The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 71: Volume 3: Chapter 65 – The Clever Wall

Read chapter 71 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 3: Chapter 65 – The Clever Wall Day 12 Aethelmar’s walls weren’t military, but they’d been taught to think. Stone plus lessons. The mortar hummed; the parapets held a thin, glassy note. The wards tasted for change, not steel anti-Gem, written by minds that didn’t bleed often but understood patterns. Yara reached with the Gem and felt drag, like a hand pushed through cold syrup. Expensive. She pulled back. The drag wasn’t strength; it was a design, an anti-hunger weave keyed to the Gem’s signature and stitched through the whole civic net: bells, gates, kitchens, water. She could force it, but the tear would black out cistern wards, sour ovens, and ring the capital through the Academy’s tether. “We inherit this place tomorrow,” Yara said. “We keep its bones. Spend only where it moves the work.” “Transformations cost more here,” she added. “So we don’t buy what we don’t need.” Bruno split the chainwolves cleanly. Four units, three wolves each, plus the two unnamed pack members integrated into the formations: two units took the west wall's shadow, one watched the carts and rear line, and one stayed mobile for intercepts. Corvin and Lira floated as a roving pair, stitching the gaps. Yara kept the bears close; Sam and Harry stayed with her at the front. While the Scars were working on their set of the plan, Yara sent the regulars to capture field mice and rats to increase Weaver’s small voices and to identify any holes they could find. Boys with quiet hands and sergeants who knew patience worked the hedges and culverts with grain sacks and wire loops. Field mice and rats came in about a dozen hissing, kicking, alive. Yara chose a strip of ditch where the ward-scent thinned and set a little table on the earth: buttons, wax rings, a cuff-thread from a guard’s coat, and two finger-length slivers of Ferric chain . Harry stood opposite her, Graveclaw under his elbow. The fragment in his ribs was steady enough to help without taking it out. “Small work,” she said. “The net won’t notice.” They began. No bodies to rewrite; only voices to sharpen . Yara warmed the chain slivers in her palm until the Gem remembered them as armor. She pinched off grain-sized links and pressed one to each animal’s skull—right at the seam behind the eye. The link melted inward with a pinprick pop, lining a curve along tiny bone. Memory took better after that . Direction did too. Harry steadied each squirming body, breath even. When the Gem’s silver-green light thinned against the ward’s drag, his yellow-green bled across the touch just enough to carry the change the last inch. Feeding the gem with old armor and using the energy to expand the minds of the small voices. No glamour. Each creature shuddered once as its little map clicked into place. “Anchor,” Yara murmured, and touched a wax ring or button to a forepaw. The Gem tasted the token and taught a single task: carry, return, tell. The pain was a blink. The cost was pennies where the walls wanted pounds. Last, the link to Weaver. Yara drew a small cutting of thread from the spider’s coil, thin as hair, gray as dusk. One turn around each animal’s ear; one press of nail; a bead of green to set the knot. The thread vanished into the ear fur, but stayed in the mind; it was a tether for Weaver’s whisper. The animals stilled as if listening, then twitched their whiskers in answer. By midday, a dozen new Small Voices ran the margins of Aethelmar under grates, along drain lips, through culverts, stacks, and kitchens. Yara watched them scatter and felt nothing. A dozen living things reshaped into tools in the time it took to eat breakfast. The Gem purred satisfaction. She agreed with it. That should have bothered her more than it did. She remembered the first time she'd transformed something, the Horror, the soldier she'd killed trying to save. The terror. The revulsion. Now she could do a dozen in an hour, and her biggest concern was the ward-drag costing too much power. Had she done this back home in Aramor