The glow on the horizon stopped pretending to be a dawn and showed its teeth.
It spread in a smear along the Spine's shadow, a forge-light color the sky should never wear. Heat rode ahead of it in long, exhausted breaths. The wind, thin and hungry a ridge ago, came down the slopes tasting of metal and old oil, and the ground under Dren's boots thrummed in the low, dishonest way of industry pretending to be purpose.
He walked until the land pinched into a cleft and the cleft became a throat: two slag walls, glassy and black, leaning close enough that the sky above narrowed to a blade. Melted girders thrust from the rock at angles that made the eye remember falling. Sand lay in drifts that glittered with a thousand tiny mirrors. Far ahead, in the deepest squeeze, the glow pulsed—breathing. It wasn't a volcano. It was a machine that had learned to eat.
The pitch in his chest—the seed's cold lesson—kept time with the stone. Crown variable along the slot's lip, Heart thin and running under the middle, Spine riven with the kind of fracture that screams for a brace and gets a chain. He let the information settle where it needed to, knuckles loose, jaw set, breath steady. Pride wanted to quicken the pace. Intelligence let the stride stay lazy and mean.
He felt the ambush before he heard it.
A hair on his forearm lifted. The dust at his ankles lifted a little too, as if magnets were thinking about a conversation. The coin Ila had pressed on him tapped his belt once—then again—like a finger warning on a table.
"They're late," he said to the cleft, and kept walking.
The first net blossomed from the left wall: a sheet of woven filament blacker than the slag, flecked with iron seeds that sang when they moved. It dropped with the mind of a hunting thing—fast as grief, eager as hunger. He didn't jump; he tilted—one lean, a Volt Dash so narrow it didn't even throw a shadow. The net hit the ground where he had been and clamped itself into the stone with a tidy, self-satisfied hum.
The second came high and crooked, aiming to catch the dodge rather than the man. He went low under its belly and heard the seeds above him whisper disappointment. He came up already moving forward, boots skimming the glass grit, cloak flicking the magnets' edge.
Figures spilled from the rock like guilt from a mouth that had run out of lies. Raiders—but not the hungry kind who wear whatever the dead left on the road. These wore plate cut from Titan scrap: dull plates braced with bone struts, masks of welded ceramic fitted with smoked lenses, gauntlets threaded with coil and magnet. Their weapons were familiar and wrong: chain that drank light, rods with iron thorns, mirrors veiled in soot. The arithmetic again, refitted for men small enough to hide in slots and proud enough to think wearing a monster's skin made them bigger.
The leader dropped last—a woman, broad through the shoulders, left arm encased elbow to knuckle in a Titan's finger-bone carved into a vambrace. Her mask was lacquered black and scored down the left cheek with a knifed sigil shaped like a crooked star. The marks on her cloak were not decorative. They were the things she'd chosen not to forget.
"Set your hands down, ashwalker," she called. Her voice dragged smoke. "Or we cut them off and wear them for luck."
Dren didn't slow. "Luck's a liar."
"Lightning's worse," she said. "I knew a man like you. He twitched once and killed his own tongue."
"Then he needed killing," Dren said, and let the sparks walk his skin—not the storm, not the rage, just a low shiver that told iron what it needed to hear: Not yours.
A rod came at him from the right, thrust by a man too proud of his reach. Dren took it in the crook of his elbow and broke it with a twist of spite. The iron thorn coughed a little, died a lot, and slid into the slag with a petulant clink. A mirror swung up from the left; two fingers on the rim, a nudge at the pitch, and the glass went slack as drool. Chain hissed from three angles, trying to be a circle around his throat. He stepped through the first, under the second, and into the third, palm up, ready for it to taste him.
It did. It didn't like the flavor. He let a thread of exact current slide into the first link and told it the simplest truth in the world: No. The chain went quiet in his hand, confused as a dog barred from a room it thought was its own. He flung it back into the chest of the man who'd thrown it and the man folded under his own arithmetic.
"Take him clean," the woman said, almost bored. "We don't have time to burn him into a shape."
Four raiders came in together—the kind of together you only get from months of surviving as a bad habit. One high, two wide, one low. The low one died first: a knee in the throat so fast his body forgot which end drew air and lay down to consider it. Dren turned into the second wide, ate his reach, and used him as a door into the third—shoulder, elbow, forearm, twist, feel the wrist remember it was built to go the other way. The high one brought his coil-gauntlet down like a hammer. Dren leaned back just enough that it missed his skull, seized the gauntlet with his left hand, and let his right hand's current unmake the coil's idea of completion. It spat sparks like a drunk. He shoved it into its owner's face. The mask took the heat. The flesh behind it remembered being animal.
