The square stone shed had been built against a dry cleft in the eastern cliff, roofed with heavy slate slabs and guarded by two pikemen who stepped aside at Edris’s nod.
From the rope yard forty paces behind them, Kiv heard Siv give a sudden, low whine. Glancing back over his shoulder through the mist, Kiv saw all three wolves lying flat on their bellies in the gravel with their ears pinned tight against their skulls and their paws tucked under their chins, refusing to look toward the shed door.
Kiv stepped over the threshold behind Edris’s lamp.
The air inside smelled of cold iron, beeswax, and crushed quarry stone. In the center of the timber floor stood a portable cage four feet high, built from interlocking ribs of dull, light-swallowing black stone bound with bronze corner-shoes. Suspended inside the cage on thick leather straps hung a three-foot tongue of dark, pitted bell-metal: the central clapper from Azhrak’s final war bell.
It was not swinging, and nothing was striking it, yet the soles of Kiv’s boots tingled against the pine floorboards as if a great mill-wheel were turning beneath the mountain.
Kiv took two steps closer to inspect the cage lashings—and felt something warm loosen behind his breastbone.
