Death shall be my bridge.

Toblakai saying

 

Burning wagons, the bodies of horses, oxen, mules, men,. women and children, pieces of furniture, clothing and other household items lay scattered on the plain south of Hissar, for as far as Duiker could see. Here and there mounds of bodies rose like earthless barrows, where warriors had made a last, desperate stand. There'd been no mercy to the killing, no prisoners taken.

The sergeant stood a few paces in front of the historian, as silent as his men as he took in the scene that was the Vin'til Basin and the battle that would become known for the village less than a league distant, Bat'rol.

Duiker leaned in his saddle and spat. 'The wounded beast had fangs,' he said sourly. Oh, well done, Coltaine! They'll hesitate long before closing with you again. The bodies were Hissari – even children had been flung into the fighting. Black, scorched scars crossed the battlefield as if a god's claws had swept down to join the slaughter. Pieces of burned meat clogged the scars – human or beast, there was no means of telling. Capemoths fluttered like silent madness over the scene. The air stank of sorcery, the clash of warrens had spread greasy ash over everything. The historian felt beyond horror, his heart hardened enough to feel only relief.

Somewhere to the southwest was the Seventh, remnants of loyal Hissari auxiliaries, and the Wickans. And tens of thousands of Malazan refugees, bereft of their belongings . . . but alive. The peril remained. Already, the army of the Apocalypse had begun regrouping – shattered survivors contracting singly and in small groups towards the Meila Oasis where awaited the Sialk reinforcements and latecoming desert tribes. When they renewed the pursuit, they would still vastly outnumber Coltaine's battered army.

One of the sergeant's men returned from his scouting to the west. 'Kamist Reloe lives,' he announced. 'Another High Mage brings a new army from the north. There will be no mistakes next time.'

The words were less reassuring to the others than they would have been a day ago. The sergeant's mouth was a thin slash as he nodded. 'We join the others at Meila, then.'

'Not I,' Duiker growled.

Eyes narrowed on him.

'Not yet,' the historian added, scanning the battlefield. 'My heart tells me I shall find the body of my nephew ... out there.'

'Seek first among the survivors,' one soldier said.

'No. My heart does not feel fear, only certainty. Go on. I shall join you before dusk.' He swung a hard, challenging gaze to the sergeant. 'Go.'

The man gestured mutely.

Duiker watched them stride westward, knowing that should he see them again, it would be from the ranks of the Malazan army. And somehow they would be less than human then. The game the mind must play to unleash destruction. He'd stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave.

The historian rode out into the battlefield, almost desperate to rejoin the army. It was not a time to be alone, in the heart of slaughter, where every piece of wreckage or burnt and torn flesh seemed to cry out silent outrage. Sites of battle held on to a madness, as if the blood that had soaked into the soil remembered pain and terror and held locked within it the echoes of screams and death cries.

There were no looters, naught but flies, capemoths, rhizan and wasps – Hood's myriad sprites, wings fanning and buzzing in the air around him as he rode onward. Half a mile ahead a pair of riders galloped across the south ridge, heading west, their telaban whipping twisted and wild behind them.

They had passed out of his sight by the time Duiker reached the low ridge. Before him the dusty ground was rutted and churned. The column that had departed the battlesite had done so in an orderly fashion, though its width suggested that the train was huge. Nine, ten wagons abreast. Cattle. Spare mounts . . . Queen of Dreams! How can Coltaine hope to defend all this? Two score thousand refugees, perhaps more, all demanding a wall of soldiers protecting their precious selves – even Dassem Ultor would have balked at this.

Far to the east the sky was smeared ruddy brown. Like Hissar, Sialk was aflame. But there had only been a small Marine garrison in that city, a stronghouse and compound down at the harbour, with its own jetty and three patrol craft. With Oponn's luck they'd made good their withdrawal, though in truth Duiker held little hope in that. More likely they would have sought to protect the Malazan citizens – adding their bodies to the slaughter.

It was simple enough to follow the trail Coltaine's army and the refugees had made, southwestward, inland, into the Sialk Odhan. The nearest city in which they might find succour, Caron Tepasi, was sixty leagues distant, with the hostile clans of the Tithan occupying the steppes in between. And Kamist Reloe's Apocalypse in pursuit. Duiker knew he might rejoin the army only to die with them.

Nevertheless, the rebellion might well have been crushed elsewhere. There was a Fist in Caron Tepasi, another in Guran. If either or both had succeeded in extinguishing the uprising in their cities, then a feasible destination was available to Coltaine. Such a journey across the Odhan, however, would take months. While there was plenty of grazing land for the livestock, there were few sources of water, and the dry season had just begun. No, even to contemplate such a journey is beyond desperation. It is madness.

That left ... counterattack. A swift, deadly thrust, retaking Hissar. Or Sialk. A destroyed city offered more opportunity for defence than did steppe land. Moreover, the Malazan fleet could then relieve them – Pormqual might be a fool, but Admiral Nok is anything but. The 7th Army could not be simply abandoned, for without it any hope of quickly ending the rebellion was lost.

For the moment, however, it was clear that Coltaine was leading his column to Dryj Spring, and despite the headstart, Duiker expected to rejoin him well before then. The foremost need for the Malazans now was water. Kamist Reloe would know this as well. He had Coltaine trapped into predictability, a position no commander desired. The fewer choices the Fist possessed, the more dire was the situation.

He rode on. The sun slowly angled westward as he continued following the detritus-strewn trail, its mindless regard making Duiker feel insignificant, his hopes and fears meaningless. The occasional body of a refugee or soldier who had died of wounds lay on the trackside, dumped without ceremony. The sun had swelled their corpses, turning the skin deep red and mottled black. Leaving such unburied bodies in their wake would have been a difficult thing to do. Duiker sensed something of the desperation in that beleaguered force.

An hour before dusk a dust cloud appeared a half-league inland. Tithan horsewarriors, the historian guessed, riding hard towards Dryj Spring. There would be no peace for Coltaine and his people. Lightning raids on horseback would harry the encampment's pickets; sudden drives to peel away livestock, flaming arrows sent into the refugee wagons ... a night of unceasing terror.

He watched the Tithansi slowly pull ahead, and contemplated forcing his weary mount into a canter. The tribal riders no doubt led spare mounts, however, and the historian would have to kill his horse in the effort to reach Coltaine before them. And then he could do naught but warn of the inevitable. Besides, Coltaine must know what's coming. He knows, because he once rode as a renegade chieftain, once harried a retreating Imperial army across the Wickan plains.

He continued on at a steady trot, thinking about the challenge of the night ahead: the ride through enemy lines, the unheralded approach to the Seventh's nerve-frayed pickets. The more he thought on it, the less likely seemed his chances of surviving to see the dawn.

The red sky darkened with that desert suddenness, suffusing the air with the colour of drying blood. Moments before he lost the last of the light, Duiker chanced to glance behind him. He saw a grainy cloud, visibly expanding as it swept southward. It seemed to glitter with a hundred thousand pale reflections, as if a wind was flipping the underside of birch leaves at the edge of a vast forest. Capemoths, surely in their millions, leaving Hissar behind, flying to the scent of blood.

He told himself that it was a mindless hunger that drove them. He told himself that the blots, stains and smudges in that billowing, sky-filling cloud were only by chance finding the shape of a face. Hood, after all, had no need to manifest his presence. Nor was he known as a melodramatic god – the Lord of Death was reputed to be, if anything, ironically modest. Duiker's imaginings were the product of fear, the all too human need to conjure symbolic meaning from meaningless events. Nothing more.

