Page 37 of Orc’s Gallows

And begins to speak with mine.

NINE

BRANNOK

The Judge speaks with her voice.

I freeze at the base of the gallows stairs, blade raised, every instinct screaming at me to attack. But the words emerging from that shifting, amalgamated mouth are Ismerie’s. Her inflections. Her rhythms. Her fears given terrible form.

My name.

Just my name. In her voice. Carrying the weight of everything she has never said aloud to me, the questions she keeps only for the dark. The Judge found the most unguarded thing it could reach and shaped it into a blade.

Doubt cracks through me before I can stop it. Whatever I feel for her—is it real? Is it mine? Or is it the sigil’s demand, mistaken for something deeper?

“Brannok.” Her real voice, raw and desperate, cuts through the Judge’s mockery. “Don’t listen. It stole my thoughts—my private fears. They’re not—I don’t⁠—”

“Silence.” The Judge gestures, and the ropes around her neck tighten. She chokes, words dying in a strangled gasp.

The claiming sigil blazes against my neck. The sight of her bound, choking, helpless—it tears through every barrier I’ve built, every wall I’ve constructed between myself and the violence I’m capable of.

She’s mine. It’s hurting what’s mine.

I charge up the stairs.

The Judge doesn’t move to stop me. Doesn’t need to. The platform itself responds, old timber groaning as the floor shifts beneath my feet. I stumble, catch myself on the railing, keep climbing.

Then the dead begin to rise.

They claw up from the ground surrounding the gallows.

Hands first—gray, rotted, still bearing rope burns around their wrists. Then arms, shoulders, heads that loll at broken angles. The executed dead of Blackhook City, pulling themselves from shallow graves and blood-soaked soil, animated by the Judge’s terrible will.

I recognize faces.

The merchant I hanged last month for treason—fabricated charges, I suspected even then. His eyes are empty now, his mouth twisted in a rictus that might once have been a plea for mercy. He reaches for me with fingers that have already started to decay.

I cut him down without hesitation.

My blade carves through his neck, severing whatever bindings hold him to false life. He collapses into ordinary death, but three more rise to take his place. Then five. Then a dozen.

The execution square fills with the walking dead.

They’re not fast. Not skilled. They attack with the mindless determination of things that have forgotten what it means to be human. But there are so many of them—weeks of executions, months of accumulated death, all rising at the Judge’s command.

A woman lunges at me—the witch from the revenant incident, her broken neck still visible beneath gray skin. I block her grasping hands with my forearm, drive my blade through her chest, feel the bindings shatter as she falls.

She’s the one I couldn’t save. The one whose death started all this.

More revenants press in. I carve through them, every stroke a killing blow, every movement designed to create space between myself and the horde. The skills I’ve honed over two decades of execution serve me now—I know exactly where to cut, exactly how much force to apply.

But for every revenant I destroy, two more rise from the churned earth.

“Sir!” Halvard cuts through the chaos. He’s fighting his way toward me, four guards at his back, their blades flashing in the moonlight. They must have followed when they realized I’d left the Hall. “There’s too many! We need to retreat!”

“I’m not leaving her!” I drive my blade through the skull of a corpse I don’t recognize—some anonymous prisoner, one of hundreds who died on this platform without anyone to mourn them. “Get to the gallows! Cut her free!”

Halvard nods and pushes forward, his men forming a wedge that carves through the revenant horde. But the Judge is watching. The Judge sees everything.