Page 3 of Orc’s Bones

What it would cost me.

I was about to find out.

The Cathedral interior swallowed echo before it returned — stone pillars, vast high-ceilinged space, ghostfire in the iron braziers lower and cooler than the lanterns outside. Everything here gave off a quality of permanent dusk. Cold. Absolute.

The authority chamber was at the center. I didn’t need Lyssa to show me. I’d been here before, under circumstances I didn’t intend to repeat.

She peeled off at the corridor junction without a word.

I pushed through the door.

He was there.

The dais. The absolute stillness of a man who had been waiting and was not going to show it. Massive — I’d read his build in reports, seen rough sketches, but reports didn’t carry this. The weight of him. The bone-ink patterns ran across his chest and down his arms in channels that weren’t decorative — functional resonance architecture, each line a connection to the ancestral remains that amplified his authority. His tusks were chipped. Not repaired. He’d kept the record.

Dark bronze eyes found me the instant I cleared the threshold.

Tracking me before I finished walking through the door.

My chest registered that. I filed it and moved on.

Varek stood at the left wall — scarred jaw, pale amber gaze running its assessment on me before I’d stopped moving. He’d already decided. I could see it in the set of his shoulders: threat, confirmed, contained. I would have made the same call.

Neither of them spoke. The chamber did its work in the silence.

I walked to the center and stopped.

“Thruk Varyn.”

The silence held for three counts. Then from the dais, a voice that came from deep in the chest and didn’t need to reach for authority — it simply had it: “Xya Wyth.”

He came down off the dais. Not hurrying. His body had already made the decision and the rest of him followed — smooth, certain — and he stopped in front of me closer than a formal assessment required.

Close enough that I had to choose not to step back.

I didn’t step back.

He was reading me. I let him. His gaze moved over the braids, the gray at my skin, the way I held my weight. Not performing stillness. He’d notice that. The bone-ink patterns along his arm caught my eye and I didn’t look away — they were relevant and looking away would have told him I was managing anything.

I am not managing anything. I am observing.

That was almost true.

“I walked the outer districts on the way in.” I held his gaze. “The interference in the bone resonance is running through multiple building foundations. Not randomly. In a directed pattern pointing toward the Crypt levels.”

A muscle worked in his jaw. “You’ve been here less than an hour.”

“Yes.”

“And you read it from outside.”

“It’s not subtle when you know what to look for.”

From the wall, Varek exhaled sharply — a man who’d heard enough to confirm his worst read and was too disciplined to say so yet. Thruk’s eyes moved to him for half a second. Varek went quiet.

Good. That dynamic was going to be important.

“The bones that are missing —“ Thruk’s voice at this range was lower. Deliberate. Like he was pressing on a bruise to test it. “Lyssa said your research had a similar structure.”