, and then they moved. Mek was on his feet before Ruk finished speaking. Sorn was already at the stairs. Rin unstrung her bow — faster to carry, slower to use, and she’d made the calculation herself — and followed.

Lira looked at the young man on the floor.

"We can’t carry him," Ruk said.

"I know."

"He’ll slow us down."

"I know, Ruk." Her voice was not angry. It was something worse: resigned. She reached into the bag at her hip and took out a small wrapped packet and pressed it into the young man’s unresisting hand, folding his fingers around it. "Willow bark and dried moss. If he wakes up he’ll know what to do with it. If he doesn’t wake up it won’t matter." She stood. Her hands were steady. Her eyes were not. "Let’s go."

They went down through the sanctuary the way they’d come up, but faster, and at the bottom Karg stopped them with a raised fist and they all stopped, because Karg’s raised fist was not a thing you ignored.

"The back," he said. "There’s a back."

"How do you know?"

"Because there’s always a back. Old places like this, they always had a way out that wasn’t the way in. The priests or the scholars or whoever built it, they always wanted a way to run that the people at the front door didn’t know about." He was looking at the lowest level, at the reliquary passage, at the walls. "Nym. You’ve been down here longest. Is there a back?"

Nym was quiet for a moment. Then: "The carvings. The hands. They all point the same direction."

"Which direction."

She pointed.

The wall she pointed at looked like a wall. It was, in every visible way, a wall. It had the same pale lichen as the others, the same damp sheen, the same old carvings of hands holding small burning things. But the hands — Ruk looked at them now, really looked — were all oriented the same way. Pointing right. Pointing at the corner where the wall met the floor.

Nym crossed to it and crouched and pressed her palm flat against the stone at the base of the corner. Nothing happened. She pressed harder. Still nothing. She turned her head and looked at Ruk with an expression that said: *your turn.*

He crossed to her. He put his hand next to hers. The thing behind his ribs woke up immediately, interested, eager in the way it was always eager when there was something old and sealed nearby. He didn’t want to use it. He’d told Karg he wouldn’t use it unless there was no other rope in the well.

He looked at the door at the top of the stairs. Through the stone, he could hear — or feel, it was getting harder to tell the difference — the fog pressing against it. The sound Rin had described. The seed’s voice, but bigger, and patient, and not alone.

He pressed his hand against the stone and let the thing behind his ribs out, just a thread of it, just enough.

The wall opened.

Not dramatically. Not with grinding or light or any of the things the old stories promised. It just — released, the way a held breath releases, and a section of stone the width of a man’s shoulders swung inward on a pivot that had been waiting, apparently, for a very long time. Cold air came through. Dark air. The smell of deep earth and old water and something else, something green and alive, which was wrong for underground but was there anyway.

"Go," Ruk said.

They went. Nym first, because she was smallest and fastest and would know soonest if the passage narrowed to nothing. Then Jara, then Rin, then Sorn, then Lira, who paused at the threshold and looked back up the stairs toward the young man they’d left on the floor.

"Lira," Ruk said.

She went.

Mek went next, sideways, because the passage was not built for men of Mek’s width, and Mek went through it the way he went through most things: by deciding the obstacle was less important than the destination. Karg went last, except for Ruk, and before he ducked through the opening he turned and looked at Ruk with those flat grey eyes.

"You used it," he said.

"There was no other rope."

Karg looked at him a moment longer. Then he ducked through the opening.

Ruk went last. He pulled the stone closed behind him, and the sound of the fog against the sanctuary door cut off as cleanly as a blade through thread.

---

The passage ran for a long time.

It was not straight. It bent and dipped and rose again, and in places the ceiling came down low enough that even Ruk had to duck, and in one place the floor dropped away entirely for three steps and they all went down into cold water to their knees before it rose again. Nobody complained. Complaining required breath, and breath was in short supply.

Nym set the pace, which was fast. She had a small light she’d taken from the reliquary — a piece of pale stone that gave off a faint, steady glow when she held it in her fist — and she held it up and moved and the rest of them followed the light.

