Kjell's Arc

Chapter 16 of 27

The broken seal let cold air through, and Kjell stepped into the hall beyond. It ran long and narrow, cut straight through the mountain's heart. Then he saw why the master had let them come. The dead stood packed in the passage, shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall. Villagers, warriors, children. Each brow bore a stamped coin, and each coin glowed faint. The master had raised its own wall of bone and meat. Kjell counted forty at least. Behind him stood four tired dwarves. He could not hack through so many. Gunnar hefted his hammer. "We cut a path," he said. Kjell shook his head. "Steel won't hold them. They'll close behind us." He had learned that the hard way, in a gully long ago. Each marked corpse needed bone, a carved rune, and fire. There was no time to burn forty. The dead began to shuffle forward, slow and sure. Merlyn pressed his branded hand to the tunnel wall. The marks on his arm flared. "They share one binding," he said. "One coin feeds them all. The master's own." He turned his blindfolded face toward Kjell. "Break the mother-mark, and every lesser mark dies." "Where is it," Kjell said. "On the master. Past them." Merlyn's mouth thinned. "But the marks are copies. Flawed copies. Carve the true seal on one, burn it here, and the flaw runs back up the chain." Kjell dropped his pack and tore at the lining. He ripped free a lindworm scale, hard and old, sewn there for eight years. Bone or scale, it had once turned death from a boy he never met. "Cut on this," he said, and pressed it into Merlyn's hand. The dead were ten feet off now. Thorgar stepped up beside Kjell, an axe in each fist. "I'll hold the front," he said. He swung. A corpse folded and did not stop. It gripped his arm. Thorin planted his father's axe and hewed the thing's leg out. It kept crawling. "Fast," Thorin grunted. Merlyn carved blind, sure strokes biting the scale. Kjell watched the wall of grasping hands close over Thorgar's shoulders. Gunnar tipped coals from his clay pot into a pile. "Now," Merlyn said, and shoved the scale back. Kjell crushed it into the coals. Fire caught the scale's edge. It cracked. A thin line of white light shot up the tunnel, from coin to coin, brow to brow. Every stamped coin flared once, bright as a forge, then went black. The dead stopped. Forty bodies dropped like cut sacks. Thorgar shrugged the still hands off his neck. Silence held the passage. Kjell stood among the fallen, his oldest trophy gone to ash. The wall was down. Far ahead, past the heaped dead, one coin still burned. The master's own. It waited in the dark, and now nothing stood between them but empty floor.