The party did not waste much time pretending the decision had settled anything. The moment they stepped fully back into Kaethar’s streets, the city seemed eager to remind them that choices did not become cleaner simply because they had been made. The square below Malakar’s tower had filled again while they were inside. A fishmonger shouted over the rattle of passing wheels. A pair of laborers argued over a broken axle with the intimate fury of men who would still be arguing when the sun went down. Somewhere nearby, someone started playing a reed flute badly enough to make the effort feel personal.
Lira cut through it all with the same direct pace she used in the woods, though the city did not reward that sort of movement the way the forest did. In the Veldtwood, things stepped aside or got stepped over. In Kaethar, every turn carried another shoulder, another cart, another merchant who believed his stall had more right to the street than anyone else’s life.
“Varna first,” the elf said.
No one argued.
That alone told Elora how badly the tower unsettled them. Under other circumstances, Zerai would have had three pinions and at least one joke before Lira finished the sentence. Thane would have grunted and asked what they were doing instead in a tone that implied he would prefer hitting something to discussing it. Even Tako, for all his spareness, might have offered some strange, bear-shaped principle to complicate matters. But now, they simply adjusted their path and let Lira lead.
“Varna first,” Elora agreed, mostly to hear something human and ordinary come out of her own mouth.
Lira nodded.
Thane shoved his hands into his coat and fell into step beside them, shoulders tight. The book was still hidden poorly beneath the cloth, concealed with a confidence only a man entirely unsuited to concealment could muster. He did not mention it again. No one else did either. That, too, started to feel like part of the problem.
Zerai, for once, was not looking everywhere at once. Her eyes stayed mostly ahead, though every now and then they flicked toward the line of the city’s rooftops as if expecting the answer to some unasked question to be hanging there in plain sight.
“What do you think they’ve done with it already?” she asked.
“The grathok?” Elora replied.
“Zerai nodded. “If Varna’s brother got there first and started cutting, that could change things.
Thane made a rough sound in his throat. “Then we tell him to stop.”
Lira glanced back at him. “If he’s already done something that matters, telling him to stop won’t undo it.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“It isn’t meant to be.”
Kaethar seemed larger in daylight than it had the night before. Not only in size, but in complexity. Dunmoor had roads and homes and a tavern and enough daily rhythm to let people mistake repetition for safety. Kaethar had layers. It had guild signs nailed over older guild signs, runners weaving through side streets with satchels sealed in wax, porters hauling crates marked with symbols no farmer would ever need to learn. It had a kind of momentum that asked nothing of the people caught inside it except that they keep moving.
By the time they reached Varna’s district, the sharpers mells of the lower market had given way to clearer ones. Cold stone. Fresh-cut herbs. Brine. Smoke used with intention rather than desperation. Her shop stood where they had left it, neat to the point of discipline, its front windows clear, its brass fittings polished, the hanging sign steady in the light breeze.
Lira slowed at the threshold because the place invited a different pace. The bell over the door was small and silver. The frame had been scrubbed. Even the step showed less wear than it should have for a business in a district this busy.
“She runs a butcher’s shop like a temple,” Thane muttered.
“Would you prefer the other one?” Zerai offered.
“No.”
Elora put her hand on the latch. Through the window, she could see movement inside. White apron. Narrow shoulders. Someone lifting a covered tray from one worktable to another with the careful economy of a person who measured their day in sharp edges and spoilage.
Good, she thought. Good that someone in this city knew what they were doing.
Then she pushed the door open, and the bell gave a bright, controlled ring that announced them as something less welcome than expected and more inevitable than hoped.
Varna looked up the moment they entered, and whatever relief she felt at seeing them again was buried beneath the same composed professionalism she wore the day before.
“You came back quickly,” she said, wiping her hands on a clean cloth before setting it aside. “Good. I was beginning to think you might decide indecision was a strategy.”
“Tempting,” Zerai said. “But apparently not one that keeps corpses useful.”
Lira stepped in before the exchange could drift. “We need to know what condition the rathok is in. We may need to move it again.”
