The Naga's words had barely finished falling when all nine Guards moved at once!
They came from every direction, above and below and to every side, the ring they had formed around the dream closing like a fist. The whale dove. The wolf's three heads howled in three different ages of the same voice, and the spider's glass legs stabbed down through the dark.
Across the ring, the owl's hundred faces turned toward them in perfect unison, and every one of those closed human eyes began, very slowly, to open.
Noah had perhaps half an instant to think.
Nine of them. Each one at the crow's level or higher, and the crow alone had killed him once. Ling at his side, shining with the Quintessential ECG he had just thrown her. The Lent Clause already sitting in her like a coat. His eight Core Capabilities, untested in a real fight, all of them still more promise than proof.