Duiker kicked his horse into a canter, eyes fixed once more on the growing darkness ahead.

 

From the crest of the low rise, Felisin watched the seething floor of the basin. It was as if insanity's grip had swept out, from the cities, from the minds of men and women, to stain the natural world. With the approach of dusk, as she and her two companions prepared to break camp for the night's walk, the basin's sand had begun to shiver like the patter of rain on a lake. Beetles began emerging, each black and as large as Baudin's thumb, crawling in a glittering tide that soon filled the entire sweep of desert before them. In their thousands, then hundreds of thousands, yet moving as one, with a singular purpose. Heboric, ever the scholar, had gone off to determine their destination. She had watched him skirt the far edge of the insect army, then vanish beyond the next ridge.

Twenty minutes had passed since then.

Crouching beside her was Baudin, his forearms resting on the large backpack, squinting to pierce the deepening gloom. She sensed his growing unease but had decided that she would not be the one to give voice to their shared concern. There were times when she wondered at Heboric's grasp of what mattered over what didn't. She wondered if the old man was, in fact, a liability.

The swelling had ebbed, enough so that she could see and hear, but a deeper pain remained, as if the bloodily larvae had left something behind under her flesh, a rot that did more than disfigure her appearance, but laid a stain on her soul as well. There was a poison lodged within her. Her sleep was filled with visions of blood, unceasing, a crimson river that carried her like flotsam from sunrise to sunset. Six days since their escape from Skullcup, and a part of her looked forward to the next sleep.

Baudin grunted.

Heboric reappeared, jogging steadily along the basin's edge towards their position. Squat, hunched, he was like an ogre shambling out from a child's bedtime story. Blunt knobs where his hands should be, about to be raised to reveal fang-studded mouths. Tales to frighten children. I could write those. I need no imagination, only what I see all around me. Heboric, my boar-tattooed ogre. Baudin, red-scarred where one ear used to be, the hair growing tangled and bestial from the puckered skin. A pair to strike terror, these two.

The old man reached them, kneeling to sling his arms through his backpack. 'Extraordinary,' he mumbled.

Baudin grunted again. 'But can we get around them? I ain't wading through, Heboric'

'Oh, aye, easily enough. They're just migrating to the next basin.'

Felisin snorted. 'And you find that extraordinary?'

'I do,' he said, waiting as Baudin tightened the pack's straps. 'Tomorrow night they'll march to the next patch of deep sand. Understand? Like us they're heading west, and like us they'll reach the sea.'

'And then?' Baudin asked. 'Swim?'

'I have no idea. More likely they'll turn around and march east, to the other coast.'

Baudin strapped on his own pack and stood. 'Like a bug crawling the rim of a goblet,' he said.

Felisin gave him a quick glance, remembering her last evening with Beneth. The man had been sitting at his table in Bula's, watching flies circle the rim of his mug. It was one of the few memories that she could conjure up. Beneth, my lover, the Fly King circling Skullcup. Baudin left him to rot, that's why he won't meet my eye. Thugs never lie well. He'll pay for that, one day.

'Follow me,' Heboric said, setting off, his feet sinking into the sand so that it seemed he walked on stumps to match those at the end of his arms. He always started out fresh, displaying an energy that struck Felisin as deliberate, as if he sought to refute that he was old, that he was the weakest among them. The last third of the night he would be seven or eight hundred paces behind them, head ducked, legs dragging, weaving with the weight of the pack that nearly dwarfed him.

Baudin seemed to have a map in his head. Their source of information had been precise and accurate. Even though the desert seemed lifeless, a barrier of wasting deadliness, water could be found. Spring-fed pools in rock outcroppings, sinks of mud surrounded by the tracks of animals they never saw, where one could dig down an arm-span, sometimes less, and find the life-giving water.

They had carried enough food for twelve days, two more than was necessary for the journey to the coast. It was not a large margin but it would have to suffice. For all that, however, they were weakening. Each night, they managed less distance in the hours between the sun's setting and its rise. Months at Skullcup, working the airless reaches, had diminished some essential reserve within them.

That knowledge was plain, though unspoken. Time now stalked them, Hood's most patient servant, and with each night they fell back farther, closer to that place where the will to live surrendered to a profound peace. There's a sweet promise to giving up, hut realizing that demands a journey. One of spirit. You can't walk to Hood's Gate, you find it before you when the fog clears.

'Your thoughts, lass?' Heboric asked. They had crossed two ridge lines, arriving on a withered pan. The stars were spikes of iron overhead, the moon yet to rise.

'We live in a cloud,' she replied. 'All our lives.'

Baudin grunted. 'That's durhang talking.'

'Never knew you were so droll,' Heboric said to the man.

Baudin fell silent. Felisin grinned to herself. The thug would say little for the rest of the night. He did not take well being mocked. I must remember that, for when he next needs cutting down.

'My apologies, Baudin,' Heboric said after a moment. 'I was irritated by what Felisin said and took it out on you. More, I appreciated the joke, no matter that it was unintended.'

'Give it up,' Felisin sighed. 'A mule comes out of a sulk eventually, but it's nothing you can force.'

'So,' Heboric said, 'while the swelling's left your tongue, its poison remains.'

She flinched. If you only knew the full truth of that.

Rhizan flitted over the cracked surface of the pan, their only company now that they'd left the mindless beetles behind. They had seen no-one since crossing Sinker Lake the night of the Dosii mutiny. Rather than loud alarms and frenetic pursuit, their escape had effected nothing. For Felisin, it made the drama of that night now seem somehow pathetic. For all their self-importance, they were but grains of sand in a storm vaster than anything they could comprehend. The thought pleased her.

Nevertheless, there was cause for worry. If the uprising had spread to the mainland, they might arrive at the coast only to die waiting for a boat that would never come.

They reached a low serrated ridge of rock outcroppings, silver in the starlight and looking like the vertebrae of an immense serpent. Beyond it stretched a wavelike expanse of sand. Something rose from the dunes fifty or so paces ahead, angled like a toppled tree or marble column, though, as they came nearer, they could see that it was blunted, crooked.

A vague wind rustled on the sands, twisting as if in the wake of a spider-bitten dancer. Gusts of sand caressed their shins as they strode on. The bent pillar, or whatever it was, was proving farther away than Felisin had first thought. As a new sense of scale formed in her mind, her breath hissed between her teeth.

'Aye,' Heboric whispered in reply.

Not fifty paces away. More like five hundred. The wind-blurred surface had deceived them. The basin was not a flat sweep of land, but a vast, gradual descent, rising again around the object – a wave of dizziness followed the realization.

The scythe of the moon had risen above the southern horizon by the time they reached the monolith. By unspoken agreement, Baudin and Heboric dropped their packs, the thug sitting down and leaning against his, already dismissive of the silent edifice towering over them.

Heboric removed the lantern and the firebox from his pack. He blew on the hoarded coals, then set alight a taper, which he used to light the lantern's thick wick. Felisin made no effort to help, watching with fascination as he managed the task with a deftness belying the apparent awkwardness of the scarred stumps of his wrists.

Slinging one forearm under the lantern's handle, he rose and approached the dark monolith.

Fifty men, hands linked, could not encircle the base. The bend occurred seven or eight man-lengths up, at about three-fifths of the total length. The stone looked both creased and polished, dark grey under the colourless light of the moon.

