Kjell's Arc

Chapter 24 of 27

The tunnel opened into a cavern so wide Gunnar's flame could not find its far walls. The breathing was here now, all around them, rising from a black pool that filled the floor. Kjell stopped at the water's edge. The sound came from below the surface, deep and slow, too large for one throat. He had hunted draugr for years. He knew the weight of a single dead thing. This was not one thing. "Too big," Thorgar said beside him. He held both axes low. "That's a lot of breathing for one corpse." "Then we count them," Kjell said. "Before they count us." He knelt and pressed his palm to the water. The cold ran up his arm. He felt the breath move through it, not in and out, but in waves, one after another, like many mouths taking turns. He drew his hand back. "Merlyn. The book." Merlyn set the stone-bound tome across his forearm and ran his branded fingers over the carved pages. The runes on his skin glowed faint green. He turned two pages, then stopped. "There is a mark here I passed by. A binding-sign for a host. Many bodies, one breath." His blind face lifted toward the pool. "They share a lung. One creature wears the flesh of dozens." "How many," Kjell said. "The book does not count. It only warns." Gunnar walked to the edge and thrust his flame low over the water. The light caught shapes below. Kjell saw them then. Pale hands. Bare shoulders. Faces turned up under the surface, eyes open, rising and falling with the breath. Row upon row of the dead, packed close, joined at the ribs by grey threads. He stopped counting at thirty. There were more behind them, sunk into the dark. "Not a lord," Thorin said. He set his father's axe across his knee. "A nest." Kjell had walked in blind. Now he saw the shape of the enemy. It was not a warrior to fight. It was a body of bodies, breathing as one, waiting for them to wade in and be pulled under. He stepped back from the edge. The others followed his eyes. "We do not fight it in the water," Kjell said. "We break the thread that joins them. One seal on one corpse burns the whole chain. We have done it before." "We need a body out of the water," Merlyn said. "And we need bone." Kjell drew a silver-tipped knife and cut the strap of his pack. He turned it inside out. The last lindworm scale was gone, spent under the peak. But the seams held the small bones he had saved for eight years. He pulled one free and set it in Merlyn's hand. "Carve," Kjell said. "Gunnar, build the fire high. We have found the bottom of the road. Now we take it apart." The breathing rose. The nearest hand broke the surface and reached for the light.