We watched it work for about an hour before we started down.
I don't know why. There was nothing to learn. It came out of the broken country behind us the way weather comes over a hill, tall enough that I had to find the top of it in stages, and it walked out into the flattened stretch where the stampede had died and it began, patiently, to tidy up.
It picked things up. It turned them over. It set them down in rows.
A hundred creatures that had killed each other over a hole in a wall, and one huge faceless thing going along the line of them like a man clearing a table.
"It has not looked at us once," Ilse said.
"It won't."
"You sound sure."
"I filed four bodies for it in the dark," I said. "I'm staff."
She glanced at me sideways. "That is the stupidest sentence anyone has ever said to me, and I was raised by Drakonirs."
'It's also true.'
It's also true, Wren agreed.
