Chapter 8 Rathok
EIGHT
RATHOK
Six of them. Boiling out of the darkness in a wave of rotted flesh and shattered bone.
Debtor-wraiths. The dead who defaulted, bound to the Ledger even in death, transformed into something that hungers and hunts and never, ever stops.
I shove Ivalys against the wall. Position myself between her and the oncoming wave. My axes come up, edges gleaming in the blue-gray light of the night-sight compound.
Six. I can handle six.
The first one reaches me.
It used to be human. The shape is still roughly right—two arms, two legs, a head that might have held thoughts once.
But death and debt have twisted it into something else.
Skin like parchment stretched over too-sharp bones.
Its mouth is open, screaming without sound, an endless silent wail of hunger and agony.
My axe takes its head before it touches me.
Skull separating from spine in a spray of black ichor. The body stumbles two more steps, hands still reaching, still grasping for the debt it can never collect. Then it collapses in a heap of twitching limbs.
No time to watch it fall.
The second wraith is already on me. Faster than the first—fresher, newer, the memory of life still driving its hunger.
Claws rake across my chest, shredding leather, drawing blood in four parallel lines that burn like fire.
I grunt, pivot, bury my axe in its skull so deep, the blade lodges in its spine.
Can’t free it. The third wraith is coming.
I release the axe. Grab the wraith’s corpse by the throat.
Swing it like a club, slamming it into the third attacker.
Both go down in a tangle of limbs and rotting flesh.
I stomp down on a throat. Feel cartilage crunch.
Stamp again—an eye socket caves beneath my boot.
A third stomp shatters what remains of a ribcage into splinters.
Blood—mine, red and hot—drips from my chest. Pain is distant. Pain is for later. Now is killing.
The fourth wraith is smarter. It hangs back, circling, looking for an opening. It used to be something more than human—orc, maybe, judging by the size. The shadow-curse twisted it even in death, making it faster, stronger, more dangerous than its human counterparts.
We face each other. Predators recognizing kin.
It lunges. A feint—I see it too late. Its real attack comes from the left, a bone-shard dagger driving toward my throat. I catch the blade with my bare hand. Bone punches through my palm, grinding against my own bones, black blood welling around the wound.
The wraith’s dead eyes widen. It didn’t expect me to stop it.
I pull it closer. Watch confusion flicker across its rotted features. And drive my tusk through its eye socket.
Skull crunches. Brain matter splatters. I keep pushing until my tusk scrapes the back of its skull, until I feel the thing that powered it—the contract-core, the debt-hunger—shatter into nothing.
Four down. Two left.
They come together. A coordinated attack from wraiths old enough to remember tactics, old enough to have been soldiers or hunters or something that knew how to kill. I yank my axe free from the second corpse, swing it in a wide arc that forces them apart.
One darts left. The other goes right.
I can’t watch both.
I choose left. The wraith sees me commit, tries to reverse, but momentum is a bitch, and physics don’t care about the undead. My axe takes it in the shoulder, splits through the collarbone, buries deep in its chest. Not a killing blow—these things don’t die from chest wounds—but enough to slow it.
I spin to face the other—
It’s not there.
It went for Ivalys.
No.
I charge. Rip my axe free. Blood sprays—mine, the wraith’s, a cocktail of red and black that paints the bone walls. The distance between me and Ivalys is six paces, maybe seven, and the wraith is already reaching for her throat—
She moves.
Not away. Not backward. Into the attack.
Her hand closes around a broken stalactite—a shard of ancient bone that fell from the ceiling, sharp as any knife. She drives it forward, up, through the soft tissue under the wraith’s chin. The point erupts from the top of its skull in a spray of ichor and corrupted brain matter.
The wraith collapses. Inches from her face. Close enough that its death-rattle sprays black fluid across her shoulder.
She doesn’t scream. Doesn’t flinch. Just yanks the bone shard free and turns to face the last attacker.
The wounded one. The one I left alive.
It’s crawling toward her. Half its chest is gone, one arm hanging useless, but the hunger remains. The hunger never dies.
I reach it in three strides. Bring my axe down on its neck. Once. Twice. The third blow severs its head completely.
Silence falls.
Six corpses surround us. Black ichor pools on the floor, mixing with my blood in patterns that look almost deliberate. The pain is starting to surface now—chest, hand, a dozen smaller cuts I don’t remember taking. I force it back down. Pain is for later.
I turn to Ivalys.
She’s still standing. Still holding the bone shard, knuckles white around its blood-slick surface. Ichor splattered across her shoulder, her cheek, matting her dark hair to her skull. Her chest heaves with rapid breaths.
But her eyes are steady. Clear. Meeting mine without flinching.
“You didn’t run.”
“Would running have helped? I’m not useless.” She’s trembling—I can see it in her hands, the fine vibration she can’t quite control. But her voice is steel.
Something shifts in my chest. Something I don’t have a name for, don’t want to examine.
She’s not prey. The realization settles into my bones. She never was.
“That was a debtor-wraith you just killed.” I move toward her, can’t help myself, need to see that she’s whole, that the thing didn’t touch her before she ended it. “Some people train for years before they can face one.”