Ruk walked in the dark at the back of the line and listened to the thing behind his ribs, which had gone quiet again. Not the quiet of satisfaction. The quiet of something that had gotten what it wanted and was now waiting to see what happened next. He didn’t like that quiet. He was beginning to think there was no version of this thing that he liked, and that the question was not whether he liked it but what he was going to do with it, and whether doing something with it was the same as becoming it.

Lira’s voice, ahead of him in the dark: "Ruk."

"Here."

"How’s the arm."

He’d forgotten about the arm. He flexed his shoulder. The wound Jara had packed with beetle paste pulled and throbbed, but it was a clean pain, a healing pain. "Fine."

"Karg’s arm isn’t fine."

He knew. He’d been watching Karg’s silhouette in the passage, the way he was holding the injured arm, the way he wasn’t swinging it the way he usually did. "I know."

"The thread is spreading."

"I know, Lira."

"We need to stop and look at it."

"We need to get out of this passage first."

"Ruk—"

"I know." He said it the way you said something when you knew it and couldn’t do anything about it yet and needed the person you were saying it to to understand both of those things at once. She went quiet. She understood.

The passage ended at a door that was not a door but a curtain of thick hanging roots, pale and dry, that had grown down over the opening from whatever was above. Nym pushed through them and the light that came back through was grey and thin and real, and the smell that came with it was cold air and wet pine and the particular sharpness of high altitude after rain.

They came out one by one onto a ledge of rock halfway down the mountain’s far side, hidden by a stand of old pines whose roots had grown into the sanctuary’s roof over the centuries. Below them the slope ran down into a valley that was still dark, still wrapped in the last of the night. Above them the mountain’s peak was lost in cloud.

Ruk came out last and stood on the ledge and looked back at the stone face they’d come through. There was no door visible. Just rock and roots and the mountain’s indifferent face.

He looked at Karg.

Karg was sitting on a flat stone with his injured arm across his knee. In the grey morning light the pale thread was visible under the skin, a thin dark line that had climbed from his wrist to the inside of his elbow. As Ruk watched, it moved. Not much. A finger’s width. But it moved.

Nym was already crouching over it. She had the curved dagger out, not to cut — not yet — but to trace the line of it, to understand its shape. Her face was doing the careful empty thing again.

"Tell me," Karg said.

"It’s not venom," Nym said. "It’s not feeding. It’s — looking. It’s looking for something."

"For what."

She looked up at Ruk.

"For me," Ruk said.

Karg’s jaw tightened. He looked down at his arm. He looked at the thread. He looked at the thing that had come out of the seed and buried itself in him and was now, apparently, using him as a compass pointed at his chief.

"Of course it is," he said, in the tone of a man who has stopped being surprised by anything.

"I can draw it out," Ruk said.

"How."

"The same way I opened the door."

Karg looked at him. The flat grey eyes. The measuring patience. "You said you wouldn’t use it."

"I said I wouldn’t use it unless there was no other rope. Karg." He held the man’s gaze. "There’s no other rope."

Karg was quiet for a long moment. The valley below them was beginning to lighten at its edges, the dark going from black to deep blue to the first pale suggestion of grey. Somewhere down in the trees a bird made a sound it probably shouldn’t have been making this early, and then stopped.

"Fine," Karg said, at last.

"Fine?"

"Fine, chief." He held out his arm.

Ruk took it. He wrapped both hands around Karg’s forearm, over the place where the thread ran, and he let the thing behind his ribs out — more than a thread this time, more than he’d used on the door, enough to feel it move through his palms and into the stone-cold skin of Karg’s arm. The thread inside reacted immediately. It pulled toward him, the way it had pulled toward him in the reliquary, the way the seed had pulled, and he pulled back, and for a moment it was a contest between two things that neither of them had names for.

Then the thread came free.

