Page 13 of Orc’s Bones

They’d been waiting to see how far I’d get.

I straightened. Looked at the sealed case with the active sigil running its thin hum under the primary archive resonance — a frequency I could almost hear now that I knew it was there, running through the stone floor under my boots and up through the wall shelving and into the bone trace samples of the Varyn lineage inside the case.

Running through Thruk’s bloodline.

This is a relay. The sigil in this case is relaying resonance data to whatever they’ve built in the Crypt levels. It’s been feeding the architecture maps to the array as it develops.

The build wasn’t finished. I’d been assuming the theft sequence was complete because nine bones were missing. But the theft sequence was complete — the full sequence had been designed with the Archive relay in place. This case had been feeding lineage data to the system the whole time, even without physical removal of the Varyn trace.

The relic. The Varyn anchor in the deepest Crypt level. It was the center of the array. The relay in this case was its tether.

I had the full picture now.

I needed to give it to Thruk.

I moved toward the basement stairs, processing the sequence as I went. Build order confirmed. Procurement logic confirmed. Archive access confirmed — someone with a third key. The relay case in the lower stacks feeding real-time data to the array in the Crypt levels, which meant the array was further along than anyone had realized. Possibly active. Possibly running.

I was three steps from the staircase when the case responded again.

Behind me. Without contact. Without my hands anywhere near the seal.

The third layer flared — a brief brightening in the Archive’s ambient hum, a pulse through the bone trace inside the case that had nothing to do with the archive’s own signal and everything to do with the sigil responding to an external trigger.

I turned.

The case sat in its position on the restricted shelf. Sealed. Intact. The ghostfire light from the lantern at the end of the row fell across it the same way it fell across everything else.

It was responding to me being present in the room. Not to contact. To proximity. To my structural signature left in the air after I’d taken my hands away from the seal.

It was reading me.

It had been reading me the entire time I was in the lower stacks. Not only when I touched it.

Every connection I’d drawn. Every piece of the pattern I’d mapped out in the restricted row — the sigil had been cataloguing it alongside me, feeding the data to wherever the array was being built.

I hadn’t found their work.

I’d been allowed to find it.

I left the lower stacks at a pace that was not a run and did not announce itself as one. Up the basement stairs, through the bone-lock at the reading room level, across the archive floor to the entrance gate. The night assistant looked up as I passed. I handed the pass-note back without slowing.

Outside, the interference I’d mapped on my first night ran through the lower district walls, pointing toward what was being built beneath us.

It was tactical. I kept telling myself it was tactical.

I needed to see Thruk. Tonight. Not at dawn, not when I’d finished — tonight, because the timeline I’d been working from was wrong and the margin between nearly complete and complete had just collapsed into nothing I could measure.

I turned toward the Cathedral.

I was already moving.

FOUR

THRUK

He had not planned to bring her to the Crypts tonight.

That changed when she arrived at the Cathedral’s outer gate at the second hour past midnight and the guard sent word up, because nobody walked into the Cathedral quarter at that hour without a reason that couldn’t wait.