Ruka’s message reached Iven with a smear of pale mud across its lower edge.
The ground freight could still reach the Sill. It could not use the short northern road. Something had settled beside the channel, and its forefoot occupied the turn where two loaded sledges were waiting to pass.
The last line said: Kesh is at the watch. Come if you can look at the upper way faster than we can unload everything.
Iven read it twice, took the field note from the copying desk and went to the next assigned outward interval. The instrument work had taught him something about arranging pressure on paper. Ruka’s note sounded like a different kind of arrangement, one that would have to be seen from the ground.
At the Sill, he found Kesh above the northern road with a borrowed field glass resting on the wall. Beyond her, the plain opened into low shelves of stone, shallow water and the grey vegetation that grew where the ground remained damp without becoming a pool. Hearth lay farther away, immense and familiar enough that his eye almost passed over it.
The smaller body beside the channel held his attention.
There were no roofs on it. No towers, no laundry poles, no little squared windows cut into the spaces between older ridges. Its back rose in overlapping plates that changed colour from dull grey at the edges to a dark green-brown where water had gathered in the seams. The forelimbs were broad and jointed differently…