The glow of the lantern revealed the stone to be green, as Heboric arrived to stand before it. She watched his head tilt back as he scanned upward. Then he stepped forward and pressed a stump against the surface. A moment later he stepped back.

Water sloshed beside her as Baudin drank from a waterskin. She reached out and, after a moment, he passed it to her. Sand whispered as Heboric returned. The ex-priest squatted.

Felisin offered him the bladder. He shook his head, his toadlike face twisted into a troubled frown.

'Is this the biggest pillar you've seen, Heboric?' Felisin asked. 'There's a column in Aren ... or so I've heard ... that's as high as twenty men, and carved in a spiral from top to bottom. Beneth described it to me once.'

'Seen it,' Baudin grumbled. 'Not as wide, but maybe higher. What's this one made of, Priest?'

'Jade.'

Baudin grunted phlegmatically, but Felisin saw his eyes widen slightly. 'Well, I've seen taller. I've seen wider—'

'Shut up, Baudin,' Heboric snapped, wrapping his arms around himself. He glared up at the man from under the ridge of his brows. 'That's not a column over there,' he rasped. 'It's a finger.'

 

Dawn stole into the sky, spreading shadows on the landscape. The details of that carved jade finger were slowly prised from the gloom. Swells and folds of skin, the whorls of the pad, all became visible. So too did a ridge in the sand directly beneath it – another finger.

Fingers, to hand. Hand to arm, arm to body . . . For all the logic of that progression, it was impossible, Felisin thought. No such thing could be fashioned, no such thing could stand or stay in one piece. A hand, but no arm, no body.

Heboric said nothing, wrapped around himself, motionless as the night's darkness faded. He held the wrist that had touched the edifice tucked under him, as if the memory of that contact brought pain. Staring at him in the growing light, Felisin was struck anew by his tattoos. They seemed to have deepened somehow, become sharper.

Baudin finally rose and began pitching the two small tents, close to the base of the finger, where the shadows would hold longest. He ignored the towering monolith as if it was nothing more than the bole of a tree, and set about driving deep into the sand the long, thin spikes through the first tent's brass-hooped corners.

An orange tint suffused the air as the sun climbed higher. Although Felisin had seen that colour of sky before on the island, it had never before been so saturated. She could almost taste it, bitter as iron.

As Baudin began on the second tent, Heboric finally roused himself, his head lifting as he sniffed the air, then squinted upward. 'Hood's breath!' he growled. 'Hasn't there been enough?'

'What is it?' Felisin demanded. 'What's wrong?'

'There's been a storm,' the ex-priest said. 'That's Otataral dust.'

At the tents, Baudin paused. He ran a hand across one shoulder, then frowned at his palm. 'It's settling,' he said.

'We'd best get under cover—'

Felisin snorted. 'As if that will do any good! We've mined the stuff, in case you've forgotten. Whatever effect it's had on us, it's happened long ago.'

'Back at Skullcup we could wash ourselves at day's end,' Heboric said, slinging an arm through the food pack's strap and dragging it towards the tents.

She saw that he still held his other stump – the one that had touched the edifice – tight against his midriff.

'And you think that made a difference?' she asked. 'If that's true, why did every mage who worked there die or go mad? You're not thinking clearly, Heboric—'

'Sit there, then,' the old man snapped, ducking under the first tent's flap and pulling the pack in after him.

Felisin glanced at Baudin. The thug shrugged, resumed readying the second tent, without evident haste.

She sighed. She was exhausted, yet not sleepy. If she took to the tent, she would in all likelihood simply lie there, eyes open and studying the weave of the canvas above her face.

'Best get inside,' Baudin said.

'I'm not sleepy.'

He stepped close, the motion fluid like a cat's. 'I don't give a damn if you're sleepy or not. Sitting out under the sun will dry you out, meaning you'll drink more water, meaning less for us, meaning get in this damned tent, lass, before I lay a hand to your backside.'

'If Beneth was here you wouldn't—'

'The bastard's dead!' he snarled. 'And Hood take his rotten soul to the deepest pit!'

She sneered. 'Brave now – you wouldn't have dared stand up against him.'

He studied her as he would a bloodfly caught in a web. 'Maybe I did,' he said, a sly grin showing a moment before he turned away.

Suddenly cold, Felisin watched the thug stride over to the other tent, crouch down and crawl inside. I'm not fooled, Baudin. You were a mongrel skulking in alleys, and all that's changed is that you've left the alleys behind. You'd squirm in the sand at Beneth's feet, if he were here. She waited another minute in defiance before entering her own tent.

Unfurling her bedroll, she lay down. Her eagerness to sleep was preventing her from doing so. She stared up at the dark imperfections in the canvas weave, wishing she had some durhang or a jug of wine. The crimson river of her dreams had become an embrace, protective and welcoming. She conjured from memory an echo of the image, and all the feelings that went with it. The river flowed with purpose, ordered and in-exorable; when in its warm currents, she felt close to understanding that purpose. She knew she would discover it soon, and with that knowledge her world would change, become so much more than it was now. Not just a girl, plump and out of shape and used up, the vision of her future reduced to days when it should be measured in decades – a girl who could call herself young only with sneering irony. For all that the dream promised her, there was a value in self-contempt, a counterpoint between her waking and sleeping hours, what was and what could be. A tension between what was real and what was imagined, or so Heboric would put it from his acid-pocked critical eye. The scholar of human nature held it in low opinion. He would deride her notions of destiny, and her belief that the dream offered something palpable would give him cause to voice his contempt. Not that he's needed cause. I hate myself, but he hates everyone else. Which of us has lost the most?

 

She awoke groggy, her mouth parched and tasting of rust. The air was grainy, a dim grey light seeping through the canvas. She heard sounds of packing outside, a short murmur from Heboric, Baudin's answering grunt. Felisin closed her eyes, trying to recapture the steady, flowing river that had carried her through her sleep, but it was gone.

She sat up, wincing as every joint protested. The others experienced the same, she knew. A nutritional deficiency, Heboric guessed, though he did not know what it might be. They had dried fruit, strips of smoked mule and some kind of Dosii bread, brick-hard and dark.

Muscles aching, she crawled from the tent into the chill morning air. The two men sat eating, the packets of rations laid out before them. There was little left, with the exception of the bread, which was salty and tended to make them desperately thirsty. Heboric had tried to insist that they eat the bread first – over the first few days – while they were still strong, not yet dehydrated, but neither she nor Baudin had listened, and for some reason he abandoned the idea with the next meal. Felisin had mocked him for that, she recalled. Unwilling to follow your own advice, eh, old man? Yet the advice had been good. They would reach the salt-laden, deathly coast with naught but even saltier bread to eat, and little water to assuage their thirst.

Maybe we didn't listen because none of us believed we would ever reach the coast. Maybe Heboric decided the same after that first meal. Only I wasn't thinking that far ahead, was I? No wise acceptance of the futility of all this. I mocked and ignored the advice out of spite, nothing more. As for Baudin, well, rare was the criminal with brains, and he wasn't at all rare.

She joined the breakfast, ignoring their looks as she took an extra mouthful of lukewarm water from the bladder when washing down the smoked meat.

When she was done, Baudin repacked the food.

Heboric sighed. 'What a threesome we are!' he said.

