CHAPTER 673: THE RIVER YOU STILL CARRY (2)

"Rude."

He touched the seam one more time, then stepped back and pinched the projection down until it hovered small and mean over his palm. The cold light rippled once and settled in lines he could carry in his head. He checked his belt without looking—vials, strips, the coil of silk he had braided himself during a long night beside an even longer woman.

"What are the odds," he asked softly, "that this is a vault rather than a prison?"

Before today: non-zero. After your powder test and the siphon’s retention curve: lower. However, the Whiteways enjoy lying with straight faces.

"Mm. So like most politics." Elowen’s face rose again—her fine mouth when she thought, the way her hands stilled completely when listening. Don’t make a promise you can’t keep to her, he told himself. Bring her proof, not excuses.

The air tasted different right here. Cleaner, despite the dust. He realized he had stopped smelling rot entirely, and that made his shoulders remember how to loosen.

"Rodion," he said, looking at the tiny map. "If we follow the gold thread, where does it put us?"

Projection: A convergent wall three passages over, behind a collapsed rib. The map claims there is no door there. The map is likely a liar.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. The last time he had followed a thread in a dungeon he had ended up under a table while three goblins argued about soup recipes over his head. He had stolen the soup. It was terrible soup. He smiled despite himself.

On the edge of his vision, something tiny moved—a pale gnat fussing in a draft. He lifted a finger and it landed, tired, too cold to be afraid. He bent his head.

"There you are," he whispered. "Late to the party."

He blew very gently and let it go. It flew two lazy circles and then disappeared toward the seam, as if following that same patience.

When he stood, his back popped. The sound was loud in the hush. He caught Thalatha’s reflection in the edge of a polished stone. Her jaw was a line, not hard, not soft. She could stand there all day and not waste a thought on how long it was. The tiny scar at the corner of her mouth—it lifted when she was pretending not to smile. He liked that scar more than most art.

He had the urge to make a joke to make her roll her eyes, then decided against it. He let the quiet stay.

Rodion pinged—a courteous little spark, almost a knock.

Pause at the top of the siphon. Sampling now.

He held his own breath out of superstition and counted. The wall went quiet in his ear. For a beat and a half—longer than he expected—there was real silence. In that silence, under everything, something like a sigh. Not air. Not stone. A living thing remembering to be alive for a count. Then the pull again, soft, careful, miserly.

Confirm faint motion. Not mechanical. Not purely mana. Living. Two to five separate sources overlapping. Error margin significant.

He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "Two to five." He shrugged a shoulder. "I’ll take ’not zero’."

You will take it regardless. That is your pattern.

He snorted. "You make me sound noble."

Noble would pick the surface path. You pick the loud, inconvenient one. That is something else.

"Charming." He rubbed the gold smear on his coat again. It had dulled to a bruise color. "We can’t cut this seam without breaking everything," he said. "If there’s a door, it’ll be where the river bends."

Agreed. Also, recommend pre-mapping the likely ambush geometry on route to that bend. Enemy pulse markers indicate a patrol pattern circulating counter-clockwise two corridors beyond. Our current position intersects in seven minutes.

"Then we have six to be clever." He turned the projection in his palm until the gold thread lay like a string across the speed-throb of Rodion’s pulse marks. He added three finger-flicked symbols—his own little icons for maybe, trap, and don’t be stupid

. The last got two copies.

He took one step back and looked at the whole again, not with the eye that loved details but with the one that loved stories. Where would he put a door if he were an elf with taste and too much time? Where would he put a fake door if he were a Blight engineer with a bad sense of humor?

His finger hovered over a place where two ribs met in a vee. It looked like a seam but it made no sense as structure. It made sense as a promise.

He could feel his heart change its beat the way it did before a foolish kiss, and that annoyed him.

"Thalatha," he said without turning. "If there were people in a box and they were not our people yet, and the box was wrapped in something we didn’t understand, and we were already inside somebody’s throat—what would you do?"

"Press two fingers on the pulse," she said after a breath. "And keep the knife ready in the other hand."

He nodded. "Yes. That."

He let his head drop back for a second and stared at the ceiling. The Whiteways inhaled above them; the lamps swelled; the shadows opened their hands and then closed them again. He felt very small and, stupidly, very seen.

"Alright," he said. "Alright."

