Location:The chamber under Harl's Bottom
Date/Time:4 Blazepeak 9943 AZI, Quenchday, the seventh bell
Realm:Lower Realm
The chamber smelled of wet stone now, and nothing else.
That was the first thing Jayde noticed when she could notice anything, and she held on to it because it was simple. An hour ago the air in that room had been blood-warm and faintly sweet and had come into the chest like somebody else's breath. Now it was a cave. Cool. Damp. The mineral smell of rock that has had water in it for a long time, and under it, very faint, the smell of eight thousand dead things that had never once in nine thousand years been anything but warm.
Yinxin had not moved off her collarbone.
Jayde did not ask her to. She sat on the chamber floor with a silver queen's weight against her and her own hands gradually coming back from wherever they had gone, the shaking going out of them in stages, and counted the ninth bell of her own heart before she trusted her arms to hold anybody up.
