Blood and Bone

CHAPTER VII

It annoyed Murk no end that Sour kept walking directly ahead of him. The man had the infuriating habit of pushing his way through the jungle fronds only to let them whip back to slap him in the face. For the twentieth time that day he had to restrain himself from throttling the squat bow-legged mage. Now he almost ran into him as Sour stopped abruptly, bringing the entire following column to an unexpected halt.

Sour thrust his hands in their tattered leather gauntlets up at Murk who couldn’t help flinching away — mostly from the ripe pong that surrounded his grimed and sweaty companion. He was aware that he himself certainly didn’t smell of cloves after the days of slogging through the dense jungle and sleeping in the warm rain, but some people just had a nasty stink to them. Maybe it was the man’s diet. They were pretty much out of food and Murk had no idea what his partner was eating these days.

‘Lookit this,’ Sour announced, and, taking off a gauntlet, he pinched at his left thumb, pulling, and the entire outer layer of white skin slid off the digit. Like a snake shedding. The Shadow mage waved the empty sac of flesh. ‘It’s like a pouch, or somethin’.’

Murk slapped the man’s hands aside. ‘Did you have to show me that? That’s disgusting. Why in the Abyss would I want to see that?’

Offended, Sour blinked his bulging mismatched eyes and turned away. ‘Think that’s disgusting … you should see my feet.’

Murk didn’t want to see the man’s feet. In fact, he didn’t want to see his own feet. Just the thought of what might be going on in his rotting leather boots made him shiver in revulsion. Each step was a squishy slide of wetness. He could imagine the soft flesh all mushed together …

With a shudder, he straight-armed Sour onward.

The plan was to find a settlement. Some sort of civilization. Acquire guides to a capital, or whatever would pass for a major trading settlement, and arrange passage out.

That was the plan. Problem was, when their hired vessel had deserted them it took away all their stores and spare equipment. They’d been left with only the few supplies they’d brought ashore and now those were gone. They marched with just the clothes, weapons, and armour on their back. And now even this was rotting away. All the leather armour and fittings stretched and weakened in the constant warmth and damp until Murk could tear it with his bare hands. And all the metal, be it iron, bronze or copper — studs, clasps and buckles, even the swords — was rusting and corroding. Some of the mercenaries had thrown it all off entirely and now marched only in the long under-padding from their armour, such as plain quilted gambesons that hung to their knees.

Murk had almost immediately thrown away his helmet. He marched now in a laced leather jerkin over a silk undershirt. His jerkin fared better than most as his sweat kept it well oiled, and his pantaloons were really no more than cloth wrappings that ran from his calves to his thighs. He’d considered carrying his knife inside his shirt where the body oils would help protect the iron blade, but he’d seen too many die in agony from cuts poisoned by rust — the locked jaw, the convulsions, the muscles constricting savagely enough to snap bones. One of the most ghastly ways to go. And so he wrapped the knife in rags and carried it tucked into his belt.

Sour, on the other hand, looked to have made no concessions whatsoever to the deathly heat and damp. He still wore his stained leather cap, which had now grown a layer of mould. His leather hauberk, with all its jangling rusted iron clasps and studs, hung from him like a rotting ill-fitting sack. His leather riding trousers flapped in tatters as he walked. The crossbow on his back was so corroded it surely must be seized. All in all, the fellow looked like an escapee from a lich yard.

But we’re none of us much better off, Murk had to admit. The real worry — aside from disease and infection — was food. They’d lost two soldiers already to some kind of bloody stomach and intestine illness. Both had been supplementing their meagre rations with gods knew what things they’d found growing in the jungle. Meanwhile, he was suffering from gut-twisting cramps together with what the veterans so colourfully named ‘the trots’. Diarrhoea, the runs, Seven Cities’ Revenge, the flux, trooper’s stomach, the two-step. Whatever you wanted to call it, it wasn’t pretty. Especially with all that blood in it.

Behind them in the column, Dee and Ostler still carried the tiny jewellery box on its stretcher. An honour-guard, of sorts, surrounded the two and their light cargo: at least five mercenaries at all times. He wondered what their guest, Celeste, thought of that. Would she be flattered … or threatened? There was no knowing how her mind worked. He’d seen nothing of her of late. Off exploring perhaps. Fine with him. Dealing with her was like trying to juggle Moranth munitions: no knowing when she might go off in your face.

A halt was called towards noon. Or at least what Murk thought was near noon. The sun remained hidden behind layer after layer of overlapping leaves and canopy. The heat was at its most crushing while a choking humidity from the night’s rain misted about them, coiling into the high canopy and the sky above. Presumably only to rain down upon them once more in the cool of the eve.

Murk slumped down on to a ridged snaking root of one of the gigantic trees that reared taller than any tower, temple or palace that he’d ever seen. Fat vines hung from its high branches and they stirred feebly, rubbing in the almost non-existent breeze. A veritable chorus of noise surrounded their party. Birds unfamiliar to him let loose their sharp piercing calls, insects chirruped and whirred incessantly, especially at night, nearly driving him crazy. Now that he wasn’t moving the bugs clouded about him. They crawled like a contagion over his face, scalp and arms while they stung and bit his skin and sucked his blood. He swiped at them lazily, already tired of having to brush them away every minute of the day and night. He’d heard of animals and people being driven mad by their constant nipping harassment and he could believe it now.

He’d seen little of all the wildlife that must crowd this jungle; the noise the column made crashing through the underbrush must send them all fleeing. Even so, Yusen had scouts out hunting. Murk prayed to Togg and Fanderay that one of them would get lucky.

Not all the animals had run off, though. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and squinted up at the surrounding canopy. After a short search he spotted a few of the troop of long-tailed monkeys who wouldn’t leave them alone. Trailed their line of march they did, hooting, grimacing and lip smacking. They were gawking just as openly as any peasant farmers at a passing cavalcade of foreigners. It seemed the Oponn-damned carnival had arrived. He bared his own teeth back at them; things must be slow in the jungle if they were the best show in town.

Without thinking about it he automatically reached to his side for his skin of water only to find nothing there. Empty and gone these last three days now. He figured they’d be dried corpses by now if it weren’t for everyone’s licking raindrops from the leaves. Instead of the missing waterskin, he searched for and found the leather pouch containing the last of his dried rations. Reaching inside, his fingers found not hard strips but a soft yielding mush. He snatched out his hand to find a smear of rotting meat dotted by writhing maggots. His shoulders slumped even further and he gritted his teeth against his revulsion. He tossed aside the pouch then wiped his hand on the rough surface of the root.

Blinking heavily he peered around at the rest of the troop. Men and women sat slumped at the bases of trees, hoarding their energy, motionless but for batting at the dancing insects. Everyone seemed to feel the drain of the heat. Everyone, that was, except …

Sour thumped down next to him on the root. ‘What’cha doing, pard?’

‘Melting.’

‘Ha!’ Leaning aside, Sour blocked one nostril and blew a great stream of mucus on to the dead leaves. ‘ ’T’aint that bad.’

‘Not that bad? Where were you born? The fiery floor of that after-world some Seven Cities cults go on about?’

‘Naw.’ He squinted about with his mismatched goggling eyes, then admitted, his voice low, ‘The Horn. I grew up on the Horn.’

‘The desert horn? South of Dal Hon?’

Sour waved his hands, his rotted leather gauntlets flapping. ‘Keep it quiet! Not something to brag about.’

Murk was intrigued. His partner had never hinted at such. In fact, he’d always gone to great pains to emphasize his city upbringing. ‘But there’s nothing there …’

‘Not true. Was a trading port. Ships always laid over. Came from everywhere, they did. I ain’t no hick!’

‘All right, all right. So that’s why you can take the heat …’

Looking away Sour remarked, ‘Ain’t the heat — it’s the humidity.’

Once more Murk wanted to throttle his partner. What stayed his hands was what Sour had already noted: the approach of the Seven Cities officer, Burastan, or whatever her name really was. The long-legged, broad-shouldered woman was still an easy place to rest the eyes, even amid all this stink and decay. She wore wide cotton pantaloons tucked into tall leather moccasins, well oiled. A loose white robe over a thin silk chemise and sash completed her garb. She had arranged her long black hair in coils atop her head, away from her neck. Seven Cities, Murk thought resentfully. No wonder she was up and about in the heat. Still, sweat glistened on her lovely upper lip even as that mouth twisted its contempt as it always did whenever she caught sight of them.

‘Cap’n wants you. Forward.’

Murk took a moment to gather his energy to rise. At his side, Sour saluted his flapping gauntlet. ‘Yes, ma’am, Banshur.’

‘That’s Burastan to you, monkeyface.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She led the way. Sour whispered aside to Murk, ‘What did she mean, monkeyface?’

Murk waved to the surrounding walls of foliage. ‘She was noting a likeness to your brothers and sisters.’

The man’s wizened whiskered face scrunched up in puzzlement. ‘Who?’

‘Never mind.’

The captain, Yusen, awaited them amid a great thicket of hanging serrated-edged fronds, each the size of a shield. With him was the wiry taciturn scout, Sweetly. A twig, as always, rode at the edge of the scout’s mouth. The twig seemed to be the man’s sole method of communication in an otherwise emotionless cipher of a face. An upward position indicated an approachable mood. During such times Murk dared venture a joke or two. A downward position indicated a nasty mood; at such times no one spoke to him. Currently the twig registered a straight outward position; neutral.

The chattering and whistling of bird calls was a deafening clamour here. Murk imagined a large flock must roost nearby. ‘What is it?’ he asked while Sour saluted.

The captain ignored the salute. He gestured ahead. ‘This way.’

Sweetly pushed aside the wide leaves, causing a torrent of droplets to fall from their frills of dagger-like edges. Sour cursed the man and lunged to cup his hands beneath the drops. Rather than responding to Sour the scout shifted his blank gaze to Yusen.

‘Water’s not our worry now,’ the captain said, and he gestured Sweetly onward. The scout advanced very carefully. He edged aside another handful of the thick underbrush and as he did so a great blast of noise erupted from all around of countless birds launching from the canopy. Bright glaring sunlight struck Murk who winced and turned aside, shading his gaze. Sour cursed the scout again.