It didn’t come out cleanly. Nothing about any of this was clean. It came out the way a splinter comes out when you’ve left it too long — with resistance and a small bright pain and a sense of wrongness that lingered after the thing itself was gone. Karg made a sound through his teeth. The thread emerged from the skin of his forearm as a pale, writhing filament no longer than a finger, and Ruk held it in his palm and looked at it and then closed his fist and the thing behind his ribs consumed it, the way fire consumes paper, without ceremony.

The mark on his hand pulsed once. Bright. Then settled.

Karg looked at his arm. The dark line was gone. The skin was red and tender where it had been, the way skin was after something had been in it that shouldn’t have, but the thread was gone.

He flexed his hand. Opened it. Closed it.

"Hm," he said.

"Does it hurt?"

"Less than before."

"Good."

"Ruk." Karg looked up. His voice had changed. Not much. But the measuring quality was gone from it, or at least it had moved back, made room for something else. "Thank you."

Ruk let go of his arm. "Don’t thank me. I’m the reason it was in you."

"You’re the reason it’s out of me." Karg stood, slowly, and rolled his shoulder. "That’s the one that matters right now."

Lira was watching them both from a few feet away with an expression Ruk couldn’t entirely read. When she caught his eye she looked away, but not before he saw what was in it: relief, and something older than relief, something that had been sitting behind it for a long time waiting for a moment to show its face.

He didn’t say anything. Neither did she. There wasn’t anything to say that the moment hadn’t already said.

"Right," Nym said, from where she was still crouched on the ledge, looking down at the valley. "So. We’re on the wrong side of the mountain. The Vanguard is on the other side. The sanctuary is compromised. We have no supplies except what we carried, which is not much, and we have one injured arm, one man we left on a floor, and one chief with something living in his chest that we don’t have a name for." She paused. "Did I miss anything?"

"The seed is dead," Jara offered.

"The seed is dead," Nym agreed. "Small mercies."

"The fog," Sorn said. She was looking back up the slope, toward the mountain’s face. "It hasn’t come through."

"Yet," Karg said.

"Yet," Sorn agreed.

Ruk looked down at the valley. The light was coming up properly now, the grey going gold at the edges, the trees below taking on color and shape. Somewhere down there was a river — he could hear it, the low constant voice of moving water — and where there was a river there was usually a road, and where there was a road there were usually people, and people meant information, and information was the only currency he had left.

"Down," he said.

Nobody argued.

They went down.

---

The river was wider than it had sounded from the ledge.

It came down out of the mountain’s roots in a rush of white water and then spread and slowed as the valley floor leveled out, and by the time they reached its bank it was a broad, cold, fast-moving thing that reflected the morning sky in pieces. The road Ruk had predicted was there — a dirt track, old but used, running along the near bank with the wheel ruts of carts worn deep into it. The ruts were recent. Someone had come this way within the last day.

Nym crouched at the edge of the track and read the ground the way she read everything: quickly, quietly, with her head tilted slightly to the left as if she were listening to it.

"Two carts," she said. "Heavy. Heading south. One of the wheels is cracked — see the irregular mark? It’ll need replacing before long." She stood. "And one person on foot, going the same direction. Small feet. Light step. Moving fast."

"Running?" Jara asked.

"Walking fast. There’s a difference. Running people don’t keep their stride even. This one was scared but not panicking." Nym looked south along the track. "Maybe half a day ahead of us."

"Could be anyone," Sorn said.

"Could be," Nym agreed. "Could also be someone who came out of the sanctuary’s front door before we came out of the back."

The thought settled over all of them at once. The young man on the floor. The one who’d been thrown through the window to warn them. If he’d woken up — if he’d been able to walk —

"We follow," Ruk said.

They followed.

The track south was easier going than the mountain had been, but not easy. The valley was narrow and the trees pressed close on both sides, old growth with roots that crossed the path and moss that made the stones slick. Mek moved through it the way he moved through everything — by treating obstacles as suggestions — and the rest of them picked their way more carefully. Karg walked with his injured arm held slightly away from his body, not favoring it exactly, but aware of it. Ruk watched him and said nothing.

