Mavius jerked awake to the muffled roar of shouting beyond the thin walls of his sleeping quarters. Even through the haze of sleep, he recognized the words being carried through the corridors like a rising storm tide: Enemy! Enemy! The cries were panicked, disordered, layered with the metallic clatter of men scrambling into armor and boots.
The Fingers was no sprawling city with distant districts and roomy avenues, it was a fortress, a cluster of stone and timber crammed into a narrow span of rock. Everything lay close to everything else. The Imperator's chambers were scarcely a bowshot from the inner fortifications, and when thousands of throats screamed danger at once, the stone itself seemed to pulse with it.
No one slept through that.
