They reached an opening like a cracked tooth. The gorge fell away again, sharper now, its walls striated with bands of stone that had learned to lean. Below, the old riverbed ran like a spine, its vertebrae the round stones time makes when it has no one to defy it. Above, the rim cut a narrow strip of sky; stars crowded the gap as if arguing over who would be allowed to look down.
Lyra crouched and pinched a smear of soil between finger and thumb. She sniffed, winced, and spat to clear the taste. "Wolfoil on the wind. Boarshield is spreading a net. He is good at nets."
Jun checked the pouch at his belt. "I have eight stones and a piece of luck. Which do you want?"
"Luck is noisy," Lyra said. "Keep the stones."
They followed the river-spine north. Twice Lyra paused to blot the ground behind them with a twist of salted ash. "Wolf-nose hates this." A third time she tucked a sprig of bitter leaf into a crevice "for the benefit of anyone whose belly argues with courage." She worked like a woman mending a shirt: fast, confident, and without sympathy for holes.
They came upon bones again—not the fresh messes the wolves make but old soldered white, rib cages like cages that had finally remembered were only ribs. Helms that had been heads and then hats and now bowls. A gauntlet whose fingers still curled around nothing as if the hand refused the rumor of its absence.
Jun knelt, then stood quickly when the ground decided to creak under him. "I don't like being looked at by people who forgot how."
"Nobody forgets how," Lyra said. "But sometimes remembering is the wrong tool." She tapped a rune carved into a thigh-bone, half only. "This script hates sunlight. It will tell us more in the morning because it will have had time to forgive us for catching it without its paint."
"What does it say?" Luo Chen asked.
Lyra tilted the bone until the lantern's hood leaked a sliver of light. Her lips moved as if tasting a word she did not want to waste out loud. "Names, mostly. A prayer to the old network. A warning to—" She cut herself off, head cocked. "Horses."
Hoofbeats. Slow at first, as if a man were teaching his mount patience. Then a second set, then a third, until the stone learned a new rhythm. Wolves answered, the sound tight and eager now that the confusion-smoke had thinned.
Lyra doused the lantern and gestured toward a run of broken shelves where the gorge wall had split and settled. "Up and over. If they ride the floor, we walk the teeth."
Jun went first this time; his body belonged to edges. Luo Chen followed, hands searching for holds and finding them when he let the pendant's small pulse tell his fingers where to reach. Each pull burned; his forearms were becoming arguments his body was losing. Lyra came last, not because she was slow but because she counted the places where a boy could make a mistake and chose to be there when he did.
They were halfway across when something heavy struck the shelf beneath Jun's boots. Stone groaned. Dust became a cloud and then a curtain. Through it, a silhouette resolved: shield like a door, helm crested with tusks, horse bulking out the gorge as if the animal had been built in a forge. Hargel Boarshield.
He looked up, and the dark made room for his gaze. He didn't shout. He didn't need to. He lifted one hand and pointed—not at the boy who had a sling and a good lie in his mouth, not at the woman whose knife had cut secrets out of stubborn things—but at Luo Chen, as if the gorge itself had told him where to point.
Jun swore. "He can smell you through stone."
"No," Lyra said, voice thin with an anger she did not have time to seed into hate. "He can count."
A horn spoke. Men behind Hargel stretched canvas bundles, shook them into torches, lit them with the kind of care soldiers give to small things that know how to betray their hands. Light punched up the gorge. Shadows lost their friends. Wolves howled in a key that meant welcome.
"Go," Lyra said, pushing. "The next shelf. Left—no, your other left."
The shelf shivered under the torch's heat. A crack that had practiced splitting for a century decided to graduate. Jun leaped the new gap and landed with a knee that would be a bruise tomorrow. Luo Chen followed, misjudged, caught the lip with his fingers, and hung there with pain as his only language. The pendant throbbed, the arm with the elder's sigil burned like a nail in fire, and he thought: I am going to be done.
Lyra lay flat, reached, and caught his wrist with a grip that believed in both of them. "Up." She hauled, he scrabbled, Jun seized his tunic from behind, and gravity found something else to scold.
Below, Hargel urged his mount along the floor and under their shelf until he judged the angle he wanted. Then he lifted his spear the way a carpenter lifts a tool he trusts and hurled it. The shaft hummed. It took the shelf three handspans to Luo Chen's right. Stone spat shards. The shelf jumped and came down uncomfortably curious about the possibility of being two shelves.
"Move!" Jun barked. Command fit him like a shirt that had been his father's and now belonged to him by sweat.
They reached a wedge where two shelves kissed and then turned away. Lyra pressed her palm to the corner. "Here," she said through teeth. "It's another seam. It wants the right song."
"I can sing," Jun said, breathless and unhelpful.
