Kjell's Arc

Chapter 6 of 27

The buried draugr lord clawed at the fallen stone below. Kjell stood on the slope and counted his people. Merlyn leaned on Gunnar. Thorin wiped dust from his beard. One face was missing. Thorgar had held the beam. Thorgar had not come up. Kjell turned toward the collapsed passage and heard the muffled scrape of a monster that would not die. "He's under it," Thorin said. He did not soften it. "Or past it." Kjell knelt at the rubble. He pulled a stone free. Another. His hands bled. The digging was slow, and each stone he moved sent the buried lord scraping harder below. He could not clear the passage before the creature broke through. If he dug, the lord came free among them. If he left, Thorgar stayed buried with it. Then a voice came up through the rocks. Low. Plain. "Stop digging." Kjell pressed his face to the gap. "Thorgar." "Beam held me. Now it pins me." A breath. "There's a way down from where I lie. I can see the lord's hall." Thorgar coughed. "Send me fire. I'll burn him." Gunnar came forward. From his pack he drew a small iron vessel on a chain, its lid pierced, its ember bed glowing through the holes. Thin smoke curled up. He had carried the coals from the mound fire inside it. "Live fire," Gunnar said. "It'll keep to the hall." Merlyn's blind head turned. From under his arm he pulled a heavy stone-bound book, its cover cut with pillar reliefs. He set it on the ground and found the page by touch. "The lord's bones must burn with the mark carved deep," he said. "I read the counter-seal aloud. Thorgar cuts it as I speak. His hand, my words." Kjell fed the chained vessel through the gap on a cord. The ember light sank into the dark. "You can't carve blind," Kjell said down the hole. "I carved a hundred hulls in the dark," Thorgar answered. "Speak, old man." Merlyn read the runes slow and flat. Below, iron struck bone. The scraping of the lord rose to a shriek, then a wet crack, then the roar of the little fire spreading through dry timber. Gold light flared through every gap in the rubble. The shriek climbed and broke. The ground shook once more and went still. The scraping stopped. The smoke thinned. Kjell called Thorgar's name into the gap and heard nothing. Thorin set a hand on his shoulder. "He knew the beam would fall." Kjell drew the rune-stamped coin from his belt. Its marks were cold now. Dead. The draugr lord was ash in its own hall. But the mound had raised more than villagers, and the coin in his hand was not the last. Somewhere the dead this lord served still walked. Kjell closed his fist and started down the slope.