Page 46 of Orc’s Hex

Varek steps into the hall from the far end. He takes in the cracked floor, the fallen statue, Drazhul with his arm around Ziva, and Setha against the wall.

Varek reads it in a second. He has exactly enough practice at moments like this.

“Tell me what you need.”

“The Hall of Oaths. Now. Clear the route.”

Varek goes.

Drazhul looks at Setha.

“You come with us.”

Setha nods.

He doesn’t move his arm from Ziva’s shoulders until they’re through the corridor door and into the main passage, and when he does move it she turns and looks at him with the full, direct attention he has come to know as well as the shape of the hold around him.

“How long do we have before it escalates to structural?”

“If we move fast? Long enough.”

“Fast.”

“Fast.”

They move.

ELEVEN

ZIVA

The Hall of Oaths smells of old stone and something older still—oath residue from three centuries of Blood Law, heavy in the walls like damp in wool. The floor carvings are warm from this morning’s crack in the Great Hall above us, the stone still processing the impact.

Drazhul stands at the center of the Covenant of Nine inscription. The oldest circle. The one that has no name carved into it anymore.

Setha stands opposite, across the carved geometry of the original oath. Varek is at the corridor entrance—not protocol, just Varek—saying nothing. I stand at the wall.

He looks at the floor for a long moment.

Then he speaks. His voice is the same as it is for everything that costs him—flat, stripped of performance, directed at the stone rather than the room.

Korvak Xorn’s name. The Covenant of Nine, what it required, what it swore. Sorvaine Mervyn’s warnings—three of them, on three separate days, before the coven marched east. He does not soften a single word of what Korvak’s reply was. The number of the dead at the breach: nine hundred and twelve.

He says it in Blood Law oath-form, which means saying it into the stone rather than the air. His knife opens his palm over the Covenant of Nine inscription and his blood drops into the channels.

The floor settles.

Not dramatically. The way stone settles when something it has been holding under tension for a very long time is finally allowed to rest. A low, structural sound that I feel in my knees rather than hear with my ears. The carved channels drink in his blood and the warmth in the floor shifts—still warm, but different. The warmth of acknowledgment rather than grievance.

Setha has both hands over her mouth.

She removes them. She accepts the oath in formal Blood Law words—the Mervyn lineage’s counter-swearing, the acceptance of the reparation, the release of the original claim. Her voice does not shake. Not once.

The ceremony is witnessed and valid.

Varek escorts Setha out of the lower levels. Brynna and I walk the junction branch below the Hall of Oaths—the older chambers whose seals I had noted on my first descent, what Isen’s records designated Mother Veyra’s working space—a name he had catalogued from traces he’d found but not yet identified—where her ritual materials had been stored. We clear the materials and reseal the chambers. I secure the doors.

The morning has been long. I came back up because I have unfinished work. And because I’ve been running two investigations in parallel since the fourth day I was in this hold, and the second one is due.