CHAPTER 743: HAMMERS IN A FOREST (1)

Steam thinned as the lift settled. Cold air came in first—pine and loam, a clean cut through noses used to stone. Someone had hung a kettle from a camp hook; the steam from it drifted and caught the morning like a soft flag. Wind came over the ridge with metal and sap in it. It smelled like hammers in a forest.

Rodion’s board dimmed itself in Mikhailis’s hand. Green dots blinked to the lip. Modest orange shaded where even daylight carried small teeth. At the bottom the breath ribbon rose and fell, crooked and stubborn.

Perimeter quiet. Warden vents set to ’lull.’ You are safe enough to make bad jokes, but please resist.

Never promised. He hid a smile and slipped the device deep into his coat, palm staying to feel its small heat. No one else needed to see it.

The team unwound into day without losing the workshop hush they had earned. Soldiers stood relaxed but neat, spears grounded, toes not lined enough to make an echo. Nurses rolled out triage tables and laid clean cloths, jars, and water skins the same way they did thread and needles below. Workers set salvage down with cloth-wraps under edges so nothing clacked. Even the skeleton pairs, out of habit, took brood distance and turned their backs toward a vent mouth nobody could see.

A strap caught at the last lip. Thalatha moved to free it, fingers quick; Mikhailis reached the same moment. Gloved hands overlapped. They both paused. The breath between them fogged in the same small space. One heartbeat too long, then a tiny nod, and they worked like they had always worked: quiet, precise. The strap lay smooth again. She stepped back. He let his palm fall to his side.

Relief went through her shoulders, but it carried a small drop. Daylight was large and full of people who liked speeches. The surface had pride. The house below had rules. She kept her face straight and did the count in her head as she always did—left arch, floor seam, vent lip, then back to faces. No one missing. Good.

They did not cheer loud. Even so, when her boots touched the terrace fully, low sounds rose—small cheers swallowed fast, spear butts kissing stone, the soft thrum a camp makes when something good happens. Eyes shone. Hands reached. Two juniors nearly ran, then remembered themselves and bowed with their forearms against their chests instead.

Aeren came next, Veteran Lieutenant by posture alone. Scar down the cheek like a thin river that had chosen the straightest path. Braids laid exact. He stopped a sword’s length away. Saluted. Looked past her shoulder.

"Commander returned." His voice was cool, not cold. Then, with that same even tone: "And the outsider?"

Mikhailis did not meet him with teeth. He stood easy, hands visible, weight a little on his back foot so a sudden gust would not make him step into a rhythm. He let Thalatha own the space; it was hers. Don’t crowd her. Don’t crowd the room. Breathe wrong on purpose, keep the Echo bored, keep the people calm.

Aeren’s stare didn’t blink. Wind tugged the smallest braid by his ear. Close by, a junior adjusted her grip on a spear and then remembered not to tap the butt twice. Two soldiers widened their stance by a thumb in the same second. It looked like threat from far away. Up close, it was just a line. People drawing a boundary because they were scared of losing the person they answered to.

"Rumor says the breach that ate your squad was not honest ground," Aeren added. He never looked at Mikhailis while he said it; he kept his eyes on Thalatha, like a man testing a bridge by staring at the far bank. "Rumor says hands pushed." His gaze slid, slow as a knife put back into its sheath, to Mikhailis for the first time. His mouth did not change shape. "Maybe his."

A ripple went through the crowd like tall grass remembering wind. Someone coughed into a glove. A kettle lid skittered against its hook and fell still. The nurse captain’s jaw worked once, then stopped. A worker put a cloth under a crate corner that didn’t need it, just to make the sound softer.

"I like rumors when they are funny," Mikhailis said lightly, and let the words lie there like a small blanket over a sharp table edge. "This isn’t. So I’ll stand over here, and you can do the part with the proof."

Small joke only. No gloating. Let him put his weight on process, not pride.

Thalatha spoke before Aeren could return the ball. Her voice came from the middle of her chest, steady and low. "By doctrine," she said, and the word fit the morning like a well-cut key. "No puppets of living bodies. Backs shown at brood mouths. Food first. Prime-step only. Those kept us breathing. He enforced them when others wanted to hurry."

She did not look at Mikhailis while she said it. She looked at Aeren. At the table. At the map of work. "Placards are tied in the halls. The Gate Warden is symbol-bound, voice-less, scope set to vent and watch. The Ossuary Hound is leashed with ring muffled. The Sentinel angles and eats cones, then vents into dead pockets. Moth-nets are folded and hung. Every piece that could be a risk stays below, not dragged up where children play."

She could have listed the moments: the bell cone that slammed and got swallowed by the coffin-door; the reeds that wanted applause and got bored; the Reset Well that tried to smile and got a placard instead. She didn’t. The room already felt those things in the way her words arrived—like bricks where bricks should be.

Her tone did not plead. It stacked. Each line landed the way a bag lands when you put it where it belongs. Aeren took it, turned it once in the space behind his eyes. The wind moved one braid by a hair.

"Then we verify," he said at last. Not mockery. Not surrender. Procedure. He stepped back one pace and gestured to the healer tables. A small tension eased along the line—everyone knew what to do at a table.

"Nothing topside that breathes rule-teeth," Mikhailis added, chin tipping toward the black lip of the lift. "Perimeter only for... the things that obey me." He coughed on the next word, turned it into a hand over his mouth. "—the little helpers remain masked."

An admirable euphemism. Also inaccurate. But acceptable for the socially fragile environment.

The nurse captain snorted before she could catch it, then put the sound away by lifting the nearest cup as if the sky had said something very serious and required hydration. Her shoulders went down the small distance that means work may begin.

Healer hands moved like water finding a bowl. Poultices unrolled. Sap bowls set into a slice of sun so the light could tell true. Pulse strings ready. They called names; soldiers answered in voices that wanted to be louder but remembered the Echo. Small pains got hands; bigger ones got notes. A worker with a scraped knuckle looked embarrassed until the nurse wrapped it anyway and wrote a tiny dot on her slate.

Mikhailis stepped forward first on purpose. He sat without fuss and offered his forearm. The healer—an older elf with ink stains at the nail beds and a steady mouth—balanced his wrist with the kind of grip you trust without thinking. Her fingers took his pulse. Her eyes did not look at his face first; they looked at the bowl.

"Witnessing Sap," Aeren said to the air, not to Mikhailis. The word carried an old weight. The bowl would stay clear if the tongue told clean truth, cloud if lies crossed it. Simple. Older than anyone here.

The healer tipped the bowl. Sap lay flat, clear as water. "Answer," she said.

"Did you invite the fall?" Her thumb sat on the inner edge of his wrist, where the skin is thin and honest.

"No."

The sap stayed water-pale. The nurse did not nod. She did not have to. Aeren watched his face the way a man watches a gate hinge he knows well.

"Did you leash the dead?" she asked, eyes still on the bowl.

"Only by symbol and task. Scope-bound."

Clear again. The nurse’s mouth relaxed by a breath. Aeren’s jaw moved once and did not move again. This was not a trial. This was paperwork for souls.

"Any action above that was not brought to me," Thalatha said, not taking her eyes off Aeren.

"Noted,"