Blinking, Murk saw that they stood at the crowded edge of a river. A near impenetrable wall of bright green verdancy lined both shores. The water was a slow-moving rust-red course that carried clumps of fallen branches and leaves along with it. Above, the sky was a clear bright blue except where a wall of dark clouds lurked in the east — the night’s rain. The wave of disturbed birdlife washed onward along the shore, brilliant shapes darting and swooping in gleaming emerald and sapphire. Like an explosion in a jewellery bourse, it seemed to Murk.

Yusen crouched at the descent to the muddy edge. ‘Should we swim it?’ he asked Murk.

Murk turned to Sour. ‘Want to take a peek?’

‘She won’t like it,’ he warned while adjusting his mouldering cap.

‘Who won’t?’ Yusen asked sharply.

‘Ardata,’ Murk half-mouthed.

‘Ah. I thought perhaps he meant …’

Murk shook his head. ‘No, not her. I don’t think she cares what we do.’

The captain’s thoughtful expression said that he didn’t know whether to be reassured by that. Murk nodded the go-ahead to Sour, who took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘But there’s gonna be trouble …’ He edged down the slope.

Murk, the captain and Sweetly watched while the crab-legged mage sniffed about the shore. He poked at the mud and picked up bits and pieces of flotsam that he examined so close to his goggle eyes that Murk could see them cross. Satisfied at last, he sat with his back to them and tossed the collected litter on to a piece of leather spread on the mud. He peered down at the mess for some time.

The blanket of heat and humidity caused Murk’s eyelids to droop and his shoulders to sag. His attention wandered to find Sweetly staring off upriver. The scout’s fixed interest stirred his unease. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

The scout’s flat gaze flicked to him and the twig clamped tightly between his slit lips fell almost straight down.

Shit. He nodded, then shut his eyes against the painful, unfamiliar glare of open sky. Raising his Warren was the last thing he wanted to do, but it was his responsibility. If he and Sour expected the troops to fight in their defence then they, in turn, were expected to utilize their talents to defend the column. That was the Malazan way: always an even exchange. And frankly, he wouldn’t be able to face them if they saw he was coasting on their backs. He didn’t know if Sour felt the same way about it all. He suspected not; the man was a far worse match to the rules and strictures of military life. And anyway, the troopers treated him more like a stray dog — one that had been kicked in the head once too often.

When he opened his eyes once more he found that he was still within the murky tangle of the Shadow woods. What that demon had named the forest of the Azathanai. How absurd it was that the one feature of all Shadow he dared not enter should be the place jammed right over where he was stuck. He decided to minimize his exposure by using the Warren merely to shift from place to place.

He caught Yusen’s attention, murmured, ‘Be right back,’ and stepped into the nearest shadow. From here he shifted to another, then another, and in this manner he moved southward. He scanned the jungle from the cover of a number of different shadows and once he was reasonably sure no one was about, he stepped out. He saw no sign of what might’ve interested the scout. It may just have been the nervous birds. One more trick. He felt through the shadow-stuff, the ephemeral Emurlahn ether, the shades of Rashan. He was searching for something specific among the flickering shapes and eventually he found it cast against the broad trunk of a tree: the silhouette of a nearly naked man, crouched, armed with spear and bow.

He returned to Yusen.

Down on the shore, Sour slipped and slid through the sticky mud flats. He poked at the clutter that accumulated along any river edge, the silvery tree branches, the layers of rotting leaves, and the thick cake-like pats of clay. Satisfied at last, he flicked his hands to clean them of the clinging mud, his gauntlet tatters flapping madly, then struggled up the naked dirt slope.

Reaching the top, he took a moment to catch his breath. Everyone waited silently for his judgement. He wiped a hand across his brow to brush away the beaded sweat but only succeeded in smearing a thick swipe of ochre-hued mud across his face.

Murk hissed out an impatient breath. ‘So? Should we cross?’

‘What’s that? Cross? No. Not a good idea.’

‘So we don’t cross.’

‘No. I didn’t say that.’

‘Yes, you did — just now.’

‘No. That’s not what I said.’

Murk took a quick breath to yell his frustration but Yusen raised a hand for silence. Murk clenched his teeth until they hurt. ‘So …’ the captain said to Sour, slowly, as if speaking to a child, ‘what should we do?’

‘We shouldn’t cross …’ A pained grunt of suppressed wrath escaped Murk ‘… least not right now.’

Yusen’s brows rose. ‘I see. Or I believe I do. Very good.’ He lifted his attention to Sweetly. ‘South — for now.’

The lanky scout’s jaws bunched and he turned away. The twig was held so straight down in his mouth it was pressing against his chin.

When the captain turned his back, Murk threw a cuff at Sour who ducked away, mouthing, ‘What?’

South. Wonderful. Towards our watching friends.

As they returned to the column, Murk asked, ‘So … what’s the problem? Why can’t we cross? What does Miss Nibs say?’

Sour was brushing the drying mud and clay from himself. ‘I don’t ask her. Don’t you know nothing? Does crazy Ammanas answer your every question?’ He raised his voice mockingly. ‘Dear Murk — you lent your knife to Lengen. That’s why you can’t find it.’

Murk did cuff him this time. ‘Quiet.’

‘Why?’

Murk tilted his head to the south and answered low. ‘ ’Cause we’re not alone.’

‘Who? Them?’ He flapped a tattered leather gauntlet. ‘Bah! They been watchin’ us for some time now.’

Murk gaped at his partner. ‘Then why didn’t you …’ Almost beyond words, he managed, resentfully, ‘And how would you know?’

Sour jerked a thumb to his chest. ‘Hey, I follow the Enchantress. Believe me — I know when I’m bein’ watched.’

Murk jumped on that. ‘There! You see! That’s exactly what I was getting at. She come and whisper in your ear?’

‘No, no. I keep tellin’ ya. Nothing like that.’ The squat fellow dug at one ear, smearing it in clay, while he tried to find the right words. ‘It’s more like a school of thought. Or a set a disciplines. Her way allows a deep access that kinda borders on Mockra, y’know? It’s a path she’s shaped that we follow. Get it?’ He peered up expectantly, brows raised.

Murk shook his head. ‘No. I don’t get it. That’s just a bunch of twaddle. Look, either she’s mistress of the Warren, or she’s a nobody.’

‘No! This ain’t Shadow. It ain’t a Realm — or a shadow of a real one.’ Murk flicked a gauntlet. ‘Houses, Holds, Realms. All that hoary old stuff. That’s the past. It’s all about paths now. No pledges or pacts or none o’ that stuff. It’s a new world, my friend.’

Murk was still shaking his head. ‘Can’t be that easy. Has to be a price …’

Sour just shrugged his humped shoulders.

‘Well — why didn’t we cross, then?’

‘That? Oh … I didn’t like the water. Gave me a bad feeling.’

Back at the column Burastan was waiting for them. She saluted Yusen then crooked a finger to call over Murk and Sour.

‘You two … maybe you could keep it down. I can’t hear the volcanoes or the stampeding elephants.’

‘Sorry, Bannister, ma’am,’ Sour mumbled.

The woman shook her head in disgust and stalked off. She threw over her shoulder: ‘And don’t wander so far from our guest.’

Sour threw up his dirty hands. ‘You called us …’ But she was gone. He turned his hurt gaze to Murk. ‘That gal. What’d we ever do to her?’

‘Don’t know. Why don’t you ask her one of these days?’

‘Yeah. Maybe.’

Murk just rubbed his gritty aching eyes. Ye gods …

That night was his worst yet. There was no food to be had at all. The scouts reported that something had scared off all the game. Murk sat with his arms wrapped around his knees. He sucked morosely on a knuckle of leather cut from a belt. At least when the rain started up they’d have some water to drink. Problem was all that fluid just went straight through him like a sieve. It came out looking exactly the same it did going in.

He and Sour traded off watches through the night. It was his turn when Yusen emerged from the sheeting rain to crouch down where they’d curled under the cover of a great towering tree.

‘We’re missing a patrol,’ he said, peering from beneath the dripping rim of his helmet.

Murk unclasped his knees. ‘I didn’t sense anything. How many?’

‘I’m not blaming you. Five. Scouts say the trail just up and disappears.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

The ex-officer looked offended. ‘What do I want you to do? I want you to find them, that’s what.’ He waved to the rain and Burastan emerged from the gloom. ‘Take a squad.’ The lieutenant nodded. Yusen jabbed a finger to him then jerked a thumb.

Murk took a deep breath to gather his strength then pushed himself awkwardly to his feet. He spat out the piece of leather he’d tucked into his cheek. Burastan waved him onward. He held up a hand for a pause. He stepped over a root as tall as his knees to find Sour nestled in where the root joined its fellow. If he hadn’t known the man was there he’d have passed right over him; mud-smeared, he resembled just another fat knot of wood. He poked Sour’s shoulder and the fellow jerked as if stung.

Eyes opened to glisten among the caked mud, leaves and twigs. ‘What d’ya want?’

‘Mind the store. I gotta go.’ And he gestured to where Burastan stood waiting in the rain. Sour goggled at the woman, his eyes growing huge. ‘Right …’

Murk wondered at his partner’s reaction until he got closer to the Seven Cities woman; her robes and top were near transparent in the rain. Against the pale milky skin of her jutting breasts her dark areolae stood out quite plainly. The woman impatiently gestured him onward again.

Burastan collected a squad. The men and women lumbered heavily to their feet and checked their weapons and shields. Then she curtly waved Murk into the jungle. ‘That way.’

Murk headed off, all the while wondering what this woman had against him and Sour. He walked slowly, and soon the lieutenant was level with him. ‘I’m not really the right fellow for this, you know,’ he told her, his voice held low.

Her answering snort told him she knew this damned well.

Huge drops pattered down from the canopy far above, slapping his head and shoulders. ‘You have any experience with large predators?’ he asked as he pushed aside broad leaves the size of himself.

‘Just men.’

Fair enough. Was this her problem? One of those man-haters? Yet she appeared to get along with the rest of the mercs well enough. And she followed Yusen’s orders without any resentment. She seemed to reserve her scorn for him and his partner.

Once he was far enough from the camp Murk halted. The squad spread out behind him and he felt Burastan’s warm disapproving presence just to his rear. He raised his Warren the slightest touch and felt it shimmering there near his fingertips.

