CHAPTER 747: HAMMERS IN A FOREST (END)

Rodion’s hum lined up like tidy numbers on a slate.

Clean. Tent pole resonance within normal flex. Smoke hole plume is just air doing a hobby.

He added his own checks anyway. The corners were ordinary: a stray feather, a dent where a crate had sat, scuffs that made no pattern. He pressed lightly along a floor seam—no hidden glass ridge. He nosed at the lamp, sniffing for the sharp cinnamon of vowel oils. Only old fat and ash.

Clear, Rodion said.

Mikhailis let a breath out that he had been holding without permission. "All right," he whispered. "Tell me everything."

The lenses answered him with a map. Lines rose like veins through dark soil. The terrace sat like a blunt lip. The lift throat cut down into the hill. Tents formed ribs. Trees stood like a wall, blacker than the sky. Beneath, a second map glowed dim, the house below arranging itself in neat humility—halls where breath knew how to go, vents like thin mouths, places with old names that didn’t need saying.

Necro-ant coverage: forty-two percent of accessible sub-layers. East tunnels complete. North-east vents at sixty percent. Southern root beds twenty percent—ward density high. Lift throat and terrace perimeter validated.

Polygons shaded themselves. MAPPED wore a steady grey. CONTESTED cross-hatched like basket weave. WARD-HEAVY went almost black. UNKNOWN stayed a patient blank, like a room not yet opened.

"How are the scouts doing in this realm?" he asked, even though the answer was already moving along the lens.

Shadow-tuned. Low signature. They carry micro-scry snippets and mana temperature deltas. Breadcrumbing reversible marks visible to me alone—phase-shifted pollen motes and dead-air notches.

He imagined one of the little scouts—half idea, half insect—pausing on a root vein to taste the air, then planting a mote of not-pollen that only Rodion could read. He liked the elegance of that.

The map rolled outward. The mountain ring came up like a jawbone. Bedrock lit with a slow pulse, a lazy river in stone. He could almost feel the hum under his boots.

Rock carries a circulating mana-current. Pattern suggests a sealed domain—anchored pocket stabilized by the ring.

"A fae-style pocket," he said, a little fond and a little annoyed. "Call it what it is. A seclusion field with rules. Time drift at the edges. Export friction when you try to take something living out that the ring thinks belongs inside."

Affirmative. Comparable to recorded demesnes. Edge cohesion high. Boundary drift potentials non-zero.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose with one knuckle. Pocket domains always have egos. This one whispers instead of shouts, but it still wants to be the main character. He knew how to talk to that kind. Respect and boredom. Rules like love letters.

"Show me the rot."

Red sigils budded one by one along the ring, clockwise. Each looked like someone had pressed a dirty thumb into dough. He dragged a fingertip in the air to connect them. The line tried to become a pattern and then refused—parasitic, not systemic.

He leaned closer to the lens until his breath ghosted it. Don’t fog your own eyes, idiot. He angled his head so the steam slipped away.

Multiple decay nodes trending clockwise. Signature analysis: necromantic, but not dungeon-bred. Dungeon residue reads uniform—cold, pressure-like, obedient to rhythm cues. These are irregular, bitter, parasitic, tugging at current lines that should stabilize the pocket.

He tasted the word bitter and found it was right. The air in the tent had no taste, but the idea of the rot did.

"So the dungeon breach was opportunistic," he said, soft for himself. "We aren’t plugging a leak. We’re chasing the rat that chewed the pipe."

He let the metaphor run a little. A leak wants help. A rat wants habit. Different tools. Different bait.

He nodded to himself.

"Put the hints together," he said. He wanted to hear the list spoken. Lists made the mind stop dramatizing and start counting.

He let his eyes move over the memory of the supply crate. He had knelt there while the quartermaster counted. The rune hid under the plank, smiling like a trap that believed in education. Reset-well mimic: press here by accident, watch the ledger forget, then point at the outsider with the neat tools and the strange luck.

He let the next memory arrive: the echo-tag they’d found near his shoulder strap. A tag that loved rhythm more than it loved honesty. He had felt it scrape off like chalk on bone when the nurse captain tapped 2-3-5 on his sleeve. Close work. Whoever set that wanted to learn my steps, not ruin me yet. Testing the fishing line before the river day.

He pictured the recruit who had been coached. Hands raw where a pen had been gripped wrong for too many hours. The handwriting on the notes—long loops on the downstrokes, neat spacing, mercy in the margins. An office habit. Not a barracks one. Clerks like their letters to look fed.

He thought of the bowl with sap as clear as mountain water. Witness-sap had no sense of humor. It did not belong to anyone’s side. It had cleared him like it was filing a form. He appreciated that.

