Rekh'Naar caught the chain a hand's width from my chest.
He didn't grab it the way a man grabs a falling weight, bracing and absorbing. He simply put his palm against the moving iron and the iron stopped, all at once, the way a struck bell stops when a hand closes over it — no slow bleed of momentum, just motion and then none, the whole enormous length of chain behind it shuddering once along its visible span and going still. The last few links, close enough now that I could see the old symbols worked into each one, hung trembling less than a foot from where my wrist still burned with a cold that hadn't faded at all.
"Back," Rekh'Naar said, not to me. Dren and Othar had me by both arms before the word finished leaving him, hauling me two full strides clear before I'd decided myself whether to resist it. "Further. All of you. Now, while it's still listening to me instead of him."
"What did it want," I said.
