Brint looked up, pale face streaked with tears. “An arrow,” he whispered. “Just a stray. He never even drew his sword.”

“Bad luck,” grunted Pike. “Bad luck.”

West stared down. Bad luck indeed. He could just see, snapped off at the edge of Kaspa’s beard, under his jaw, the broken shaft of an arrow, but there was surprisingly little blood. Few marks of any kind. A splatter of mud down one sleeve of his uniform, and that was all. Despite the fact they were, in essence, staring cross-eyed at nothing, West could not help the feeling that Kaspa’s eyes were looking directly into his. There was a peevish twist to his lip, an accusatory wrinkling of his brows. West almost wanted to take him up on it, demand to know what he meant by it, then had to remind himself that the man was dead.

“A letter, then,” muttered West, his fingers fussing with each other, “to his family.”

Brint gave a miserable sniff which West found, for some reason, utterly infuriating. “Yes, a letter.”

“Yes. Sergeant Pike, with me.” West could not stand there a moment longer. He turned away from his friends, one living and one dead, and strode off up the valley. He did his very best not to dwell on the fact that, had he not ordered the charge, one of the most pleasant and inoffensive men of his acquaintance would still be alive. One cannot be a leader without a certain ruthlessness, perhaps. But ruthlessness is not always easy.

He and Pike floundered over a crushed earth rampart and a trampled ditch, the valley growing steadily narrower, the high cliffs of stone pressing in on either side. More corpses here. Northmen, and wild men such as they found in Dunbrec, and Shanka too, all peppered liberally across the broken ground. West could see the wall of the fortress now, little more than a mossy hump in the landscape with more death scattered round its foot.

“They held out in there, for seven days?” muttered Pike.

“So it would seem.”

The one entrance was a rough archway in the centre of the wall, its gates torn off and lying ruined. There seemed to be three strange shapes within it. As he got closer, West realised with some discomfort what they were. Three men, hanging dead by their necks from ropes over the top of the wall, their limp boots swinging gently at about chest height. There were a lot of grim Northmen gathered around that gate, looking up at those dangling corpses with some satisfaction. One in particular turned a cruel grin on West and Pike as they came close.

“Well, well, well, if it ain’t my old friend Furious,” said Black Dow. “Turned up late to the party, eh? You always was a slow mover, lad.”

“There were some difficulties. Marshal Burr is dead.”

“Back to the mud, eh? Well, he’s in good company, at least. Plenty of good men done that these past days. Who’s your chief, now?”

West took a long breath. “I am.”

Dow laughed, and West watched him laugh, feeling the slightest bit sick. “Big chief Furious, what do you know?” and he stood up straight and made a mockery of a Union salute while the bodies turned slowly this way and that behind him. “You should meet my friends. They’re all big men too. This here is Crendel Goring, fought for Bethod from way back.” And he reached up and gave one of the bodies a shove, watched it sway back and forth.

“This here is Whitesides, and you couldn’t have found a better man anywhere for killing folk and stealing their land.” And he gave the next a push and set it spinning round and round one way, then back the other, limbs all limp and floppy.

“And this one here is Littlebone. As hard a bastard as I’ve ever hung.” This last man was hacked near to meat, his gold-chased armour battered and dented, a great wound across his chest and his hanging grey hair thick with blood. One leg was off below his knee, and a pool of dry blood stained the ground underneath him.

“What happened to him?” asked West.

“To Littlebone?” The great fat hillman, Crummock-i-Phail, was one of the crowd. “He got cut down in the battle, fighting to the last man, over yonder.”

“That he did,” said Dow, and he gave West a grin even bigger than usual. “But that’s no kind of a reason not to hang him now, I reckon.”

Crummock laughed. “No kind of a reason!” And he smiled at the three bodies turning round and round, the ropes creaking. “They make a pretty picture, don’t they, hanging there? They say you can see all the beauty in the world in the way a hanged man swings.”

“Who does?” asked West.

Crummock shrugged his great shoulders. “Them.”

“Them, eh?” West swallowed his nausea and pushed his way between the hanging bodies into the fortress. “They surely are a bloodthirsty crowd.”

Dogman took another pull at the flask. He was getting good and drunk now. “Alright. Let’s get it done then.”

He winced as Grim stuck the needle in, curled his lips back and hissed through his teeth. A nice pricking and niggling to add to the dull throb. The needle went through the skin and dragged the thread after, and Dogman’s arm started burning worse and worse. He took another swig, rocking back and forward, but it didn’t help.

“Shit,” he hissed. “Shit, shit!”

Grim looked up at him. “Don’t watch, then.”

Dogman turned his head. The Union uniform jumped out at him straight away. Red cloth in the midst of all that brown dirt. “Furious!” shouted the Dogman, feeling a grin on his face even through the pain. “Glad you could make it! Real glad!”

“Better to come late than not to come at all.”

“You’ll get no trace of an argument from me. That is a fact.”

West frowned down at Grim sewing his arm up. “You alright?”

“Well, you know. Tul’s dead.”

“Dead?” West stared at him. “How?”

“It’s a battle, ain’t it? Dead men are the point o’ the fucking exercise.” He waved the flask around. “I’ve been sat here, thinking about what I could’ve done differently. Stopped him going down them steps, or gone down with him to watch his back, or made the sky fall in, or all kind o’ stupid notions, none of ’em any help to the dead nor the living. Seems I can’t stop thinking, though.”

West frowned down at the rutted earth. “Might be’s a game with no winners.”

“Ah, fuck!” Dogman snarled as the needle jabbed into his arm again, and he flung the empty flask bouncing away. “The whole fucking business has no winners, though, does it! Shit on it all, I say.”

Grim pulled his knife out and cut the thread. “Move your fingers.” It burned all the way up Dogman’s arm to make a fist, but he forced the fingers closed, growling at the pain as they bunched up tight.

“Looks alright,” said Grim. “You’re lucky.”

The Dogman stared round miserably at the carnage. “So this is what luck looks like, is it? I’ve often wondered.” Grim shrugged his shoulders, ripped a piece of cloth for a bandage.

“Do you have Bethod?”

Dogman looked up at West, his mouth open. “Don’t you?”

“A lot of prisoners, but he wasn’t among them.”

Dogman turned his head and spat his disgust out into the mud. “Nor his witch, nor his Feared, nor neither one of his swollen up sons, I’ll be bound.”

“I imagine they’ll be riding for Carleon as swiftly as possible.”

“More’n likely.”

“I imagine he’ll try to raise new forces, to find new allies, to prepare for a siege.”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

“We should follow him as soon as the prisoners are secure.”

Dogman felt a sudden wave of hopelessness, enough almost to knock him over. “By the dead. Bethod got away.” He laughed, and felt tears prickling his eyes the next moment. “Will there ever be an end to it?”

Grim finished wrapping the bandage and tied it up tight. “You’re done.”

Dogman stared back at him. “Done? I’m starting to think I won’t ever be done.” He held his hand out. “Help me up, eh, Furious? I got a friend to bury.”