Night had a hard edge to it, the kind you could feel against your teeth. The valley lay stitched in dim torches and exhausted fires; the Spire's broken throat still smoked where Neren's charges had ripped its tuning plates. Men slept in fits and starts, and the air smelled of hot metal, wet earth, and a worry that had no small words.
Kaelen moved like a shadow that belonged to the stronghold now—familiar, uneasy. The conduit throbbed beneath his sleeve, steady as a second heartbeat. It had been a tether to victory and a thief of laughter; it had bought them hours and taken from him something he had not realized he could miss until it was gone. Nights felt longer when you carried both debt and key.
They started the evening in the council hall with the binder tied in the center like an ugly trophy. He had spoken enough to point them toward Fallow Mire, enough to make the location smell of truth. Now he sat with his hands bound and his mouth a slow, dangerous thing that wet with thought.
"You taught them the song," Kaelen said, watching the binder's glass-scarred lips. "You sang what they wanted."
The binder looked up. His eyes were small and tired, like cinders someone keeps blowing on. "We sang what they paid us to sing," he said. "Money, food, promises for brothers who'd rot otherwise. Men give tongues for a warm hearth. Don't make their choice into myth."
Serenya smiled without humor. "And yet you speak in a tongue that breaks mountains." Her voice cut. "We need more than excuses."
Outside, someone hammered a bell once—three knocks that carried across stone. It was a sound Kaelen had learned to read; it meant more than sleep. Scouts returning.
They filed in with faces made of new news. One of the runners carried a scrap of torn canvas: a shredded banner, blackened at the edges. Another bore a message burned into a thin tablet—Crown cipher, crude and urgent. Eldan's face paled when he saw it.
"The Crown moves," the runner said without preface. "They've called to a larger muster. Forces from the north are folding in. They build a ladder—a chain of spires, they say, not one but many points. The binder's choir is to be rewired across the range."
A murmur ran like loose stone through the hall. Lira's fingers tightened on the edge of the table. "They will not stop at Fallow Mire if they can place pillars across the range," she said. "If they tune teeth across the jaw, the mountain sings back for them everywhere."
Kaelen felt the conduit coldly: the Warden-sigil pulsed in agreement. The binder's warning had been truth; the Crown had plans beyond a single throat. Each new Spire would be another instrument in a choir vast enough to unmake the seams that had held sleeping things for centuries.
"We struck a cradle," Kaelen said. "We stole a limb of the chain-beast and we broke plates. It cost us blood, but it cost them time. Time is what we have. We need to cut more."
Serenya's hands were already shaping the answer. "A strike team tonight. Smaller. Sharper. Hit their staging houses further down, where they gather coils and build lattices. Make their nights a ruin so their hymn has no voice."
Varik stood to speak, jaw working. His leg was still raw where the Clamp had bitten, and a dull fury in his face had sharpened into the kind of resolve that looks like steel. "I'll run the reserve," he said. "But I want a tether team with you, Kaelen. Up close, quick—no grand speeches. We take the men who taught the Crown how to sing, not just their tools."
Kaelen met Varik's eyes. For a second he saw the man not as a soldier but as a ledger: all the debts he had kept and the ones owed to him. He nodded. "We take the teachers," he said. "We take their tongues and we burn the books."
They left at dusk like men who were stealing a sleep they would not get back. The valley had been quieted by the earlier fights, but not by peace; it had the hush of a field between strikes. Lanterns winked across gullies. Distant horns answered each other in rhythms that were not friendly. The burden of the night lay on all their shoulders.
Their route dipped around a spur of slag, through a thicket where the Hollow Flame's ash scars still steamed. The stolen limb of the chain-beast was secured on a sled and hidden under skin—iron and glass dull and heavy like a bad dream. Neren rode with it, eyes glassy and intent, fingers itching at stray rune-lines as if he could coax better patterns with touch alone. Daren walked at Kaelen's side, eyes bright and absurdly steady for a boy who had seen too much.
They reached the staging houses near a black stand of pines. Crown men were lighter here; they trusted the night and their machines' hum. Kaelen watched their rotations, felt the mountain's patience in his palm, and waited.
The first strike came like a blade pulled from water: Varik and his shield-bearers hit the forward tents and cut the sleeping guards like old cord. Serenya's veterans took the greater danger on the ridge, dropping stones and darking signals. Kaelen went with the tether team into the heart.
