Page 11 of Orc’s Hex

A knock. Two raps, precise, familiar.

“Come.”

Isen Crow doesn’t wait for permission he’s already been given twice in his life and has decided applies indefinitely. He comes in with a ledger under one arm and the particular urgency of a man who has spent six years wanting to say something to someone who could finally understand it.

“She’s been in the Archive for six hours.” Isen sets the ledger on the table without asking if there’s room for it. “I’ve never seen anyone read Old Script that fast who wasn’t raised on it. She caught a transcription error in the third shelf’s ceremonial index that I’ve been walking past for four years.”

Drazhul doesn’t move from the chair. “Is that a problem.”

“It’s not a problem. It’s—“ Isen stops himself, recalibrates, tries again with the visible effort of a man choosing precision over enthusiasm. “It’s useful. I wanted you to know the Archive is being read properly for the first time since my predecessor died.”

“You’ve read it properly.”

“I’ve read it thoroughly. There’s a difference, and she embodies it.” Isen glances at him—quick, assessing, the look of an archivist cataloging a new variable in an old system. “She’s still down there. It’s past dark.”

Drazhul says nothing.

Isen, who has known him long enough to stop needing things spelled out, looks at the cold hearth, the untouched dinner tray by the door, and Drazhul sitting in the dark with his collar still open at the throat.

“I’ll tell her the Archive locks at midnight,” Isen says. “For the wards. That’s not a lie. It also happens to be true tonight specifically because I’ve decided it’s true tonight.”

“Isen.”

“Clanlord.” Perfectly level. He picks the ledger back up. “I’ll see myself out.”

He goes.

Drazhul sits another minute in the dark, and then he stands, and he does not examine too closely why standing feels like a decision he’s already made.

THREE

ZIVA

Iwait until the second hour past midnight.

Not because I’m being careful. Because the garrison runs a full rotation until the second hour, and I’d rather not have to explain to Varek Thorn what I’m doing in the catacombs at midnight, which would require either lying or telling the truth, and I’m not certain which one would go worse for me.

I take my full kit. Absorption vials, rune-marked and sealed. The ritual blade—short, double-edged, iron-forged with a copper inlay I added myself after a job in the Thornwood that nearly killed me and taught me the lesson about preparation costing less than recovery. Chalk block for working inscriptions on unmarked stone. A torch I light from the hearth and shield with my palm until I’m through the door.

Varek told me the catacombs are off-limits without escort.

I told him I understood.

Both of these things are true.

The hold at this hour is a different animal. During the day it runs on garrison noise—boots on stone, orders from the training yard, the forge quarter’s steady percussion. At night it breathes differently. The silence is deeper and the shadows between torchbrackets are wider and the stone does it louder without the ambient noise covering it.

I take the lower keep corridor. No one stops me. The night watch does a circuit that misses the lower keep’s eastern passage by a clean four minutes, which I’d timed from my window yesterday morning. Varek runs a tight garrison. He just didn’t expect me to be paying that much attention.

The catacomb door swings inward without sound. Good hinges. Someone has been maintaining them.

The upper catacombs I’ve already walked. I move through the sealed crypts corridor at pace, one hand trailing the wall for the change in the stone that marks where Drazhul and I stopped yesterday. The change arrives: dressed stone ending, smoothed natural rock beginning, the temperature dropping past what depth alone would explain.

Once, when I was forty. Before I understood what I was dealing with.

He stopped there. I let him.

What he stopped before saying is in how he said it. He came down here. He found the chamber. And whatever happened when he did—whatever the curse did to him, alone in the mountain with the thing that had been eating his bloodline—he’s been staying out of the lower levels ever since. For a man built the way Drazhul Xorn is built, that’s a significant piece of information.