Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 581 of 619

The Seraphine reached the northern shore on the eighth day. Ajax led his crew off the deck and up a stony beach toward the cliffs. Chalam went first, his bone staff swinging low over the ground. Rowan tracked beside him, eyes on the rock. Kael carried a torch. Elara held her bracelets ready. The cave mouth waited ahead, a black gap in gray stone. Somewhere inside stood the sealed gate the seer had found from a season's distance. Corin came down the beach behind them. Ajax turned. He had not sent the boy-turned-man north. But Corin walked fast, his gray robe dark at the hem with seawater. "You put me at the Crossing gate," Corin said. "I found the key that started this. I mean to see the lock." Ajax studied him. The wizard he had aged and trained, still hungry to prove his gift mattered. Ajax nodded once. "Stay behind Chalam. Read what he tells you to read." They entered the cave. Kael's torch threw light on wet walls. Chalam stopped forty feet in. His staff shivered in his hands. "The gate holds," he said. "No one has broken it." Ajax let out a breath he had held for eight days. They had won the race. The maker had not reached it first. The gate rose from the cave floor, a slab of old stone marked with a spiral. Corin pressed close and went pale. "It hums," he said. "Like the disc. Loud." He swayed. Kael caught his arm and set him straight without a word. "Steady," Kael said, and let go. Chalam laid chalk lines and lodestone at the base. "I can read the maker's mark if I open the first layer," he said. "It won't break the seal. But it costs me." Ajax knew the cost. Weeks of muddled thought, a cracked staff before. "Do it," Ajax said. "We need to know whose hand cut this." Chalam spoke the words. The spiral flared once. Rowan raised his bow toward the dark behind them out of habit. Chalam's staff held. It did not crack. He read the stone, then sat back hard on the wet floor. "Same hand as the key," he said. "The young maker. He cut this gate too. He plans to open it himself." Ajax knelt. The gate was his to hold now, and the maker was one man, not a house. "Then we set watch here," Ajax said. "He comes to this cave, we take him. Kael, Rowan, you hold the mouth in turns. Corin reads the stone each hour for changes. Chalam recovers." He stood. "We don't open it. We wait for the man who wants to." The crew took their posts. Ajax had reached the gate first, held the ground, and turned the hunt around. The maker would come to him now.