Commander Veyt did not like the way the red-eared boy kept looking down at his bandaged wrist.
“Sergeant Drel,” Veyt said briskly. “Take the prisoner up to that dry limestone niche above the root arch. Double-hitch her right wrist and ankles to the rock ring. Leave the lamp crew here on the frame.”
Two veteran sergeants untied Ashaun from the lower post, hauled her up a short, dry shelf of stepped stone thirty paces above the gravel shore, and lashed her ankles and her functional right wrist to an ancient iron tether-ring set into the back of a shallow alcove.
One of the sergeants carried Ashaun’s torn leather pack and the narrow bell dagger they had pried out of her fingers under the net. Veyt climbed up to the lip of the alcove and held the short, dull-grey blade under a lantern.
In the yellow light, the weapon looked unimpressive. Its narrow edges were unsharpened for slashing, the hilt was wrapped in plain iron wire, and a dark hairline crack ran two inches up the flat of the metal from their earlier test on the causeway fragment. Edris’s official manuals spoke at length about the glorious bronze clapper and the lost war-horns of the Vanguard; the temple histories had carefully omitted the ugly little severing knives the smiths had forged at Falling Bells to cut the god’s circuit apart.
