The shadow that stretched from the creature’s boots was not black.
It was the dull, dead grey of unpainted slate, and as the Last Guest took its single measured stride toward the split mine arch, that shadow did not crawl across the floorboards like ordinary shade. It poured upward through the fractured ceiling vault, sliding through the thirty-foot crevice opened by the rogue mortar shell, and spilled out onto the muddy hillside above the fort.
Through the Dominion connection, Noll Vey felt the touch of that shadow on the mountain turf.
It did not crush the wet grass or tear the wires running down to the ford. It touched the command ridge eighty paces below Battery Number One, where the senior officers of the Third Border Brigade had established their field headquarters at the beginning of the siege.
Three large command pavilions stood in a neat row behind the earthwork revetments. They were handsome structures of heavy duck canvas, waterproofed with boiled linseed oil, their guy-ropes pegged with seasoned oak and their ridgepoles carved from straight mountain pine. In front of each tent, an eight-foot iron pike was driven into the sod, bearing the embroidered silk pennant of its company: the Black Boar of the High Shelf, the Crossed Mallets of the River Redoubt, and the Silver Scale of the March Ledger’s provincial provost.