The thing behind his ribs had gone quiet in the way it went quiet when it was satisfied. He didn’t trust that quiet. He was beginning to understand that the thing had moods, and that its moods were not his moods, and that the gap between what it wanted and what he wanted was sometimes narrow and sometimes not. On the mountain it had wanted the same thing he’d wanted: to survive, to fight, to push through. In the reliquary it had wanted the seed, and he had not wanted the seed, and that had been the first time he’d felt the gap clearly, like a crack in stone you put your finger into and find it goes deeper than you expected.

He needed to understand it. He needed to understand it the way you needed to understand a weapon you’d picked up off a battlefield — not just how to hold it, but what it had been made for, and who had made it, and whether the person who’d made it had been making it for you or for someone else entirely.

The archive on the peak had had answers. The archive was gone now, buried under however many tons of mountain the Ethereal Lord’s thrashing had brought down. Whatever had been written on those walls was written nowhere else, or if it was, he didn’t know where.

He needed someone who knew things he didn’t know.

He was thinking about this when Nym stopped.

She stopped the way she stopped when she’d found something — not suddenly, not with alarm, but with a particular quality of stillness that was its own kind of signal. The rest of them stopped too, reading her the way they’d learned to read her over the years.

"There," she said.

She was pointing at a tree. A large one, old, with bark the color of iron and roots that spread out from its base like a hand laid flat on the ground. Sitting in the crook of two of those roots, with his back against the trunk and his knees drawn up and the wrapped packet Lira had pressed into his hand still clutched in his fist, was the young man from the sanctuary floor.

He was awake.

He was looking at them.

His eyes were the color of river water over pale stone, and they were very clear, and they were not afraid. That was the thing Ruk noticed first: he was not afraid. He had been thrown through a window twelve feet off the ground, he had lain on a stone floor in shock while a group of armed strangers argued over whether to take him with them, he had apparently walked half a day through mountain forest on legs that should not have been working yet, and he was sitting in the roots of a tree looking at them with the calm of someone who had been expecting them.

"You’re slower than I thought," the young man said. His voice was low and even and carried a faint accent Ruk didn’t recognize — something from the east, maybe, from somewhere past the ranges. "I’ve been sitting here long enough to eat."

He held up the willow bark packet. It had been opened and resealed.

Lira made a small sound. "You knew what it was."

"My mother was a healer." He looked at her. "You packed it well. The proportions are right. Most people get the moss ratio wrong."

"Who are you," Ruk said.

The young man looked at him. The clear eyes moved from Ruk’s face to his hand — to the mark, which was faintly visible even in daylight now, a pale luminescence under the skin — and then back up.

"My name is Davan," he said. "I was a runner for the Vanguard’s eastern Chapter for three years. I stopped being that about six days ago, when I understood what the Return actually meant." He paused. "I’ve been looking for you since then."

"For me specifically," Ruk said.

"For whoever had the Warden’s mark." Davan’s eyes dropped to Ruk’s hand again. "I didn’t know it would be an orc. The texts didn’t specify." He said it without judgment, the way you stated a fact that had surprised you but that you’d adjusted to. "I know where the second archive is. The one they didn’t destroy. The one that has the answers you’re looking for." He looked up. "I’ll take you there, if you’ll take me with you."

Ruk looked at him for a long moment. He looked at Karg, who was watching Davan with the flat grey eyes and the expression that meant: *I don’t trust this, but I’m listening.* He looked at Nym, who had her head tilted to the left again, reading the young man the way she’d read the road.

Nym gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. Not *trust him.* Just: *he’s telling the truth about something.*

Ruk looked back at Davan.

"Get up," he said. "You can walk and talk."

Davan got up. He was steadier on his feet than he had any right to be. He fell in beside them as they started south again along the river track, and the morning came up around them, and the mountain fell away behind, and the valley opened ahead into something wider and less known.

The thing behind Ruk’s ribs turned its attention to the young man walking at his side, curious, interested, the way it was interested in old things and sealed things and things that knew more than they’d said yet.

Ruk kept walking.

There was a long way still to go.