He felt for the weight of the lotus sling at his side and checked the clasp. He had cleaned it last night by habit, even though it was already clean. He always did that before a detour. It made a ritual of disobedience so it would sit better in his bones.

He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, once, twice, until his throat stopped thinking it was a fist.

He sighed, glanced at Thalatha a few steps away. "Change of plans. We’re going sightseeing."

_____

The liches stood like dark statues as the Myco-Archivist sorted cores from their last fight into two neat piles—pure and tainted. The Archivist’s gills lifted and fell like small fans, tasting each heart through the air. When it didn’t like something, its delicate tool gave a dry little tok on the stone. When it approved, it tapped twice, soft, almost pleased. The pure pile had a clean glow under the skin, like a pearl held to sunlight. The tainted ones bled a thin green thread along the seams when you tilted them—sour in a way your tongue flinched at even from a distance.

Silk Guards flexed spinnerets nearby, as if stretching fingers before a performance. A few tugged on their own test lines and listened to the ping the way a musician listens to a single note. When they were satisfied, they folded the spinnerets back like neat tools.

The skeleton ranks stood in tidy lines that didn’t sway and didn’t breathe. Some bore scuffs from the last push: hairline chips at the rim of a tower shield, a shallow groove along a spear socket, a bowstring re-knotted with the kind of care that means "we’ll replace this, but not right now." They didn’t fidget. They didn’t cough. They simply were, like chess pieces arranged and waiting for a hand.

"Alright," Mikhailis said, clapping once. The sound went up and came back thinner from the ribs overhead. "You get one drink. Small. No names."

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. The liches turned their heads as if the same thought had reached them. Their crowns—those cold, steady flames above the bone brow—dimmed a shade. Not hunger. Focus.

They bent to the work. Obedient marrow, compliant drift. It never stopped feeling strange: the way a shin bone knows how to be a shin bone even after it has forgotten the leg it lived in. The way ribs find their curve like memory returning to a hand. On the floor, small bone storms swirled inward and up, settling into kneecaps, elbows, the hinge of a jaw.

They rose with the quiet ease of rain filling a bucket.

A shield rim kissed a shield rim and sat just so. A spear butt thudded, measured, into stone. Bows creaked once, like old doors proving they still had good hinges. The ranks swelled: shields polished by nothing but discipline, spears balanced in hollow hands. Archers formed at the rear, checking their line of sight, turning their skulls as if squinting even though there were no eyes.

Mikhailis watched their posture the way anyone else might watch a lover’s mouth. Not because bones were romantic. Because this, too, was a language, and he needed his army to be fluent.

Formation strength now approximately one hundred and fifty units. Recommend specialization: shield wall, spear block, archer line.

"Do it," he replied. He snapped two fingers and pointed. Tanglebeetles trundled to pair with the forward shield bearers, spools primed; Silk Guards drifted toward the archers like polite shadows, already weaving the first thin curtains; the Crymber Twins—one frost-cool, one ember-warm—slid into the gaps between spear clusters, their breaths syncing out of habit, hot and cold canceling each other’s extremes.

He moved down the line, not as a general striking poses, but as a fussy chef doing last-minute prep. A tower shield sat a finger too low; he nudged it up by tapping the bracer with a knuckle. A spear bearer held his point too proud; Mikhailis pushed the haft down a palm, so the aim would bite seam rather than slide off plate. He tightened a bow’s nocking point with a quick twist, and the archer’s skull tilted, considering the new tension as if it approved.

Thalatha stood just out of reach, watching the liches as if waiting for them to break a rule. She didn’t blink often. She didn’t waste breath on questions she could answer with eyes.

"You keep to your rules," she said at last, voice quiet. Not a compliment. A measurement.

Mikhailis tilted his head. "I keep to rules that make sense."

"What is the shape of this one?" Her gaze cut toward a lich whose hands moved with a librarian’s patience.

"No names," he said. "No plates. No plaques. Drift only. We don’t raise a person. We raise the job they left behind." He tapped his temple gently. "If a memory tries to climb the ladder, we kick it back down. If a plate clings, we don’t touch it. If a crown brightens like greed, I break it."

Thalatha’s mouth did a small thing. Not a smile. A change of weather. "I will watch," she said.

"I expected nothing less," he answered without heat.

He stepped to the Myco-Archivist. "Show me."