Page 8 of Orc’s Hex

“All right,” she says.

Two words. No inflation. No performance of how fine everything is.

He cannot remember the last time anyone said all right to him and meant only that.

She pulls a stool to the table’s edge and opens her notes. Handwriting small and precise, a shorthand he can’t read from here. He suspects this is intentional.

“What I touched beneath the sigil isn’t in your chest.” She doesn’t look up from the page. “The inscription reads as ancestral marking—clan sigil, heritage marker, standard for a clanlord of your lineage. But what I hit when my hand made contact goes past the inscription. Past the floor. Past the architecture. Whatever it is, it’s older than you are. Older than the hold. It’s been in this mountain longer than Clan Xorn has been in this mountain.”

He’s known this.

Not as a fact he could prove. As a thing carried so long it stopped registering as separate from him. He suspected it. He wanted someone else to confirm it, because your own suspicions about yourself are the last ones you trust.

“Say the rest of it.”

She looks up.

“The magic reads as Blood Law. Old Blood Law—first-generation practice, before the refinements. It’s in the foundation of this mountain, it’s active, and it’s been active for longer than anything should be able to stay active without someone feeding it.” A beat. “Which means someone is feeding it.”

From the courtyard below, the first sounds of morning drill filter through the stone—iron on iron, Garrok Stonefist’s voice carrying even through three feet of basalt. Drazhul has always found that rhythm clarifying. Right now it barely registers.

“It’s not a remnant,” he says.

“Not a remnant.” She closes the notes. “Someone has been maintaining it. Kept it from the natural deterioration that old magic undergoes when left alone. Whatever is in your foundation is as current as the day it was placed.” Her eyes don’t leave his face. “And it was placed a very long time ago.”

He stands with his back straight and takes it.

All of it maintained. Someone ensuring the curse stays current, stays targeted, stays precisely calibrated to the living version of the bloodline it was built to end. Every year he’s been surviving it, someone made sure it didn’t weaken.

Not surviving it. Losing to it. Those are the same thing from outside. From inside they are nothing alike.

“Does it have a name.”

“The inscription I read was partial. I need the catacombs to get the rest.”

“You said upper floors last night.”

“I said upper floors last night,” she agrees, zero apology in it. “Last night I didn’t know what I was dealing with. This morning I do.” She holds his gaze. “The catacombs, Drazhul. Today.”

It’s the first time she’s used his name.

He doesn’t let it show. It shows anyway, somewhere he can’t account for.

He takes her himself.

Not because protocol demands it—Varek’s wariness, while usually an asset, means he reads Ziva as threat first and everything else second. Drazhul needs someone with him who’s reading her correctly. Which means him.

Varek falls in behind them at the corridor entrance, torch in hand, saying nothing. He’s been doing that for decades—appearing where he’s needed before being asked. Drazhul has never once asked him how he manages it. Varek would just look at him.

Ziva walks at his left and doesn’t comment on Varek’s presence. She’s already read him—in that fast, quiet way she reads everything—and moved on.

“The lower levels have never been fully mapped,” Drazhul says.

“I noticed the cartography stops at the Hall of Oaths.”

“We don’t have a map of what’s below it.”

A beat. “Has anyone been below it.”