"Don't." Lyra's eyes flicked to the pendant. "Luo Chen."
He didn't ask what she wanted; he knew. The stone made his fingertips want to be careful and his bones want to be brave. He lifted it, pressed it to the seam, and let the memory of the old word—calibration—be in his mouth without making sound. The sigil on his arm flared. Pain went up to his teeth and back down to his knees. Space adjusted. The seam admitted doubt and then a body.
"Through," Lyra said.
Jun squeezed in and was a shadow gone. Lyra took Luo Chen's shoulder and shoved him until the seam remembered how to allow. She was last again; she left the seam with a whisper that sounded like closure and apology.
Behind them, Hargel's torch-bearers reached the place where wolves would not go because their noses were older than their courage. Hargel threw a second spear anyway, because courage is an arithmetic not every man agrees to share. The spear kissed stone and rebounded. Hargel grunted and smiled with the few teeth the world had not argued out of his mouth.
"Run," Lyra said. "And if your legs complain, tell them they can keep their opinions until morning."
The seam joined a tunnel whose floor had once been wet and now was honest about being dry. Their footsteps made a hollow talk that tried to become panic and failed because Lyra's hooded lantern never gave fear enough room to grow. The air smelled of old roots and a faint memory of ash.
They moved until the tunnel widened into a low chamber with two exits: one narrow and belly-close, the other a taller arch with lines scratched into the stone like a promise written for someone else to read. Lyra studied the arch for a heartbeat, then shook her head.
"Arches are mouths," she whispered. "Mouths can bite. Low one."
They crawled. Elbows, knees, and grit negotiated a peace that left skin paying the tax. Twice the passage pretended to end and twice it admitted a body because Luo Chen, guided by the pendant's small pressure, put his hands where the rock remembered being kind. The sigil on his arm hummed without pain now—a tuning fork, not a nail.
Cold bled through the stone ahead. The crawl lifted into a narrow lip. Beyond it lay another night: stars sharper, wind cleaner, the plain a closed mouth. Hargel's hunt was still somewhere behind them, its breath gathered but not yet thrown.
They sat just long enough to keep their legs from writing complaints into their bones. Lyra turned to them and, with the lantern still hooded, drew shapes in dust: a circle, a jagged line, a toothed square.
"Factions," she said, barely above breath. "Sanctum will break a village to fix a book. Wolffire will burn a book to feed a horse. Gearwheel will take a god apart to weigh its teeth. Your village died where their arithmetic overlapped."
Jun's jaw knotted. "So we go where their math is wrong."
"Gearwheel City," Lyra said. "Not to bow. To ask questions loudly in rooms where answers pay rent."
They ate in silence—pressed grain and dried berries, a sliver of hard cheese that tasted like a town with walls. The food did not make them strong; it made them patient. Dawn rehearsed somewhere far to the east.
A sound came from the right-hand dark: iron on stone, cautious, measured—three beats, pause; three beats, pause. Not a wolf, not a horse. A man who had taught his feet to argue with fear and win on points. Lyra's lantern darkened to a breath of coal. Jun's sling rose without shaking. Luo Chen curled his fingers around the pendant and felt it answer with a steady, cool weight—as if reminding him that choices could be made without flames.
The steps halted just beyond the edge where their shadow ended. Wind combed a thread of starlight across a shape—mail links that had learned too many truths, a travel cloak's hem scuffed to the color of stone, a shoulder where a badge had been torn away so long ago the cloth had forgotten it, leaving only the ghost of a sunburst in frayed stitches.
Jun's voice shaved the silence. "Don't take another step."
The figure did not oblige or disobey. It turned its head, listening the way soldiers do: to distance, to wind, to breath. Then it stood very still, as if letting their fear try on the shape of its shadow to see if it fit.
Lyra's whisper was a thread. "If he speaks, he'll try to buy time. If he charges, he'll try to break the line. Either way—eyes, not stories."
Luo Chen felt the pendant's calm press in his palm and the memory of fire tighten his ribs. The sigil on his arm thrummed once, a warning or a welcome he could not read.
The wind shifted. Somewhere far behind, a horn tested its voice and decided the night had one more note in it.
"Up," Jun said through his teeth, sling steady. "If you come, you come into the light."
The figure did not move.
The lantern's coal sighed. The stars held their argument. The gorge waited to see who would decide first.
Far behind them, as the last of the village's light fell into itself, a tusked helm lifted above the broken palisade. Hargel Boarshield stood in the ruin and turned a broken spearhead in his fist until its edge caught the fire and showed him where it had bitten. He looked north, not at the flames, not at the dead, but at the dark that had taken two boys and refused to give them back.
"Alive," he told the night, as if it were an order that would be obeyed.