Vanehald
In which the world-shield is right where they left it.
It occurs to me that it might turn out to be an advantage that Commander Gorriti ran away before the trouble started. If he’d still been in charge, I suspect he’d have been more of a hindrance than a help.
And this would appear to be, more or less, the end of the subplot about the world-shield – which I’d completely forgotten before I began this re-read, even though it’s Jela’s motivation all the way through. I think it failed to sink in the first time I read these books because, reading them as a prequel, I already knew that the world-shield wasn’t going to be the thing that mattered in the end.