Page 9 of Orc’s Bones

Varek arrived as Thruk finished reading it, let himself in with the ease of long service, and stood at the window that overlooked the Cathedral courtyard. He skipped framing it. “She was right about the walls. Lock confirms the analysis.”

“Yes.”

“So.” He turned from the window. “She went in alone. She came back with everything we needed.” He moved toward the door. “That’s either brilliance or the longest game I’ve seen.”

“Good.” Thruk set the report down. “That’s your job.”

Varek’s mouth thinned — not amusement, not irritation. The look he got when he’d been given an answer he couldn’t argue with and didn’t like. He moved toward the door.

“One more thing. Sevan’s sensitivity being intact — Korven noted it’s unusual.”

“He did.”

“Most exposure at that level damages the pathways. It’s a byproduct of the mechanism.” Varek’s hand was on the door. “Unless the person who wrote that marking was being deliberate about not damaging him.”

The door closed.

Thruk stayed where he was.

Careful. Not methodical — she’d drawn that line herself. Methodical was a pace. This was care. Someone had been inside a sealed Crypt chamber for ninety minutes and had walked out leaving Sevan breathing, sensitivity intact, nothing broken beyond what the mechanism required.

The sigil. The precision of it. The problems it had solved that nobody else had managed to solve.

Her in the chamber. Crouched to read the lower portion, hands at her sides, that tight control in her face that wasn’t distance. Someone staring at their own work being used in ways they hadn’t sanctioned, holding every reaction behind her teeth.

She hated it. She was going to take it apart anyway.

The ghostfire held steady. Then he went to think about what lived in the lower Crypts and who he was taking down into them tomorrow.

THREE

XYA

The Archive smelled the same.

Bone dust and iron, old parchment and the faint metallic edge of sustained death magic — a combination that shouldn’t have been a comfort and was anyway. I’d spent more hours in this building than I’d spent sleeping during my graduate years, and the smell hit me before I’d fully cleared the entrance, before Lyssa’s assistant finished unlocking the reading room gate.

Full access. Lower stacks. Lyssa had arranged it the way she arranged everything: efficiently and without ceremony, a sealed pass-note left with the night staff, no annotation about why the exiled bone witch needed the run of the collection at an hour when no one else was working.

I didn’t waste time on gratitude. I got to work.

The Bone Archive’s reading room was lit brighter than anywhere else in the Dominion — more ghostfire lanterns per square meter than the Cathedral authority chamber, because the work here required precision and the Archive’s founding principle was that records must be legible under any condition. Long tables of black stone. Shelving built from bone-reinforced dark wood that had absorbed decades of accumulated signal until it sat somewhere between mineral and organic. The catalogue ran from the upper level down to the basement stacks, organized by lineage significance — the most significant bloodlines at eye level, the oldest and most sensitive records in the sealed chambers below.

I started at the top and read my way down.

Not the physical records — not yet. I read the signal first. Moved along the upper-level shelves with two fingers trailing the bone-reinforced wood, feeling for the interference I’d tracked through the outer district walls. It was here. Fainter than in the Crypts, more diffuse, but unmistakable once you knew the texture of it — that same directed pressure underneath the Archive’s ambient hum, foreign and careful and pointing in the same direction everything else pointed.

Down. Into the lower stacks.

I pulled the lineage records for the twelve bloodlines with the deepest Warline Crypt representation and laid them out across one of the stone tables. Working through them was the work I could do half-asleep after years of practice — tracking lineage signatures, mapping anchor structures, comparing documented bone inventory against current status. Most archivists found it tedious. I found it the way a locksmith found a lock: immediate — a system that had rules and rewarded knowing them.

The first three bloodlines were intact. Fourth showed a discrepancy — one anchor bone logged in the catalogue and not present in the Crypt inventory Lyssa had compiled. I marked it and kept going.

By the time I reached the seventh bloodline, I had six discrepancies. By the twelfth, nine.

Nine missing anchor bones. Not random. I laid the catalogue cards out in order of the Warline Crypt’s lineage hierarchy — most significant at the top, oldest bloodlines at the base — and looked at the pattern of absence.

It was a sequence.