The dispersal compound sat in nineteen sealed drums in a sump four metres under the north freight approach. Wren had put her nose on the same smell eleven weeks earlier, on the flank of a burned deer nobody had thought to keep.
Agricultural herding class, Directorate manufacture, a stencil on every drum carrying a lot number plus a year. Luna copied all nineteen numbers into volume four before anybody touched anything, since a thing destroyed unread is a thing nobody can be charged with.
That compound is what walked forty thousand animals at Orison in the first place.
It does not command a herd, does not frighten it, plus does not know a city from a wheat field. What it says is that the ground behind the column has gone bad, which is a sentence an animal cannot argue with.
