Kjell's Arc

Chapter 7 of 27

The lord's hall still glowed below the rubble when Kjell reached the last of the fire. He had killed the draugr lord. He had not learned who it served. Somewhere the coin in his belt pointed at a master still walking, and Kjell had no name, no track, no thread. The bones that might have named it were ash now. He knelt at the gap in the stone and looked for anything the fire had missed. "Stop," Gunnar said. He crouched beside Kjell, hammer across his knees. "Bone's gone. Nothing to read in ash." "Then I've got nothing," Kjell said. He turned the dead coin in his fingers. Its marks stayed cold. Below, a stone shifted. Thorgar dragged himself up from the black passage, bear pelt gray with dust, one arm pressed to his ribs. Kjell had counted him dead an hour ago. He gripped the dwarf's harness and hauled him clear of the gap. Thorgar spat grit and sat. "Beam pinned me," Thorgar said. "I cut free after the fire took him." He held out his fist and opened it. A charred fragment of bone lay in his palm, no longer than a finger. "Pulled this before it burned. Mark cut into it. Not mine. Not the counter-seal." Kjell took the fragment. A single rune was scored into the black surface, deep and clean. He did not know it. He turned toward the man who would. Merlyn sat on a flat stone, blindfold gray with mound dust, the heavy stone-bound book open across his knees. His fingers moved over the fragment when Kjell set it in his hand. They stopped. They pressed the groove twice. "This is a bond-mark," Merlyn said. "A servant cuts it to name the one it serves." "Then read it," Kjell said. "It is half a sign." Merlyn's thumb ran the broken edge. "The fire ate the rest. This part is a place-rune. North face. High ground." He shut the book. "The master this lord served sits under a mountain to the north. That is all the bone gives." "A mountain," Kjell said. "How many mountains stand north of here?" "One with a hall cut into it," Gunnar said. His voice went flat. "Under siege. Everyone in the region knows it." Kjell looked at the burnt fragment. It was not a name. It was a direction. The lord's bones had told him where, not who. He closed his hand on the bone and stood. His axe was heavy at his hip, and the road north was long. "Then that's the thread," Kjell said. "We follow it up the mountain." Thorgar got to his feet, one hand still on his ribs. "I'll walk," he said. Nobody argued. Kjell fed the smoking censer's cord back to Gunnar, took his bearings north, and started down the slope toward the road that climbed to the besieged hold.