Chapter 723: Collaring the Ossuary Hound (1)
Three... two... one.
The metronome bar on Rodion’s panel flashed a lopsided pulse that refused to become a song. Green dots padded across the stone in front of them, small as seeds. Orange X’s sat like patient scolds. A thin blue ribbon climbed the stair throat and fell again with the dungeon’s breath—up on the inhale, down on the sigh—telling them when to move and when to pretend to be furniture.
<Window open. Anti-pattern engaged.>
The Ribbon-Scout formation drifted into its slow arc. The Hypnoveil slid ahead, mantle lowered, edges soft, turning the corridor dull on purpose. Behind it the necro-ants spread like a quiet spill, splitting into three staggered scent lines. Workers brushed mint dust in one thread, glowcap air in the second, bone meal in the third. The scents did not fight each other. They braided, then separated, then crossed again—just enough to bother anything that loved symmetry too much.
The skeleton pair took the rear, blades turned so only the blunt backs showed. Marsh cloth hugged every joint. They looked like tired porters in a museum that had forgotten what art was.
Thalatha lifted two fingers toward the rib-lip ahead and shaped the word without sound. "Exhale."
On the floor’s next down-breath they crossed in order—veil nose, workers, soldiers, nurse, Mikhailis and Thalatha side by side, skeletons last. No one tried to be first. No one tried to be brave. They moved like a slow idea that did not want attention.
Mikhailis kept his hands low and his mouth closed. No tapping. No clever beats. The Deacon loves applause. He let the thought sit and did not add a joke to it, not this time.
The Ossuary Hound waited at the fork beyond—ribs and chain looped into a long body, a skull shaped like a bucket full of nails. Its tail ended in a loose ring segment, and the ring had its own opinion about rhythm. Tap. Tap. Not loud. Not shy. Like a child counting when nobody asked. The air around the ring gave a tiny twitch that his teeth could feel.
Rodion dimmed the side feeds until the Hound filled the panel. At the bottom, the soft bar blinked again, deliberately crooked.
<Hold cadence irregular. Breathe only on exhale. If the tail climbs beyond 0.7 rhythm index, I drop a boredom sheet.>
Thalatha stood to his right, shoulders down, chin level. She drew two small circles with her index finger, close to her thigh—sleeve-speech: watch the ring.
Mikhailis dipped his head. "I see it," he breathed into his sleeve. "Ugly little metronome."
Her eyes cut toward him, calm but sharp. "No jokes with hinges."
"Who, me?" His mouth twitched and stopped. Don’t poke the floor. It has more hands than you do.
Two body-lengths downwind of the Hound, the Riftborne Necrolord took her mark. Crown-light at dawn, not sunrise—visible to the dead, not insulting. The Hypnoveil lifted a corner and left a slit the size of a door for people who did not like to be seen entering rooms.
<Failure rails armed. If tail index climbs: veil drops boredom. Workers add a fourth scent. If howl: skeletons show backs, veil expands, retreat two body-lengths.>
Thalatha’s fingers fluttered a short phrase near her hip. "No tapping. If you have to cough, cough inside your chest."
The Hound turned its skull a notch at nothing. Its eye sockets held no light, but they managed to look offended. Thalatha did not blink. Mikhailis kept still.
Break the symmetry first. Then collar in one motion. No speeches. No victory lines. He repeated the recipe in his head so the part of him that loved to improvise would sit down.
Workers 12, 18, and 23 scissored out to the fork and laid their crumbs fast and clean—mint-paper dust, a thin bone-meal ring, a glowcap breath. The threads crossed, parted, braided again. The Hound halted. The tail-ring stuttered, as if a clerk’s two neat columns had suddenly split into three.
Tap... tap...
The beat stumbled. If rhythm had eyebrows, they rose.
Thalatha saw it the same moment he did. Her hand slid to her belt. A strip of marsh cloth appeared in her fingers like a card in a street trick. One light flick. The cloth sailed and fell over the ring like a lazy scarf.
No clink. No spark. The chain swallowed the strip and sulked.
She didn’t smile. She did not even shift her weight. She just breathed when the floor told her to. Of course you throw like that, Mikhailis thought, a small, ridiculous pride rising in his chest. The world corrects when you touch it.
