She heard it through the floor.
She had been reading in the small sitting room off the main corridor, the one with the window that caught the last of the afternoon light, and the sound came up through the stone the way sounds travel in old buildings, filtered and muffled and wrong enough that she looked up from her page before she'd consciously decided to. It was not a sound she could immediately classify, which was notable because she could classify almost everything. She had spent years training herself to read sound the way other people read text, the specific vocabularies of distress and anger and fear that appeared in voices and environments and spaces before anyone put language to them.
This sound had no immediate category. It was below language. It was a sound that preceded language.