Varna’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Move it where?”
“To Malakar Revaine,” Elora said.
The room changed, if only by a fraction. Not much. Just enough for Varna to go still in the shoulders before the motion disappeared.
“I see,” Varna said. “Then you’d better come look at what’s still worth moving.”
Varna stepped out from behind the front counter and motioned for them to follow. The deeper room beyond the shop proper was colder than the rest, not merely from stone and shade, but from deliberate design. The air had that same dry crispness they noticed before, though stronger now, tinged with blood, salt, and the sharp bite of preserving herbs. Metal hooks lined the walls, while bundles of dried plants hung from rafters overhead. Two long worktables stood beneath hanging lamps, both scrubbed clean enough to suggest either discipline or obsession.
The grathok lay on a reinforced platform at the far end of the room. Even dead, it looked like something that should not have fit comfortably inside any building made by sensible hands. Its bulk filled the space, all stone-knotted muscle and fur laid flat now beneath streaks of meltwater and a preservative sheen. The creature’s hide had been cleaned of road muck and old blood. A section along the torso was shaved and marked in pale chalk lines, though not yet opened. Thick iron clamps pinned the limbs in place, less for restraint than positioning. Someone took the trouble to make the impossible manageable.
Saren stood on the opposite side of the platform, sleeves rolled to the elbow, one gloved hand resting on the creature’s side while the other held a long, narrow blade that looked more like something a surgeon would wield than a butcher. He glanced up when they approached, then gave a small nod that managed to be both polite and distracted.
“We waited,” he said. “Mostly.”
Thane’s brow lowered to meet his grumble. “Mostly?”
Varna did not bother softening it. “We cleaned the exterior, examined the structure of the hide, and tested the density of the outer layers where rot is most likely to set in first. We did not open the cavity, though, so the heart is still there. There is no damage to anything your wizard would call irreplaceable.”
“That’s a comfort,” Lira said.
“It should be,” said Varna. “Because if we had done nothing at all, you’d have a larger problem than trust.”
She crossed to the table and laid two fingers against one of the chalk lines. “The hide is denser than I expected and less uniform. Tone growth has formed around the musculature in ridges, not plates. Cutting into the wrong section would cause splinter stress along the body. If your wizard needs the carcass as a vessel rather than simply a source of parts, that matters.”
Zerai moved closer, studying the markings. “So it’s still viable.”
“Yes,” Saren said. “‘Still viable’ is not the same as ‘forgiving.’”
Elora’s eyes moved over the grathok’s body, then back to Varna. “What does that mean in practical terms?”
Varna met her gaze evenly. “It means if you intend to use it, stop hesitating. The body will hold for a little while yet, but not forever. It is preserved. It is not immortal.”
Silence followed. They had their answer, and like most useful answers, it had not made anything easier.
Varna left them with the grathok and disappeared through a side door. Saren remained a moment longer, adjusting one of the clamps at the creature’s shoulder until the iron sat exactly where he wanted it. Only then did he peel off one glove finger by finger and glance toward them properly.
“If you mean to keep your wizard happy,” he said,” do not let anyone enthusiastic near the body with a blade, a hammer, or an idea.”
Zerai folded her arms. “What about questions?”
Saren considered that. “Questions are survivable.”
“High praise.”
“It’s what I have.”
He set the glove aside, crossed to a narrow shelf against the wall, and selected a small ceramic jar sealed with wax. Its lid bore a painted mark that meant nothing to Thane and very little more to the rest of them, though Lira narrowed her eyes as if she half-remembered seeing the symbol stamped on a ledger or crate at some point in a life she preferred not to think about.
Saren passed the jar to Varna as she returned. She did not thank him. Mostly because he did not require it.
“Root salt,” Varna said, more to the room than to any one of them. She broke the seal with her thumbnail and tipped a careful line of grey-green crystals along one of the chalk marks on the grathok’s flank. “This should hold the interface seams clean until evening.”
“Interface seams,” Thane repeated. “That’s what we’re calling it now.”
