Chapter 728: Bands of the Dead (3)
"Rear pair," Thalatha said. "Quiet legs. Odd counts."
Soldiers went in low and quiet, knives finding the softer gaps at rear limb joints. No flourish. No second swing. One, pause, half, done. Another. The odd counts kept the Echo band asleep. Bone cut like thick rope.
One beetle at the edge didn’t get the memo. It broke left and tried to go around the trench, shell scraping rib stone. Scurabon met it with a sting at the inside knee and hopped back. The beetle re-angled and crashed into a mint patch, legs flinching. That half-step of flinch was enough. The Hound’s chain dragged one ugly line under its belly. The beetle lifted on instinct and exposed a seam. A worker slid a smear of resin under the seam and pressed. The leg stuck for a blink, just long enough for a soldier to hamstring clean.
"Don’t chase," Mikhailis warned softly. "Let them bring their necks to us."
He felt Thalatha’s glance—approval without sugar. He glanced back. Less talking, more counting, he told himself, amused and obedient.
In three breaths, the clatter turned to settled clicks. The pack broke. The corridor smelled like old teeth and mint.
He breathed out. "Plates are good. Struts good. Meat, not so much."
Rodion posted the neat result.
<Chitin and jawbone collected. Application: shoulder skirts for soldier ants; shingle for forward workers; rails for litter and shield frame roof.>
Thalatha flicked two fingers—salvage lanes. Workers moved the plates with that same quiet dignity, stacking by size, edges wrapped in cloth to kill noise. One nurse paused to check a soldier’s glove for resin burns, then tapped his wrist twice—drink water, fool. The soldier bowed his head and obeyed.
A side corridor held three Wights standing very straight like nervous ushers who had read all the rules and wanted more. The team’s footfalls, even careful, made a small rhythm by accident. The Wights turned their heads as one, not hostile—only hopeful for a rule to keep.
"Give them paper," Mikhailis said, and tried to keep the joy out of his voice. He liked it when order met hungry minds.
The Archivist carved a neat bone placard. His hand did not hurry. The script came out simple and handsome.
no rhythm here
no call-and-response
pass in ones
The letters looked like they belonged to the room. The Wights drifted close with the meek eagerness of clerks given an updated schedule. Their hoods tilted, reading. Their bodies loosened in that small way that means, finally, someone said it out loud.
The Necrolord stepped to a side post and wrote attend / keep door with spare strokes. She did not press a leash. It was a task, not a chain. The Wights arranged themselves in a white-noise fence where traffic would try to make beats. One raised a palm and then lowered it with a tiny, satisfied nod, like a teacher who finally got chalk.
"Door guardians with manners," Mikhailis whispered. If only the palace had those.
The last trial before the mid rest found them at a high gallery with a bad kind of space. The air tasted like chalk. It pulled moisture out of your tongue. The light felt thin. The bones of the gallery made lines your eyes didn’t enjoy following.
A pale shape slid from a vault and rode the space—Bone Drake Fledgling. Its body was long and underfed-looking, pale plates not yet thick. Wings weren’t real wings, more like tough membranes stretched on mean fingers. They let it glide, then drop. Pounce first, think later. Dust scald puffed from its throat in a short, hot cloud. The heat felt dry and old, like someone opened an oven that had been on too long.
Mikhailis raised a hand. "Try the soft way," he said. "If it fights, we keep our hands."
The Necrolord reached. Her crown-light’s thread laid along the drake’s spine like a line of chalk. The mind there snapped back—proud, hot, sharp—refusing entry. No coil nodes on the surface, no bone-lattice to pin. It was too young to take a crown, and too sure of itself to kneel.
"Four points," Thalatha said, already setting the room in her head. "Veil kills the light. Sentinel eats the breath. Hound keeps it guessing. Scurabon clip. Pebble if it starts counting."
Rodion hammered the anti-pattern bar into the corner of the panel, irregular and stubborn, a little ugly on purpose.
