We moved Tarrow three paces from the Godkiller before his arm tried to drag him back.
The relic knife held. His shoulder did not. White salt had crept beneath his collar and hardened the cloth against his skin. Pell put a hand on his good shoulder and kept him faced away from the corpse.
“Don’t look at it,” she said.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were about to.”
Tarrow shut his eyes. “Then I’ll continue not looking.”
Venn checked the knife’s angle. His salted fingertips left pale smears on Tarrow’s sleeve. “We should bind him before we move him again.”
“Bind the arm or the fire?” I asked.
“The arm. The fire has its own opinions.”
“Good. I’d hate to have a simple problem.”
Pell kept her knife at the Factor’s throat while I pulled a strip from the torn hem of my coat. My stone fingers made the knot ugly. They managed it. That counted as professional success.
The Factor watched the Godkiller’s open chest. He had not looked away since the ribs parted. Pell’s blade pressed a red line into his neck.
“Now,” I said. “What does your client expect to happen?”
“I told you. The next part has begun.”
“And I told you that wasn’t an answer.”
“You’re standing beside a corpse that responds to a name you stole from its memory. I would be cautious about demanding further demonstrations.”
“I’m being cautious. That’s why I’m asking before I touch it.”
His mask turned toward my hand. The hook fragment still sat beside Istren’s black letters, its point buried under the cracked stone. “Your client expected the opened body to show the way.”
“The way to what?”
“The body that must open.”
Pell shifted the knife. The Factor swallowed around the blade.
“Use fewer riddles,” she said. “They’re easier to cut through.”
“The First Deity’s body,” he said. “The Godkiller’s chest is supposed to reveal where it can be reached.”
The words settled between us. Venn’s eyes narrowed. The Godkiller’s ribs were no longer simply a corpse’s ribs. They were a lock turned by a name, and the thing inside was a direction.
“You were sent to get a location,” I said.
“I was sent to confirm the sequence.”
Next
Vera has a route beneath the ridge, but Venn wants to use the same method to reach Oda—and the fire in Tarrow’s arm has answered the map once already.
“By a client who knew what the sequence would do.”
“I was given instructions for after the name was spoken. I was not given the whole method.”
“Then start with your instructions.”
He hesitated. Pell put just enough pressure on the knife to make him choose.
“I was told to watch the chest,” he said. “If the ribs opened, I was to wait for the witness to carry the name to the exposed marrow. The body would answer with a path. I was to record it and leave the witness alive if possible.”
“Generous.”
“They were specific about the witness.”
“They were specific about me.” I felt the cold weight of the bone fragment in my palm. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
That answer sounded true. It also changed nothing useful.
Pell looked at me. “We can walk away.”
The way she said it made clear she would not drag me in either direction. She had kept me alive once by cutting a tether. I knew that as fact. The rest of the memory was gone, and I could not make myself feel the rescue as if I’d been there. I could still choose what to do with the person who had done it.
“Not until we know what ‘carry the name’ means,” I said.
Venn glanced at the letters on my palm. “It may not mean speaking it again.”
“Excellent. We’ve narrowed the options to touching the corpse or not touching it.”
“I can do it,” he said.
“No.”
His eyes lifted to mine. For a moment, his controlled expression looked almost offended. Then the hunger for knowledge covered it again.
“You’re the witness,” he said. “The pact recognized you.”
“Then it can recognize me from here.”
I stepped to the ribs.
The dark inside the chest was not empty. A pale structure lay under the split sternum, ribbed and layered, too fine to belong to a human body. It looked like the underside of a shell. Thin grooves ran across it, intersecting and branching. At the center was a shallow hollow the size of my palm.
The Godkiller’s teeth clicked once.
Tarrow jerked against the binding. The knife in his arm rang softly against the floor. Pell turned and caught him before he could wrench himself upright.
“Stay with me,” she said.
“I am.” His voice had gone hoarse. “It’s pulling.”
“Then pull back.”
“I’m trying.”
The red glow began under his sleeve. I backed away from the chest. It dimmed. When I stepped close again, it returned.
“Convenient,” I said. “The corpse has a preference.”
“Your hand,” Venn said. “The name.”
I held my cracked palm over the hollow without touching it. The black lettering was intact. The fragment beside it trembled against the stone.
The grooves beneath my hand filled with darkness. It spread from the hollow in branching lines, running through the pale surface. One route grew thicker than the others, then curved toward the edge of the exposed chest. My hand burned where the name was carved into it. The fire in Tarrow’s arm flared bright enough to show through his sleeve.
“Vera,” Pell warned.
“I see it.”
The map kept forming. Its lines gathered into the shape of a broad coast and a ring of broken ridges around a central hollow. I knew the coastline. Every Saltborn knew it. The white settlements along the ribs of the fallen giant had been drawn that way on guild charts for generations.
The mark stopped at the farthest ridge, where no settlement stood. A black notch split the bone there. The hollow at the center of the map remained dark.
Venn leaned in. “That’s not a road.”
“No,” I said. “It’s an opening.”
The line ended at a narrow gap beneath the ridge, a place where the giant’s white bones disappeared into the black salt. The First Deity’s body lay beyond it, or beneath it. The map gave no distance, no safe route, no indication of how much of the corpse was buried in the ocean. It gave us a gap and expected us to be grateful.
My palm slipped lower. The map’s dark lines sharpened. Pain crossed my wrist in a dry, branching crack. I tried to lift my hand. The bone fragment had caught on the pale surface, and my fingers would not close around it.
“Vera.” Pell moved toward me.
“Wait.”
The hollow beneath my palm filled with a last dark mark. A small circle appeared at the map’s far edge, where the opening lay. It split down the middle like a door.
The Godkiller’s jaw snapped shut.
The map vanished. The bone beneath my hand went pale again.
I pulled free. The fragment came with me, tearing a shallow furrow through the stone of my palm. Blood welled along the crack and turned grainy before it could run. I flexed my fingers. Two answered. The others had gone numb.
Tarrow’s red glow died back to an ember. He sagged against Pell, still breathing hard.
No one spoke for a few seconds. The Factor watched my hand with the focused interest of a man whose employer had told him to keep an instrument intact.
Pell wiped blood from the edge of her knife. “You got your answer.”
“I got a place.”
“Same thing, today.”
Venn looked from the corpse to the pale, empty map beneath its ribs. “If it can make a body answer from outside the memory…”
“Don’t,” I said.
“My sister’s mind is trapped. Her body is still alive.”
“I know.”
“This may be a way to reach her.”
“Or a way to open her.”
His gaze stayed on the map. “I know the difference.”
I believed he knew the words. I had seen what hunger for forbidden knowledge did to sensible people. Venn had been living with that hunger long before any of us learned about Oda.
The Factor spoke behind Pell’s knife. “The client will need the location.”
“Your client can wait,” Pell said.
“They will come looking.”
“Then they can find us at the end of the road.”
Tarrow shifted. Pain tightened his face, but he managed to straighten against her arm. “We’re going to the ridge?”
I looked at the Godkiller’s ribs, then at my hand. The letters of Istren remained black, the name still legible beside the broken fragment. The map had taken a piece of feeling and left us a route that went under the black salt. It was a fair trade by the standards of this job.
“We’re going to find out what waits at the opening,” I said. “After we get Tarrow somewhere he can sit down without being stabbed to the floor.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ve had enough of the floor.”
Pell kept her knife on the Factor. Venn kept his eyes on the map. I wrapped my hand in the torn coat and did not tell either of them that I could no longer feel my smallest finger.
The corpse had given us a direction. It had not said what would happen when we reached the door.