Step by step, with Tern and Moth leaning into their chest traces and Ysabet hauling on the forward hemp line with her left hand, they dragged the slate slab seventy paces out along the submerged causeway to the central stone pier.
Moored against the low limestone blocks of the pier sat an old flat-bottomed stone barge—a broad slab of buoyant volcanic pumice framed in ironwood that Amren’s earlier survey had used to float sounding lines across the deep pocket. Working together while Ashaun kept the dagger blade pressed hard into the collar groove, Ysabet and Osha levered the black-stone bell cage off the narrow slate runner and slid it onto the center of the broad pumice raft.
Sweat poured down Ashaun’s gray cheeks and dripped off her chin into the ankle-deep brine. The muscles of her right forearm stood out like twisted hemp cables under her sleeve, jumping with small, unwanted twitches as the bell clapper fought the blade’s damping cut. Across the causeway, the dark circle of the deep quiet-water pocket lay only sixty paces farther along the submerged stones.
Ashaun looked at the sixty paces of black water ahead, then down at her trembling right fist on the dagger hilt.
