Kjell's Arc

Chapter 26 of 27

The pool lay still now. The dead had sunk back under the water, the shared breath gone. Kjell stood over the burned corpse and looked at the low black arch in the far wall. Cold air poured from it, but no light came with it. Whatever bred this nest waited beyond that dark mouth. He could not see what stood there. One blind step could be his last. "We need light," Kjell said. "I will not walk into that thing's teeth." Gunnar knelt and struck flint. He built a small fire from the last dry wood in his pack. The flames caught. He fed them slow. "Torch won't reach far," he said. "Cold air will eat it." Thorgar picked up his axes and moved to the arch. He held one blade into the dark and felt for a wall. "Floor drops here," he said. "Stone steps. Wet." Merlyn came forward, his branded hands faint green. He pressed his palm flat to the cold stone of the arch. His blind face turned as if listening. "Signs cut here," he said. "Old. A ward. Something behind it wants the dark kept dark." "Can you break it?" Kjell asked. "Not the ward. The dark." Merlyn drew a bone token from his belt and cut a small mark into it with his knife. He handed it to Gunnar. "Burn this in the coals. Hold it high." Gunnar set the bone in the fire. It caught white, not orange. The light did not flicker. It grew steady and cold, and it pushed into the arch where the torch had failed. Kjell looked past the steps. The white light showed a wide chamber below. Bones filled it. Troll bones, huge and old, stacked in walls and heaps. Cracked ribs leaned against a great weathered skull taller than a man. Femurs stood upright like fence posts. A graveyard of giants, gathered here by no hand Kjell knew. At the center sat a thing made of them. Troll bone lashed with grey thread into one shape, hunched and waiting. It did not move. But the threads pulsed slow, and Kjell knew it fed on the dark and hated the light. "There," Kjell said. "That is what made the nest." Thorin lifted his father's axe. "Then we go down. While the light holds." Kjell took the first step. The stone held his weight. The white bone-light rode above them in Gunnar's hand, and the dark could not close on them now. He led them down into the troll graveyard, toward the bone-thing at its heart. Behind him, the arch no longer breathed cold and blind. The blocker was gone. Now Kjell could see his enemy, and see it whole. It was worse than he had feared, and it was still waiting.