‘What are you doing?’ Burastan whispered. ‘We’re supposed to be looking.’

‘I am.’

‘Really?’ The remark carried a wealth of contempt.

‘I am searching among the shadows.’

‘What for?’

Murk felt his patience finally slipping away. ‘For one that doesn’t belong. Now, if you don’t mind …?’

Her snort conveyed how little she minded.

Thanks to his Shadow talents the night was as clear as day for him. He sifted through the shadows nearby, finding nothing. Glancing back to Burastan, he saw in the woman’s clenched brows that she was a touch nervous out here in the dark so far from camp. Good. Let’s see how she likes stumbling about in the night. ‘This way, you say?’

She nodded, her jaws clenched. ‘Yes. The scouts found a blood-spoor but lost it in the rain.’

‘Let’s move on then.’ And he started forward.

After a brief hesitation, she followed, and the squad brought up the rear.

‘You don’t seem to have much time for me or Sour …’ he said as he pushed his way through stands of thick razor-sharp grasses.

‘Shouldn’t we be quiet?’ she answered, exasperated.

He stopped again to search among the shadows. ‘We’re making so much noise crashing through the underbrush that whatever it was is long gone by now. So …?’

Close to his side she scowled, a hand going to the grip of her curved sword. After a time she ground out, ‘I fought in the Insurrection. I have seen Malazan High Mages raise their might. I felt the Whirlwind and saw it brought low. I grew up hearing stories of Aren’s fall.’ Her gaze shifted from scanning the jungle and she made a show of looking him up and down. ‘You two. You’re a pathetic joke. That’s what you are. The might of Malaz …’ She snorted her contempt once again.

Ah. A touch bitter, are we? Well, we all have our stories. Fought in the Insurrection, did you? Which side, I wonder …

He gestured ahead. ‘A bit further.’

‘Wait.’ She waved up two of the escort. ‘Take point.’ The men nodded, hefted their large shields and drew their swords.

Here, the undergrowth was thin; the canopy so dense as to cut off all hint of the overcast sky. The ground was a slick morass of reddish clay. Murk was no farmer but so far the soil, if you could call it that, didn’t strike him as particularly fertile. Rich soil, so he understood, had to have rotting plant matter mixed up in it. This soil — or dirt — possessed none. The insects, fungus, mould and such seemed to immediately eat up most of the fallen vegetation, leaving the soil as desiccated and lifeless as any desert.

Their crawling progress slowed even further as the two guards, practically blind in the dense gloom, edged their way forward. ‘This is absurd,’ he whispered to the lieutenant. ‘Let me go ahead. I’m the only one who can see.’

‘Can’t have you wandering off.’

‘So you do care …’

The tall woman glared down at him. ‘Yusen would have my head.’

‘And this Yusen … ex-Sixth Army?’

She gestured impatiently ahead. ‘Stay focused.’

They had arrived at the base of a particularly ancient tree. As broad as any peasant’s hut, its fat trunk supported its own forest of hanging creepers. Here Murk sensed something and he raised a hand for a pause. Then he cursed, realizing no one could see. ‘Wait,’ he murmured to Burastan. The woman gave a low whistle and the guards all stilled. ‘Spread out,’ he mouthed low. Another whistle and the patrol shifted to establish a perimeter.

Murk eased his awareness just the merest touch into Shadow. He began to search among the shapes cast recently. Fat drops pummelled him here beneath this giant tree, slapping his shoulders and head. After a time he found something; or rather, something flitted past him so fast he almost missed it. A strange Shadow. Humanoid, it was. Yet as he watched it move it bent down, hunched, then leaped, springing, to fly away in a great bound, clearly outlined as an immense cat.

Murk grunted his dread as if punched. Bad news. A kind of Soletaken or D’ivers. Just like Trake, Rikkter or Ryllandaras. Call it what you will. Way out of our class.

‘Murk,’ Burastan whispered from nearby.

Normally, enmeshed as he was within his Warren, he would have ignored such an interruption, but there was something in the woman’s voice. Something he’d never heard before. Blinking, he opened his eyes on to the jungle and hissed impatiently, ‘What?’

The lieutenant appeared to have lost some of her colour and she raised a hand to indicate his shoulder. He glanced and grunted once again. The fat drops that had been punishing him here amid the thick vines were not rainwater. He slowly raised his gaze and it took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. Above him, upside down and gutted like butcher’s carcasses, their arms slowly swinging, dripping blood from their fingertips, hung the missing patrol.

Murk lowered his stunned gaze to Burastan. She now had her blade out though he’d not heard her draw it. Carved glyphs ran down its length and red enamel or paint gleamed in the delicate script. Red, Murk realized. She’d been of the Seven Cities Red Swords.

‘Locals?’ the woman breathed, peering about, her eyes bright.

Murk swallowed to talk past the acid choking his throat. ‘You could say that.’

That morning Yusen ended all patrols. He kept everyone except the scouts close to the column. Murk kept a wary eye on his partner after the man’s claim that he could sense the locals. They all knew they were there — question was, how close and how many.

He noticed the crab-legged fellow peering about at the jungle far more anxiously than before. He was pulling repeatedly on his helmet and rubbing his dirty hands on his flapping trousers, all the while sneaking sidelong glances into the leaves. Murk sidled closer to murmur, ‘Who is it?’

‘Our friends. All around us now.’

‘All around? Then why haven’t you-’ At that moment the order came back for a halt. Troopers waved the pair forward.

They arrived to find Yusen in the cover of a copse of trees. ‘Reception committee ahead,’ he told them. ‘You’re with me.’

‘They’re all around,’ Sour warned.

The captain grimaced his displeasure. ‘Yeah. Our scouts and theirs been playing tag all day. Let’s see if we can come to an understanding before someone gets hurt.’

Murk emphatically agreed, as it was his thinking that that someone would most likely be them.

Yusen started forward through the dense hanging leaves. A short march later Sweetly emerged from cover to join them. The man’s twig stood straight out from his lips: neutral, or undecided. Murk took this as an encouraging sign.

It seemed to Murk that the four men waiting ahead amid the tree trunks appeared as if by their own brand of magery. But he knew this for an illusion. They had merely been standing so still and so calm that his eye could not separate them from their surroundings. No magic, no animism or Elder sorcery. Still, it made him profoundly uneasy the way they just seemed to flicker in and out of the jungle background like that. They wore loincloths only, with bands of leather, or fibre ropes, tied round their arms and legs. Some sort of jewellery flashed at ears and noses, and hung from necks and arms. Looking at them carefully now he realized that half their camouflage was swirls of tattooing that splashed across upper thighs, stomachs, arms, necks, and even half-obscured faces.

They were a wary lot. Two held spears ready while the other two had arrows nocked. The bows were slim but as tall as they. The arrow points were tiny — better suited to bringing down birds, but they gleamed darkly and he realized with a jolt that they were poisoned. His stomach clenched even tighter at the discovery and his hand strayed to the knife at his side.

The two with the bows straightened taller, the gut strings of the bows creaking.

Sour suddenly threw his hands out wide, pulling all eyes to him. The squat fellow made an exaggerated pantomime show of untying his weapon-belt and dropping it to the ground. Murk knew this as an empty gesture as the sword was rusted in its sheath. But their friends knew no better.

The two with the spears eased them up a touch. Murk followed along by throwing down his knife. The spears straightened upright even more. Murk murmured aside to Yusen, ‘Drop your sword.’

A hissed breath communicated their commander’s unease.

‘Has to be done …’

The man swore under his breath but unbuckled the belt and let it fall.

Murk glanced sideways to Sweetly. The scout’s twig now rested downward. ‘Slowly and sweetly now …’ he whispered. The man’s slit gaze remained bland but the twig edged straight down. He slowly reached behind his back to draw out two oiled gleaming long-knives that he let fall.

The two bowmen relaxed their gut strings and lowered the bows to point downward. Murk eased out his clenched breath. Sour started forward with his bandy-legged awkward stride then thumped down, sitting halfway between the two parties. Grumbling inwardly, Murk followed.

One of the spearmen, perhaps the eldest of the party, handed his weapon to the other and came forward. Closer now, Murk could see that he was quite sun-darkened, and very lean. His hair was straight and black, touched very slightly with grey. Bands of bluish tattooing encircled most of his muscular legs and arms, and his neck. He sat smoothly and Murk was again impressed by the man’s strength — life here in the jungle was obviously very demanding. The man’s dark eyes moved between him and Sour. They were guarded and wary, but also touched by curiosity.

Murk pointed to himself. ‘Murk.’

‘Sour.’

The leader inclined his lean aristocratic head then nodded to himself. ‘Oroth-en.’

Murk frowned at an eerie suspicion. ‘You understand Talian?’

‘Tal-ian? Is this the speech of the demons? A few of us Elders remember it, and them, too well.’

A sudden dread took hold of Murk. ‘Demons? We know of no demons. We are lost. We want to find a city. A city? You know city?’ He held his arms out wide. ‘Many people.’

Unease clouded the man’s features and his brows drew down. ‘You seek the Ritual Centres? Why seek them? There is nothing there. Only death.’

Murk struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. ‘So … no people?’

‘No. No longer. All gone. Fled into the jungle.’

Murk glanced aside to Yusen.

The captain looked as if he’d just tasted something exceedingly sour. He cleared his throat. ‘Oroth-en … we are lost and we wish to return home. Can you help us?’

The local pointed back up their path. ‘Turn round, strangers. Return from where you came. Flee Himatan.’

Yusen rubbed his neck as if to ease a tightening knot and let out a long troubled breath. ‘I understand. Today, however, my people hunger. Can you spare some food?’

Oroth-en gave a firm nod. ‘Come with us.’

* * *

Ina awoke and surged to her feet, blade ready all in one swift movement. The tiny cell she occupied in the foreign vessel was night-dark but it was not something here that had roused her from her sleep. Rather, it was the lack of something: a lack of movement or noise. No longer did the vessel pitch or roll as if tossed by giants’ hands. No longer did the timbers shudder beneath the crash of great waves washing over them.

She charged for the ladder and was up in an instant.