The woman was already moving, no wasted seconds on men she could replace. She came in with the Titan-bone vambrace forward and a hook-blade low, aiming to catch tendon where lightning doesn't help. Dren liked her instantly for the insult of the attempt. He dropped an EMP Veil, just a breath wide, held it for a blink, and stepped through—inside her swing, outside her balance, almost shoulder to shoulder, so close he could smell the varnish on the bone. His head turned, his voice stayed low.
"Wrong angle."
She changed it, and he smiled without joy.
They traded three movements so fast the watching men saw only an argument end badly: wrist, blade, foot, then arm, stone, knee. She fought like someone who had remembered too many times how close death lives to the skin. He let her remember again. He took the hook when it came the fourth time, not with his hand, with his field—a flicker of charge that pulled the metal a finger's width offline—and drove the heel of his palm into the Titan-bone at her forearm. Bone sang; she lost her grip; the hook went to ground.
She didn't flinch. She drove her head into his cheekbone. His eyes flashed white. He grinned blood and turned her elbow the way an honest hinge wishes to go. Something crunched. She dropped to one knee and he put his hand on the back of her mask and shoved her face into the glass grit until she remembered it.
"Who keeps your leash," he said.
"Eat me," she said into the stone.
"Wrong answer," he said, and lifted her face out of the grit by the hair at the neck. "Next."
"Keep him!" one of the raiders shouted, panic breaking rank with bravery. "We sell him—he's worth ten bells—"
Dren looked at the speaker. The speaker forgot the shape of his own mouth for a second. Dren set his heel on the woman's wrist and leaned. Her breath hissed through her teeth in a way that told him she wasn't done yet—not with him, not with the day. He respected that. He didn't ease up.
"Who keeps your leash," he said again, softer now, almost gentle. "You tell me and I let you walk out of this slot with your knees pointed the right way."
The woman laughed, and he respected that too. It wasn't a story laugh. It was an old stone giving a little because it had to. "We keep our own," she said. "The pact keeps us."
"The pact," he said, and let his palm lay a whisper of current against the nape of her neck without burning, just enough to light the outline of the truth. "Say it."
"The Hollow," she said. "We bind ourselves to the March. We tithe iron and men and we live where the Titan shadow doesn't fall."
"And when it does?"
"We move before it finishes falling," she said, and blood bubbled at the edge of her mask where the grit had cut her lip. "We drag our children on sleds and wear our dead on our backs and we are alive again when the counting is done."
"Arithmetic," he said.
"You say it like a curse," she said. "I say it like a door that still opens."
A mirror twitched at the edge of his vision; he put his hand out without looking and pushed its pitch out of true. The glass sagged. He didn't look away from the woman.
"How many," he said. "For the March."
"Enough to make Emberfall wish it had fallen last season," she said, and in the little dark under the mask he felt her smile with broken pride. "Titans, ashwalker. Kings. Not the brutes you've cut. The ones that think."
"Emberfall," he repeated, as if tasting a word he'd been forgetting on purpose.
"You know the name," she said. "They send runners to spin stories about courage and walls. We send shadows to count their barrels. When the March turns its face, we won't be standing in front of it. We will be behind it, picking gold out of the footprints."
Dren leaned a fraction more. She hissed. The Titan-bone creaked. "Who speaks for your pact."
"The Hollow speaks for itself," she said. "Mouths and men. Chain and bell. We are not believers. We are accountants. We learned what survive adds up to."
"Names," he said.
"You want gods," she said, and spat blood into the grit, missing his boot by an inch. "You already killed one of our little gods in the pretty grove, didn't you. The cloaked liar with all the verbs. I heard about the lightning and the laughing. You're that knife. I should have watched the weather better."
He let that memory flash cold in the back of his head—the false Creator's robes burning, the smell of singed leaves, the flaming bat bursting from the trees like a bad idea's last argument. He made no sound. He pressed the heel of his hand between her shoulders until her bones complained again.
"Names," he said.
