For another forty minutes they followed the tilt of the glassfish scale down the raining channel, until the porous tufa ceiling rose and the cold shower drained away into a clogged gravel sinkhole.
Ahead of them, the passage narrowed into a dry, echoing gallery of fluted limestone. Through the soles of her wet boots, Ysabet could feel the faint, rhythmic clink of iron hammers and the low, testing hum of the bronze clapper as Veyt’s engineers bolted another strut onto the resonance frame somewhere beyond the rock wall.
Beside her knee, Pip’s left rear leg dragged across a flat stone, recovered with a scrape of claws, and then buckled at the joint.
The creature caught itself on its front four feet before its cracked shell plate hit the floor, but it did not rise immediately. Its sides heaved in shallow, rattling breaths that smelled of hot chalk. Beneath the green-clay repair on its flank, the pale interior lights flickered twice like a tallow dip drowning in its own grease and went nearly dark.
And along the seams of its shell, the hundreds of fine sensory filaments were twitching wildly in every direction at once.
The hollow, sound-carrying chambers around this side of the lake acted like an ear trumpet for the entire lower basin. Every worm burrowing away from the flooded causeway, every blind rock-swift fluttering in panic against a closed shaft, every loose pebble sliding down a chute, and every hammer-tap from the shore was pouring straight into those…