“I didn’t have years.” She tucks the small weapon into a back pocket. “I have a brother in trouble and a monster in front of me.”
I reach her. Stop. The urge to touch her is overwhelming—to check for wounds, to confirm she’s alive, to feel the warmth of her against my blood-slicked palms. But I don’t trust my control right now.
The shadow-curse is singing in my veins, the aftermath of combat flooding my body with urges I can’t afford to indulge.
“You’re hurt.”
She looks down at herself. At the ichor painting her clothes, the tremor in her hands, the scrape on her forearm where she must have hit the wall when I shoved her.
“This isn’t mine.” She gestures at the black fluid. “Well. The scrape is. But everything else—”
“Is theirs.” I finish for her. “Good.”
She looks up. Our eyes meet. The night-sight washes everything in shades of blue and gray, but I can still see the fire in her gaze. The stubborn defiance that hasn’t dimmed even after watching me tear five corpses apart with hands, tusks, and axes.
“You’re bleeding.” Her voice has changed. Softer. Concerned.
I look down at myself. The claw wounds on my chest are weeping steadily, the leather of my armor hanging in tatters.
My palm is a ruin—the bone dagger punched straight through, and pulling it free did more damage than leaving it in would have.
Blood—my blood, red and hot—drips from a dozen smaller cuts.
“Flesh wounds. The shadow-curse heals minor damage quickly.”
“Those don’t look minor.”
“They’re not killing wounds.” I move past her, toward the trail we were following. “We need to keep moving. The fight will draw more of them. The wraiths communicate somehow—screams we can’t hear, messages in frequencies the living weren’t meant to understand.”
She falls into step beside me as if the fight changed something between us.
Maybe it did.
? ? ?
We find more signs of Gror’s passage as we move deeper.
Another scrap of fabric. A boot print in centuries-old dust. A smear of blood on a jutting bone—fresh enough that I can smell the iron, the fear, the particular tang of a man running for his life.
The trail is too clean. Too deliberate. Breadcrumbs leading us exactly where someone wants us to go.
I don’t share these concerns with Ivalys. Not yet. She’s had enough reality for one night—the fight with the wraiths, the revelation about her brother’s capture, the growing certainty that we’re walking into a trap we can’t avoid.
Instead, I focus on the path. On the signs the tunnels leave for those who know how to read them. On the route I’ve pieced together from decades of enforcing in these depths—the route toward the secret entrance beneath Ledger Hall.
“How much farther?”
Ivalys presses her marked palm against the tunnel wall, and the sigil flares briefly—a pulse of light that illuminates the bioluminescent fungi clinging to the stone. The blue-green glow makes the blood on her hands look black, makes her face look like something carved from stone and shadow.
“Left or right?” She studies the junction ahead, reading it with instincts she doesn’t know she has.
“Right. Left leads to the Bone Pit. Right leads to much deeper tunnels. That’s where the secret Hall entrance should be.”
“Deeper?” I don’t like the sound of that. “And my brother’s trail leads there?”
I breathe deeply. Follow the scent through the maze of smells that make up the labyrinth.
“No.”
She looks up sharply.
“The trail ends here.” I indicate the junction ahead. “Everything we’ve been following—the fabric, the blood, the boot prints—it all leads to this spot. And then it stops.”
“Stops?”
“Vanishes. As if whoever laid it wanted us to reach this exact point and no farther.”
The sigil blazes, painting her face in white-gold light that makes her look like something holy.
Something terrible. “Don’t tell me it’s a trap.
Don’t tell me we’re doing what he wants.
I know.” Her voice cracks. Just a fraction.
Just enough to show the fear beneath the fury.
“I know. But my brother is still in his hands. And the only way to free him is to destroy the monster holding him.”
I stare at her. At the fire burning in eyes that refuse to dim, no matter how dark the tunnels get. At the stubborn set of her jaw, the determined angle of her shoulders, the way she faces me like I’m just another obstacle between her and her goal.
She’s magnificent.
“Then we go to the Hall.” I turn toward the right passage—the path to whatever lies beneath the Ledger Hall. “But we go my way. Careful. Quiet. No more fights we can avoid.”
“And the fights we can’t avoid?”
I glance back at her. At the woman who killed a debtor-wraith with nothing but a broken bone and more courage than sense.
“Those, we win.”
Something that might be a smile flickers across her face. Brief. Gone before I can be sure I saw it.
We move into the darker tunnels. The older tunnels. The places where death has lived so long, it’s forgotten what life looked like.
When she stumbles slightly on the uneven ground and my hand shoots out to steady her—palm finding her elbow, fingers closing around warm flesh—I let the contact linger a moment longer than necessary.
She looks up at me. Questions in her eyes. Awareness I can’t pretend isn’t there.
I release her. Step back.
“Watch your step. The floor gets worse from here.”
She nods. Says nothing. But her gaze holds mine for a beat too long before she turns back to the path ahead.
We descend deeper into the dark.
And somewhere in the tunnels behind us, something still follows.
Patient. Watching. Waiting.
Let him watch. I tighten my hold on my axes. Let him see what’s coming for him.
The woman beside me glances over. As if she heard the thought.
She doesn’t smile. But something in her expression suggests she agrees.