"You'll hear them from their throats when they're standing on Emberfall's wall," she said. "March-lords. Choir-men. The King of Teeth. The one they whisper is only half awake and chews mountains in his sleep. Go there if you like being small."
He let the pressure ease, only a fraction. "Which road."
"The one they don't guard," she said. "The one where the river used to be a road, and now the road is a river. East, then north, then cut left at the old ore ladder that points at a sky it can't reach."
He felt the lie and the truth in the way the pitch ran through her. Most of it was clean. One angle wanted to put his feet in a pit. He pushed her face into the grit a little to remind the angle who to be.
"You wear that bone like it makes you more than you are," he said. "It only makes you heavy."
"You carry lightning like it makes you a god," she said, breath hitching like laughter. "It only makes you a storm that forgot the crops."
He could have liked her.
"Do you kill me," she said, and there was no fear in it now, only the ledger. "Or do you leave me with my men so they can find out what I told a stranger."
"You didn't tell me enough to matter," he said. "You told me a direction. That doesn't buy you death."
"I don't want your mercy," she said.
"I don't sell it," he said.
He stepped off her wrist and she rolled to a sit with the stubbornness of a woman who has decided not to fall in front of an audience. She took her mask off with her good hand. Her face wasn't pretty. It was true. A nose once broken and set by someone who loved her too little or too late. A scar bitten through the eyebrow. Eyes a hard brown that turned soft only when they threatened to go black. She spat once more, like a ritual, and wiped the grit away with her wrist.
"You keep north," she said. "You'll die with a view."
He put his hand on the slag and listened. The road she'd sketched was real enough: a dry river that had been convinced to be a road again by people with better feet than faith, a ladder of rusted rails that had fallen from a crane and decided to point for the rest of its life, a left cut where the wind forgot which way to blow. The far pitch was bad—Crown whipped, Spine torqued, Heart set to boil if someone coughed in the wrong place. Emberfall lay beyond that, if the stories hadn't lied so completely they'd become a religion. He wondered idly whether the fortress would have the decency to fall when it should, or the stubbornness to make its deaths his problem.
He stood and let his gaze take in the raiders who were still breathing. They kept their distance. Not courage. Arithmetic.
"You're in my way," he said. "Get out of it."
The woman stood with him, cradling her broken arm like it was a child that had misbehaved and would be talked to later. "We'll shadow you," she said. "Not close. Far enough to pretend we weren't together when the sky chooses which of us to count."
"You shadow me and I kill you by accident," he said. "My accidents are not small."
"Then we'll go the other way," she said, and some of her men chuckled because sometimes the only joke left is the obvious one.
He turned his back on them and began to walk.
"Dren," she called.
He didn't stop. He didn't honor her with his face. He gave her his shoulder.
"If you reach Emberfall before the March does," she said, "tell them the Hollow doesn't hate them. We just love living more."
"Tell them yourself," he said, and kept going.
The slag walls widened by degrees until the sky became sky again and the heat decided it had made its point and settled down into the kind of warmth that only makes men tired. He climbed a stair of broken beams and came out on a shelf of stone that ran east like the lip of a bowl. The glow on the horizon was closer now, smeared against the world like grease. Something big breathed there, and the breath smelled of iron trying to remember being blood.
He didn't look back. Ila's coin touched his belt once and stayed quiet.
He let the pitch do its narrow work inside him and angled east along the shelf, where the old river had decided to be road and then failed. He found the fallen ladder—a tangle of rails and cabling thrust up at the sky like a prayer with no words. He cut left where the wind forgot its name and followed the Spine where it rose in a long, aching arc toward the place all the trouble had decided to meet.
Storms played at the edges of his sight, practicing their lines. He didn't call them. He didn't need them. He had anger where lesser men keep fear and he kept it one degree to the left. He had pride like a blade and kept it along his bones. He had a line to walk and he walked it.
By dusk, the Forge-glow was a pressure behind his eyes. By night, it became a city-shaped smear. He didn't stop. He didn't eat. He drank once, the way a man pours oil where a machine asks and doesn't thank the can. The ground worsened. The air sharpened. The nightsong of scrap and far-off hammers found him and refused to leave.
Somewhere behind him, on a different path, raiders rethreaded their nets and told each other the kind of story that makes the next hour survivable. Somewhere ahead, men with walls told each other different stories in bigger words. Between those two mouths, a March gathered its teeth.
He did not plan. He cut.
He was not chosen.
He had come anyway.