Varna looked at him and wondered if simpler language was expected. “It is a term of use.”
“For what?”
“For points of contact between systems.”
“Oh. Well, of course.”
Zerai, on the other hand, already moved closer. “Root salt from where?”
“The western exchange,” Varna said. “Military allocation.”
At that, Lira’s attention sharpened. “For a butcher?”
Varna’s mouth twitched, though whether in amusement or irritation was hard to tell. “For licensed magical handling. Not all privileged supply passes through a barracks first.”
Thane tipped his head toward the jar. “And if you can buy it, what makes it military?”
Varna replaced the lid with neat efficiency. “Permission.”
That answer satisfied no one except perhaps Varna herself.
She moved to a narrow table near the wall where three slips lay weighted beneath a brass rod. Beside them sat a shallow tray filled with damp black matter that looked, at first glance, like rich soil packed into a polished wooden frame. Thin white threads veined its surface in delicate branching lines. The tray was no larger than a serving board, but it had its own little stand, its own lamp, and its own place in the room, as if whatever it was belonged there as naturally as knives and twine. Elora saw Thane see it.
“No,” she said under her breath.
He was already walking over.
“What is that?”
Varna did not even turn. “Message bed.”
Thane stared at the black laom and its pale woven filaments with open suspicion. That’s dirt.”
“It is not merely dir.”
“It looks like merely dirt.”
“Most systems look simpler than they are to people determined not to understand them.”
Zerai made a quiet sound in her throat that might have been a laugh if she had not caught it in time. Lira pretended not to hear it.
Thane leaned in, not close enough to touch it, but near enough to make his distrust physical. “And people send messages through it?”
“They do.”
“How?”
Varna gave him a look usually reserved for children asking why the moon did not fall into the sea. “By sanctioned relay. The bed is paired with larger lines elsewhere in the city. Government offices, military houses, certain guilds, anyone licensed and wealthy enough to pay for access.”
“And anyone can hear what’s passing through it?” Thane asked.
“No.”
He folded his arms. “You sure about that?”
“Yes.”
“You sound awfully sure for someone who sends words through fungus.”
Saren snorted. It was the first sign he had a sense of humor at all.
Varna, to her credit, did not sight. “No, Master Korrick. Random passersby cannot simply pluck official correspondence out of the rootnet because they dislike the idea of it.”
“Rootnet,” Thane muttered. “That’s worse.”
Lira stepped in before he could continue the argument on principle alone. “How common is it?”
“In Kaethar?” Varna glanced toward the little tray. “Common enough that those who need it use it and those who do not complain about the people who do.”
Elora’s expression softened with recognition. “I’ve heard of them. Not used one, but my order never had the coin for it.”
Zerai tipped her head. “I’ve seen one in a magistrate’s office. Smaller than I expected.”
“They are usually made to look harmless,” Varna said. “People trust a thing more easily when it resembles a garden.”
Thane gave the tray one last mistrustful look, as if expecting it to answer him back. “Still sounds like a bad idea.”
You suspect the worst of things very quickly, don’t you, dwarf?”
“Saves time.”
Before she could reply, someone rapped twice at the front door. A voice on the other side called for a parcel, a signature, and confirmation that the noon notice had already gone through the line.
Kaethar, Lira thought, never stopped speaking to itself.
And that, more than the streets or the walls or the sheer number of people packed into it, was what made the city feel larger than Dunmoor. Not the bodies. The channels between them. The things already moving before you knew you needed to ask. They came for an answer about a carcass. Instead, standing in the cold room with the grathok on its iron table and the fungal message bed quietly breathing at the wall, Lira felt the city remind them of something none of them wanted to admit. This place ran on knowledge they did not own.
The stepped back out into Kaethar carrying an answer that improved nothing. The grathok was still viable. That should have simplified the world. Instead, it only narrowed it. The body could still be used as Malakar’s ritual path remained open. The road ahead merely became harder to pretend there might be a better one waiting somewhere else in the city if they stalled long enough to find it.
