The chamber Mireth chose sat three levels below the main keep, in a section of the catacombs old enough that the walls still bore the original cut marks from when the first stones were laid.
She used the rune light instead, words drawn in ash along the floor that burned with a cold green glow once she breathed the activation phrase over them.
Seven of them knelt in the centre of the circle, wrists bound behind their backs with iron cord. I had read their files that afternoon. Three convicted of intelligence leaking to human operatives.
Two caught coordinating with a rogue eastern pack. One who tried to bribe a perimeter guard into looking the wrong way at the wrong hour. The last, a young male who had simply been standing in the wrong corridor during the sweep and could not explain himself well enough to be released.
They knew why they were there. People always know.
"Please." The oldest one was looking at Mireth, not at me. Most people looked at Mireth when they were about to beg.
They seemed to believe she was the more reachable one. "We can be useful. Whatever information you need, whatever you want us to say."
Mireth did not respond. She moved around the circle checking the rune lines, crouching to correct a smudged curve near the eastern mark, straightening without acknowledging he had spoken.
I stood in the doorway with my arms folded and watched.
She positioned herself at the northern point of the circle, opened the old text to the marked page, and began reading aloud in the ritual language. The words were flat, deliberate, nothing poetic about them. They sounded like instructions being read from a document, which was exactly what they were.
The green light along the floor brightened.
She drew a short blade from her belt, moved to the man nearest the northern point of the circle, and cut his throat in a single efficient motion. He went forward without a sound. The blood hit the rune lines.
The room changed.
It was not loud. That was the thing I had not expected. The man's bond snapped with a force I felt in my back teeth, a pressure change in the air like something enormous had moved nearby, except nothing visible moved at all.
But somewhere across the empire, in a location none of us in that room would ever know, his mate felt it. The other end of the cord severed. I learned later from the scouts that a woman in the eastern territories dropped dead in her kitchen at that exact moment, no wound, no illness, just gone.
The other six screamed.
Their bonds cracked in sequence, one after another, a rolling wave of severed connections that left each of them clutching their chests like something had been physically removed from inside their ribcages.
That was not figurative, the bond was a real thing, a physical structure that lived inside Lycan bodies the way organs lived inside human ones. When it broke, the body registered it as catastrophic damage.
They screamed until they ran out of air, then they kept making the sound without voice.
Then slowly, they stopped.
They stood up. All six of them, still bound at the wrists rising from their knees with a smoothness that had nothing organic about it. Their faces were blank, their eyes were open, focused, tracking movement in the room with mechanical attention. But no one was home behind them.
They were stronger. I could see it in how they held themselves, the way weight distributed differently through frames that had shed whatever biological overhead bonded Lycans carried.
The bond costs something. Maintaining it, sustaining the connection across distance, feeling what the other person feels, absorbing their pain. Strip that out, and what remains is raw capacity with nothing else to spend itself on.
"It worked," Mireth said. She was still standing at the northern point, the text closed under her arm. She was looking at the six standing figures with the expression she wore when calculations proved correct, not pleased exactly, but confirmed. "The severance held across the full circle. No leakage to the surrounding runes."
"The smell," I said.
She understood immediately. Something in the room had turned, a rot underneath the ash and stone, the smell of processes that should not exist pressed into the world through a gap that was not meant to be opened.
"It will dissipate," she said. "The texts describe it as a residual marker of the boundary crossing. It fades within hours in a properly sealed chamber."
I watched the six figures. They had not moved since standing. They waited with a patience that living things do not have, the patience of objects.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Twenty more. Take them from the dungeon batch holding group, the traitors from the eastern sweep, no one with active interrogation value.
I want to see if the scaling functions, one to seven is a small proof. Seven to twenty tells us whether the circle can handle increased load without collapsing the rune work."
"Twenty is manageable." She made a note in the margin of the text. "I will need an additional assistant. Someone to hold the secondary anchor points during the expanded ceremony."
"Use whoever you trust. If you trust no one, use Thorne's lowest-ranking soldier who cannot read, less dangerous that way."
She almost smiled at that. Almost.
A sound at the chamber entrance made us both turn. One of the outer scouts had come down, still wearing mud from the field, water dripping from his gear onto the old stone.
He looked at the six standing figures with the blank faces, then looked away quickly.
"Report," I said.
"My king." He kept his eyes on me with visible effort. "Poisoned water, the eastern river tributary feeding the Greyveil village.
We do not know when exactly it happened, the current is too fast to hold residue long. But the village is dead, humans moved upstream at night."
The six figures had not reacted to his arrival. They stood exactly as they had stood since rising. It was patient, empty and waiting.
My jaw tightened. I felt the pull toward immediate action, toward the impulse that said a response needed to be loud and fast to mean anything. I let the feeling pass without following it. Loud responses were for rulers who needed to prove something.
Chapter 9: The Burning Fields
The farm was the biggest one for twenty miles in any direction, which was exactly why I chose it.
We moved out at midnight, forty warriors split into four groups, each one taking a different approach through the fields so the guards could not track all of us at once. The humans had posted sentries along the main road but left the eastern edge of the property open, which told me they were thinking about armies, not raids. That was their mistake.
I took the eastern group myself. We crossed a low stone wall, moved through a stretch of wheat that came up to our waists, and reached the first of the large barns without a single alarm raised. The guards near the road were talking to each other. I could hear them from where I crouched in the field, their voices carrying easy and relaxed in the night air. They had no idea.
"Wait for the signal," I told my group in a low voice, watching the two nearest sentries. "Once the first fire goes up on the west side, move fast. Hit the grain stores first, then the feed barns. Do not stop to fight unless someone blocks you directly."
