Chapter 340: Count of the Living

"So do I," Kane said.

The yard didn’t give them time to turn the wish into a plan.

Elven captains were already shouting for cordons.

Bodies lay in drifts across the broken approach: painted, torn, yellow light gone out of their eyes as if someone had snuffed a hundred candles with one breath.

The elephant’s carcass still blocked part of the gate wreckage.

Smoke from the earlier mana flares hung low and sour.

Civilians who had fled the nearer streets were being pushed farther in by wardens with open hands and tight voices, district by district, away from the smell and the sight.

Kane raised Mjoldr just enough to catch attention.

"Cordon first. No one walks the outer stones without a partner. No one burns anything until Griselda and the city warders say the residual is inert. If a body twitches, you call it before you swing."

An elven sergeant repeated the order down the line.

Rope and spear-posts started going up in rough rings around the densest piles.

Thora moved into the work without being asked, compact axe still dark, expression reduced to pure sequence: count, separate, mark.

Misha had already found a flat stretch of unbroken wall and was turning the morning into paper: names of the living, gaps in the watch rotations, which lanes still needed clearing before the panic invented its own disasters.

Sira stood with the new bow half-raised, orange hair full of leaf litter, eyes too bright.

"They all dropped at once. That is not a victory. That is a hand letting go of puppets. I want to know where the hand went."

"So does everyone with a working brain," Kessa said.

She flexed her gauntlets; dried black-tinged blood flaked off the knuckles.

"I say we take a hunting line into the belt before the trail goes cold. Whatever wore that woman’s face is still out there."

Thora didn’t look up from the body she was turning for the warders’ mark.

"We don’t chase a presence that can drop a hundred corrupted at once into trees we do not control while the gate is still a hole. We secure. Then we brief. Then we argue about hunts."

"Practical as ever," Kessa muttered, but she stayed inside the cordon.

Griselda landed on a clear stretch of wall walk, wings folding tight.

A pair of city warders in pale scarves climbed up to meet her.

Their conversation was low and technical.

Essence bleed, inert thresholds, which piles could be moved and which had to wait.

When Griselda finally spoke loud enough for Kane to hear, her voice carried the flat certainty he trusted more than hope.

"Essence is decaying. Not clean. Not active enough to turn a fresh wound on contact. We can begin ordered burning on the outer third within the hour if the wind holds. Inner piles wait for a second pass."

"Do it," Kane said.

"Firlia—status on the civilian lanes."

Firlia appeared from the direction of the second ring, green hair stuck to her neck, a slate already half-filled.

"The nearest three districts are moving under warden escort. No confirmed yellow eyes inside the walls. Two false reports already: paint and shock, not corruption. I have runners on the Menual road with your seal as ordered. Outer posts are under instruction to hold any belt arrival for eye-and-vein check."

"Good."

Kane glanced once toward the tree line.

"Misha. Pattern."

Misha didn’t need the invitation expanded. She spoke while still writing.

"Cross-check is consistent. The runner’s account and the scarred woman’s last word fit the same chain. Teachers move through the bands. Charms are issued, anti-attention craft, not true protection. Warm stones appear where maps show none."

"No traces?"

"Bands are taught to burn traces. Then the turn: animals first, people second, coordinated enough to hit a gate as a single intention. When the possessing presence withdraws, the turned drop together. This was not a random frenzy. It was a probe that spent a people to measure our close-down speed."

Sira’s jaw worked.

"And the World Tree is the thing they actually want."

"If the old accounts are right," Misha said, "yes. Corruption of the tree is an opening move, not a trophy at the end. Today was the hand knocking on the outer wood to see how fast we answer."

Kane walked the inner edge of the cordon while the first authorized burns were lit on the outer third.

Flame took the inert bodies with a smell that made several younger elves turn away.

The forest beyond the approach watched in ordinary green silence, birds starting to call again too soon, undergrowth ordinary, no white eyes, no heat-haze between the trunks.

The speed of that ordinary return sat wrong in his gut.

A battlefield this size should have left the belt raw for longer.

Instead, the trees looked almost eager to pretend nothing had stepped out of them.

He stopped at the approximate place where the scarred woman had stood.

"System. Any signature in a forward cone."

[Scan: Low-grade decay only]

[No active possession markers]

[Forest noise floor: Returning to baseline faster than projected]

"Too fast," Kane said under his breath.

[Agreed. Anomaly logged.]

Thora joined him, wiping her axe edge on a scrap of already-burned hide.

"You are thinking about going back in."

"I am thinking about the fact that whatever drove this could stand in the open, look at me through a dying woman’s eyes, and leave the entire wave on the ground like dropped tools. A hunt into that without a better fix is how you feed it more bodies."

He nodded toward the burns.

"We finish the count. We get the Queen the sequence before the rumors finish inventing a second gate. Then we decide whether the boat still has a morning to leave on."

Kessa called from the wall, impatient.

"Chief. The warders want a second pair of eyes on a pile that is smoking wrong."

"Griselda has it," Kane answered.

"You stay on the cordon. If anything sits up, you end it, and then you shout."

"Boring," Kessa said, but her ears stayed forward, and her gauntlets stayed ready.

Sira dropped from a low wall block to walk a few paces with him, bow still in hand.

"When this is paper and ash, I am not sitting in a rear chair while you sail toward Giants and leave the forest’s hand uncut."

"You may not get a choice," Kane said.

"Someone with a spine has to hold the protocols if the belt knocks again while the main strength is on water. We will have that argument after the Queen, not in a yard full of burning dead."