Chapter 724: Collaring the Ossuary Hound (2)
"We test the lane on the exhale only," she mouthed.
He nodded. We wait for the room to give it to us. We do not steal.
The Hound took the inner pass on the next down-breath alone, slow as a lesson. It eased along the two-person width, chain lying quiet under the scarf, ribs barely brushing air. Halfway through, a lantern deep in the Warden’s chest brightened half a thought. The Hound paused and watched the light die back. Its tail did not move. The cloth did not slip. It finished the arc and came back the same way, as if to tell them: it works if you respect the sigh.
Rodion’s small green ticks lined up along the pass lane. The orange half-arc under the elbow remained. The blue breath ribbon pulsed in and out, an old lung deciding not to be cruel for a moment.
<Deliverables: Do-not-step arc under right elbow. Pass lane on inner spiral. Yawn point marked. Coil-rune seam confirmed.>
Thalatha let a breath go from the place under her collarbones that always held the first bad reflex. She did not smile. She stood a fraction taller.
Mikhailis tucked the pebble into an easy pocket on his cuff and patted it once. Dog first. Bell later. Order matters. Pride breaks ankles. He glanced sideways at Thalatha. She did not look at him, but her mouth softened for one heartbeat. He caught it and saved it, the way he saved clean screws.
The skeleton pair waited at the rear, backs turned, blades still reversed. One skeleton adjusted a strap with tiny care, the way old professionals touch tools. The Hypnoveil’s hem lifted an idea and dropped it again, maintaining dull.
The Hound came to the veil and lay down with its tail ring quiet, cloth dangling like a scarf a lazy artist forgot to remove. It faced the stair. It did not pant. Ribs rose and fell in a tidy line.
<Leash check: stable. Response time: sub-second. Tail index: 0.12. Good dog.>
The last two words hung in the panel in plain text because Rodion had decided to indulge them for once. Mikhailis felt heat on his ears and pretended to study the coil seam again.
The seam ran in a shallow spiral, then forked into two thin strokes over a feeder stone—the same stone the Hound had marked as a yawn point. A little curl at the end of the second stroke had a mean personality. Thalatha leaned closer, squinting just enough to make Mikhailis want to tease and then deciding not to.
"Archivist first," she breathed. "We copy it clean before we touch anything."
Mikhailis nodded. He glanced at the necro-ants. The nurse with the little scar on her thorax stepped forward and tapped to call the Archivist Wretch. She did not look afraid of the Wretch. She looked like a clerk who respected a colleague’s obsession.
The Wretch came at a slow, careful trot—thin, robe in tatters, bone stylus clutched in one hand with a precision you could trust with your wedding ring. It eased down in front of the seam as if a chair had been brought for it. With a tiny brush, it cleared dust. With the stylus, it traced the first curve—hold—and paused, looking for permission. Thalatha gave a very small nod. The stylus moved again—bind—then stopped at the little mean curl.
The Wretch looked up. Its sockets were not cruel. They were exact. It lifted the stylus the way a child lifts a hand in class when the answer is not obvious.
Thalatha bent a little, careful not to cast shadow over the seam. "If we invert one clause," she said softly, "we muffle a little without lying." She glanced at Mikhailis.
He grimaced thoughtfully. "We need it to sleep deeper when we ask, but not forget how to wake when the floor is angry." He shaped the clause in the air with two fingers, not touching. "This turn, not that turn."
The Wretch tapped the stone once—ready. It copied the curl as shown, then drew a ghost of the inverted curl beside it, not touching, asking again. Thalatha’s eyes moved once left, once right. She shifted her chin half a degree. The Wretch erased the ghost with a soft brush and drew a new one. Mikhailis felt satisfaction in his teeth at the neatness of the correction.
Rodion’s overlay drew pale versions of both on the panel, labeling one "original," one "muffler (soft-invert)."
<Note: apply muffler only with veil trance. Without trance, risk of bounce-back chatter increases. Keep yawn pebble ready. Do not layer two inversions; that is how people die.>
"Copy," Mikhailis said. Thalatha did not answer with words; she tapped the hilt of her knife once, a private yes.
The Wretch finished the copy, then looked at Thalatha again. She bent enough to lay a small square of clean cloth on the stone beside it, a stupidly gentle thank-you that somehow made sense. The Wretch relaxed, the corners of its mouth tugging into something like peace, and started a second copy on bone salvage for redundancy.
The Hypnoveil pulsed a small boredom sigh over the landing, just enough to make the Warden’s lantern-maggots dim a hair. The big thing across the stair did not move. The chain ring on the Hound’s tail did not twitch. The air tasted like iron and old paper and the mint of their earlier tea faded into memory.
