Page 53 of Orc’s Hex

He looks at Ziva.

Her face is doing the thing it does when she’s run the numbers and doesn’t like the answer. Shoulders set. Eyes on the constructs, the focus of someone who has arrived at a conclusion she’s been resisting.

“We can’t manage this.” Flat.

“No.”

“Every time we put them down they come back. The mechanism in the foundation is generating them faster than we can dismantle them. If we fought twelve hours straight we’d still be fighting. We’re not solving the problem. We’re managing it.”

“Then we stop managing it.”

She looks at him.

“The origin sigil. We go to the Foundation Crypt and destroy it at the source.”

“I know what that requires.”

“So do I.”

She looks at the constructs rising from the floor. Looks at him. The calculation in her eyes is the sharpest he’s seen it—not whether but how, not the risk but the method, and the fact that she’s at the method stage already tells him everything about where she is.

“Mother Veyra.”

“Contained?”

“Marked. She can’t leave the advisor chamber while the containment holds. I sealed her movement but not her voice. Vocal Blood Law activation requires sustained direct contact with the floor stone—I hadn’t marked the floor, because the oath architecture here predates the garrison by two centuries and I needed to read it before I disrupted it. That was the gap.”

“Can she do it again?”

“Not once we’re in the crypt. The distance will break the channel.”

“How long?”

“Long enough.” She turns. “Varek.”

Varek is already in the doorway.

“Hold the hall. The chalk marks will keep them inside as long as the threshold lines are intact—don’t let anyone cross them in or out.” She looks at Drazhul. “We go now, before they fully reform. Once they’re at full strength it takes four times as long to put them down.”

Varek looks at Drazhul. One look—a lifetime of practice reading situations past the point of discussion. He nods.

“Garrok,” Drazhul says.

“I’ll find him.” Varek steps aside. “Go.”

Drazhul follows Ziva to the crypt door.

Behind them the constructs keep rising, and the cracks in the Great Hall floor hold their darkness like mouths that haven’t finished speaking.

THIRTEEN

ZIVA

The crypt door is behind the eastern stair, recessed into the hold’s mountain face, and it opens without a key because no one in Blackscar has ever needed to lock it. Nobody wants to go down.

We go down.

Below the Hall of Oaths, the character changes.