Page 24 of Orc’s Bones

“There won’t be.” He held my gaze. “I want you to understand that before we go down.”

“I understand it.”

“And you’re not⁠—“

“No.” I cut it off cleanly. “He weaponized the proof that exiled me and aimed it at the people the sacred rules were already failing. That’s colder than anything the sacred rules ever did. I’m not going to mourn him.”

Thruk’s gaze moved across my face. Reading. What he found there satisfied him, because the set of his jaw eased by a fraction — not relief, the confirmation of what he’d already concluded.

“Good.”

One word. It landed in my chest and I let it.

We stood at the railing of the Bone Bridge with the Dominion at our backs and the grave fields below and the last light of the day going gray around us, and neither of us moved to put distance back in the space between us.

“There’s one more piece. Malverek is a revenant. Or close enough — he’s been rewritten. His own body runs on the same technique he’s been applying to the Crypt structures. He didn’t only study the transfer mechanism. He used it on himself.”

That landed differently. I could see it — the slight recalibration in how Thruk was holding the information.

“Which means he can’t be killed the normal way.”

“He can be killed. But not by conventional physical damage. The body he’s inhabiting is held by bone-thread bindings running the same binding sequence as the constructs. To end him, you have to reach the anchor point — the bone at the center of his binding system.”

Thruk looked at his hands.

“He built himself the same way he built the constructs.”

“Yes. Which is either the most committed demonstration of his own ideology I can imagine, or a man who had run out of other options.” I pushed off the railing. “Possibly both.”

“Can he feel it,” Thruk said. “When the construct was destroyed in the chamber — did he feel it.”

“The relay was active when it happened. He would have read the collapse through the system.” I met his eyes. “He knows you can do it. He built the construct knowing your lineage patterns would be the fastest thing to find the anchor point. It wasn’t only a weapon aimed at you. It was a test.”

“He was testing whether I could do what I did.”

“And now he knows you can. Which means when we go into the lower Crypt levels tonight, he’ll be waiting for us to try the same thing on him. He’ll have modified his binding structure since the construct. The anchor point will have moved.”

The wind off the grave fields came up again. Cold this time, the temperature dropping with the last of the light.

Thruk turned away from me toward the fields. The Dominion rose behind us, its spires visible against the darkening sky, the Cathedral above everything, the ghostfire beginning to catch in the lanterns along the outer wall.

“Then we move before he finishes building. We don’t wait for him to be ready. We go tonight.”

“Yes.”

“And you can find the anchor point, even if he’s moved it.”

“I built the technique he used to move it. I can read where he put it.”

He turned back.

The ghostfire in the nearest lantern caught, throwing pale light across the bridge, and in that light the ink in his forearms ran clear and bright with the Dominion below him, every bone in every tier of the Warline Crypts connected to what he carried in his blood. The thing Malverek was trying to prove was arbitrary. The thing that had been used against him since the moment someone had first started writing activation sigils into his ancestral remains.

I looked at the bone-ink on his arm.

Not arbitrary. Not infrastructure. His.

“Let’s go down.”