Kjell's Arc

Chapter 3 of 27

The gully still smoked behind them when Kjell sat on a cold rock and drew both coins. The first he understood. Its marks had bound twenty villagers to ash. The second refused him. Its runes ran deeper, cut in an older hand, packed tight with strokes he could not read. He turned it in the firelight until his eyes ached. Without their meaning, any binding he carved at the mound would crack the moment the draugr lord tested it. "I can't read it," Kjell said. The words came hard. Thorin looked up from wiping his axe. Gunnar set down the corpse he had searched. Thorgar said nothing, only watched. "Then we don't go to the mound," Thorin said. Blunt, final. "Not blind." Gunnar took the coin and held it near his face. He ran a thumb over the stamped lines like they were bad welds. "Forge-marks," he said. "But not mine to fix. You need a rune-worker." Kjell knew one. He had paid him once in silver and left with hard lessons and no thanks. "There's a man," Kjell said. "He works seals into stone. He taught me what little I know." They found him two days on, in a hut wedged against the mountain rock. Merlyn stood at a slab, striking runes with a twin-headed hammer, each blow ringing flat. A leather blindfold covered his eyes, stitched with the Helm of Awe. His hands glowed faint blue where the marks crossed his skin. He did not turn when they entered. "You brought company," Merlyn said. "You never learned that patience I sold you." Kjell laid the coin on the slab. "I need this read. Before the mound." Merlyn set down the hammer. He pressed two fingers to the coin and went still. The glow in his hands climbed to his wrists. A long time passed. Thorgar shifted. Thorin did not. "A binding," Merlyn said at last. "Locked in three parts. Break one, the others hold. Break two, the third snaps shut." His voice went flat. "Your seal will fail. Every time." "Then teach me the order," Kjell said. "There is no order that works with your hand." Merlyn turned his blindfolded face toward him. "The eastern quadrant is cut wrong on purpose. A trap for readers. I know the man who cuts that way. I buried the last one who tried it." Kjell's jaw tightened. "So I go and die." "No." Merlyn lifted his hammer. "You go, and I cut the counter-seal into the mound stone myself. My hand, not yours. The draugr lord marked his own dead. I break the mark that binds them to him." Gunnar looked at Kjell. Thorin nodded once. Thorgar drew a bearded axe from his back. Kjell closed his fist around both coins. He could not read the deeper runes, and he never would. But now a man walked with them who could. The road to the mound was open again, and this time it led somewhere he could win.