The Necrolord stepped through the veil slit. The motion looked wrong and right at the same time: a press through nothing, then the nothing folded like a shawl across her shoulders. Her left hand found the Hound’s spine, fingers pale as chalk laid along bone. Her right traced counter-rotation over the coil-runes hidden beneath the shoulder plates. The mark was so exact that Mikhailis’s brain accepted it before his eyes finished watching the line close.
Rodion’s timer drifted along the panel’s bottom like fish in a quiet tank.
<Three-beat window off the Choir. Two-point-six... two-point-nine... three-point-four...>
A second line fed into Mikhailis’s lens only.
<Hold your breath on my "one," release on my "two-and-a-half." Please try not to pass out.>
He almost smiled. You worry, professor? He held anyway. On the beat he let his breath out soft, and with it he pushed the smallest thing he owned down the Necrolord link. Not a command. Not that hero nonsense. Just permission that matched the creature’s shape.
Stand. Heel. Scout.
The Hound exhaled a not-sound. Its jaw loosened. The tail-ring sagged under the cloth. The eye sockets dimmed to a dark that wasn’t hostile, only tired. For a heartbeat the chain tried to find its old beat, like a tongue searching for a missing tooth. The damp cloth killed the rhythm gently. The Necrolord’s sigil seated. The leash held.
"Good dog," Mikhailis said into his sleeve, because he could not help himself. Thalatha didn’t elbow him; she didn’t need to. Her mouth trembled like a laugh wanted to live there and chose work instead.
<Leash stable. Latency acceptable.>
The Hound lifted its head and looked at the stair well. It stood in a stance that already assumed them. It did not seem surprised. Thalatha rolled her wrist: slow circle; twice; return if nothing tries to be brave.
The Hound moved like a bad memory learning manners. Under the Hypnoveil’s boredom, its ribs clicked softly, chain links whispering on stone. Above, the Basilica Warden lay across the higher steps like a bell frame that had fallen asleep wrong. Between its ribs, lantern-maggots glowed a sick, patient moon.
Rodion kept the bar crooked. The Hound’s paws touched only green dots. Mikhailis watched the Warden’s empty eyes the way a child watches a stern teacher—ready to look down the second they sharpened. Nothing. Then a little tug ran through the tendon by the Warden’s right elbow. The Hound froze. Rodion stamped a broken dotted arc on the stone beneath it.
<Do not step.>
The circle continued. Hugging the inner spiral, the Hound’s steps found a slim stripe where the stone remembered being a path. The blue ribbon on the UI brightened when the floor sighed out and dimmed when it drank in.
"Fussy stair," Mikhailis whispered into his sleeve.
Thalatha’s eyes tracked the blue. "We like fussy. Fussy writes things down."
On the third loop the Hound lowered its snout to the landing stone and traced a hairline seam cut into it. Not decoration. A sentence, etched thin as a vein, in the bone’s own language. Coil-runes tucked where a lazy eye would never look.
Mikhailis felt his mouth move before his head approved. "Hello," he breathed, voice so small it lived inside his sleeve. "You feed our friend here, don’t you?"
Rodion zoomed the seam until it filled a corner of the board. A small inset popped: an Archivist Wretch pictogram, stylus lifted, ready.
<Command lattice present. Archivist can copy and transpose. Potential muffler.>
Mikhailis crouched on the exhale and flattened his palm against the cool stone near his boot without touching the seam itself. The skin of his hand reported small details to his head: a faint temperature dip that ran in a line, a low hum that did not match the Choir but did not fight it either. So you’re the spoon that stirs him to wake or sleep. He pulled his hand back and wiped nothing off on his trouser, a habit he had no reason for.
Thalatha shifted close enough to look without casting shadow. Her thumb tapped her cup scar three times inside her glove, a thinking tic she sometimes forgot she still owned. "Can you read any of it?"
"Two shapes," he murmured. "Hold. Bind. And a third I think is remember... maybe keep." He didn’t pretend certainty. This floor hated people who performed.
The Hound finished the loop and paused at a flat corner of stone. It set its jaw at an angle, like a dog pointing birds. Rodion drew a tiny circle at the same spot on the UI.
<Yawn point. One pebble here resets micro-twitch. No second pebble within five breaths, or you will build rhythm.>
Worker 23 slid a smooth pebble into Mikhailis’s hand without looking up. The gesture had a small dignity that made him want to behave. He nodded to the worker like two craftsmen sharing a bench.
Thalatha’s eyes stayed on the Warden. Her breathing matched the stair’s sigh on purpose. "We test the lane on the exhale only,"