They'd lost the room. A hundred creatures that navigated by the shape of returning sound, dropping into a space where every pulse they threw came back muffled, smeared, wrong. I watched one clip a stone spur it should have cleared by a yard and go tumbling.
Another pulled up short of a wall that wasn't there, and a third simply stopped flying and hit the floor with the sound of a dropped bundle of sticks. The clean falling geometry of the dive came apart into something scrambling and furious and close, and that was fine, because close was where the rest of us lived.
"They're still coming!" Ilse shouted, somewhere off to my right.
"Good!" I shouted back. "Now they have to land!"
And they did.
The first rank hit the frost and skidded, wings scrabbling for purchase they didn't have on ice, and Brunhilde walked into them the way you walk into a wheat field.
