Kjell's Arc

Chapter 15 of 27

The left fork climbed for a long stretch before it stopped. Kjell walked into stone. Not a wall of cut blocks. A skin of dark rock, smooth and seamless, sealed across the whole tunnel mouth. Merlyn pressed one hand to it. The brands on his arm flared, then dimmed. "It closed this behind its eye," he said. "When the coin went blind, it sealed the road." Kjell struck the seal with the flat of his axe. The blow rang and died. No crack. No dust. "We cut through," he said. Gunnar shook his head. Gunnar had shod iron in a mountain forge for thirty years, and he knew rock the way Kjell knew beasts. "That's not stone laid by hand," Gunnar said. "It grew there. Cut it and it heals. You'd chip a week and lose." Merlyn ran his fingers over the surface. He found a single mark low near the floor, a rune bitten into the rock. "A lock," he said. "Same kind as the door in the yard. Bone and fire break it, not steel." He traced the mark twice, slow, then slower, reading it blind through his touch. Kjell knelt and opened his pack. He drew out the stone book, its carved pillars cold in his hands. "Read the counter," he said. "You did it before." Merlyn took the tome and laid it open on his knees. Gunnar tipped a coal from his clay pot near the page. Merlyn dragged one finger across the carved marks. "The counter wants bone," he said. "Old bone. We have none." The passage held nothing but rock. Then Thorin stepped forward from the dark behind them. He unhooked his father's axe from his belt and set it down. His hand went instead to his beard, to an iron ring braided deep in the gray. He worked it loose. Wrapped inside the ring was a finger bone, yellow with age. "My father's," Thorin said. "I carried it out of the pass." He held it out to Merlyn. "Cut on it." Kjell looked at the old warrior. Thorin had walked out of one betrayal alone, carrying only this. "You don't have to," Kjell said. Thorin's jaw set hard. "Cut on it," he said again, and that closed it. Merlyn took the bone. He read the trap-mark once more, then set his blade and carved the counter-seal into the yellowed length. His hand moved sure and blind. When the last stroke bit, he handed the bone back. "Now burn it," he said. "At the seal." Kjell pressed the carved bone to the marked rune. Gunnar tipped his coals against it. Fire caught. The bone blackened and split. The rune on the wall flared white, then the dark skin of stone crazed and fell away in sheets. Cold air poured through from a hall beyond. The road stood open. Thorin picked up his father's axe and said nothing. Ahead, under the peak, the master waited, and now nothing stood between it and Kjell but the last dark.