Page 6 of Orc’s Bones

“I heard her.”

“That’s not compliance. That’s a schedule.”

“Her compliance isn’t what I need.” Thruk moved back toward the dais. “She read the interference from outside the buildings. She’d been in the city less than an hour.”

“Which is exactly what concerns me.” Varek pushed off the wall and crossed his arms. He was going to say the thing, straight, no circling, the point delivered like a blade. “She’s either the most valuable asset we have to stop what’s in those Crypts, or she already knows what’s in there because she helped put it there, and she’s using this as the access she needs to finish it.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Varek’s eyes narrowed. He hadn’t expected that. “You’re not concerned.”

“I’m very concerned.” Thruk climbed the dais steps. “If she’d wanted to accelerate whatever’s happening in the Crypts, she didn’t need to come back. She built the framework. She could have handed it to whoever finished it from exile. She came back because she’s trying to stop it. Or she came back because she needs access to something inside the Dominion she couldn’t access from the outside.” He let that sit. “Either way, I need to know which it is before the bones are gone.”

Varek chewed on that. He had a quality Thruk valued above almost everything else — he updated when the evidence made him, instead of defending what he’d already decided. Slow and sometimes infuriating, but it meant when Varek committed to a position, the position was sound. “Eyes on her.”

“Have eyes on her. Don’t let her see them.”

“She’ll see them.”

“Probably. Do it anyway. The point isn’t surveillance. It’s letting her know we’re serious enough to track her.” He looked at the door she’d walked out of. “She’ll respect that more than pretending she has free run.”

Varek was already at the door. “One more thing before I go. Korven reported in — Sevan, the crypt watcher from the overnight shift, hasn’t come back. Stationed at the mid-level passage. Door was sealed. Korven’s bone-lock sequence isn’t responding.”

The bone-lock mechanisms in the Warline Crypts were tuned to lineage resonance. If Korven’s sequence had stopped working, someone had rewritten the architecture.

“Get him to the upper entrance. Now.”

Varek was gone.

The Warline Crypts began where the Cathedral’s foundation ended, and Thruk had walked the descent passage enough times that his body knew the transition before his mind caught it — air pressure shifting, the hum rising from background noise into a hum with direction and weight, the floor angling down in that gradual pull that felt less like walking and more like being drawn.

Korven met him at the upper entrance.

Sixteen years on post had compressed the man — not smaller, but denser, like a blade worked until there was nothing left but edge. He was holding his right hand with his left, knuckles raw from working the bone-lock manually. He’d run every sequence he had and gone to brute force after, which told Thruk the situation was worse than Varek’s report had framed it.

Korven held up the hand. “Sixteen years,” he said. “The sequence I’ve held for sixteen years, and the secondary override after that, and nothing. It’s like the lock —“ He stopped. Jaw tight.

“Like someone else wrote it.”

The nod Korven gave was small and furious — a man who’d been staring at a violation of his domain for hours and was barely holding the fury behind professional composure. “The bone inside the mechanism. It doesn’t read like mine anymore. It reads like it belongs to someone else.”

Thruk put his palm against the door.

The bone-lock was integrated into the architecture — built into the door frame itself, the bone structure tuned to his bloodline and to Korven’s sequence and to nothing else. He pressed his bloodline through it, the bone-ink on his arm warming as the ancestral connection activated.

The lock registered him. He felt his own bloodline signature come back — the Varyn line, everything the Dominion’s authority ran through, the weight of generations of it.

And underneath that: wrong.

Overwritten. The lock’s bone memory has been overwritten — layer on top of layer, and the original underneath, muffled, like shouting through stone.

He dropped his hand. “Get the secondary unit to the lower entrance passage. Seal both ends before we open this.”

Korven was already moving — no clarifying questions, no wasted breath. That was what Thruk had built in him over sixteen years, and it showed. The unit arrived, positioned. Thruk stepped to the side of the door rather than in front of it.

Old habit. You didn’t stand in the kill-line of a door you didn’t know the other side of.

“Open it.”