Mango Chiefton's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Mango spread the shaman's stencil on the platform floor. Dawn light showed what the dark had hidden. The bone plate was cracked down the middle. Its carved rune channels had worn thin as thread. He pressed his sharpened bone sliver into a groove and dragged it. The line came out crooked, smudged at the turn. He wiped it and tried again. Worse. A smudged rune could break the whole binding. "It's finished," he said. "The stencil's dead. I can't trace clean lines without it." Riko crouched beside him and ran a thumb along the crack. His young cousin had the steadiest hands in the troop. He had crafted finer needles for Mango before. "Then stop tracing," Riko said. "You don't need the plate. You need the pattern." "I can't carve dozens of runes freehand. One slip kills the binding." Riko pulled the cracked plate closer. He tilted it to the light and studied each worn channel. "I'll cut a new stencil," he said. "Same runes. Fresh bone." He looked at the empty offering by the bars, the strange banana and meat mash the wolf had left in the mud below. "But I need a hard, flat piece. Bigger than that scrap." Mango's stomach turned. He knew the only tool in the cage with a broad bone head. He lifted it from the corner where he had leaned it. The skull hammer. Its striking face was carved with old marks, wide and smooth. "This," he said. "You can cut a stencil from the flat of the head." Riko took the hammer and weighed it. "It's thick. My hands will cramp before I finish." Mango broke off a violet dreamvine leaf and pressed it into Riko's palm. "Chew it, don't smoke it. Just enough to steady your grip." Riko chewed. His breathing slowed. He wedged the bone sliver against the hammer's flat face and began to carve. He worked all morning. Mango held the old plate as a guide while Riko copied each worn rune onto the fresh bone. The boy's cuts were clean and sharp where Mango's had smudged. Below, the wolf circled the trunk, six eyes turned up, waiting for blood that never dripped. By noon Riko set the hammer down. The flat of the skull now held a full row of clean rune channels, deeper and truer than the shaman's worn plate. He passed it up. Mango pressed his sliver into the first groove and dragged. The line came out sharp, no smudge, no break. "It holds," Mango said. But the new stencil was smaller than the old. It carried fewer runes at once. Each pressing would take longer, and he still had no smoke to seal the cuts. He looked at the wolf below, then at the river, then downstream toward the far glow of a lantern-lit club he had passed once. Somewhere down there, men burned bone for many things. He would have to go and find more ash.