<Do not gift a cadence. If you feel clever, you are probably wrong.>
The Hypnoveil dimmed the vault. Not darkness—just less shine for the eye to chase. The drake’s first glide missed by a body and a half. It hissed, offended. Dust scald blew again, a tight cone. The Sentinel raised the coffin lid and took the scald an inch off ideal—enough to spread the heat. The lid drank it and grew warm. A hum built along the coffin-door’s edge, like a chord under the skin.
The Sentinel stepped, turned, and vented the heat into a dead shaft, a place that did not like drama. Stone drank the warmth and gave back the smell of old pottery and sunless clay.
The Hound whipped its tail like a lazy metronome, cloth still on the ring. The chain wrote ugly figures on the floor, loops that refused to become a pattern. The drake snapped at the wrong angle and lost air for a breath.
Scurabon jumped at the wing edge, blades small and quick. Two slits at the leading membrane, one longer, one short, offset. Nothing brutal. Just enough to make the glide lie to the body that believed in it. The drake tilted and corrected and over-corrected. Air lost trust.
Workers threw a moth-net over the muzzle and nose. The net wasn’t tight. It was cool. The moths inside it drank the angry heat. The drake shook its head, trying to spit rage that had been made sleepy.
It bucked. A claw hit stone and scraped. The sound tried to be a cue. Thalatha’s hand flicked. A pebble flashed from her fingers and tapped the yawn point Rodion had marked a breath earlier. The tap was not loud. It was placed. The wingbeat tripped, just for one blink. The drake’s body expected the air to be there; it wasn’t.
"Now," Mikhailis said, voice flat, and soldiers hit the shoulder in a wedge. Not a rush, a press. Knives went in where tendon met plate. A jam, then a twist. The joint lost its argument with geometry. The dislocation sounded like a table leg quietly giving up after one too many winters.
The drake fell, not in artwork, not in tragedy. It went down like a bad habit that finally met a schedule.
It lay there, head netted, chest lifting fast, then slower. Dust scald puffed once more, thin and pointless, and stopped. The Hypnoveil held the light low until the room remembered it was safe.
No one cheered. The Hound lowered its head, chain ring quiet under cloth. The Sentinel set the coffin-door to neutral. Scurabon checked the wing edges once more, confirming the slits were clean.
The Necrolord stood by and did not raise it. He nodded: "Clean."
<Harvest complete. Cartilage for flexible wraps. Calcium sap to thicken resin. Meat to pods—ration soldiers first, then workers.>
They pulled back to a moderate safe room where the Choir hum sounded like a long exhale. The stone here felt settled, like an old bench nobody argued over. Steam still clung low, thinner now, tasting faintly of mint and the dust scald that had already faded from the air.
The queen-to-be came trotting with three nurses, a little formal for her size. She carried a sheet made of pressed resin dust. Lines had been scratched on it with a neat foreleg, nothing fancy, just routes and dots, the kind of drawing that made sense the first second you looked.
"She wants to propose something," Mikhailis said, and his face actually brightened. "Look, Thalatha—rota. Shuttle rotation for the stair. Three-on, two-off, one hovering at the lip."
He crouched to her height so he didn’t turn the moment into a lecture. The young royal set the sheet down with ceremony, then tapped each simple mark: three teams moving like gears, one waiting near the narrowest rib, a little arrow showing how relief steps in without holes.
Thalatha took it in silently. Her jaw eased a little. "Good," she said after one breath. "Kind to the juveniles. Clean handover. No gaps."
She turned to the Regent so the praise would travel properly. The Necrolord performed a small, deliberate tilt toward the young one and did not steal the light. The nurse council made a tiny ripple with their antennae that meant pride without noise.
"Waiting and clean fights fed us better than flashing swords," Thalatha said, almost to herself, but loud enough to be heard. She asked Rodion for a bone tab with a finger twitch. The Archivist offered his stylus like a priest with a relic. She wrote in a straight soldier hand—no double inversion ever—and tied it at the stair with a knot so neat it made two workers sigh in quiet pleasure.
Mikhailis tapped his cuff, then raised two fingers like a guilty schoolboy giving a confession. "Yawn pebble doctrine," he announced, keeping his face solemn. "One impact only. Never two in five breaths." He paused, then added, almost humble, "Signed, a former idiot."