Kjell's Arc

Chapter 4 of 27

They reached the mound at dusk. It rose from bare ground, a hump of stone and turf older than any road nearby. Merlyn walked the slope with one hand on the earth. His branded skin glowed faint blue where he touched it. He stopped and struck the stone once with his hammer. The blow rang wrong, dull, like a cracked pot. "The counter-seal doesn't go in stone," he said. "Not here. The mark he cut runs through bone. I must break it on bone." Kjell opened his pack. He had teeth and claws sewn into his beard, a rune-axe, silver knives. He had scales stitched in the lining. He had no bone big enough to hold a binding this strong. "I carry none," he said. "Not for this." "Then we have nothing," Merlyn said. He did not soften it. Gunnar knelt and pressed his ear to the mound. He had spent thirty years reading metal by feel, and he read this ground the same way. "Hollow," he said. "There's a chamber. The old dead are down there. Their bones would serve." "We dig into a draugr lord's hall," Thorgar said. He drew both axes. "Bad idea. I'll go first." They broke the turf where Gunnar marked it. The stone gave into a low passage. Cold air pushed out, thick and sour. Kjell went in behind Thorgar with a torch. The chamber held a stone bench and shelves cut into the wall. On the shelves lay the bones of the mound's first dead, dry and pale, laid out with care. Something stirred in the dark beyond the torchlight. A black shape lifted from the far wall and beat toward them. Kjell threw up an arm. A raven struck it, all beak and claw, glossy feathers flashing in the flame. It shrieked once. Thorgar's axe caught it out of the air and pinned it to the floor. It went still. "The lord's eye," Merlyn said. He had felt it, not seen it. "He knows we're here now. Work fast." Gunnar lifted a long thigh bone from the shelf. He turned it in his hands and rapped it with a knuckle. "Sound," he said. "This one holds." He passed it to Merlyn. Merlyn set the bone across his knee. He drew a chisel and his twin-headed hammer. His hands lit brighter now, the glow climbing to his elbows. He struck. Each blow bit a rune into the bone. He did not pause, did not check his work. His blind hands knew the path. The eastern cut, the one that had killed the last reader, he made without flinching. He finished and held the bone up. The carved runes pulsed pale gold, like the marks stamped on the draugr's coins. "It's cut," Merlyn said. "Bring fire. When he comes, we burn him with this, and the mark that binds his dead to him breaks." Deep in the mound, stone scraped on stone. The draugr lord was awake, and he was coming up.