Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 599 of 619

By dusk the crew had closed two more seams up the coast. Both went the same way. Elara ran ahead by moonlight. Ajax bled into the stone. Chalam sealed it with dust. The rot stopped. Another creature dead beneath the black cliffs. Ajax stood at the rail and felt something he had not felt in a long fight. Boredom. He found Chalam and Aldric below deck, bent over a chart by lamplight. "We've killed six of these things now on this coast," Ajax said. "Every one the same. Bleed, kill, seal. Is that all this land holds? More doors? More bound gods to put back to sleep?" Aldric looked up. Grey stubble, green tunic, a scholar's calm. He set down his pen. "You want a different fight." "I want to know if there is one," Ajax said. "Or if I sail west forever, resealing my father's work like a hired mason." Aldric pulled a torn map to the top of the pile. He tapped a mark inland, away from every seam. "This isn't a door. No spiral. No collar. A drover at the last town told me of a valley two days east. He wouldn't ride through it." He paused. "Cattle gone. People gone. Longer than anyone counts." Tucker leaned in the hatchway, gold chains catching the lamp. He had been listening. "A god that takes," he said. "Not one that sleeps. That's new." He grinned. "And a valley full of scared folk is a valley full of talk. I can work that." Chalam ran his thumb along his staff. "No binding signature there. Nothing my staff can read from here." He frowned. "That means it was never sealed. It moves free." Ajax felt the difference land. Every creature he had killed had been trapped, waiting, half-dead already. This one walked. This one chose. "So not everything in this world is a corpse in a box," he said. "No," Aldric said. "Some things still hunt." Ajax weighed it. Elara ran the seams faster than he ever could. His crew followed to close them. That work no longer needed him at every stone. But a living god that took cattle and men, one no wizard had ever bound, that was ground no one had claimed. That was a wall worth building on. He made the call. "We turn east. Leave the seams to Elara's line and Chalam's dust." He looked at Tucker. "You'll ride into that valley first. Buy drinks. Learn what takes them." Tucker touched two fingers to his brow. "Been run out of worse towns." Chalam rolled the chart. "If it isn't sealed, my staff won't help you find it." "Then we find it your way," Ajax told Aldric. "Books and drovers." At dawn the Seraphine came about and drove for the eastern shore. For the first time on this coast, Ajax was not chasing a door someone had already closed. He was hunting something still alive.