On deck she took in that the storm still dominated the seas encircling them but that some sort of eye or pall of calm currently kept it at bay. Further up the long deck two shadowy figures confronted her mistress. All this she took in even as a great plank-juddering growl sounded near her shoulder. She spun slashing to find only swirling smoke, or shadows, from which pale frosty eyes glared eager hunger.

‘Call them off,’ came her mistress’s clear voice.

A weak flick from one of the obscured figures and the rumbling presence sank as if to haunches, backing away. Ina padded along the wet planks to her mistress’s side. ‘Call these two off,’ she murmured to the Queen of Dreams. ‘I beg of you. We know them’ — she flicked her blade to the near-translucent one who wavered hardly more than a hanging scrap of shadow — ‘the Deceiver, and,’ she motioned to the other far more substantial presence, ‘the patron of killers. They have no honour, m’lady.’

The Queen of Dreams stood with one thick arm crossed over her heavy bosom, supporting the other, chin in hand while she studied the two. ‘My dealings have been few, Ina. Do not worry yourself.’ She heaved a great sigh as if preparing herself for a distasteful task and let her arms fall. ‘What is it you wish, Usurper? No, wait, let me tell you what it is you wish. In brief, you hope to turn every unfolding, every meeting or event, all to your eventual benefit, yes?’

Ina could plainly see through to the rolling dark waves behind the hunched figure as it gave what might have been a shrug. ‘You have the truth. I confess that I am no different from you, Enchantress.’

‘You may congratulate yourself on some few superficial resemblances. But we differ profoundly, Usurper. You are young while I am old. This persists as an unbridgeable gulf between us that you yet may cross. Eventually … a century at a time.’

The wavering scarves of shadow that outlined the Deceiver shifted then, as if affronted. ‘That title. You persist in that title. One throne is as good as any other. Are you trying to provoke me?’

The Enchantress squinted southwards as if tired of the conversation. ‘Shadow has a throne, Usurper.’

‘That again. Shadow is … broken. And the throne with it.’

A tired, almost sad smile came and went from the Queen.

The slit eyes of the other figure, the Rope, had not left Ina the entire time and he leaned to his cohort to murmur, ‘Time.’

The Deceiver waved a limp hand once again. ‘Yes, yes. We are currently enmeshed in said unfoldings to the west. Suggestively close to the west, in fact. Many wonder at the peculiar timing of your journey …’

‘All will shy away once they are certain of whom I am going to meet. You can be sure of that.’

The tatters of shadow wavered as if the figure were shifting from foot to foot. ‘Ah, yes. Well … you have our warning! Have a care! Now, we must go. Charming though you may be in your disarming coquetry, we can hardly be expected to idle about here all the day and night. Much to do.’

The two faded away like passing scraps of shade.

‘Warning?’ Ina asked. ‘What does he mean?’

The Queen of Dreams hugged herself, crossing her arms as if chilled. ‘Not even he knows. But I would not have him change. Shadow finds him … amusing. At least for now. And that is a good thing.’

Ina studied the muted seas. She self-consciously touched a finger to her mask as she did so — it was hopelessly smeared blue now from the constant damp. ‘Have we stopped?’

‘No, this calm will pass.’

‘And our destination?’

The Queen of Dreams studied her for a time. ‘Jacuruku. You have heard of it?’

‘We have heard the travellers’ tales. City of riches. City of magic. Where any wish may be granted by the one who awaits within. Ardata the Perilous.’

The Queen of Dreams hugged herself even tighter. ‘Yes, Ina. Perilous. Very perilous.’

*

Within the plains of Shadow, Ammanas and his cohort, Dancer, kicked their way through the worn stones of an ancient nameless ruin.

‘What was that all about?’ Dancer asked, rather irritated. ‘A warning? A warning about what?’

Shadowthrone gave another negligent flick of his hand. ‘That? Oh, I just throw those out. It confuses them.’

‘That it does,’ Dancer breathed aside. Then he stopped as his partner had come to a halt, facing away. Ammanas now peered to where a dark brooding forest dominated the landscape. The hounds surrounding them paced restlessly, uneasy this close to these woods. The forest of the Azathanai.

Ammanas gave a shudder. His hands tightened on the silver hound’s head of his walking stick. He raised his hooded eyes to Dancer. ‘The Azathanai.’ And he shivered again. ‘Inhuman and thus incomprehensible.’ He raised the walking stick in emphasis. ‘Oh, I try. I do try. But there-’ and he pointed to the woods. ‘But there. There lies true impenetrability. Their goals — if they can even be said to possess such — what are they? They vex me. They truly do.’

‘You’re not the first.’

Ammanas gave a faint laugh. ‘No. Certainly not. Yet …’ and he raised a crooked finger. ‘Perhaps I shall be the last, no?’

‘We can only hope — and plan.’

‘Indeed.’

Ammanas set off again. His slippered feet shuffled through the dust. After a time he cleared his throat. ‘So, what do you think that damned Azathanai meant — the throne? What sort of nonsense is that?’ His tiny eyes darted about from one shadow to another. ‘You don’t think it’s true … do you?’

Dancer smiled as if somehow secretly pleased by his cohort’s unease. He gave a mimicked negligent wave. ‘That? Oh, I think she just tossed that off to confuse you.’

* * *

For Pon-lor, descending out of the Gangrek Mounts and entering the green abyss that stretched before them to the eastern horizon was like slowly submerging himself into warm poisoned water. The dense high canopy closed over his head like the surface of the sea and beneath he found the atmosphere so humid as to be almost unbreathable. Sweat started from his brow, back and limbs. His robes hung from him as smothering weights.

Two of the guards he had led from the slaughter within Chanar Keep had not survived their wounds. Of the two remaining, one was already ill beyond his skill to heal. Many, he knew, blamed the air itself; unhealthy, bearer of sicknesses in its heavy wafting miasmas. But Thaumaturg teachings insisted that it was in fact the countless insects. They were a maddening curse. Bites left smears of blood across faces and necks. Some of these wounds refused to heal, becoming swollen livid welts that wept a clear humour that only attracted even greater clouds of the midges, mites and flies of all types. He said nothing, but he knew that many of these creatures carried parasites and fevers, and that some were even laying eggs within the wounds, which would eventually hatch to feast upon the host’s flesh. As for his own bites, he could purify himself through his Thaumaturg arts.

This morning the sick guard, Lo-sen, would not waken. He lay gripped in a burning fever, delirious, hardly even aware of his surroundings. The remaining guard, Toru, stood aside, scanning the surrounding jungle while Pon-lor studied his companion. He set a hand to the man’s sweaty brow and found it searing hot to the touch. I can heal flesh and break flesh … but I cannot cure a fever.

He raised his eyes to Toru. ‘There is nothing I can do.’

Looking away, the man flexed his grip upon his sword. After a time he grated: ‘There is one thing.’

Pon-lor dropped his gaze. Yes. One last thing. The onus is upon me. He summoned his powers and drew a hand down across the blank staring eyes. He felt the heart racing like a terrified colt trapped in the man’s chest and he soothed it. He eased the mad beating then slowed it even more to a calm easy rest. The man’s clenched frame relaxed and a long breath eased from him. When Pon-lor removed his hand the man’s heart beat no more. Pon-lor stood, straightened his robes.

‘Thank you, Magister,’ Toru said.

Thank me? No — you should curse me. I have led you poorly. Lost my command. My only hope to redeem myself is to return with the damned yakshaka, or this witch herself. Collecting that bastard Jak’s head along the way wouldn’t hurt either.

He gestured into the jungle. ‘This way.’

After the sun had passed its zenith — from what he could glimpse of it through the layers of canopy — he chanced upon a plant he recognized. It was a thick crimson-hued vine dotted by large cup-shaped flowers, pale and veined, like flesh. Alistophalia. The Pitcher. Also known as Ardata’s Cup.

He broke off one blossom and examined it while he pushed aside leaves and grasses. Within, trapped by the clear sticky ichors, lay corpses of insects all in varying degrees of decomposition.

It feeds upon those it attracts.

He remembered the words of an ancient writer: Beware the Queen’s gifts, for poison and death lie hidden within.

Yet their Thaumaturg lore had found many uses for poison. This one’s could deaden nerves and mask pain. In larger doses it induced a trance-like sleep that to all outward appearances mimicked death. In just a slightly stronger dose it brought the eternal sleep itself. It was Master Surin’s serum of choice for his dissections. Under its influence a subject lived even as Surin exposed the heart and vital organs. The diaphragm continued to expand, the lungs to operate. Surin’s slick hands slid amid the glistening organs as he indicated this feature and that. Pon-lor and his classmates had crowded close round the table.

Surin had turned his attention to the head. He’d raised his keen scalpel blade to the immobilized face. ‘And now, gentlemen,’ he’d said, ‘the miracle of adaptation that is the eye.’ And the blade had descended to slide into the exposed clear orb. Pon-lor remembered thinking, appalled: This man is still alive, still aware trapped within.

Did he watch as the knife-edge penetrated his eye?

‘My lord?’ Toru asked.

Pon-lor halted, blinking. He peered up. ‘Yes?’

The guard gestured to a gap through the fronds, where the earth was bare and beaten. He squatted to examine the spoor. ‘Some sort of animal track. Heading east for now.’ He raised his helmeted head to look at Pon-lor, cocked a brow.

‘If you think it safe …’

Toru straightened. ‘I believe so, Magister.’

Pon-lor started forward but Toru stepped in front. ‘With your permission — I will lead.’ He drew his blade.

‘Very well.’ Following, Pon-lor returned his attention to the cup-shaped blossom in his hand. Beautiful … but deadly.

He cast it aside.

The track veered to the north and then to the south but tended to return to the east. He was grateful; along its relatively clear way they made good time. As the shafts of sunlight that managed to penetrate the canopy slanted ever more and took on a deep rich gold, he began to consider where to stop for the night. A wide tree would offer cover against the rain. However, after a few more hours of walking they came to the perfect cover against the gathering dusk and its inevitable downpour, but Pon-lor did not know if he dared enter.

