Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 557 of 619

The dead creature lay sealed under the slab. Ajax turned the seventh spiral token in his bloody hand and looked past the stone table. Two dark doorways opened off the far wall. He had not seen them until now. "Chalam. What else is here?" Chalam crossed the chamber and set his staff to the first doorway. The Verath bone glowed pale. "No binding past this. No god. Just rock and air." He stepped through, and Ajax followed with a torch. The passage opened into a small room cut square. Shelves lined every wall. Ajax raised the torch and stopped. Glass vials stood in rows, sealed with wax. Chalk sticks lay bundled with cord. Small iron rods rested in a rack, and beside them sat clay jars packed with gray dust. Chalam moved down the shelves fast. He lifted a vial, held it to the light, set it back. He touched the gray dust and rubbed it between his fingers. "Lodestone. Ground finer than I can grind it." He picked up a bundle of pressed chalk and turned it over. His hands moved quicker now. "This is a wizard's store. Older than mine. Better than mine." Ajax watched the wizard's face. Chalam rarely showed much. Now his eyes moved from shelf to shelf like a hungry man at a table. "You want these," Ajax said. "I need these." Chalam did not soften it. "My satchel holds three vials and a pinch of dust. This holds forty vials and a jar of lodestone I could work a year on." He lifted a small green flask and read a mark scratched into the wax. His jaw tightened. "This one I don't know. The mark's a binding sign. Old." Ajax set the token in his pouch and stepped closer. "Are they safe to carry?" Chalam opened his own satchel and drew out one of his numbered vials. He held it beside a vial from the shelf and compared the wax and the color. "The lodestone and chalk, yes. Tools, not workings." He set the green flask apart from the rest, careful, on the empty stone. "That one I carry alone. Until I read it, no one touches it." "Then take it all," Ajax said. "Every vial, every rod, the dust. Load it before we climb down." Chalam began wrapping the vials in cloth from his satchel, packing them close so they would not knock. He worked without a word, but his hands were steady and sure for the first time since the gate. Ajax held the torch and let him work. When the shelves were bare, Chalam slung the heavy satchel and rose. "This changes what I can do. The far sites. The old wards. I can reach them now." Ajax nodded. The island had given him more than an island. It had armed his wizard for whatever door came next. "Then we carry it home," he said, "and we find out who stocked this room."