The market thickened since they entered Varna’s district. Afternoon commerce turned the streets meaner in the way all crowded places eventually did. Carts pushed harder. Buyers stopped apologizing when they stepped on feet. Voices rose from the ordinary frictions of too many people trying to win the same inch of ground. Kaethar absorbed indecision.
Lira took the lead without meaning to. Elora stayed close behind her, quieter than before. Thane came behind them with one hand resting near the fold of his coat where the book sat hidden awkwardly enough that only courtesy prevented the rest of the world from commenting on it. Zerai walked with her arms folded and her eyes unfocused, still somewhere between Varna’s cold workroom and the knowledge that the grathok became, somehow, more dangerous now that it was lying still.
“I still don’t like any of this,” she muttered.
“No one asked you to,” Thane said.
“That’s what worries me.” The gnome absent-mindedly fiddled with a loose toggle on her robe with her thumb and forefinger, the embroidery surrounding it showing premature age from the worrisome habit.
Elora glanced toward a passing runner carrying a sealed leather tube beneath one arm. He cut across the flow of the crowd with the kind of speed only official purpose ever seemed to buy. Behind him, near the corner of a counting house, a clerk stood over a shallow tray filled with black loam and white fungal threads. As he read from a narrow slip, the threads stirred, rising and winding together until they formed the delicate shape of a mushroom cap above the soil. Another man waited beside him with a pen poised over a ledger. When the clerk finished speaking, the cap gave a faint shiver, and the threads withdrew back into the loam as though the message had been swallowed.
The city was always sending itself somewhere.
Zerai noticed her looking. “Still weird, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“The message beds.”
Elora gave a small shrug. “Only because Dunmoor doesn’t have one.”
“Dunmoor doesn’t have a lot of things.”
“That one might be a blessing,” Thane said. “Sending words through dirt still sounds like begging to be overheard.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Zerai said.
“That’s what people always say right before something works exactly like that.”
Lira might have answered, but something at the edge of her vision tightened first. No movement so much as the absence of it. A space in the crowd that seemed to close too quickly after someone passed through. A figure in a dark coat angling away from them with the practiced indifference of someone who had every right to be exactly where he was.
She turned her head slightly, just enough to keep him in sight without advertising that she had noticed him.
The man never looked back.
That bothered her more than if he had.
“Elora.” The warning was quiet enough that only the other woman heard it. She did not turn, did not ask, only shifted a little closer as though the crowd had made it necessary.
They crossed the next lane together. By the time Lira reached the passage, there was no one left to catch. The lane beyond lay still. A door hung carelessly open. Somewhere farther in, unseen, something gave a soft wooden creak and then thought better of continuing. That was all. Enough to tell her he had not panicked. Enough to tell her he had done this before.
Lira changed course at once, cutting toward the gap. By the time she reached it, there was no one there. Only narrow service passage, a broken crate shoved against the wall, and the smell of wet rope. A dog sleeping beneath an overturned handcart raised its head long enough to confirm she was not carrying food, then settled back into the important business of ignoring the world.
“Elora?” Zerai called from behind.
Lira turned back.
Elora stood in the mouth of the lane with one hand at her belt pouch, her expression flattened into that careful calm people reached for when they already knew something was wrong.
“What’s wrong?”
Elora worked the flap open and checked inside, then checked again as though a second look might shame the missing thing back into existence.
“The ring,” she said.
Thane cocked his head to the side. “What ring?”
“The signet. From the bandit guy.” That landed hard enough to stop them all.
Zerai stepped closer at once. “Nothing else?”
Elora shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Targeted, then,” groaned the dwarf.
Lira looked once more at the empty passage, then down at the ground just inside it. A single silver coin sat on the crate, centered like a dare.
Not enough to count as payment. Just enough to count as contempt. She picked it up between thumb and forefinger. Someone in Kaethar saw what they carried, understood it mattered, and took it without touching anything else.
When they stepped back into the market, the city looked exactly the same. That was how she knew it had changed. By the time they reached the edge of the lane, no one was in the mood to pretend the theft was small just because it was clean.