Thalatha flicked her gaze toward Mikhailis. "Say it."
He understood. He had seen the way she liked to frame a job; words pinned the work to something steady. He leaned toward the seam, close enough to smell the cool dust the Wretch had lifted, and spoke to it with that small tone he used when he wanted the room to approve.
"Hello," he breathed. "You feed our friend here, don’t you?"
Rodion zoomed the view until the seam swallowed a corner of the panel. The magnified bone looked like frost that had decided to learn grammar. He layered an inset in the upper edge—an icon of the Archivist Wretch, stylus lifted mid-stroke, as if the little scribe was raising a hand for permission.
The Hound eased past the seam and finished its second loop around the landing. It paused at a corner that wasn’t a corner so much as a sigh in the stone. Its skull tilted; the chain tail stilled. It set its jaw the way pointing dogs do when they have learned the word before the whistle. Rodion drew a tiny circle on the stone in the feed—clean, exact, a place made for one pebble and no rhythm after.
"Fetch," Mikhailis murmured to the air, not loud enough to wake dust. Worker 23 stepped in without glancing up, placed a smooth pebble in his palm, and withdrew with the dignity of someone who always knew the next step. The pebble held the cool of the floor inside it. He liked that. It felt like a promise taken from stone.
They held position while the Hound traced one more loop, this time slower, pads landing only where Rodion’s green dots pulsed. It stood at the inner pass and waited, counting the stair’s breath the way soldiers count heartbeats before breaking cover. On the exhale it slipped through the two-person width, ribs barely brushing air, then returned on the next sigh, checking its own work as if to say: the math is honest.
When it reached them again, the Hound folded down beside the veil. The cloth over the tail ring dangled like a lazy scarf. The skull rested on bone paws that didn’t shed heat the way living dogs did; still, it managed to look... content. The dim in its sockets no longer burned with that mean candle some undead carry. It was just quiet.
<Deliverables: Do-not-step arc under right elbow. Pass lane on inner spiral. Yawn point marked. Coil-rune seam confirmed.>
Thalatha let go of a breath that had been living high under her collarbones. She did not smile; she simply set the breath down on the floor like a coin and left it there. Her eyes slid to him.
"Good call," she said, voice kept low so the stair would not think it was being praised.
He shrugged, a small, inward motion. Don’t preen. Be useful. "Dog first, bell later," he answered. "I’ve been wrong enough times to like the order of that."
Waiting tried to scratch at Thalatha like a shirt tag she couldn’t quite find. She folded and unfolded her fingers once inside the glove. Then stillness again. She kept her gaze moving across the feeds without chasing any single one, the way you watch a river for change rather than for drama. Mikhailis watched her choose not to leap. She has been trained to move when the itch begins, he thought. Now she is training herself to stand when standing is smarter. Something in his chest warmed in a way he did not let into his face.
Rodion, mercifully, holstered the sarcasm and let the network hum. On the panel, small badges began appearing where nurse habits repeated with good outcomes—a tiny hand icon marking a third tap on the wall at tight throats, a gentle swirl where they paused to let a juvenile cross before them, a cloth symbol where they polished bone text before reading it.
<Auto-tagging: "do not retrain."> appeared in neat type. The note stayed unobtrusive, like a librarian’s pencil margin. Mikhailis felt seen and forgiven at once. He knows I’m watching. He does it anyway. Bless the marshmallow.
They spread outward to the four flagged points with the mood of a crew doing chores no one would sing about later and everyone would live because of.
Rib Spindle C–North was a rumor you could feel in your teeth before your eyes found it—a hairline stress spidering across a narrow crossing like a lie trying to stay thin. Workers arrived with resin, bellies low. They pressed a bow-splint into place, forelegs smoothing, abdomens swaying in a slow, efficient rhythm. The crack’s hunger dulled. A Scurabon tested weight in a careful half-step, then backed off and marked a bypass with two clean dots. The new lane was no wider than a man’s shoulders. One at a time. No flourish. Thalatha flicked two fingers—their version of a road sign: patience zone.
Resin Basilica East kept its wrong note like a singer who could not help flattening one pitch. Behind that off-beat arch they found a counterweight stage built into shadow. The Hypnoveil folded its mantle and created a hush that felt like cotton. Inside that hush, a platform rose with no rope and no complaint, as if the room had been saving the trick for someone who knew when not to clap. A lift, but only when the crystal light thinned. Rodion stamped a pale "for later" in the corner of the feed.