Page 2 of Orc’s Bones

The interference I’d registered held. Directed outward. Deliberate.

Someone has been inside these bones. Not physically. Working the memory from within it.

I held that and said nothing. Partial findings named aloud before the full picture was legible were more dangerous than silence.

“The lanterns in the Carrow blocks were uneven. South-facing worse than north.”

Lyssa’s stride didn’t break. “Eight weeks. We thought maintenance — the fuel structures in the south wall need realignment.”

“It isn’t maintenance.”

“No.”

She’d known that. Known it long enough that it had finally overridden the vote that kept me out. Lyssa cared about the dead as people rather than power structures — she’d catalogued hundreds of bloodlines and knew the signal of every significant lineage in the Archive’s records. She knew exactly which person, which memory, had been taken with each missing bone. The lanterns flickering hadn’t alarmed her. The bones had.

“Three absences confirmed in the lower Crypt levels,” Lyssa said. “Six in the upper. All lineage anchors. All from bloodlines with enough authority infrastructure that losing them would destabilize the bone-channels Thruk Varyn draws on directly.”

Thruk Varyn.

I’d been preparing for that name since I accepted the summons. I’d built a picture of him from the outside — reports that made it through exile, reputation that traveled — a man who’d spent every year of his tenure proving he deserved what his bloodline handed him. I thought I was ready for that room.

I wasn’t prepared for the city. The way it pressed back against me like I’d never left. The hum beneath my boots was unchanged. The bones didn’t register my exile as relevant. They’d been waiting the way stone waits — without patience, without impatience, without any awareness that I’d been gone at all.

The Cathedral of Ancestors rose ahead as we cleared the last bend of the outer districts. No banners. No announcement. Just that impossible scale — bone and black stone fused until they were the same material, spires reaching from the basin as naturally as things rooted in it, the oldest argument for the Dominion’s authority made into architecture.

I had a long history with that argument. None of it was warm.

“He’s expecting me.”

“Yes.”

“And Varek Thorn?”

Lyssa’s mouth flattened. Not a wince. The careful blank of someone who’d already absorbed the bad news and didn’t want to re-experience delivering it. “The war commander is present.”

Of course he was. Varek Thorn was the Dominion’s most efficient arm — whatever Thruk decided, Varek executed, and whatever Thruk hadn’t sanctioned, Varek watched like a wall watches a crack forming in it. My presence was sanctioned by necessity and nothing else, and Varek would make sure I felt that distinction every second I was inside his reach.

I didn’t give it more than three seconds.

We reached the Cathedral steps. The bone column nearest me had shifted — pulled at my attention the way a wrong note pulled at an ear trained for it, and I stopped without deciding to. I set my palm against it.

I’d pressed my hand to this column a hundred times as a student. Foundation memory: intact. Historical additions: clean.

Surface layer: the same interference I’d been tracking through the outer district walls. Faint. Running south and down toward the Crypt levels.

I noted it and moved on.

“Xya.”

Lyssa watched me from two steps up. She had the archivist’s attention — cataloguing everything, never quite turning it off. “I need Archive access when we’re done. Full. Lower stacks.”

“I expected that. I’ll arrange it.”

I turned back to the steps and climbed.

The authority chamber was going to be what it was. Thruk Varyn was going to assess me the way men with absolute power assessed things they hadn’t chosen but needed — as a resource with potential liabilities. I was going to let him. His competence was real, that much came through even filtered reports. Real competence I could work with.

What I couldn’t tell from reports was what it would cost to be in the same room with him.