Lira still had the silver coin in her palm. It was a Kaethan mark, thin and bright where it had been recently polished by other hands, with the city seal on one face and a crowned profile on the other worn nearly smooth by years of passing from purse to purse. It looked ordinary enough to be insulting. She could not decide whether she wanted to keep it or drive it through the throat of the thief if she ever found him.
“The grathok is still good,” Thane said at last.
No one answered him immediately. There was nothing to argue with in what he said, only the uglier truth beneath it. The body was still viable. Malakar’s path remained open. Whatever else Kaethar took from them, it did not take that.
“Elora?” Lira asked.
Elora drew a slow breath. “Varna was clear. If Malakar intends to use the grathok as a vessel, then waiting is only going to make that harder.”
“Assuming we still mean to trust him,” Zerai muttered.
“We don’t,” Lira said.
Zeari looked at her. “Then why do I feel like we’re walking back into his hands anyway?”
Because they were. The answer was obvious enough that none of them bothered saying it first.
Lira opened her hand and looked down at the coin again. It flashed dull silver in the light, ordinary enough to be insulting. The blood boiled in her veins and flushed in her cheeks. Were it not for the length and sharpness of her ears, she almost could have been mistaken for a human scorned.
“Kaethar’s started touching the edges of this,” she said.
Thane gave a short, ugly grunt. “A city like this gets its hands on everything.”
“Yes,” Lira said. “That’s the problem.”
Zerai folded her arms tighter. “So what now? We’ve got a dead grathok we can still use, a wizard we don’t trust, a city that just picks our pocket on purpose, and somehow the only thing getting clearer is how much worse this is about to get.”
Elora let out a breath that might have been the beginning of a laugh on a kinder day. “That may be the clearest thing anyone’s said all day.”
No one moved after that. The answer sat with them whether they wanted it or not. The grathok was still viable. The ritual could still be done. The road forward remained open. It was only everything attached to it that had soured.
Lira closed her fingers around the coin.
“We have an answer,” she said.
Thane looked at her. “Doesn’t feel much like one.”
“It isn’t.” Her eyes lifted toward the rise beyond the market roofs where Malakar’s tower stood somewhere out of sight, patient as a snare and twice as sure of itself. “It’s just the only road that hasn’t started closing.
That settled over them more firmly than agreement might have. They had only reached the point where standing still began to look less like caution and more like giving up. Zerai, quick as a thought, reached out and plucked the coin from Lira’s hand.
“Lira’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
“What I should have done earlier,” Zerai said. She turned the coin over once, studying the stamped face. “We keep circling the same miserable conclusion, and I’m getting bored of listening to us think.”
“That’s because thinking inconveniences you,” Thane muttered.
“It does,” Zerai said flatly. “Terribly.”
She rolled the coin across her knuckles, then looked at the others.
“Heads,” she said, “we take our furry friend back to Malakar and let the dangerous smug wizard—”
“Necromancer…” Thane interrupted.
“—wizard,” she continued, “do the dangerous, smug wizard thing.”
Elora folded her arms. “And tails?”
Zerai’s mouth curved, though there was very little humor in it. “We move the carcass ourselves. Loudly. Publicly. Through enough of Kaethar that every hand already reaching for us gets one clear chance to reach farther.
Lira watched her for a beat. “You want to use it as bait.”
“I want to stop pretending this city isn’t already sniffing at it.”
Thane gave a short grunt. “That’s not the worst idea you’ve had.”
“Please put that on a plaque.”
Elora looked from one face to the next, then back to the coin. “Either way, we’re inviting trouble.”
“No,” Lira said. Her eyes lifted briefly toward the distant rise where Malakar’s tower stood somewhere beyond the market roofs. “Trouble’s already invited. We’re just deciding whether to knock on one door… or all of them.”
Zerai flicked the coin into the air. It spun once, bright in the afternoon light, then again, climbing above the noise of the market before dropping toward her waiting hand.
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