The sulfur mist didn’t drift. It curbed.
Ren Vale noticed the shift ten seconds before the first lead mantlet touched the stone. The warm draft rising from the boiling well suddenly backed up, eddying in unnatural circles as though an invisible wall had been erected across the mouth of the lower fissure.
Beside him on the dark rock ledge, Mira stiffened, her left hand flying to her chest.
The gentle, glass-like shear chime beneath her collarbone became muffled, its sound reverberations dying within three feet of her body as if smothered by wet loam.
“Ren,” she whispered, her voice tightening with sudden, cold dread. “The echoes... They’ve stopped. The rock is silent.”
Artificer Ren dropped his agate mallet onto the felt blanket, his jeweler’s loupes snapping down over his eyes. He stepped to the lip of the shelf, sniffing the humid air.
“Lead,” the Artificer rasped, his scarred jaw setting like iron. “Lead-lined sound mantlets. Three inches of rolled sheet-lead mounted on spruce frames. They’re deploying a sound dead-zone to blind our deep ring.”
From the shadows of the northern canal, twenty figures emerged in slow, timed together silence.
