Page 14 of Orc’s Bones

Thruk was already dressed. He’d been at the window of his private chambers watching the ghostfire lanterns when the guard’s runner knocked, and the fact that she’d come to him rather than waiting for morning told him the Archive had given her news worse than she’d anticipated.

He told the runner to send her to the upper Crypt entrance.

Then he went down.

The Crypts at the second hour were different from the Crypts during the day. Not darker — the ghostfire at the upper passage burned the same pale, cold light regardless of hour. Different in the way silence was different at depth. The hum threading through the walls at a lower register. As if the preserved dead breathed more slowly at night.

He’d always known that was not literally true.

He’d also always known the Crypts were more awake than the daytime foot traffic made them feel.

Varek met him at the passage junction, already in full war arrangement — which meant someone had sent word to him as well, or Varek had simply anticipated. With Varek, anticipation and information arrived at the same place by different roads.

“She’s three minutes behind you.” Varek’s arms were crossed when he said it. “I clocked her at the outer gate.”

“Let her through when she arrives. Don’t make her wait.”

Varek’s expression said he had opinions and had decided to save them for later. He moved to his position at the upper passage entrance and stood there like a wall.

Thruk descended.

The upper Warline Crypts were exactly as they should have been — the carved corridors, the sealed crypt chambers behind bone-lock doors, lineage markers cut into the wall beside each chamber entrance. Every marking a record of what was housed inside, how the hum ran through the tier. He’d read these walls since he was old enough to understand what they meant. He knew them the way he knew his own patterns — not consciously, in his body, an immediate register of right or wrong before thought caught up.

Wrong.

Not in the way it had been wrong at the mid-level door the previous night — that was localized, precise. This was broader. Distributed. A vibration running through the upper tier walls that hadn’t been there hours ago when he’d descended with Xya. Not interference. Activation. The hum wasn’t being rewritten. It was being pulled at. The walls were responding to a call he couldn’t hear.

It knows I’m here. Whatever is in the walls right now is tracking me.

He slowed. His hand went to the weapon at his side out of habit, and the bone-ink in his forearms warmed without him consciously calling on them — a reflex from twenty years of situations that required the lineage amplification before he had time to think about requiring it.

He reached the mid-level corridor junction.

The two crypt guards stationed there were down.

Not dead. Both breathing — he could see the rise and fall from six meters out, both of them slumped against opposite walls in the posture of people who had dropped where they stood. The same bone-sickness as Sevan from the previous night.

He checked the pulse of the nearer one. Strong, even. Then he straightened and looked at the corridor ahead.

The chamber door at the end was open.

Not broken open. Bone-lock disengaged, door standing ajar on darkness, as if whoever had opened it intended to come back through.

Or intended for you to follow.

He went through the door.

The chamber housed three older bloodlines, their remains in sealed alcoves along all four walls, dense with centuries of accumulated presence. He’d been in this room a dozen times. He knew what it should feel like.

This was not it.

It was moving.

Drawing from the sealed alcoves on the south wall with a pull he could feel through his forearms — a drain, the exact opposite of what the lineage remains here were designed to do. They were supposed to hold. Preserve. What was happening in the south wall was taking from them rather than protecting what they contained.

He crossed to the south wall and put both hands against the sealed alcove face.

Wrong.