'You mean our dislike of each other?' Felisin asked, raising a brow. 'You shouldn't be surprised, old man,' she continued. 'In case you haven't noticed, we're all broken in some way. Aren't we? The gods know you've pointed out my fall from grace often enough. And Baudin's nothing more than a murderer – he's dispensed with all notions of brotherhood, and is a bully besides, meaning he's a coward at heart...' She glanced over to see him crouched at the packs, flatly eyeing her. Felisin gave him a sweet smile. 'Right, Baudin?'

The man said nothing, the hint of a frown in his expression as he studied her.

Felisin returned her attention to Heboric. 'Your flaws are obvious enough – hardly worth mentioning—'

'Save your breath, lass,' the ex-priest muttered. 'I don't need no fifteen-year-old girl telling me my failings.'

'Why did you leave the priesthood, Heboric? Skimmed the coffers, I suppose. So they cut your hands off, then tossed you onto the rubbish heap behind the temple. That's certainly enough to make anyone take up writing history as a profession.'

'Time to go,' Baudin said.

'But he hasn't answered my question—'

'I'd say he has, girl. Now shut up. Today you carry the other pack, not the old man.'

'A reasonable suggestion, but no thanks.'

Face darkening, Baudin rose.

'Leave it be,' Heboric said, moving to sling the straps through his arms. In the gloom Felisin saw the stump that had touched the jade finger for the first time. It was swollen and red, the puckered skin stretched. Tattoos crowded the end of the wrist, turning it nearly solid dark. She realized then that the etchings had deepened everywhere on him, grown riotous like vines.

'What's happened to you?'

He glanced over. 'I wish I knew.'

'You burned your wrist on that statue.'

'Not burned,' the old man said. 'Hurts like Hood's own kiss, though. Can magic thrive buried in Otataral sand? Can Otataral give birth to magic? I've no answers, lass, for any of this.'

'Well,' she muttered, 'it was a stupid thing to do – touching the damned thing. Serves you right.'

Baudin started off without comment. Ignoring Heboric, Felisin fell in behind the thug. 'Is there a waterhole ahead this night?' she asked.

The big man grunted. 'Should've asked that before you took more than your ration.'

'Well, I didn't. So, is there?'

'We lost half a night yesterday.'

'Meaning?'

'Meaning no water until tomorrow night.' He looked back at her as he walked. 'You'll wish you'd saved that mouthful.'

She made no reply. She had no intention of being honourable when the time came for her next drink. Honour's for fools. Honour's a fatal flaw. I'm not going to die on a point of honour, Baudin. Heboric's probably dying anyway. It'd be wasted on him.

The ex-priest trudged in her wake, the sound of his footfalls dimming as he fell farther back as the hours passed. In the end, she concluded, it would be she and Baudin, just the two of them, standing facing the sea at the western edge of this Queen-forsaken island. The weak always fall to the wayside. It was the first law of Skullcup; indeed, it was the first lesson she'd learned – in the streets of Unta on the march to the slaveships.

Back then, in her naivety, she'd looked upon Baudin's murder of Lady Gaesen as an act of reprehensible horror. If he were to do the same today – putting Heboric out of his misery – she would not even blink. A long journey, this one. Where will it end? She thought of the river of blood, and the thought warmed her.

 

True to Baudin's prediction, there was no waterhole to mark the end of the night's journey. The man selected as a campsite a sandy bed surrounded by wind-sculpted projections of limestone. Bleached human bones littered the bed, but Baudin simply tossed them aside when laying out the tents.

Felisin sat down with her back to rock and watched for Heboric's eventual appearance at the far end of the flat plain they had just crossed. He had never lagged behind this distance before – the plain was over a third of a league across – and as the dawn's blush lightened the skyline before her, she began to wonder if his lifeless body wasn't lying out there somewhere.

Baudin crouched beside her. 'I told you to carry the food pack,' he said, squinting eastward.

Not out of sympathy for the old man, then. 'You'll just have to go find it, won't you?'

Baudin straightened. Flies buzzed around him in the still-cool air as he stared eastward for a long moment.

She watched him set off, softly gasping as he loped into a steady jog once clear of the rocks. For the first time she became truly frightened of Baudin. He's been hoarding food –he has a hidden skin of water – there's no other way he could still have such reserves. She scrambled to her feet and rushed over to the other pack.

The tents had been raised, the bedrolls set out within them. The pack sat in a deflated heap close by. Left in it was a wrapped pouch that she recognized as containing their first-aid supplies, a battered flint and tinder box that she'd not seen before – Baudin's own – and, beneath a flap sewn along one edge at the bottom of the pack, a small, flat packet of deer hide.

No skin of water, no hidden pockets of food. Unaccountably, her fear of the man deepened.

Felisin sat down in the soft sand beside the pack. After a moment she reached to the hide packet, loosened its drawstrings and unfolded it to reveal a set of fine thief's tools – an assortment of picks, minute saws and files, knobs of wax, a small sack of finely ground flour, and two dismantled stilettos, the needlelike blades deeply blued and exuding a bitter, caustic smell, the bone hafts polished and dark-stained, the small hilts in pieces that hinged together to form an X-shaped guard, and holed and weighted pommels of iron wrapped around lead cores. Throwing weapons. An assassin's weapons. The last item in the packet was tucked into a leather loop: the talon of some large cat, amber-coloured and smooth. She wondered if it held poison, painted invisibly on its surface. The item was ominous in its mystery.

Felisin rewrapped the packet, returning it and everything else to the pack. She heard heavy footsteps approach from the east and straightened.

Baudin appeared from between the limestone projections, the pack on his shoulders and Heboric in his arms.

The thug was not even out of breath.

'He needs water,' Baudin said as he strode into the camp and laid the unconscious man down on the soft sand. 'In this pack, lass, quickly—'

Felisin did not move. 'Why? We need it more, Baudin.'

The man paused for a heartbeat, then slipped his arms free of the pack and dragged it around. 'Would you want him saying the same, if you were the one lying here? Soon as we get off this island, we can go our separate ways. But for now, we need each other, girl.'

'He's dying. Admit it.'

'We're all dying.' He unstoppered the bladder and eased it between Heboric's cracked lips. 'Drink, old man. Swallow it down.'

'Those are your rations you're giving him,' Felisin said. 'Not mine.'

'Well,' he said with a cold grin, 'no-one would think you anything but noble-born. Mind you, opening your legs for anyone and everyone back in Skullcup was proof enough, I suppose.'

'It kept us all alive, you bastard.'

'Kept you plump and lazy, you mean. Most of what me and Heboric ate came from the favours I did for the Dosii guards. Beneth gave us dregs to keep you sweet. He knew we wouldn't tell you about it. He used to laugh at your noble cause.'

'You're lying.'

'As you say,' he said, still grinning.

Heboric coughed, his eyes opening. He blinked in the dawn's light.

'You should see yourself,' Baudin said to him. 'From five feet away you're one solid tattoo – as dark as a Dal Honese warlock. Up this close and I can see every line – every hair of the Boar's fur. It's covered your stump, too, not the one that's swollen but the other one. Here, drink some more—'

'Bastard!' Felisin snapped. She watched as the last of their water trickled into the old man's mouth. He left Beneth to die. Now he's trying to poison the memory of him, too. It won't work. I did what I did to keep them both alive, and they hate that fact – both of them. It eats them inside, the guilt for the price I paid. And that's what Baudin's now trying to deny. He's cutting his conscience loose, so when he slips one of those knives into me he won't feel a thing. ]ust another dead noble-born. Another Lady Gaesen.

