When Veyt’s palms closed around the black iron clapper, the metal did not ring aloud. The sound went straight through the wet floor and into the closed horn crown above Pip’s eyes.
Pip stiffened on all six legs. Its sideways jaw clicked shut so hard that a tiny flake of pale mineral chipped from its lower tooth plate. Through the bond, Ysabet felt the cavern vanish beneath a sudden, suffocating flood of someone else’s weather.
It was not a temple pageant or a polished tale of ancient glory. It was cold mud up to the knees in a willow ditch along the northern border, smelling of wet wool, bowel blood, and burned pitch. Iron bolts were coming down through grey alder branches faster than anyone could raise a shield. A boy with a split helmet was trying to hold his own ribs together with mud-caked fingers while calling for his mother in the flat dialect of the river towns. Three paces away, a woman with a sergeant’s braid was begging for water that nobody had left in a canteen, and over all of it Commander Veyt was kneeling behind a dead mule, biting the inside of her own cheek until her mouth filled with salt so her voice would not shake when she ordered the remaining twelve men to crawl toward the ditch wall.
