Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 603 of 619

Ajax led them down with his father's blade in hand. Kael took the front with a torch. The passage narrowed, then dropped. Water ran black along the floor. No one spoke. They did not know how the thing fought. They knew only that it had killed a sealed god and left the corpse to rot. The seer stopped them at a bend. "It waits below," she said. "It felt us come. It knows our number." Her gray eyes stayed on the dark. "It does not fear us." "Then we make it," Ajax said. The passage opened into a wide stone room. Iron cages lined one wall. Men sat inside, thin and silent, chained at the wrists. Living captives, just as the seer had said. Rowan moved toward them. "Alive," he called back. "Weak." The thing came from the roof. It dropped without sound, gray and long, more limbs than Ajax could count. It took one of the six swords first, faster than a blink, and the man was gone into the dark before his cry landed. Kael threw his torch and pulled a knife. "Spread," he said. "Don't clump." They spread. Ajax learned it as it moved. It hunted by sound and heat, like the beasts. It struck from above, then vanished up the wall. Torren swung an iron rod at it and missed. "It won't hold still," he said, flat. "Elara," Ajax said. "Light. All of it." Elara raised her band. White fire filled the room, hard and cold. The thing shrieked and clung to the ceiling, blind. "It burns in light," she said. "I can hold it. Not long." "Chalam. Where does it drop from?" Chalam pressed his staff to the stone. "The seam above the cages," he said. "It nests there. It will come down there." Rowan set an arrow. Ajax moved beneath the seam and waited. The light held the thing pinned and screaming. Then Elara's arm shook. "Now," she said. "It's coming." The light broke. The thing dropped for Ajax's heat. He drove his father's blade up into its open mouth, both hands, all his weight. Iron went deep. The thing folded around the blade and thrashed. Kael and Torren struck its limbs. Rowan's arrow took its throat. It went still. Ajax pulled the blade free. His arms burned. One sword lost. Not the rest. "Chalam," he said. "Is it the god, or a thing the god made?" Chalam knelt by the body. He read it with his staff. "Made," he said. "Like the beasts it fed on. The god is deeper. This was its hand." Ajax looked at the cages, then at the passage running down past them. Rowan was already breaking the locks. The captives blinked in the torchlight. "We know how it fights now," Ajax said. "We take these men up. Then we go for the one that sent it."