She spoke loudly, meeting Heboric's eyes. 'I dream a river of blood every night. I ride it. And you're both there, at first, but only at first, because you both drown in that river. Believe anything you like. I'm the one who's going to live through this. Me. Just me.'

She left the two men to stare at her back as she walked to her tent.

 

The next night, they found the spring an hour before the moon rose. It revealed itself at the base of a stone depression, fed from below by some unseen fissure. The surface appeared to be grey mud. Baudin went down to its edge, but made no move to scoop out a hole and drink the water that would seep into it. After a moment, her head spinning with weakness, Felisin dropped the food pack from her shoulders and stumbled down to kneel beside him.

The grey was faintly phosphorescent and consisted of drowned capemoths, their wings spread out and overlapping to cover the entire surface. Felisin reached to push the floating carpet aside but Baudin's hand snapped out, closing on her wrist.

'It's fouled,' he said. 'Full of capemoth larvae, feeding off the bodies of their parents.'

Hood's breath, not more larvae. 'Strain the water through a cloth,' Felisin said.

He shook his head. 'The larvae piss poison, fill the water with it. Eliminates any competition. It'll be a month before the water's drinkable.'

'We need it, Baudin.'

'It'll kill you.'

She stared down at the grey sludge, her desire desperate, an agonized fire in her throat, in her mind. This can't be. We'll die without this.

Baudin turned away. Heboric had arrived, weaving as he staggered down the bedrock slope. His skin was black as the night, yet shimmering silver as the etched highlights of the boar hair reflected the stars overhead. Whatever infection had seized the stump of his right wrist had begun to fade, leaving a suppurating, crackled network of split skin. It exuded a strange smell of powdered stone.

He was an apparition, and in answer to his nightmarish appearance Felisin laughed, on the edge of hysteria. 'Remember the Round, Heboric? In Unta? Hood's acolyte, the priest covered in flies ... who was naught but flies. He had a message for you. And now, what do I see? Staggering into view, a man aswarm – not in flies but in tattoos. Different gods, but the same message, that's what I see. Let Fener speak through those peeling lips, old man. Will your god's words echo Hood's? Is the world truly a collection of balances, the infinite tottering to and fro of fates and destinies? Boar of Summer, Tusked Sower of War, what do you say?'

The old man stared at her. His mouth opened, but no words came forth.

'What was that?' Felisin cupped an ear. 'The buzzing of wings? Surely not!'

'Fool,' Baudin muttered. 'Let's find a place to camp. Not here.'

'Ill omens, murderer? I never knew they meant anything to you.'

'Save your breath, girl,' Baudin said, facing the stone slope.

'Makes no difference,' she replied. 'Not now. We're still dancing in the corner of a god's eye, but it's only for show. We're dead, for all our twitching about. What's Hood's symbol in Seven Cities? They call him the Hooded One here, don't they? Out with it, Baudin, what's carved on the Lord of Death's temple in Aren?'

'I'd guess you already know,' Baudin said.

'Capemoths, the harbingers, the eaters of rotting flesh. It's the nectar of decay for them, the rose bloating under the sun. Hood delivered us a promise in the Round at Unta, and it's just been fulfilled.'

Baudin climbed to the rim of the depression, her words following him up. Orange-tinged by the rising sun, he turned and looked down on her. 'So much for your river of blood,' he said in a low, amused voice.

Dizziness washed through her. Her legs buckled and she abruptly sat down, jarring her tailbone on the hard bedrock. She glanced over to see Heboric lying huddled an arm-span away. The soles of his moccasins had worn through, revealing ravaged, glistening flesh. Was he already dead? As good as. 'Do something, Baudin.'

He said nothing.

'How far to the coast?' she asked.

'Doubt it would matter,' he replied after a moment. 'The boat was to have patrolled for three or so nights, no longer. We're at least four days from the coast and getting weaker by the hour.'

'And the next water?'

'About seven hours' walk. More like fourteen, the shape we're in.'

'You seemed spry enough last night!' she snapped. 'Running off to collect Heboric. You don't seem as parched as us, either—'

'I drink my own piss.'

'You what?'

He grunted. 'You heard me.'

'Not a good enough answer,' she decided after thinking a moment. 'And don't tell me you're eating your own shit, too. It still wouldn't explain things. Have you made a pact with some god, Baudin?'

'You think doing something like that's a simple task? Hey, Queen of Dreams, save me and I'll serve you. Tell me, how many of your prayers have been answered? Besides, I ain't got faith in anything but me.'

'So you haven't given up yet?'

She thought he wouldn't answer, but after a long minute in which she'd begun to sink into herself, he startled her awake with a blunt 'No.'

He removed his pack, then skidded back down the slope. Something in the able economy of his movements filled her with sudden dread. Calls me plump, eyes me like a piece of flesh – not to use like Beneth did, but more as if he's eyeing his next meal. Heart hammering, she watched for the first move, a hungry flash in his small, bestial eyes.

Instead he crouched down beside Heboric, pulling the unconscious man onto his back. He leaned close to listen for breath, then sat back, sighing.

'He's dead?' Felisin asked. 'You do the skinning – I won't eat tattooed skin no matter how hungry I am.'

Baudin glanced at her momentarily, but said nothing, returning to his examination of the ex-priest.

'Tell me what you're doing,' she finally said.

'He lives, and that alone may save us.' He paused. 'How far you fall, girl, matters nothing to me. Just keep your thoughts to yourself.'

She watched him peel Heboric's rotting clothing away, revealing the astonishing weave of tattooing beneath. Baudin then moved to keep his own shadow behind him before bending close to study the dark patterning on the ex-priest's chest. He was looking for something.

'A raised nape,' she said dully, 'the ends pulled down and almost touching, almost a circle. It surrounds a pair of tusks.'

He stared, eyes narrowing.

'Fener's own mark, the one that's sacred,' she said. 'It's what you're looking for, isn't it? He's excommunicated, yet Fener remains within him. That much is obvious by those living tattoos.'

'And the mark?' he asked coolly. 'How did you come to know such things?'

'A lie I spun for Beneth,' she explained as the man resumed his examination of the ex-priest's crowded flesh. 'I needed Heboric to support it. I needed details of the cult. He told me. You mean to call on the god.'

'Found it,' he said.

'Now what? How do you reach another man's god, Baudin? There's no keyhole in that mark, no sacred lock you can pick.'

He jerked at that, his eyes glittering as they bore into her own.

She didn't blink, revealed nothing.

'How do you think he lost his hands?' Felisin asked innocently.

'He was a thief, once.'

'He was. But it was the excommunication that took them. There was a key, you see. The High Priest's warren to his god. Tattooed on the palm of his right hand. Held to the sacred mark – hand to chest, basically – as simple as a salute. I spent days healing from Beneth's beating, and Heboric talked. Told me so many things – I should have forgotten all of it, you know. Drinking durhang tea by the gallon, but that brew just dissolved the surface, that filter that says what's important, what isn't. His words poured in unobstructed, and stayed. You can't do it, Baudin.'

He raised Heboric's right forearm, studied the glistening, flushed stump in the growing light.

'You can never go back,' she said. 'The priesthood made sure of that. He isn't what he was, and that's that.'

With a silent snarl Baudin pulled the forearm around to push the stump against the sacred mark.

The air screamed. The sound battered them, flung them both down to scrabble, claw, mindlessly dig into the rock – away . . . away from the pain. Away! There was such agony in that shriek, it descended like fire, darkening the sky overhead, spreading hairline fissures through the bedrock, the cracks spreading outward from under Heboric's motionless body.

