Page 13 of The Steel Beast’s Heart

He accelerates past, slotting back into the column ahead of me. I watch his pack—the straps cinched tighter every visit, the bag lighter every time he rides through. A man unpacking his life one trip at a time, leaving the important parts at a bakery twenty minutes from the compound.

We stop once. A gas station at the base of a pass where the road bends north and the mountains rise ahead like a wall. Finn fuels Knox's bike first, then his own. Chain stands at the pump island with his phone to his ear, one hand on the back of his neck, and his mouth softens in a way it only does when Morgan's on the other end. Diesel stretches his back by the air compressor and rolls his neck against the stiffness.

I check my phone. No messages from the compound.

Knox stands beside his bike at the edge of the lot, facing the mountains. The Bloodstone range runs north-northeast, granite peaks above the treeline, the valley between them hidden from here. Knox grew up in that valley. Trained in those mountains. Left over twenty years ago and never rode back.

He's riding back now, and the set of his shoulders carries it—not fear, not hesitation, but the weight of a thing put off too long.

Finn walks to him and stands beside him without a word.

Knox nods once, and we mount up.

The encampment fills the valley floor.

Tents stretch from the base of the eastern ridge to the river. Hundreds of them, hide and canvas, some new, some patched and restaked, smoke rising from forge fires that glow orange in the late afternoon. Orcs move between the rows. Armed, scarred, carrying the marks of three factions tearing each other apart over who rules next while Drogmar dies slow. I count cook fires and estimate the camp at six hundred, maybe more.

Knox leads us down the switchback into the valley at road speed, no faster. The column tightens. The sound of nine engines echoing off the granite walls announces us before the first sentry raises his head.

Dravik meets us at the camp's edge.

He stands in the road with his arms at his sides, braids shot through gray, built like a man who grew up in sparring pits.

Knox pulls his helmet. Drags a hand through his hair. The two of them look at each other, and then Knox clasps Dravik's forearm and Dravik clasps his.

"They're gathered," Dravik says. "All three factions. Varak brought fifty from the eastern camps. He's been talking about his brother's blood right since he arrived."

Knox nods.

"And my father?"

"Alive." Dravik's mouth tightens. "He asked to see you."

Knox doesn't answer that. He turns back to the bikes, and the brothers fall in behind him. Finn at his right shoulder, Colt at his left, the rest of us filling in without discussion. We fall in behind him the same way we ride behind him. Nobody needs to be told where to stand.

The orcs in the camp watch us pass. Two minotaurs and seven orcs in leather cuts, road-dirty, smelling of exhaust and sweat, walking through a camp of warriors who spent the past year killing each other over who sits next on a throne that isn't empty yet. I keep my kit on my shoulder and my eyes on the faces around us—curious and hostile in equal measure, and more than a few too young to hold an opinion and too armed to need one.

Knox walks straight through without looking at anyone. Finn walks beside him.

Dravik leads us to the center of the camp. A cleared space, packed earth, a fire pit ringed with stones. The faction leaders sit on three sides. Their men stand behind them. Six hundred orcs in a valley, and the silence when Knox stops in the center of it hits harder than the engines did.

Knox speaks in Orcish. I don't understand the words. The language runs guttural and clipped, built for commands, and Knox's voice drops into it like he's pulled on a coat he left behind and found it still fits. Dravik translates for us under his breath, and what he translates is this: Knox is invoking single combat. Ancient orc law. A challenge to the disputed succession, settled by blood, witnessed by the clans.

Varak stands from the eastern delegation.

He's younger than Knox. Broader through the shoulders, his tusks uncapped, deep scars running both forearms from wrist to elbow. Torgan's brother. The man who carved his claim to his dead brother's seat through a year of violence, and it shows in every scar. He accepts the challenge with a word I don't catch and a gesture that needs no translation: a fist raised.

The arena sits above the camp on a flat stone shelf cut into the ridge face. A circle marked with symbols older than the camp, carved deep into the granite, filled with moss and rainwater. The factions file up the path and ring the edges, and six hundred orcs go quiet at once.

Knox strips his cut.

He shrugs the leather off, and the Feral Sons patch comes free in his hands. He holds it out to Finn.

Finn takes it. His fingers close on the leather, his throat works and his eyes go bright. Knox grips his brother's shoulder with one hand and holds him there. They don't speak. Finn's chin lifts.

I take my place at the ring's edge. The kit opens on the stone beside me.

I've run the scenarios. Knox takes a body blow that fractures ribs—I have the wrap and the palpation sequence. A joint dislocation: the reduction technique for orc bone structure differs from human and minotaur, and I drilled the technique until my hands could do it without thinking. Blood loss gets hemostatic gauze, direct pressure, the tourniquet if it's arterial. Blunt trauma to the skull I can't fix here, but I can stabilize long enough to buy time.