It was a long-abandoned heap of stones that might have at one time been a temple or shrine, perhaps even a sort of border marker. Roots choked it now, and trees grew tall from its slanted sides. The questing roots had heaved aside the huge blocks of dressed limestone. Some had fallen away from the building. None of this gave Pon-lor pause. What troubled him were the heaped goat skulls. They lay in a great pile before the entrance: bleached white bone beneath black curved horns. Many had been set into the crotches of nearby trees. Some of these had since been overgrown and incorporated into the flesh of the tree. Trees with grinning dead animal faces. Why did this disturb him so?

An old practice, he realized. All long ago.

He waved Toru forward to examine the structure. After studying the ground and the interior, the guard returned. By now it was quite dark beneath the trees. ‘No one,’ Toru reported. ‘Only animal tracks.’

‘Very well. We’ll spend the night.’ His remaining guard was obviously reluctant but said nothing. ‘What is it?’ he invited.

‘An ill-omened place, Magister.’

‘This entire jungle is ill-omened, I fear, Toru. We’ll just have to make do, yes?’

‘Yes, Magister.’

They climbed the stone stairs to the enclosure. Geckos scampered from Pon-lor’s path in bright olive streaks. Spiders the size of outstretched hands hung in thick webs about the abandoned shrine. Pon-lor brushed dirt and leaf litter from the stones, wrapped his robes about himself, and sat.

Toru took first watch. ‘Magister …’ he asked after watching the darkening forest for a time. ‘Was this — do you think this was dedicated to … her?’

Pon-lor raised his chin from his fists. ‘For a time, perhaps. However, originally, no. This dates back far before her. And what need has she for temples or shrines? The entire jungle of Himatan seems to be dedicated to her.’

Toru grunted his understanding and was quiet after that. Thunder echoed and rumbled above. Then the rains began again. A spider that had been hunting among the stones padded up to Pon-lor’s side. As if curious it gently stroked his robes with its long hairy forelimbs. It was larger than Pon-lor’s hand. He edged it aside. Perhaps it was merely hoping to escape the rain.

When Toru woke him for his watch the rains had long ceased. Fat drops now pattered down from the canopy as heavy as slingstones. He lowered himself to the stone lip of the small shrine’s entrance and wrapped his robes about himself for warmth. He sat hunched, watching the glittering wet wall of foliage. The cry of a hunting cat sounded through the night. Then the ghosts came.

They arrived as a file of youths escorted by a priest in rags. They chivvied along a goat with them. The priest and many of the youths, male and female, carried suppurating sores on their limbs, faces and necks. Pon-lor recognized the symptoms of the Weeping Pestilence as recorded in Thaumaturg histories. It had struck centuries before. Named ‘Weeping’, it was thought, for the obvious reference to the constant drainage of the sores that erupted everywhere, and for the pain and misery it inflicted upon the entire society. Weeping indeed.

Yet these ghastly wounds and scars were not the only marks they carried. The youths were emaciated, little more than walking skeletons. The priest’s ragged feathered robe hung from him loose and soiled. Pon-lor recognized the starvation — and desperation — that accompanied plague and the breakdown of social order.

‘Great Queen,’ the priest announced, falling to his knees, ‘we beg for your pity.’ He gestured curtly to the children, who knelt as well. The youngest held a crude twine rope tied about the goat’s neck. ‘Spare our village. Turn your hand of condemnation from us and our devotion will be without end.’ He waved the goat forward and the child, a boy of no more than perhaps five years, pulled it to the fore. It bleated, nervous and unhappy.

‘Please accept this offering and smile upon us, great Queen! Protect us. Turn aside your Avenger.’

The priest drew a curved blade and rested a hand upon the goat’s side.

Pon-lor jerked then, muffling a cry, as the blade flashed and sank into the chest of the boy.

Toru leaped up drawing his sword at once. ‘What?’ he demanded, bleary, half-awake.

Pon-lor could not take his eyes from the horrifying tableau. He swallowed the acid in his throat and managed to answer, his voice thick, ‘Nothing. A shadow. Just a shadow.’

Toru grunted, a touch irritated, and lay down once more.

The boy had clasped the priest’s wrist. His expression was one of startled surprise and hurt. The priest now hugged the child and, weeping silently, gently lowered him to the ground.

The eldest youth present, a girl, held out a bowl to the priest. The children all gathered round, eager, their lean faces full of hunger.

Pon-lor found himself slowly rising, a formless revulsion choking him, backing away. His gorge rose in his throat, his heart clenched so tight it could not beat, yet he could not pull his gaze away. Ancient Demon-King forgive them … not even you …

To his relief, the priest yanked the blade free to slash the goat’s throat. The girl held the bowl to the neck while blood pumped and jetted, darkening her hands. The children pressed close, cupping their hands and hungrily licking. Meanwhile, the corpse of the boy lay unremarked as if forgotten.

Pon-lor forced his eyes aside and wiped a cold wetness from his cheeks.

Chopping sounded and Pon-lor glanced back to see the priest using a stone hatchet to cut the goat’s head free. This he set among the stones exactly where a bleached fleshless skull now rested. The youths picked up the goat carcass and hurried off with it. The priest reverently gathered up the boy. Turning, he gave one last bow to the shrine, and backed away into a screen of shimmering trees that no longer existed, a sort of orchard, well tended and maintained.

Pon-lor watched the phantoms slip away then sat without moving, hugging himself, hands inside his robes for warmth. Never, even in the most rabid denunciations of the Queen of Monsters, was there any hint of human sacrifice. Could his forebears have been so ignorant of the degenerate practices hidden away here within this green abyss? Yet the priest had been weeping, a man close to breaking. All of them sick and starving. Histories told of plague sweeping though the jungles generations ago. Could it have been this appalling? Blind desperation. He had witnessed a people driven to the edge and it felt as if a hot knife had carved out his heart.

He hugged himself tighter and leaned forward to rest his sweaty brow against his knees.

The next thing he knew stirrings from behind woke him and he turned to see Toru searching among their meagre supplies. He cleared his throat. ‘Have we anything?’

‘Little enough,’ the man grunted. He lowered a pouch. ‘Magister, for a time I kept an eye on you. You … saw something in the night?’

Pon-lor struggled to rise on legs numb and stiff. ‘A tragedy, Toru. I was allowed — or cursed with — a vision of tragedy.’

The guard said nothing, merely handed over a few scraps of dried meat and a knot of stale rice wrapped in leaves. After this brief meal, Pon-lor taking tiny bites and chewing as long as possible, they took sips from the one remaining skin of water and resumed their march.

Toru led. He returned to the animal path. It was so well-trodden that it curved along as naked red-tinted dirt weaving between the thick hard-barked roots. Yet they met no animals. Pon-lor imagined their clumsy tramping must be driving them away.

Towards midmorning, the unseen sun’s heat driving straight down upon their heads, Toru, a good few paces ahead, disappeared amid a great crashing of dry branches followed by a gasped cry of agony. Pon-lor charged forward to find a shallow pit. Toru had managed to turn slightly as he fell and he lay on sharpened stakes impaled through his side along his torso and legs. Pon-lor threw himself flat and reached out to the man. ‘Take my hand!’

The guard struggled to speak but only coughed up a great gout of blood that exploded across his face and chest. He pointed, his lips working. A scuff sounded next to Pon-lor and something cracked on his skull. Flashes of light exploded in his vision and all went to dark.

*

Stinging awoke him. Sharp stinging impacts across his face. He opened his eyes just in time to see a woman slap him once more. He sat propped up against a tree, his hands tied behind his back, a gag across his mouth. The woman who peered down at him with open hate and a touch of fear was the ugliest he had ever seen. Pox scars from a savage encounter with that illness gouged her cheeks and brow, and a cleft lip, a harelip, pulled her mouth into a permanent open twist. That she was quite young only made the disfigurements all the more painful to see. Straightening, she kicked him in the crotch, doubling him over, hardly able to breathe.

‘He’s awake!’ she yelled.

Pon-lor merely thanked the gods he hadn’t vomited from the pain. He would have asphyxiated behind the gag. Blinking the tears from his eyes he saw someone new crouched on his haunches beside him. Looking up, his eyes met the grinning familiar features of their erstwhile guide, Jak.

The youth was squatting with his hands hanging loose before his knees. He cocked his head, making a show of looking Pon-lor up and down. ‘You don’t look so good right now, mister rich pretty brat. You know, you should be more careful wandering around the woods when you got no idea what you’re doing.’

He leaned forward to push a stiffened finger into Pon-lor’s side. The mage yelled behind his gag.

‘Yeah. I knew Loor tagged you good there. Damned Thaumaturgs. What in the Abyss does it take to kill you?’

Another youth came shambling up, skinny and awkward. This one wore oversized blood-spattered armour of banded hauberk, helm, and greaves that Pon-lor recognized: Toru’s. ‘We should just kill ’im,’ he whined. ‘They’re dangerous-’

‘Course he’s dangerous,’ Jak sneered. ‘He’d be worthless otherwise, wouldn’t he? Just like you,’ and he slapped the youth’s side. Unnoticed by the crouching Jak, anger suffused the lad’s narrow face but was quickly hidden behind a morose dejection. The lad shuffled away. ‘Find the damned witch’s trail, Thet!’ Jak shouted after him.

Pon-lor relaxed his tight shoulders, unclenched his fisted hands and eased back against the trunk. He was suddenly glad he’d delayed unleashing his own outrage against these ragtag castoffs — for that was what he recognized them as: squatters, runaways, or outright criminal exiles from the eastern villages. So far he’d counted eleven in the group.

Then it struck him and he laughed as loud as he could behind the lashings of cloth tied across his mouth. Of course! Too rich! Oh, so very rich!

Jak rose, uneasy. ‘What’s so funny?’

Pon-lor snorted. Kenjak Ashevajak — the Bandit Lord! Ha!

‘What!’ Jak demanded, kicking him.

‘Hanthet Hord,’ Pon-lor mouthed behind his gag. And he laughed anew, more at himself than at this skinny young man quivering in rage before him.

Jak’s face darkened as understanding came and he lashed out again, connecting with the side of Pon-lor’s head and sending him down. Po-lor, however, continued to laugh even with his face pressed into the dirt. ‘Watch him, Myint,’ the youth snarled and marched off.

Hands none too gently yanked Pon-lor upright. The woman regarded him closely. This near, her scarred battleground face was even more of a horror. Could have had that cured at the capital, Pon-lor thought. Not something to mention, though. Her sharp deep eyes studied him and he saw a keen intelligence behind them. Dangerous, this one.

