Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 600 of 619

The Seraphine reached the eastern shore by midday. Ajax sent Tucker ahead to the last town before the empty valley. He came back at dusk with a full report and a hard face. "They won't guide us in," Tucker said. "Not for silver. Not for anything. One old woman would only point east and cross herself." He looked at Ajax. "Whatever takes them, they think it hears its own name." Ajax gathered his crew in the ship's hold. He needed to find the valley before he walked into it blind. Chalam set his staff on the chart and shook his head. "No binding there. Nothing to read. I told you my staff finds sealed things. This one was never sealed." His voice went clipped. "I can't point you to it." Ajax turned to Aldric. "Then we find it another way." Aldric spread the drover's torn map. He tapped the mark where cattle and men had vanished. "Two days east. But a mark on paper won't show you what waits inside. We'd walk in with no eyes." That was the wall. A valley they couldn't see into, a god no magic could sense. Ajax refused to send men over a ridge into nothing. Then he thought of the woman below deck. "The seer," he said. "She reaches ten days out to sea. She doesn't need a binding to find. She finds people." He brought her up. She had come to his house by choice, sworn to no lord, free to leave. She sat cross-legged on the deck and set a bowl of black water before her. "I can look," she said. "But I look for lives, not for gods. If this thing is empty of a soul, I may find only what's around it." "Then find what's around it," Ajax said. She bent over the bowl. The lamp guttered. Chalam watched close, ready if she strained too far. Long minutes passed. Her breath went shallow. Then she spoke. "A valley. Green, still. No cattle. No birds." Her hands shook. "There are people. Alive. Held. Deep under the east ridge, in the stone." She pulled back and gripped the rail. "I couldn't see the thing that holds them. When I reached for it, the water went dark. It knew I was looking." Silence in the hold. Elara steadied the seer with a hand on her shoulder. "That's more than we had," Elara said quietly. Ajax weighed it. The valley was real. Living captives waited under the east ridge. And the god had felt the seer's eye, which meant it thought, and it guarded. Not a corpse in a box. A hunter with a den. "East ridge," Ajax said. "We know where to strike now." He looked at his crew. "At first light we ride for the valley. The seer gave us the door. Now we open it."