Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 51 of 619

Ajax wiped his blade on the dead man's shirt and stepped around the stone chair. Grayson was already there, kicking aside a length of cloth someone had draped across the back. Behind the chair, set into the floor, was an iron hatch the size of a shield. A spiral was stamped into its face. "Same mark as the doors," Grayson said. "Same mark as the tokens." "Open it." Grayson set his enchanted blade to the seam and cut. The iron parted. He pried the hatch up with the flat of the sword and let it fall back against the stone. A stair went down into the dark. Outside, boots crossed the courtyard. Elara came through the broken gate on her own feet, slower than usual but walking. She stopped at the chair and looked down at the open hatch. Her sleeve had slid back. The gold band on her wrist was no longer dim. It caught the torchlight and threw it back, brighter than the flame. "You're standing," Ajax said. "I shouldn't be." She lifted her arm. The band pulsed once against her skin. "It's been drinking moonlight since we left the coast. Every night. I thought it stopped after the first time." "It didn't." "No." She flexed her fingers. Light gathered at the tips and faded when she closed her hand. "I have more than I did a week ago. More than I had before the blinding spell. It's still filling." Grayson looked at the band, then at Ajax. "That's not nothing." "No," Ajax said. "It's not." He took a torch from the wall and went down the stair. Grayson followed. Elara came last, her light steady on the steps ahead of them. The room at the bottom was small and dry. A single iron stand held a wooden box bound in the same spiral bands as the doors above. Ajax cut the bands. The lid lifted on its own hinges. Inside were four iron collars. Smaller than the ones from the coastal shelf. Made for a man's neck, not a god's. Beneath them, a folded map on oiled cloth. Ajax spread it on the stone. Six marks along the coast. One was the shelf where his father had set the seat. One was a valley two days west. Others he did not know. Each was ringed with a spiral. "He wasn't guarding a thing," Grayson said. "He was guarding a list." "Of what?" Elara answered. She pointed at the collars. "Of who wears these next." Ajax rolled the map and put it in his shirt. He took the four collars and set them in a sack. The man in the chair had kept names. The organization behind him would want them back. "We ride at dawn," he said. "West first." Elara's band caught the torch again and held the light.