They found the teachers where the Crown kept its apprentices—a ring of men perched over coils and plates, singing under breath as they matched dead notes to living metal. These men were not soldiers but smiths taught to half-practice liturgy, faces soft with the hunger of their trade. They did not have the brutality of the binder, but they had the quiet need of those whose hands want to place final touches on a god.
Kaelen moved, shadow neat and cold, and the conduit whispered a small guidance: push this seam, not that one; make stone hold here, not there. He worked like a machinist of sleep, shifting stone to trip ladders, blistering a line of coils with a flare thrown from Neren's careful hand. Wards sang under Lira's breath and turned the sound back on itself for a moment.
Panic bloomed. Men rose and flailed and some tried to sing a stabilization—thin words that had no force once the cradle was broken. Varik's axe found the throat of a man who tried to light a rune-plate and Serenya's blade bit the clasp of a harness before the binder's chant roared into being.
They caught a man—no, a teacher—his fingers black with soot and his tongue still tasting metal. He looked at Kaelen with the frankness of a man who knows the end and tries to bargain with the face of truth.
"We teach what is asked," he said, as if it were fact and not confession. "They bring rewards. They bring safety for kin. The Crown does not coerce us all. Some are fools who want order."
"Who leads you?" Varik demanded.
The man spat a name—one Kaelen had not expected and with it a cold sweeper of the gut: a regional binder, a man from the Crown's lesser nobility who carried glass and letters, a cloth-stamped officer that traveled between the Spires—someone known as Mael Gavre. The binder they had captured had worked at a smaller scale; Gavre was the man the Crown had employed to stitch choirs together.
"Gavre moves at dawn," the teacher said. "He will be at the Spire's heart. He keeps a ledger of notes and a phial of a dark brew that steadies the voice."
Kaelen felt the world narrow like a throat. Gavre. A man who would not be idle while his instrument shattered. If Gavre moved, the Crown's choir could be rewired faster than they had time to break it.
"Where?" Kaelen demanded.
The teacher, trussed and frightened, offered it up: a hollow beyond the Fallow Mire—an old kiln bolted with iron and served by a set of caves where the Crown stacked their finer crystals. "He keeps them in the kiln of the Glass-Heart," the teacher whispered. "A place of old heat where the song is forged into a spine."
Varik's answer was a hard, tight sound. "We go at dawn," he said. "We cut the heart." His eyes flicked to Kaelen, an unasked question there: do we break him or bind him? Kaelen knew the cost of both.
They returned with the teacher tied and the chain-limb quiet under Neren's careful watching. The stronghold woke to their return with a cautious cheer—the kind you give to men who bring back spoils from the dark—but the mood was thin. The binder sat and watched the teacher like a man watching a mirror that had been cracked: recognition and disgust braided.
"Gavre," the binder muttered, as if the old name were an ache. "If the Crown moves him, it means they are ready. He is not a man of games. He is a crafter of choruses, and he answers to men who have not yet bled for their crowns. If you cut Gavre, you slow the choir. If you capture him, the Crown will burn the kiln and move faster. There is no good way."
Kaelen felt the conduit warm at the decision. One more strike—one more plunge into the teeth—could buy them a chance to dismantle the glass-heart before it sang whole. But the Maw's whisper was now a chorus in his skull, no longer a single voice; the mountain had heard their actions and had whispered back in riddles and hungers.
He thought of Eldan's wife, of Daren's bright, stubborn hand, of the laugh he could not anymore recall. He had made a bargain and the bill kept calling.
"Then we do both," he said, surprising himself. "At dawn we cut the kiln and take whatever Gavre keeps. At noon we burn the hearth where the Crown would remold what we take. We slow them and leave them furious."
Serenya's smile was a blade. Varik's jaw set like iron. Lira closed her eyes and whispered to the runes—no blessing nor curse, only a pact.
They set watches and fed the sentries. Kaelen sat with the binder a moment before retiring, watching the man's hands, which trembled not with fear but with a small, honest regret that had nothing heroic about it.
"Do you think you are forgiven?" Kaelen asked.
The binder met his eyes. "Forgiveness is not for the ones who play tongues with crowns. It is for those who find the strength to teach a different song." He coughed. "If you bind Gavre, keep your ears open. He will sing like a man who expects the world to obey him."
Kaelen listened. The conduit pulsed, bright and small as a star. Dawn would come, and with it teeth and music and the chance to make things unmake themselves.
The night stretched long and thin. Somewhere beneath stone, the Maw turned and tasted the air. It wanted more.