‘I don’t think we need you,’ she murmured, intimate and low. ‘And I know one way to kill you.’ She drew a wide scimitar blade from her side and pressed its finely honed edge to his neck. ‘Stories are this is one sure way. Want to find out?’

He edged his head in a sideways negative. She nodded. ‘For now. Remember, I’ll be behind you all the way …’ She pushed him with the point to start him walking. ‘Let’s go.’

Pon-lor cooperated, falling into line among the ‘bandits’ as they started off. At first he’d been astounded that Jak had let him live, but now he thought he had an idea of the Bandit Lord’s plans. No doubt he intended to collect a rich ransom for handing over a living Thaumaturg to the Queen of the Witches. This on top of the reward he expected for the yakshaka, should he manage to intercept the witch escorting it now, and present it as his own prize.

Good, then, that the cretin should lead him to his own goal. He’d thought little of his own chances of tracking her down; all his hopes had rested on Toru and Lo-sen. Many would perhaps not believe that a powerful theurgist mage should find himself lost in the jungle. But this was far from their training and expertise, as the ease of his capture had shown. The common villagers would never have dared the attempt, such was the dread of the Thaumaturg name. Yet Pon-lor did not think that these dregs and misfits — bandits! — understood this at all. They’d merely acted out of an assured confidence in their own mastery of this environment — an obviously justified assumption. And in his own concomitant helplessness — an unjustified assumption. Just as misguided as their quaint belief that merely by binding his hands and gagging him they’d rendered him powerless.

For the moment he saw no reason to demonstrate the error of their thinking. Especially when they were leading him to the suborned yakshaka and its captor. Once they had accomplished that unintended service he would regain control of the yakshaka, or, failing that, destroy it, and deal with this Night-Queen’s spy. Then he would allow himself the indulgence of meting out punishment for the loss of his command. In that strict order.

Until then, he would endure these indignities and petty insults. But later these bandits would all writhe in indescribable agony. He would see to it.

* * *

Osserc did not sleep. But he did dream. Waking dreams they were. Almost indistinguishable from mundane seated reality. They came and went like flitting scraps of shadow or idle thoughts passing before his gaze to disappear as if mere blurs against the rippled glazing of this murky window here in the Azath construct on Malaz Isle, which the locals named the Dead House.

Across the table of rough-hewn wooden slats covered in wax dribbles and cluttered by bottles and dusty glasses of all styles and fashions, the Jaghut Gothos was, in contrast, solid and unrelentingly permanent. The soft glow of his golden irises varied faintly as the entity blinked, occasionally. His head was sunk leaving his long iron-grey hair to hang as a ragged curtain. Gnarled hands, all swollen joints and misaligned fingers ending in yellowed talon-like nails, rested motionless upon the table’s slats. Even his breathing barely registered as the slightest rise and fall of his solid wide shoulders. Osserc vaguely wondered if breathing were even necessary for such a one as this.

Clamping his jaws tighter, he now reluctantly slid his gaze to the third party at their table. Its head was of roughly the same size and hairiness as a coconut. A Nacht it was, a strange monkey-like creature said to have once been native to this island. It sat so short its chin barely cleared the height of the table. It was asleep, or pretending to be, its coconut head nested in its arms. Yet this was only its appearance; the thing was far from any sort of natural animal. He suspected it to be a demon, though of what sort he had no idea. Clearly, it served this house — that is, was a chosen servant of the Azath. Similar to the guardians who sometimes manifested to defend the houses.

The creature’s knobby head popped up as if it were preternaturally aware of his quiet regard. Its tiny black eyes blinked sleepily then sharpened. It raised a hand to brush the hairs over its wide mouth as if in profound thoughtfulness.

Osserc let out a loud grating exhalation.

The creature nodded as if in agreement and then switched to pulling on the scraggly hairs of its chin as if stroking a goatee.

He dragged his gaze away to rest upon the grimed and leaded window glazing. Why did the Azath always torment him so? Was this merely a symptom of its alien character? But all that was mere distraction — and perhaps that was all it was in truth. Distraction.

Through the filthy rippled glazing it was impossible to tell if it were day or night over the modest port city of Malaz.

Was this perhaps a comment on how the Azath saw the world? Through a distorting lens?

Osserc sensed beyond the isle, to the south, the potent wintry heartbeat of power that was the brooding presence of the entities known as the Stormriders. Entities of utter frigid ice and rime. His gaze shifted to study anew the Jaghut opposite. A connection? Many postulated as much.

And truly alien. Not unlike the Azath as well. Anastomotic? Perhaps.

Yet none of these lines of inquiry tugged at him. Distraction. It was all mere distraction from the path he ought to be pursuing. He shut his eyes to rest them for a moment and when he opened them once more he found his gaze had returned to the warped opaque glass of the window.

So. Eyes looking outward are blind.

‘What are you thinking?’ came the dry croaked voice of Gothos. It startled Osserc, so long had it been since either of them had spoken. Steeling himself, he turned to meet the bright amber churning of the Jaghut’s eyes. He could not help but flinch slightly from the unyielding demands of that gaze.

‘I am thinking that you are irrelevant. That this creature is irrelevant. Even this construct. All are mere irrelevancies and distraction from where I ought to be looking.’

Gothos raised a jagged fragment of blue glass from the table and held it to one eye. ‘Memories are not the truth of the past. We sculpt them to suit our images of our present selves. And, in any case, the truth of then is not the truth of now.’

Osserc snorted his scorn, but within he felt something he had not known for ages untold — a profound unnerving, as if something he’d thought utterly unshakable had just revealed an empty gulf beneath. ‘You surprise me, Gothos. I thought you of all beings would argue for timeless enduring truths. Bedrock absolutes.’

‘Exactly. You thought.’

He made a conscious effort to move his gaze away as if disinterested. ‘You will hear no admissions from me. No confessions.’

The Jaghut scowled his profound distaste. ‘Of course not. I would be the last to want such mush and mawkishness. Which is perhaps precisely why I am here. As you say — I am irrelevant.’

As none other possibly could be.

So be it. Osserc closed his eyes. The memory of a flash of an indescribable brilliance seemed to blind him then. Ancient ones, such power! Such astounding potency. A young man’s voice echoed in his thoughts. A scream of anguish. Father!

His eyes fluttered open and for an instant his heart and limbs trembled in memory of that fright. He clenched his jaws and shifted in his seat. ‘I have guarded the wellspring of Thyrllan from all who sought to exploit it. Kept it apart. Walled it off at costs few could imagine.’

He turned his gaze on Gothos as if accusing, attempting to lance into those pits of argent. ‘Who would dare ask more of me?’ Yet he found within those pits no opponent, no challenge or quarrel. The flat steady gaze seemed to deflect his accusation upon himself.

‘Who indeed,’ the Jaghut said, a lip curling from one thrusting tusk.

Or so Osserc thought he said. Perhaps he imagined it. He was, after all, still within the Azath House. It, or they, set the rules here.

Irrelevant. Once more I shy away from the gulf. I am like prey caught fascinated by the predator’s gaze. Terrified and circling, yet unable to break away. I could if I wish merely walk out that door — yet what of all that I have struggled to understand, to achieve? Final answers ungrasped? If there are any to grasp. Perhaps there are none.

Then at least I would possess that knowledge.

So be it. He sat at the table as if relaxed, his legs crossed, hands one over the other upon one knee. Yet he felt those hands tighten to clamps on his leg. ‘I have asked nothing of others that I have not demanded of myself,’ he began, then immediately wished he hadn’t and clenched his lips. Too much of a damned justification. Why the urge to explain to this one? Especially when this entity had nothing but contempt for explanations or justifications. To this one they were all no better than self-serving pleas and apologies.

As they are to me as well …

Yet Gothos refrained from heaping scorn on that statement. Instead, he edged his head to peer through his ragged curtain of hair and his cracked lips drew back even further from his tusks in a merciless smile as if reading those very thoughts. ‘Exactly, Osserc. You have asked nothing of others. And so … by your own admission …’ Osserc’s hands clenched painfully upon his leg ‘… you have asked nothing of yourself.’

He came as close then to walking away as he ever did. Despite all the risks he had taken. All the costs and cunning it took to gain entry to the Azath. He nearly slammed back the chair and walked out. How dare he! The audacity! No one would dare! Not even … well, perhaps he. And Caladan. And T’riss. Azathanai those two. Yet Gothos is not.

Odd then that Gothos should bother himself. He does not serve the Azath, surely.

Osserc crossed his arms. ‘Odd to hear such a charge from one who has spent ages hiding himself away.’

The grimace of bared yellowed teeth that was Gothos’ smile flashed again. ‘Is that what you call what we are doing here?’ Before Osserc could answer that a gnarled hand rose to brush the murky air. ‘But no matter. As I am — what was it we both agreed upon … irrelevant?’

Again the deflection. Yet again the prey survives to circle the predator in the night. And if I am the prey and Gothos is not the trap nor the jaws awaiting me — then who? Or what? The Azath themselves?

‘The charge that I have asked nothing of myself is so absurd in the extreme that I would have slain anyone else for suggesting it. I closed Kurald Thyrllan! I have maintained the peace! I have done nothing but watch and ward the boundaries of that realm. I cannot even begin to tell you of the countless efforts to breach Thyrllan that I have crushed. Even my-’ He bit his tongue, so sharply did he cut himself off.

It seemed to him that the Jaghut’s smile took on an even more hungry and satisfied curl. ‘Yes?’ he prompted, though the knowledge lay in his eyes of liquid gold.

No! I will not simper here. Not before this one. Osserc leaned back to clasp his knee once more. ‘Even those of my own blood have had to be … dissuaded … now and then.’

‘How sad for you. But I was speaking of demands placed upon yourself, not others. Warding Thyrllan is all very well. It has kept you busy, I suppose. I’m sure that it has been most … distracting.’

Distracting? The word infuriated him — as did everything out of the damned Jaghut’s mouth — but then it began to take on a terrifying weight. Distracting? Distracting from what? Was there something …

He pulled his gaze away to find himself once more staring at their audience, the Nacht. Its head lay nestled in its skinny folded arms. Its mouth was open showing tiny sharp teeth. It was snoring quietly. Drool wet the table before it.