The warrior beside me, a lean fighter named Corvath who had been with me for six years, nodded without speaking. He understood how raids worked. Most of the others did too. These were veterans, men who had been running operations since before Kaedor took the throne, back when raids meant something different than they meant now.
"Commander," Corvath said quietly. "The houses on the north side. Civilians. Do we avoid them?"
"We avoid nothing that slows us down," I said. "But we are not here for bodies. We are here to destroy their capacity to feed their soldiers. Stay focused on that."
He nodded again. Around us, the other warriors shifted their weight, checking weapons, adjusting positions. I could feel the tension in them. Not fear exactly, more like the awareness that what we were about to do crossed a line we had not crossed before. Raiding military supplies was one thing. Burning civilian farms was something else.
The signal came from the western edge of the property, a quick orange flare against the dark sky as Helvar's group lit the first store. I was already moving before it fully caught.
We hit the eastern barn with torches we had carried wrapped in oilcloth. The grain inside went fast, dry from a long summer, and within two minutes the fire was loud enough that it did not matter anymore whether the sentries heard us. They heard us. They heard everything. Humans started coming out of the farmhouse and the workers' quarters, some of them half dressed, most of them confused before the confusion turned into something harder.
The heat pushed against my face. I stepped back from the barn entrance and watched it burn, flames climbing the wooden support beams with speed that felt almost alive. Around me, my warriors spread out, moving toward the next target, the feed barn on the south side of the property.
A group of armed men came around the south corner of the main barn at a run. One of them was shouting orders, clearly someone used to being listened to, a broad man in a wool coat carrying a short sword who moved with more purpose than the others behind him.
"Hold the line," he was yelling at the humans scrambling out around him. "Do not run, hold the line, protect the stores."
I broke off from my group and went directly at him. He saw me coming and set his feet, which I respected for the two seconds it took me to reach him. He got his sword up in time for a proper guard. He was not untrained. He blocked my first strike and pushed back with enough force to tell me he had done this before in some capacity.
"You want to die for grain," I said.
He did not answer. He swung again, lower this time, trying for my legs. I stepped past it, got inside his reach, and ended it quickly. He went down without making a sound at the finish. The men behind him scattered.
By then the sky above the farm was lit up orange across its full width, all four groups having reached their targets at roughly the same time. The fire was past controlling. Humans were running in every direction, some of them crying, some of them just running with no direction at all, away from the heat. I watched a woman dragging two children toward the road, their faces streaked with ash. An older man fell while trying to carry something from one of the smaller buildings. No one stopped to help him up.
"Commander," Corvath said, appearing at my shoulder. "West group reports full success. Helvar says the main storage complex is gone."
"Good. Pull everyone back to the wagons. We leave in five minutes."
We had the food wagons waiting on the road a quarter mile east. My warriors loaded them with everything we had pulled from the stores before the fires took them, sacks of grain, cured meat from a cold house on the north side of the property, barrels of salted provisions that would last through winter. The work went quick. These men knew how to move supplies under pressure.
I stood on the road watching the farm burn behind us. The flames had spread to the main house by then. I could see figures still moving around in the yard, trying to organize some kind of response, but it was too late for organizing anything. The damage was done.
"Move out," I said.
We were back through the border before dawn.
Kaedor was at the gate when we came in, standing in the outer yard with his arms at his sides, watching the wagons roll through. He looked at the supplies, then at the smoke still visible on the horizon behind us. His face showed nothing. That was normal for him. I had served under him for fifteen years and I could count on one hand the number of times his face had shown me anything I could read.
"How much?" he asked.
"Enough to supply three packs through the cold months," I said, dismounting. "Plus what we burned. They lost the better part of a full harvest."
He nodded slowly. "It is not enough."
"My king, we burned their largest farm in the region."
"One farm," he said. "They have more. I want raids running every night from here until they cannot feed their border garrisons." He looked past me at the warriors coming through the gate, most of them moving with the heavy tiredness that comes after a night of hard work. "Pick different teams each time so no group is going out two nights in a row."
I watched the warriors for a moment before answering. Some of them were bleeding from minor wounds. Others had burns on their hands from the torches. They looked functional but not fresh. "The men are stretched. The purges pulled a lot of experienced fighters off active duty over the past weeks. What I have left is capable but not deep. If I am running nightly raids on top of perimeter duty, something gives eventually."
"Then rotate the perimeter assignments to free up more fighters for raids." He turned back toward the keep. "I need the humans too busy managing starvation to maintain their containment strategy."
"And when the men start making mistakes from exhaustion?" I said. "When we lose entire teams because someone falls asleep on approach?"
He stopped walking but did not turn around. "You have managed tired warriors before, Thorne. Manage them again. The raids continue."
I did not argue further. There was no point in it once he had framed something as a necessity. I watched him walk back across the yard, and I noticed, as he passed under one of the gate torches, that he pulled his left sleeve down over his wrist with a quick movement that looked automatic, like someone covering something they did not want to think about.
The mark again. It had been there for days. I had not asked him about it directly but I had seen Mireth watching his wrist during the last briefing with the careful attention she gave things that concerned her. Whatever it was, it was getting worse, not better. I could tell from the way he kept adjusting his sleeve, the way his hand went to it without him seeming to notice he was doing it.
I was turning to follow him inside when one of the gate sentries came forward with a messenger who had arrived during the raid, waiting since well before dawn. The messenger's horse was lathered. He had ridden hard.
"Report," I said.
The messenger was young, still catching his breath from riding hard. "Commander Blackclaw. The border pack at Greywood, the resurrected attacked last night. Same time as your raid, near enough. They took prisoners. Living ones. Pulled them out of their houses and carried them off."
I went still. "Bodies?"
"None left behind. Not one. Just the houses torn open and the people gone."
Kaedor looked at me. "Get fresh horses. We ride now."