“Torches!” Veyt’s voice cut through the dark from the raft. “Hold your pike-butts together! Don’t let the tamer’s party into the ring—take up the third verse by ear!”
Three veterans near the raft struck sulfur matches against their shield bosses and took up the pounding four-beat chant again, using the bronze hum of the clapper to guide their pikes in the gloom. Beneath the torn copper net, Pip’s new half-crown of blades gave an unwanted ring, pulling its injured head back toward the cage like a hook in a fish’s jaw. Every syllable the veterans shouted tightened the black horn above its right eye, trying to force the remaining lattice on its left brow to fuse shut and finish the war-crown.
Just above the left end of the bank, where the vertical root chimney met the gravel, Ysabet, Ashaun, Osha, and the three iron wolves slid out of the cleft in a shower of wet shale.
Siv, Tern, and Moth hit the gravel in silence, dropping low to lunge between the nearest pikemen’s knees and knock two soldiers flat into the mud with the flat of their armored shoulders—just as Kiv had trained them to clear a path without locking their jaws on flesh or jarring Siv’s healing left tooth.