Another none-too-veiled comment? Am I trying the patience even of immortal otherworldly entities such as these? Is this a stunning victory or an abject failure? The answer to that question would go far to solving this impasse.

* * *

Shimmer dreamed of the day the Crimson Guard swore the Vow. They’d been on the run for weeks. Hunted by imperial columns. Fleeing a disastrous direct challenge of Kellanved’s forces. K’azz led them ever northward — or was being driven ever northward. They’d been part of a proud field army of fifty thousand, an alliance of contingents from across the continent. But with failure came fragmentation, desertion, and an utter melting away of any hope of alliance. Now they were reduced to little more than a ragged band of some six hundred. The hard unbowed annealed core. The true believers — such as herself. Oh, certainly, some remained because they lusted for battle, or could never admit defeat — Skinner and his followers among their numbers. But most remained for only one overriding motive. For him. For K’azz.

Of all the battles K’azz had personally led or marshalled, or the flanks he commanded, he had lost not one. It was an old story: winning the battles but losing the war. Time and again they had been let down, abandoned, or outright betrayed by those they fought beside or for. The Bloorian league of nobles. Cawn switching sides on the day of battle. Tali’s lukewarm support, as if resenting K’azz’s growing lustre as a potential political rival. The number of times the man had succeeded in extracting them from seemingly hopeless disasters under the patronage of petty princes and barons across Quon were too many to count.

But now rumours were circulating that the self-styled Emperor of Quon had lost his patience with them. That he had turned his most dreaded weapon upon them. The army of undead that he had raised through his monstrous and unhallowed black arts. The T’lan Imass.

For her part, Shimmer did not believe that only now had Kellanved taken note of them. Rather, it seemed to her that he had probably come to the conclusion that in K’azz lay a figurehead who could possibly unite resistance to his growing hegemony and here was a chance to be rid of him.

That day as they filed through the narrow ravines and passes of the foothills of the Fenn Range it came to her that they were no longer making for what she naturally assumed had been K’azz’s objective all along: the northernmost mountain fastness of his homeland, D’Avore.

Curious, she had kneed her mount forward to draw up beside him. ‘My prince-’

An easy laugh from him had stopped her. ‘Prince?’ he said, still chuckling. As always it was an infectious gently chiding laughter that made her flush, self-conscious. ‘Honorary at best, Shimmer. Those Bloorians do love their titles.’ The smile fell away. ‘At least they used to. I hear Kellanved has ordered all nobles executed. Every family in Bloor must be in the woods now burying their ridiculous fancy coats of arms.’

And he shook his head at the absurdity of it. How sad he looked, it occurred to her. Even this trivial episode had touched his heart. She lowered her attention to one of her mail-backed gloves, adjusted it. ‘We do not make for the Red Keep?’

‘No, Shimmer. Not yet, at least. A side venture first. A visit to an old locale …’ He appeared about to say more but shook his head instead. ‘Indulge me in this, yes?’

‘Of course, my-’ She caught herself.

‘Captain?’ he suggested, his mouth quirking up.

The expression made him appear even more youthful — his unshaven chin hardly dusted in light reddish-blond hairs. Shimmer cleared her throat, feeling her face heating once more. ‘Duke, at least, I should think.’

He inclined his head in acceptance. ‘Very good, Shimmer. Yes. Duke. At the least — and the most.’

Shimmer tilted her helmeted head to excuse herself and fell back. K’azz bent to talk with his old teacher and adviser mounted at his side: Stoop, siegemaster to the D’Avore family for nearly half a century.

She found herself between Blues and Smoky. Blues rode easily with a leg negligently curled up around his pommel, Seti-style. His hands free, he practised with two sticks, twisting and flicking them in blurred mesmerizing patterns. Smoky, on the other hand, rode with both hands in a death-grip on his pommel, legs clamped tight. He appeared terrified, as if his mount, desperate to murder him, was about to throw itself off the ledge they walked.

‘What word?’ Blues asked.

‘He wouldn’t say.’

Smoky let out an angry snort. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

Blues eyed the surrounding rocky slopes and the distant peaks. ‘There’s power in these mountains,’ he murmured.

‘I feel it too,’ Smoky growled and he hunched even lower on his mount. It seemed to Shimmer that the horse almost sighed its exasperation. ‘Nothing familiar though. Can’t place it.’

The sticks clacked together in one of Blues’ hands. He eyed the ridge ahead. ‘Gettin’ closer.’

Shimmer glanced back down the column where it twisted along the narrow trail. She spied Skinner in his long coat of armour riding close to the rear. Cowl was next to him, wrapped as usual in his shroud-like dirty ash-grey cloak. Together again, those two. That damned sneering assassin disturbed her like none other she’d met over a lifetime’s career of war and conflict. But even she, grudgingly, had to give the man his due: he did his job and kept Dancer’s Talons at bay.

Still, it saddened her to see Skinner drifting more and more into that one’s company. Once he’d been inseparable from K’azz. Always at his side. Their champion, many had even thought him — then. Their answer to Dassem Ultor. But each defeat and setback in their campaigning seemed to drive the man ever further from K’azz’s side. There was an element, she knew, among the guard who were of the opinion that a company’s lack of success was the fault of its commander. And this was especially true of any mercenary company.

Riding the trail, the cool wind brushing at her hair where it escaped her helmet, Shimmer tightened the reins round her fist and pulled on her mail coat where it caught at her thigh. She’d been against that from the start — the idea of their turning mercenary. She’d never quite fully understood K’azz’s rationale. Something about ease of movement across Quon Tali, and not being a threat to local suzerainty.

At least so it was on the face of the papers and treaties they signed with the various princes, kings, chieftains, councillors and nobles with whom they’d taken ‘employment’. Papers these representatives were quick to throw to the wind the moment Kellanved and his motley army appeared on their borders.

In any case, turning mercenary did swell their numbers. The lustre of K’azz’s family name drew many, together with those associated with him: Skinner, Blues, Lazar, Cal-Brinn and Bars. Even the name Cowl drew recruits who wished to work with him — and learn his trade. The sort of men and women she thought they could do without. Such as Isha, Lacy and the Wickan renegade, Tarkhan.

Now, though, those who fought for money alone had long since drifted away. Now, only those who’d always regarded themselves as part of the personal guard of the Red Duke remained.

Or so she’d thought at the time.

K’azz led them up on to a narrow natural plateau hidden away among the climbing ridges of the Fenn Range. It was thickly grassed, the air cold. Nearby, a herd of wild horses startled Shimmer as they thundered off, wary of their advance.

Here K’azz had them dismount and gather in a circle. Pushing her way through the thigh-high grasses, Shimmer noted dark fisted knots of stone poking up here and there. Standing stones. But hardly cyclopean. Small and eroded. No more than headstones.

‘Feel it sizzle?’ she heard Blues murmur to the skinny young mage now at his side, Fingers.

‘It’s like ten stones pressing down on my skull,’ the kid groaned, and he held a hand to his forehead.

‘Gather round!’ K’azz called from the dusk.

‘Have a care, K’azz. This is no ordinary field,’ Smoky answered, warning.

‘I know. Gather round.’

Shimmer pressed forward into the tightening ring of the remaining guard encircling K’azz. The faces of some, she noted, held an anxious worry. And then it came to her like a sudden panic: was this it? All their battles and struggle to come to an end here in this isolated, inauspicious place? Had he brought them here to disband? Here, this very night? The suspicion clenched her heart and made it hard to breathe.

Yet across the small clear circle Stoop was not concerned. To the contrary, the old saboteur looked positively pleased. He held a crooked smile behind his grizzled beard while he scratched at his chin with the stump of his elbow.

K’azz raised his arms for silence. Yet even as he did so Skinner pressed forward, frowning, as if sharing Shimmer’s fears. Shimmer felt a brief echo of the attraction she once held for him as his blond hair blew about his still handsome features. ‘Why have we ventured so far north, K’azz?’ he demanded. ‘Are we yielding the fight?’ He turned to address the crowded company. ‘I have always maintained we should head to Tali. The city would rise to our banner. We could lead a liberating force eastward.’

The audacity! The man had just announced his plans should K’azz dissolve the company. Shimmer drew breath to shout him down, but K’azz merely raised a hand for silence and she reluctantly subsided. ‘Are you vowing that you will never abandon the fight?’ he asked in a manner remarkably composed, given this implied challenge to his authority.

Skinner now frowned in earnest. He peered about, gauging the mood of the company, and Shimmer was relieved to see hardly any support for him in the hard, disapproving expressions around the circle. ‘Of course,’ he answered easily, as if to shrug off the ridiculous question. ‘That is my very point. I counsel that we return to the struggle.’

K’azz merely gave a small nod of assent, and in this guarded reaction — giving away nothing — Shimmer recognized the commander at his most dangerous. He had somehow manoeuvred Skinner exactly where he wanted him, she realized. Yet of course he reveals nothing of it. ‘Very good. For that is my intent. That is why I have brought us here.’ He raised his chin to address the entire gathered company. ‘We are here to swear a vow!’ he began, loudly, catching everyone’s attention. ‘As many of you have already noticed, this is no random field. It is an ancient site. A place of power. Holy to our family, to our ancestors, and, some say, even to those ancient ones who preceded us upon these lands.

‘We gather here on this day in the sight of one another to swear a binding oath. What we here swear is unrelenting and unending opposition to the Malazan Empire for so long as it shall endure. To never abandon or turn away from such opposition. To this cause all gathered here must give their individual agreement and binding commitment. Those of you who know doubt, or who feel unable to pledge yourselves utterly to this cause, are free to go. Nay, are encouraged to go. And all without rancour or ill-feelings.’

While talking K’azz turned full circle to peer at every face, to fix a hard gauging eye upon every member of his remaining guard. ‘So … this is my Vow. This is what I here pledge and what I, in turn, ask of anyone who would choose to follow me. Now … what say you, Stoop?’

The wiry old siegemaster gave an easy shrug. ‘I so swear, a course.’

‘Blues?’

Their unofficial weaponmaster nodded solemnly. ‘I so swear.’