He zoomed the lens out and saw the ring again. The rot had walked it like someone with a key and a schedule. Clockwise. Even spacing where the ground allowed. It avoided junior watch paths but crossed Elder patrol arcs as if it had a badge.

He closed his eyes and saw hands. One pair in gloves, careful, not young hands but disciplined ones. Another pair bare and quick—glamoured to look young. The same hands in two costumes. He opened his eyes.

"Clerical hands. Elder access."

I am cross-checking patrol authorizations against residue timestamps. Two schedules overlap too cleanly to be separate people. Mana handwriting on the reset rune and the strap echo match within four-point-eight percent variance.

"Someone who passes in two guises." His mouth went tight. "By day a weary Elder who can sign anything. By night a young face with new shoes."

He let the picture build. Ink stains under polite nails. The smell of beeswax and old paper on a cloak. A gait that saves the knees in daylight, then turns springy after dark. Same person. Same hunger. Two masks.

He sat back on his heels. Canvas rubbed his shins through his trousers. I don’t want to blindside Talatha. She deserves a clean brief, not a letter on a table.

The thought pushed up against another. If I wake her, we lose time to ceremony. If I move now, we catch breath still warm on bark. He balanced the two until his ribs stopped arguing.

The little bone tab came out of his inner pocket. He turned it between finger and thumb, feeling the grooves from old permissions. The bone had been polished by the lives of other messages. He set it on his knee and took a charcoal nub.

He marked the corner with 2-3-5 ticks, small and sharp. High heat. No rhythm. He kept his own breath irregular while writing; habit. He folded the tab inside a neat square of cloth that smelled faintly of leather and sap—the smell he always connected to Talatha’s gloves and the inside of her tent. The scent settled something in him he hadn’t named yet.

He tied the nurse-code knot on the cloth’s edge. Urgent but contained. The knot was simple to look at, hard to copy. He had learned it from watching the nurse captain bully thread into discipline. He smiled at the memory of those strict fingers.

He sealed the fold with a touch of resin. The bead cooled fast and went dull. He slid the note under the edge of Talatha’s map, the place her hand always went first at dawn. The map paper had a worn shine there from a thousand touches.

He hesitated. He wanted to add a small line—Stay safe. He did not. She wasn’t a letter that needed soft corners. He gave the message the shape of duty instead.

"Cleared. Hunting source of rot. No topside assets engaged. Seven-night mirror still stands," he wrote inside, then closed it again.

He turned to his pack. Packing was its own quiet ritual. He laid each tool out and let his fingers remember them.

The anti-scry cloak first. A plain dark cloth kissed with damp ash and resin along the seams. He rubbed fresh ash into the collar with his thumb until it dulled the thread shine. The smell was cold and old. He shook it once—no jingle, no whisper. Good.

Two prime-step stones. Smooth and a little greedy for heat. He rolled them in his palm and felt the prime numbers as notches in his breath. Two, pause, three, pause, five. He tucked them where his left hand would find them without looking.

The small vial of witness-sap. It was cloudy at the neck from age, but the surface stayed clear when he moved it. Old but honest, he thought, and put it in a pocket where it would not crack if he fell. He patted it once.

Recall tokens for the elites lay in their cloth pocket. He checked they didn’t jangle. The weight of them was like a secret promise. He respected that weight with a slow exhale.

He slid on the cloak. It sat right on his shoulders, tugging a little at the collar where the resin wanted to remember being sap. He smoothed it with his palm, whispering nothing in particular. He liked his tools to think he was listening.

"Let’s go," he whispered, and the tent swallowed the words without learning them.

He eased the flap open two fingers’ width. Night breathed in his face—pine, cold, the metal taste of magic working on stone somewhere under his feet. He waited until the flap stopped moving before he slipped through.

Black trees cupped the camp. The tents nested like birds that trusted their nest builder. Frost painted the pine needles silver where starlight wandered. The ground was dry except where breath had condensed into darker patches. He avoided those; wet places remember steps.

He flattened against the shadow of a rope line and let his ears count the camp. A slow heel scrape near the lift lip. A soft sniff near the cook tent. A quiet murmur between two guards passing each other a strip of dried apple.

I have sent the necro-ants ahead in chevron. They are whispering their pebble pings with long waits between. No rhythm, came the cool line in his head, clipped and calm.

He could almost feel the little lives moving—more idea than insect, more discipline than idea. He pictured a tiny body pausing at a "yawn point" in the ground and tapping once, then holding breath for five long counts before tapping again. He liked the stubbornness.

North line sentries facing out. Breaths steady. One at the cook tent is reading the bottom of a pot for omens; harmless. Avoid the lip. Cross between tents two and three where the ground dips.