IM AN ORC?

The mill began to collapse.

Ruk moved before the first beam fell.

He caught Zree by the shoulder and pulled her clear of the split in the floor. Pale light surged from the gap, turning the dust in the room the color of bone. The false note below them was no longer a single pull. It was a cluster of broken sounds, several hollower marks trying to answer one another beneath the old mill race.

"Outside!" Grasha shouted.

Karg drove her axe into the door Varn had tried to use. The blade tore through the wood, then she kicked the broken panel aside. Crossbow bolts struck the doorway from the hill below.

Sorn dropped through the upper rafters and landed beside Ruk.

"Roof guards are down," he said. Blood darkened one sleeve. "Three more on the east slope."

"Then they keep the east slope," Ruk answered. "We keep the people."

The floor bucked beneath them.

Zira was already at the cracked edge, one hand glowing over the seam, the other holding her skirt clear of the dust. She did not try to heal it. Her light formed a narrow barrier around the break, slowing the pale energy that was pushing upward.

"It is not a manifestation yet," she said. "It is a mouth with too many teeth. If the marks join, the hill comes down."

"Can you hear the order?" Ruk asked Zree.

The shamaness had gone pale, but she put both hands against the floorboards. Her amber eyes flared.

"There are five marks," she replied. "One under the mill. Two in the race. Two in the slope. The central one is feeding the others."

A burning beam crashed behind them.

Grasha dragged the merchant table away from the spreading fire. The grain sack with the broken river-key fell to the floor. Nym scooped it up and then stopped when she saw something beneath the table.

A leather ledger had been strapped to the underside with wire.

"Ruk!"

She cut it free, flipped it open, and swore under her breath.

The pages were covered in columns: river sites, delivery dates, names written in initials, amounts paid in silver or hollow-metal. Some entries were crossed out. Others were marked with a small black dot.

"This is the Court’s route book," she said. "They have more cells than we thought."

The mill groaned again.

"Take it," Ruk told her. "We leave now."

They ran through the door into the night.

The hill had become a battlefield. Three Court fighters waited among the grass below, crossbows raised. Karg went down the slope first, moving through the bolts with her axe held high. One bolt hit the haft. Another tore through her upper arm. She did not slow. She reached the nearest crossbowman and hit him hard enough to throw him into the dry race channel.

Grasha followed with a roar that carried over the crack of timber behind them. She hooked one fighter’s ankle with the flat of her axe and put him down. Nym appeared behind the last one, drew a knife across the back of his knee, and took his crossbow before he hit the ground.

Sorn vanished into the grass after the men on the east slope.

Ruk turned back toward the mill.

The broken floor had widened. Pale light poured through the walls and seams of the old building. The hollower marks beneath it were pulling at the hill’s foundation. If the mill collapsed into the wound, the weight of stone and timber could give the false note enough material to form something large.

"Zree," he called. "The center!"

She stood beside him at the edge of the slope, breathing fast. "The mill is above it. I need line of sight to the race."

"Take it."

He ran downhill toward the dry channel.

The race had been cut through the hill long ago, a narrow trench of stone and packed earth. The old waterwheel lay broken at one end. Beneath it, five hollower marks glowed through the soil in a linked pattern, each one feeding pale lines into the central spiral under the mill.

Ruk raised the artifact.

The false note attacked his awareness immediately. It had learned from the river and the market. It came at him in layers, imitating the boundary’s voice, breaking apart, then repeating. Each layer tried to make him answer the wrong sound.

He remembered Lenna’s words at the river bend.

*The seam needs weight. Something steady on the outside.*

Ruk planted his feet in the dry race. He did not fight the false note. He held the artifact low and listened past it.

The real voice was there.

It was strained. The hollower marks had forced the boundary into a narrow channel beneath the hill, but it had not been fooled. It knew the injury. It was trying to return to its proper shape.

Ruk gave it room.

Clear light flowed from the artifact into the race channel. The central spiral trembled.

Above him, the mill wall came down.

