While Ysabet rinsed the wooden bowl in a trickle of clean side-seep and gave the mouse in her pack another drop of water on her knuckle, Ashaun followed the deep gouges across the floor of the hall.
Thirty paces past the shelf of stone hands, the heavy double rut made by the black-stone cage stopped against a jagged lip of dark chert. Chips of black stone and a smear of bright blood on the rock showed where the frame had wedged hard. Beyond that ridge, the ruts changed: one side dragged heavier than the other, and deep, uneven boot-scrapes ran right alongside the bars.
“He couldn’t lever it over the chert with a pole,” Ashaun said, crouching beside the smear and touching the wet stone with two fingers of her right hand. “So he opened the outer damping shutter and hugged the cage frame against his chest to haul it sideways. Look at the wall.”
Along the southern curve of the cavern, where Edris had staggered past with the unshuttered clapper pressed against his ribs, the stray vibration of the bell had cracked open a row of dormant mineral seams in the rock.
Thin wisps of pale yellow vapor curled out of the hairline fissures, smelling sharply of river mud, charred pine pitch, and wet wool. As Tern trotted past the nearest crack, the wolf flinched, sneezed twice, and backed away with his hackles raised; from the split rock came the faint, tinny sound of a distant bugle and the…