Blood streaming from her ears, Felisin tried to crawl away, up the trembling slope. The fissures – Heboric's tattoos had blossomed out from his body, leapt the unfathomable distance from skin to stone – swept under her, turning the rock into something slick and greasy under her palms.

Everything had begun to shake. Even the sky seemed to twist, yanked down into itself as if a score of invisible hands had reached through unseen portals, grasping the fabric of the world with cold, destructive rage.

The scream was unending. Rage and unbearable pain meshed together like twin strands in an ever-tightening rope. Closing in a noose around her neck, the sound blocked the outside world – its air, its light.

Something struck the ground, the bedrock under her shuddering, throwing her upward. She came back down hard on one elbow. The bones of her arm shivered like the blade of a sword. The glare of the sun dimmed as Felisin fought for air. Her wide eyes caught a glimpse of something beyond the basin, lifting ponderously from the plain in a heaving cloud of dust. Two-toed, a fur-snarled hoof, too large for her to fully grasp, rising up, pulled skyward into a midnight gloom.

The tattoo had leapt from stone to the air itself, a woadstained web growing in crazed, jerking blots, snapping outward in all directions.

She could not breathe. Her lungs burned. She was dying, sucked airless into the void that was a god's scream.

Sudden silence, out beyond the ringing echoes in her skull. Air flooded her, cold and bitter, yet sweeter than anything she had known. Coughing, spitting bile, Felisin pushed herself onto her hands and knees, shakily raised her head.

The hoof was gone. The tattoo hung like an after-image across the entire sky, slowly fading as she watched. Movement pulled her gaze down, to Baudin. He'd been on his knees, hands cupping the sides of his head. He now slowly straightened, tears of blood filling the lines of his face.

The ground under her feeling strangely fluid, Felisin tottered to her feet. She looked down, blinking dumbly at the mosaic of limestone. The swirling furred patterns of the tattoo still trembled, rippling outward from her moccasins as she struggled for balance. The cracks, the tattoos . . . they go down, and down, all the way down. As if I'm standing atop a bed of league-deep nails, each nail kept upright only by the others surrounding it. Have you come from the Abyss, Fener? It's said your sacred warren borders Chaos itself. Fener? Are you among us now? She turned to meet Baudin's eyes. They were dull with shock, though she could detect the first glimmers of fear burning through.

'We wanted the god's attention,' she said. 'Not the god himself.' A trembling seized her. She wrapped her arms around herself, forcing more words forth. 'And he didn't want to come!'

His flinch was momentary, then he rolled his shoulders in something that might have been a shrug. 'He's gone now, ain't he?'

'Are you sure of that?'

He shook off the need to answer, looking instead at Heboric. After a moment's study, he said, 'He breathes steadier now. Nor so wrinkled and parched. Something's happened to him.'

She sneered. 'The reward for missing getting stomped on by a hair's breadth.'

Baudin grunted, his attention suddenly elsewhere.

She followed his gaze. The pool of water was gone, drained away until only a carpet of capemoth corpses remained. Felisin barked a laugh. 'Some salvation we've had here.'

Heboric slowly curled himself into a ball. 'He's here,' he whispered.

'We know,' Baudin said.

'In the mortal realm...' the ex-priest continued after a moment. 'Vulnerable.'

'You're looking at it the wrong way,' Felisin said. 'The god you no longer worship took your hands. So now you pulled him down. Don't mess with mortals.'

Either her cold tone or brutal words in some way steeled through Heboric. He uncurled, raised his head, then sat up. His gaze found Felisin. 'Out of the mouth of babes,' he said with a grin that knew nothing of humour.

'So he's here,' Baudin said, looking around. 'How can a god hide?'

Heboric rose to his feet. 'I'd give what's left of an arm to study a field of the Deck right now. Imagine the maelstrom among the Ascendants. This is not a fly-specked visitation, not a pluck and strum on the strands of power.' He lifted his arms, frowning down at the stumps. 'It's been years, but the ghosts are back.'

Watching Baudin's confusion was a struggle in itself. 'Ghosts?'

'The hands that aren't there,' Heboric explained. 'Echoes. Enough to drive a man mad.' He shook himself, squinted sunward. 'I feel better.'

'You look it,' Baudin said.

The heat was building. In an hour it would soar.

Felisin scowled. 'Healed by the god he rejected. It doesn't matter. If we stay in our tents today we'll be too weak to do anything come dusk. We have to walk now. To the next water-hole. If we don't we're dead.' But I'll outlive you, Baudin. Enough to drive the dagger home.

Baudin shouldered his pack. Grinning, Heboric slung his arms through the straps of the pack she'd been carrying. He rose easily, though taking a step to catch his balance once he straightened.

Baudin led the way. Felisin fell in behind him. A god stalks the mortal realm, )yet is afraid. He has power unimaginable, yet he hides. And somehow Heboric had found the strength to withstand all that had happened. And the fact that he's responsible. This should have broken him, shattered his soul. Instead, he bends. Could his wall of cynicism withstand such a siege for long? What did he do to lose his hands?

She had her own inner turmoil to manage. Her thoughts plundered every chamber in her mind. She still envisaged murder, yet felt a vaguely mocking wave of comradeship for her two companions. She wanted to run from them, sensing that their presence was a vortex tugging her into madness and death, yet she knew that she was also dependent on them.

Heboric spoke behind her. 'We'll make it to the coast. I smell water. Close. To the coast, and when we get there, Felisin, you will find that nothing has changed. Nothing at all. Do you grasp my meaning?'

She sensed a thousand meanings to his words, yet understood none of them.

Up ahead, Baudin gave a shout of surprise.

 

Mappo Trell's thoughts travelled westward almost eight hundred leagues, to a dusk not unlike this one but two centuries past. He saw himself crossing a plain of chest-high grass, but the grass had been plastered down, laden with what looked like grease, and as he walked the very earth beneath his hide boots shifted and shied. He'd known centuries already, wedded to war in what had become an ever-repeating cycle of raids, feuding and bloody sacrifices before the god of honour. Youth's game, and he'd long grown weary of it. Yet he'd stayed, nailed to a single tree but only because he'd grown used to the scenery around it. It was amazing what could be endured when in the grip of inertia. He had reached a point where anything strange, unfamiliar, was cause for fear. But unlike his brothers and sisters, Mappo could not ride that fear across the full span of his life. For all that, it had taken the horror he now approached to prise him from the tree.

He had been young when he walked out of the trader town that was his home. He was caught – like so many of his age back then – in a fevered backlash, rejecting the rotting immobility of the Trell towns and the elder warriors who'd become merchants trading in bhederin, goats and sheep, and now relived their fighting paths in the countless taverns and bars. He embraced the wandering ways of old, willingly suffered initiation into one of the back-land clans that had retained the traditional lifestyle.

The chains of his convictions held for hundreds of years, snapped at last in a way he could never have foreseen.

His memories remained sharp, and in his mind he once again strode across the plain. The ruins of the trader town where he'd been born were now visible. A month had passed since its destruction. The bodies of the fifteen thousand slain – those that had not burned in the raging fires – had long since been picked clean by the plain's scavengers. He was returning home to bleached bone, fragments of cloth and heat-shattered brick.