Grasha shouted a warning.

Karg reached the falling timber first. She braced one shoulder against a beam that would have crushed Zree where she stood. Grasha cut through a broken support, changing the fall just enough that the debris crashed to the side of them instead.

Dust rolled over the slope.

Zree emerged from it, coughing, one hand pressed against the ground.

"The center is weakening!" she called. "The left mark is feeding it more than the others."

Ruk saw it. The mark on the north wall of the race glowed brighter, its pale line running into the center like a vein.

"Nym!"

She slid down the slope beside him, ledger tucked inside her coat.

"What?"

"North mark. Pull the anchor stone. Do not break it."

Nym looked at the glowing spiral, then at Ruk. "You know I hate instructions that end with ’do not break it.’"

"You will manage."

She gave him a thin smile and ran.

Sorn appeared at the far end of the race with blood on his blade and no enemy behind him. He took the east mark. Grasha, still limping from the falling debris, took the west. Karg went for the south mark, her injured arm held close but her grip on the axe steady.

"On Zree’s word," Ruk called.

Zree listened.

The false note rose. The collapsed mill shifted above them. A crack ran through the hill from the race to the black sky.

"Now!"

Four anchor stones came free at once.

The linked marks screamed. Pale energy flared between them, then snapped back toward the central spiral. Ruk held the true voice open beneath it. Zree projected a resonance pulse from the slope, precise and sharp despite the exhaustion in her face.

The central spiral folded inward.

For one terrible second, the hill seemed to inhale.

Then the wound closed.

The pale light vanished. The dry race settled around Ruk’s boots. The mill ruins shifted once more, then became ordinary broken timber and stone.

No manifestation rose from the hill.

Ruk lowered the artifact and let out a breath he had not realized he was holding.

Karg came down the race with her arm wrapped in a strip of torn cloth. Zira followed, her pale healing light already closing the wound around the bolt tear.

"You should have moved faster," Zira told her.

"I moved exactly fast enough," Karg replied.

Grasha laughed once, tired and hard. "That is the closest you will get to an apology."

Nym stood apart from them, reading the ledger in the moonlight. Her expression had changed.

"This is worse than routes," she said.

Ruk came to her.

She turned the book so he could see the last pages. The entries were not just deliveries. They listed people. Some had amounts beside their names. Some had the black dot. Some had the word *listening* written in the margin.

"They are buying people," Nym said. "Not workers. Test subjects. Anyone with a talent for hearing the seam. Watchers, shamanesses, scouts, children who notice the wrong sound before adults do."

Zree went still.

"The old hermit at the river bend," Ruk said. "He warned that they turn people into listening instruments."

"This ledger says where the next transport goes," Nym continued. Her finger stopped at a line near the bottom. "Orrin’s Ford. Before the next flood."

The phrase made the group quiet.

A flood was coming. The Court had chosen a moment when the river would cover tracks, carry false resonance farther, and make it harder to reach anyone trapped beneath the water.

Ruk looked at the collapsed mill, then toward the dark line of the river.

"We return to Reed Market," he said. "We get the ledger to Davan. We tell Grummok what the Court is doing. Then we go to Orrin’s Ford before the flood reaches it."

Nym closed the book.

"No," she said.

Everyone looked at her.

She pointed to a smaller entry on the page. A number and a date, both written in the same hand as the rest.

"We do not return first. This is an advance team. The prisoners are moving tonight. If we go back to town, they will be inside the Ford by the time we arrive." She looked at Ruk. "We can send Sorn with the ledger. The rest of us keep moving."

Sorn took the book from her without comment.

Ruk watched the ledger disappear into his coat. The group was tired. Karg was wounded. Zree had pushed her sound-mapping twice in a day. But people who could hear the boundary were being carried toward a flood and an engine designed to use them.

He looked east, where the old river ran black beneath the stars.

"Sorn takes the ledger," he said. "The rest of us go to Orrin’s Ford."

Behind them, the remains of the mill settled into silence.