Valdris was quiet in the way cities are quiet after a storm has passed overhead and decided not to land. Crews on the Iron Line sent steady updates. Warders slept in shifts. By late afternoon the palace had switched from crisis to bookkeeping.
The debrief took twenty minutes in a high chamber with a wall of glass over the city. Tiers of stone roofs. Slow air traffic. A long table already covered in slates and cups that had been reheated too many times.
Marcus didn't sit. "If the Abyssal Kin try a second push, it'll be noise, not another basilisk," he said. "We reinforce the western slope and lay traps in the dry ravines. Patrols double through dawn."
"Storm-Griffon pairs shadow the wardhouse shuttles for forty-eight hours," Ian said. He was holding himself a little too straight, the way men do when something under their armour hurts. "If a drummer so much as twitches, a wing shows up and changes his mind."