The ancient shoulder-women of his adopted clan had divined the tale from the flat bones they burned, as the Nameless Ones had predicted months earlier. While the Trell of the towns had become strangers to them all, they were kin. The task that remained was not, however, one of vengeance. This pronouncement silenced the many companions who, like Mappo, had been born in the destroyed town. No, all notions of vengeance must be purged in the one chosen for the task ahead. Thus were the words of the Nameless Ones, who foresaw this moment.

Mappo still did not understand why he had been chosen. He was no different from his fellow warriors, he believed. Vengeance was sustenance. More than meat and water, the very reason to eat and drink. The ritual that would purge him would destroy all that he was. You will be an unpainted hide, Mappo. The future will offer its own script, writing and shaping your history anew. What was done to the town of our kin must never happen again. You will ensure that. Do you understand?

Expressions of dreadful necessity. Yet, without the horrific destruction of the town of his birth Mappo would have defied them all. He'd walked the overgrown main street, with its riotous carpet of weeds and roots, and had seen the glimmer of sun-bleached bones at his feet.

Near the market round, he discovered a Nameless One awaiting him, standing in the clearing's centre, grey-faded robes flickering in the prairie wind, hood drawn back to reveal a stern woman's visage. Pale eyes met his as he approached. The staff she held in one hand seemed to writhe in her grip.

'We do not see in years,' she hissed.

'But in centuries,' Mappo replied.

'It is well. Now, warrior, you must learn to do the same. Your elders shall decree it so.'

The Trell slowly gazed around, squinting at the ruins. 'It has more the feel of a raider's army – it's said that such forces exist south of Nemil—'

Her sneer surprised him with its unveiled contempt. 'One day he shall return to his home, as you've done here and now. Until that time, you must attend—'

'Why me, damn you!'

Her answer was a faint shrug.

'And if I defy you?'

'Even that, warrior, will demand patience.' She raised the staff then, the gesture drawing his eye. The twisting, buckling wood seemed to reach hungrily for the Trell, growing, filling his world until he was lost in its tortured maze.

'Strange how a land untravelled can look so familiar.'

Mappo blinked, the memories scattered by the sound of that familiar soft voice. He glanced up at Icarium. 'Stranger still how the mind's eye can travel so far and so fast, yet return in an instant.'

The Jhag smiled. 'With that eye you might explore the entire world.'

'With that eye you might escape it.'

Icarium's gaze narrowed as he scanned the rubble-strewn sweep of desert below. They'd climbed a tel the better to see the way ahead. 'Your memories always, fascinate me, since I seem to have so few of my own, and more so since you have always been so reluctant to share them.'

'I was recalling my clan,' Mappo said, shrugging. 'It is astonishing the trivial things one comes to miss. Birthing season for the herds, the way we winnowed the weak in unspoken agreement with the plains' wolves.' He smiled. 'The glory I earned when I'd snuck into a raiding party's camp and broken the tips of every warrior's knife, then sneaked back out with no-one awakening.' He sighed. 'I carried those points in a bag for years, tied to my war belt.'

'What happened to them?'

'Stolen back by a cleverer raider.' Mappo's smile broadened. 'Imagine her glory!'

'Was that all she stole?'

'Ah, leave me some secrets, friend.' The Trell rose, brushing sand and dust from his leather leggings. 'If anything,' he said after a pause, 'that sandstorm has grown a third in size since we stopped.'

Hands on his hips, Icarium studied the dark wall bisecting the plain. 'I believe it has marched closer, as well,' he said. 'Born of sorcery, perhaps the very breath of a goddess, its strength still grows. I can feel it reaching out to us.'

'Aye.' Mappo nodded, repressing a shiver. 'Surprising, assuming that Sha'ik is indeed dead.'

'Her death may have been necessary,' Icarium said. 'After all, can mortal flesh command this power? Can a living being stay alive being the gateway between Dryjhna and this realm?'

'You're thinking she's become Ascendant? And in doing so left her flesh and bones behind?'

'It's possible.'

Mappo fell silent. The possibilities multiplied each time they discussed Sha'ik, the Whirlwind and the prophecies. Together, he and Icarium were sowing their own confusion. And whom might that serve? Iskaral Pust's grinning face appeared in his mind. Breath hissed through his teeth. 'We're being manipulated,' he growled. 'I can feel it. Smell it.'

'I've noted your raised hackles,' Icarium said with a grim smile. 'For myself, I've become numb to such notions – I have felt manipulated all my life.'

The Trell shook himself to disguise his flinch. 'And,' he asked softly, 'who would be doing that?'

The Jhag shrugged, glanced down with a raised eyebrow. 'I stopped asking that question long ago, friend. Shall we eat? The lesson needed here is that mutton stew is a taste superior to that of sweet curiosity.'

Mappo studied Icarium's back as the warrior strode down into camp. But what of sweet vengeance, friend?

 

They rode down the ancient road, harried by banshee gusts of sand-filled wind. Even the Gral gelding was stumbling with exhaustion, but Fiddler had run out of options. He had no answer to what was happening.

Somewhere in the impenetrable sweeps of sand to their right a running battle was under way. It was close – it sounded close, but of the combatants they could see no sign, nor was Fiddler of a mind to ride to investigate. In his fear and exhaustion, he'd arrived at a fevered, panicky conviction that staying on the road was all that kept them alive. If they left it they would be torn apart.

The battle sounds were not clashing steel, nor the death cries of men. The sounds were of beasts – roars, snaps, snarls, keening songs of terror and pain and savage fury. Nothing human. There might have been wolves in the unseen struggle, but other, wholly different throats voiced their own frantic participation. The nasal groans of bears, the hiss of large cats, and other sounds – reptilian, avian, simian. And demons. Mustn't forget those demonic barks – Hood's own nightmares couldn't be worse.

He rode without reins. Both hands gripped the sand-pitted stock of his crossbow. It was cocked, a flamer quarrel nocked in place, and had been since the scrap began, ten hours ago. The gut-wound cord was weary by now, he well knew. The wider than usual spread of the steel ribs told him as much. The quarrel would not fly far, and its flight would be soft. But he needed neither accuracy nor range for the flamer to be effective. The knowledge that to drop the weapon would result in their being engulfed – he and his horse both – in raging fire, kept reminding him of that efficacy each time his aching, sweat-slick hands let the weapon slip slightly in his grip.

He could not go on much longer. A single glance back over his shoulder showed Apsalar and Crokus still with him, their horses past the point of recovery and now running until life fled their bodies. Not long now.

The Gral gelding screamed and slewed sideways. Fiddler was suddenly awash in hot liquid. Blinking and cursing, he shook the fluid from his eyes. Blood. A Fener-born Hood-damned gushing fountain of blood. It had shot out from the impenetrable air-borne sand. Something got close. Something else stopped it from getting any closer. Queen's blessing, what in the Abyss is going on?

Crokus shouted. Fiddler looked back in time to see him leap clear of his collapsing mount. The animal's front legs folded under it. He watched the horse's chin strike hard on the cobbles, leaving a smear of blood and froth. It jerked its head clear in one last effort to recover, then rolled, legs kicking in the air a moment before sagging and falling still.

The sapper pried a hand loose from the crossbow, gathered the reins and drew his gelding to a halt. He swung the stumbling beast around. 'Dump the tents!' he shouted to Crokus, who had regained his feet. 'That's the freshest of the spare mounts. Quickly, damn you!'

Slumped in her saddle, Apsalar rode close. 'It's no use,' she said through cracked lips. 'We have to stop.'