K’azz then faced Skinner. ‘Skinner? What of you?’

He was still frowning, as if sensing a trap but unable to pin it down. Finally he shrugged as well. ‘Of course. I also swear. Fighting on has been my intent all along.’

K’azz’s hard gaze now fell upon Shimmer and a cold finger seemed to press itself upon her spine. She felt a sudden weight, as if she were being sucked down into the earth beneath her feet, or the earth itself were rising up to swallow her. The pounding of hooves returned to her ears and she thought perhaps the herd of wild horses had returned. But the thunder was too deep for mere horses. Something immense moving across the land. Or is it simply my heart? She tried to speak but could make no sound. After what seemed an eternity the words escaped her numb lips.

‘I so swear.’

The punishing weight of that gaze moved on and she could breathe again. All that must have been as an instant. Blinking to clear inexplicable tears from her gaze she peered out across the tall stands of grasses weaving in the evening winds and there she spied a lone dark figure, watching. It was a woman; that much was clear. But broad, powerful and dark-skinned, her long kinky black hair wind-tossed.

Strangely panicked by the appearance of one woman — some sort of displaced tribal, Seti or Wickan — Shimmer glanced to K’azz, now asking Lean to swear. Dare she interrupt? She returned her gaze to the grasses but the woman was gone. Moved on. A refugee, perhaps, from the fighting in the south. Odd that she should be alone.

The swearing continued, K’azz demanding a personal pledge from all gathered. For some reason the ritual awakened another memory in Shimmer and she found herself drifting back even further in time to when she was a child.

‘Shimmer …’

Had that been the wind? A distant voice calling her name?

If she tried very hard she could remember a little of her youth. A farm in one of the more rural Kan provinces. She could recall feeding chickens and pigs. Harvesting rice. Playing with an army of brothers and sisters in the dry dusty ground before their family hut.

A hard upbringing. But for the most part a happy one. Until all came to an end.

Until he came. A man so old as to be nothing more than dried flesh and wisps of white hair. Or so it appeared to the child she was at the time.

She remembered her father bending down before her. He took her shoulders in his big hard farmer’s hands. ‘You will go with this man, Iko. It is a great merit to your family that he has chosen you. Be studious. Learn his teachings. But above all — be obedient! For it is by honouring him that you honour us. Your parents and all your ancestors before you. Do you understand?’

And she looking up at him, blinking through tears, hardly understanding. ‘Yes, Father. I swear.’

‘Very good, Iko. Do not cry. You go now to the capital. To a great school. Dance well. Bring us merit.’

‘Yes, Father.’

Then a cruel dry grip upon her wrist tugging her along and a rasping mutter. ‘I do not know why I bother. Too short you are. Too short by far. But,’ and the hand swung her up on to a cart, ‘one must do the best one can with what the gods provide.’

And if her childhood had been deprived but benign, the school proved a hundred times as harsh and in no way benign. For the discipline of the dance of the whipsword was unforgiving.

‘Shimmer.’

There it was again. That voice. Calling. More insistent this time.

The school’s lessons had been brutal but she’d survived. She wondered if she was the last of the whipsword dancers, now that the Kan court had been obliterated. Thinking back, she couldn’t exactly remember how or why she’d survived the Malazan encirclement and siege. She, the last of the Kan king’s bodyguards.

‘Shimmer!’

The voice had a presence now. An image coalesced to impose itself upon her. It was the ghostly figure of Stoop, their old siegemaster. He was peering at her closely, anxiety on his crimped brows. ‘You’ve drifted far, lass. Any further and you’ll not make it back, I think. Best to return, yes?’

She peered at him, confused. ‘You’re not supposed to be here …’

‘No less than you, lass. Now stop your daydreaming. We’re in a dangerous place. Most dangerous the Guard’s ever been, I’m thinking.’

‘Dreaming?’ She frowned, glanced about at the drifting and wavering images that surrounded her. They appeared to her like the rippling reflections from a lake.

Or a river.

Her gaze snapped back to Stoop. ‘Where am I?’

‘Lost among your memories.’

‘How do I …’

He raised a brow. ‘Get back?’ He started off, but paused when she did not move. He beckoned her onward. ‘Just you follow me, lass. Any way’ll do.’ And he set off once more.

She stalked after him, full of wonder, but touched by anger as well. She now knew she was not physically present wherever this place was — her own mind, no doubt — yet she took a great deal of reassurance from the hiss and shift of her long mail coat as she moved.

She came to herself once more at the railing of the Serpent. Only now the river was hardly wider than a stream. Its dense jungle verges reached out to one another almost closing out the sun and blue sky overhead. And the vessel was not moving. They appeared to have run aground on a sand bar, or shallows. She now wore only thin linen trousers, a shirt and leather sandals. The heat and close humidity was unbearable. She could barely breathe the thick miasma. And who knew for how long they had been marooned here, the ship rotting beneath them?

Yet could this not be another dream?

‘This isn’t a dream,’ said the voice of Stoop.

She glanced aside to see him standing with her at the railing. The macabre humour of such a claim coming from him, a dead man, raised a smile to her lips. ‘It is if you’re here,’ she answered.

‘I’m close now, aye. We all are. All the Brethren. We’re frightened, Shimmer.’

The half-amused smile fell away. ‘Frightened?’

‘Aye. Of where we’re headed. Of who is awaiting us there. She’s like nothing else here in the world — ’cept maybe the Shattered God.’ He raised dead eyes to peer at her directly. ‘She has the power to steal us away, Shimmer. You won’t let that happen, yes?’

‘I promise, Stoop. I won’t let that happen to you.’

‘To me? I’m talking about all of us, lass. Now close your eyes.’

She could not help but shut them for an instant. When she opened them he was gone. She peered about the ship’s side. The rest of her companions sat about, or sprawled as if asleep. She pulled her hands from their clawed grip of the dried and splitting wood. The nails were blackened and broken. Insect bites dotted the flesh of her arms, livid and swollen, most unhealed. The noise from the surrounding jungle was now deafening: a cacophony of bird shrieks and whistles, insect whirrings, and the warning calls of unseen large animals. She went to find K’azz.

He was at the stern, sitting hunched, his head bowed. Everyone, it seemed, was bewitched. ‘K’azz,’ she urged. ‘Wake up. K’azz? What has happened to you?’

‘He dreams.’

Shimmer spun to find the Jacuruku witch, Rutana, uncomfortably close behind. This near, she could see that the whites of the woman’s eyes were not white at all, but a sickly yellow. And the pupils now appeared different, as if slit vertically. ‘What have you done?’ she breathed, and she slid back a step, a hand going to the knife at her belt.

‘I? Nothing. I do not have such power. My mistress, now. Well … that is a different matter.’ Her familiar sneering smile twitched her lips. ‘What you experience now is merely a side effect of her presence. Imagine, then, if she were to actively raise her might …’ She lifted her bony shoulders. ‘Well, there are none who could withstand her.’

‘Not even Skinner?’

Hate raged in those sallow eyes and things seemed to writhe beneath the flesh of the woman’s neck and arms. Grimacing, she clamped a hand to the amulets and charms tied to her arm and squeezed there, the hand whitening with effort. She lurched away a short distance and then stopped, turning to glare. ‘Him she permitted to leave. Permitted! Remember that, Avowed.’ She stormed off.

‘Must you bait the woman?’

Shimmer looked to see that K’azz was now gazing up at her. ‘She insists upon baiting me.’ She extended a hand to him and pulled him upright.

‘I dreamed,’ he murmured, his gaze narrowed on the glimmering waters of the river.

‘So do we all.’

‘I have read philosophers who posit that life itself is a dream.’

‘Life bleeds,’ Shimmer answered, full of contempt for such a claim.

The man’s slit gaze shifted to her and she felt its weight. ‘You may just have something there, Shimmer. Though even the basest animals bleed.’

Sighing, she leaned her weight on the cracked, sun-faded wood of the ship’s side. ‘Then we are animals, K’azz. And we are base.’

He joined her, peering at her while she steadfastly regarded the light glimmering from the murky blood-red waters. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You have come to the preferred response in the philosophical dialogue. And so I ask — what sets us apart then, if anything, from the animal?’

She felt so tired. It seemed as if she’d slept all these last weeks, yet she felt unaccountably exhausted. Worn out, or ground down. As if her will was under some sort of relentless crushing pressure. She rubbed her eyes, bruised as they were by the stabbing scintillating reflections. What was he going on about? Surely he must have some point — he was no fool. Perhaps it merely eluded her. She was not tutored in philosophy as he was. ‘I don’t know, K’azz,’ she whispered — or believed she did. ‘We have each other.’

‘Yes. Exactly, Shimmer. Each other. Society. That is what sets us apart.’

She’d heard this argument before, in many shapes and versions. The critique came to her at once. ‘The herd. The group. So — we are sheep.’ Still she refused to meet his gaze.

He snorted as if mildly amused by the rebuttal. ‘That old line. Sheep and wolves. People who push that analogy haven’t spent much time with either animal. Truth is, the wolves’ society is more sophisticated. Wolves have a hierarchy. And the worst fate for any wolf is to be cast out of the pack. If a sheep becomes lost it just wanders around until something eats it. If a wolf is cast out, it dies of loneliness. Human society shares much more with the wolf than the sheep. So that comparison isn’t valid.’

Frustrated now, Shimmer turned on her commander. This close, his sickness, or condition, made her almost wince. Parchment-like skin stretched taut over high cheekbones, the skull’s orbits of the eyes clearly visible. His hair was a thin white mat flattened now by sweat and grime. Reading her reaction, he turned his face away.

That in her thoughtlessness she had hurt him stabbed her and she cursed her stupidity. I am not the one who is ill. Or dying. Yet she had to believe he still spoke with a purpose. ‘What are you trying to say, K’azz?’

Head turned away, he said, his voice now rough, ‘Where we are going there is neither sheep nor wolf, Shimmer. I believe the entity awaiting us does not even know what society is. Has never been part of a group, or even a family, such as we know or understand it. She, or it, is unfathomably alien to us. Remember that, Shimmer. In the days to come.’

‘Yes, K’azz. I will.’

Straightening, he cleared his throat. ‘Very good. Shall we go wake the others, then?’

‘Yes.’