Len saw the hunter coil to spring from the edge of the underwater channel.
He was twenty feet above the creature on the sagging landing, his left arm useless in its cedar splints, his courier knife in his right hand. He couldn’t throw the knife through twenty feet of blinding steam with enough force to penetrate the creature’s dense, non-cellular tissue, and he had no firearm.
Then his fingers brushed the belt at his right hip.
His hand found the cracked sound bow of Deren’s brass bell.
The memory of Doma’s words at the kitchen table flared through his mind. The thing stole Signal Recognition on Day Five. It knows the chime of this brass as intimately as you do.
Len unhooked the leather mid-air loop with his thumb. He swung the three-pound brass bell outward over the railing. That let his arm extend to the full length of the tether. Then he allowed the heavy iron clapper to strike the cracked waist of the casting.
CLANG.
The note was not sweet. It was sharp, cracked, and clashing. That sound benchmark had rung across twenty winters of mountain post roads. The sound sliced through the roar of escaping steam, through the bone-shaking detonations of the blown valves. Through the wild cries of the refugees like a sharpened razor.