Snarling, Fiddler glared out into the biting sheets of sand. The battle was getting closer. Whatever was holding them back was giving ground. He saw a massive shape loom into view, then vanish again as quickly. It seemed to have leopards riding its shoulders. Off to one side four hulking shapes appeared, low to the ground and rolling forward black and silent.

Fiddler swung the crossbow around and fired. The bolt struck the ground a half-dozen paces from the four beasts. Sheets of flame washed over them. The creatures shrieked.

He spared no time to watch, pulling at random another quarrel from the hardened case strapped to the saddle. He'd only a dozen quarrel-mounted Moranth munitions to start with. He was now down to nine, and of those only one more cusser. He spared a glance as he loaded the quarrel – another flamer – then resumed scanning the wall of heaving sand, leaving his hands to work by memory.

Shapes were showing, flashing like grainy ghosts. A dozen dog-sized winged reptiles shuddered into view twenty feet up, rising on a column of air. Esanthan'el – Hood's breath, these are D'ivers and Soletaken! A huge cape-shape swept over the esanthan'el, engulfing them.

Crokus was frantically rummaging in a pack for the short sword he'd purchased in Ehrlitan. Apsalar crouched beside him, daggers glinting in her hands as she faced down the road.

Fiddler was about to shout that the enemy was to her left, when he saw what she'd seen. Three Gral hunters rode shoulder to shoulder in full charge, less than a dozen horse-strides from their position. Their lances lowered.

The range was too close for a safe shot. The sapper could only watch as the warriors closed in. Time seemed to slow down as Fiddler stared, helpless to intervene. A massive bear bolted up from the side of the road, colliding with the Gral rider on the left. The Soletaken was as big as the horse it pulled down. Its jaws closed sideways around the warrior's waist, between ribs and hips, the canines sinking in almost past the far side. The jaws squeezed seemingly without effort. Bile and blood sprayed from the warrior's mouth.

Apsalar sprang at the other two men, flashing beneath the lanceheads, both knives thrusting up and out as she slipped between the horses. Neither Gral had time to parry. As if in mirror reflection, each blade vanished up and under the ribcage, the one on the left finding a heart, the one on the right rupturing a lung.

Then she was past, leaving both weapons behind. A dive and a shoulder roll avoided the lance of a fourth rider Fiddler hadn't seen earlier. In a single, fluid motion, Apsalar regained her feet and sprang in an astonishing surge of strength, and was suddenly sitting behind the Gral, her right arm closing around his throat, her left reaching down over the man's head, two fingers sinking deep into each eye, then yanking back in time for the small knife that suddenly appeared in her right hand to slide back across the warrior's exposed throat.

Fiddler's rapt attention was violently broken by something large and scaled whipping across his face, knocking him from the saddle, sending his crossbow flying from his hands. He struck the road surface in an explosion of pain. Ribs snapped, the shattered ends grinding and tearing as he rolled onto his stomach. Any thoughts of trying to rise were quickly killed as a vicious battle burst into life directly above him. Hands behind his head, Fiddler curled himself tight, willed himself smaller. Bony hooves battered him, clawed feet scored his chain armour, ravaged his thighs. One sudden push crushed his left ankle, then pivoted on what was left before lifting away.

He heard his horse screaming, not in pain, but in terror and rage. The sound of the gelding's hooves connecting with something solid was a momentary flash of satisfaction amidst the pain flooding Fiddler's mind.

A huge body thumped to the ground beside the sapper, rolling to press a scaled flank against him. He felt the muscles twitching, sending sympathetic shivers through his own pummelled body.

The sounds of battle had ceased. Only the moaning wind and hissing sand was left. He tried to sit up but found he could barely lift his head. The scene was one of carnage. Immediately in front of him, within an arm's reach, stood the four trembling legs of his gelding. Off to one side lay his crossbow, flamer gone – the weapon must have discharged when it struck the ground, catapulting the deadly quarrel into the storm. Just ahead the lung-stabbed Gral lay coughing blood. Standing over him speculatively was Apsalar, the assassin's throat-slitter held loosely in one hand. A dozen paces past her, the hulking brown back of the Soletaken bear was visible, rippling as it tore at the meat of the horse it had brought down. Crokus stepped into view – he'd found his short sword but had yet to unsheathe it. Fiddler felt a wave of compassion at the expression on the lad's face.

The sapper reached one arm behind him, groaning with the effort. His hand found and rested against scaled hide. The twitches had ceased.

The bear roared in sudden alarm. Fiddler twisted around in time to see the beast bolt away. Oh, Hood, if he's fleeing . . .

The trembling of the mare's legs increased, making them almost blurry to Fiddler's eyes, but the animal did not run, stepping only to interpose herself between the sapper and whatever was coming. The gesture rent the man's heart. 'Dammit, beast,' he rasped. 'Get out of here!'

Apsalar was backing towards him. Crokus stood motionless, the sword falling unheeded from his hands.

He finally saw the newcomer. Newcomers. Like a seething, lumpy black carpet, the D'ivers rolled over the cobbles. Rats, hundreds. Yet one. Hundreds? Thousands. Oh, Hood, I know of this one. 'Apsalar!'

She glanced at him, expressionless.

'In my saddlebag,' the sapper said. 'A cusser—'

'Not enough,' she said coolly. 'Too late anyway.'

'Not them. Us.'

Her reaction was a slow blink, then she stepped up to the gelding.

A stranger's voice rose above the wailing wind. 'Gryllen!'

Yes, that's the D'ivers's name. Gryllen, otherwise known as the Tide of Madness. Flushed out of Y'ghatan in the fire. Oh, it comes around, don't it just!

'Gryllen!' the voice bellowed again. 'Leave here, D'ivers!'

Hide-bound legs stepped into view. Fiddler looked up, saw an extraordinarily tall man, lean, wearing a faded Tano telaba. His skin was somewhere between grey and green, and he held in his long-fingered hands a recurved bow and a rune-wrapped arrow nocked and ready. His long, grey hair showed remnants of black dye, making his mane appear spotted. The sapper saw the ragged tips of tusks bulging the line of his thin lower lip. A ]hag. Didn't know they travelled this far east. Why in Hood's name that should matter, I don't know.

The Jhag took another step towards the heaving mass of rats that now covered what was left of the bear-killed horse and rider, and laid a hand on the shoulder of the mare. The trembling stilled. Apsalar stepped back, warily studying the stranger.

Gryllen was hesitating – Fiddler could not believe his eyes. He glanced again at the Jhag. Another figure had appeared beside the tall bowman. Short and wide as a siege engine, his skin a deep, warm brown, his black hair braided and studded with fetishes. If anything, his canines were bigger than his companion's, and looking much sharper. A Trell. A Jhag and a Trell. That rings a towerful of bells, if only I could get through the pain to spare it another thought.

'Your quarry has fled,' the Jhag said to Gryllen. 'These people here do not pursue the Trail of Hands. Moreover, I now protect them.'

The rats hissed and twittered in a deafening roar, and surged higher on the road. Dust-grey eyes glittered in a seething storm.

'Do not,' the Jhag said slowly, 'try my patience.'

A thousand bodies flinched. The tide withdrew, a wave of greasy fur. A moment later they were gone.

The Trell squatted beside Fiddler. 'You will live, soldier?'

'Seems I'll have to,' the sapper replied, 'if only to make some sense of what just happened. I should know you two, shouldn't I?'

The Trell shrugged. 'Can you stand?'

'Let's see.' He pulled an arm under him, pushed himself up an inch, then remembered nothing more.