Yeah, he told Naranash. We’re winning. Looks like Flaradnam held the breakwater after all. We’re driving them back.

The Kiriath knight spat up blood. That’s good. He’s a good lad, ’Nam, he’ll follow through. Shame I’m going to miss that party. He coughed throatily for a moment. You keep hold of that sword, you hear? Best friend you’ll ever have. Friend to ravens, remember that. Make sure—

And the reptile peon was on Ringil, long shriek and the rasping, scaled impact against his cuirass. He staggered and went over backward in the sand. The long spiked tail lashed around, the claws dug in, and Ringil screamed back in the creature’s face at the pain, smashed the pommel of the Ravensfriend into its eye. The peon shrilled and its fangs snapped shut inches from his throat. He got his left forearm in the way, guarding, dropped the Ravensfriend and stabbed two stiffened fingers from his freed right hand into the creature’s eye, down past the socket and into the brain behind. The peon thrashed and shrieked and snapped, and he rolled it over in the fountaining storm of sand it was making with its tail. Pinned it there with his body weight while his fingers burrowed and shoved in up to the hilt. The eyelid flapped up and down on his knuckles like a trapped moth’s wing scraping in the cup of a boy’s closed palms. The tail lashed about, damp sand came up in shovel loads, swiped him across the face, got gritty into his mouth as he sucked breath and snarled and fought and then, finally, finally, with a high whining noise in its throat and a shivering convulsion, the fucking thing died.

And by the time he staggered back to his feet, so had Naranash.

He never knew if in those last moments the Kiriath knight had seen the peon attack, understood what was going on and had drawn his own fading conclusions about the state of the battle. If at the end he’d known that Ringil had lied to him.

But Ringil had never seen him afraid.

“You sure you’re interpreting the texts right?” he asked Shalak. “I mean, maybe the language—”

“I grew up speaking Tethanne as well as Naomic, Gil. My mother made me learn to read it as well. I’ve seen copies of the translations they made of the Indirath M’nal in Yhelteth, I’ve seen the commentaries on it, and I know enough of the High Kir original to follow those commentaries. And I’m telling you, Gil, the day the Kiriathwent up against the Vanishing Folk, they were scared.”

Shalak clasped his hands at waist height and cast his head back a little. Ringil remembered the pose from summer gatherings of the city’s Aldrain enthusiasts that he’d attended in his youth. Everybody huddled together and chattering in early-evening gloom, taking wine in little fake Aldrain goblets in the tiny gardens at the back of the shop. There was a quote coming.

“How should one fight an enemy that is not wholly of this world?” Shal declaimed. “They come to us in ghost form, striking snake-swift out of phantasmal mist, and when we strike back they return to mist and they laugh, low and mocking in the wind. They—”

But now the rest of it was gone, carried away on the cool breeze out of nowhere that blew up Ringil’s neck. He snapped back to the previous night, the krin-skewed walk home from Grace-of-Heaven’s place and swooping laughter past his face like a caress. He felt the same shiver creep up his neck again and found he’d raised a hand involuntarily to touch his cheek where the laughter had seemed to touch . . .

“Pretty conclusive, wouldn’t you say?”

Shalak, finished now with his quotations, looking at him expectantly. Ringil blinked.

“Uh—yeah.” He scrambled to cover for his disconnection. “I guess. Uhm, that bit about not wholly of this world. They say the Aldrain came from the band originally, don’t they? And that’s where they went back to. You think that’s possible?”

“With the Aldrain, anything’s possible. But likely?” Shalak shook his head. “You talk to any decent astronomer, here or in the Empire, they’ll tell you the band is made up of a million different moving particles, all catching the sun’s rays. That’s why it shines, it’s like dust motes in a sunbeam. It’s just not a solid arch the way it looks. Hard to see how anything could live in the middle of something like that.”

Ringil brooded. “The Majak believe that the band is a pathway leading to the Sky Home of the honorable dead. A ghost road.”

“Yes, but they’re savages.”

Ringil remembered Egar’s scarred and tattooed features, slightly surprised at the sudden flare of affection it triggered. It was how the steppe nomad would cheerfully have described himself—I ain’t fucking civilized, Gil, he’d said one campfire night on the march to Hanliahg. That’s not something I’m ever going to need—but still Shalak’s automatic sneer went home like a barb. He held down a spurt of unreasonably defensive anger.

“I don’t know,” he said carefully. “You spend any time that far north, you get to see some strange shit in the sky. You should get yourself up there sometime. And anyway, here we are talking about the Aldrain as ghost warriors. So you know, maybe there’s something in it.”

“Ringil, I really don’t think you can stack a bunch of shamanistic gibbering up against the gathered writings of the Kiriath’s finest minds and expect it to make a pile the same height.”

“All right. So you tell me—how did these finest minds among the Kiriath beat the Aldrain?”

Shalak shrugged. “With machinery, it seems. The way the Kiriath did most things. There are a lot of references to—”

Outside in the street, someone started shouting. Something thumped audibly against the wall. Shalak flinched, perhaps with the old memories, and went swiftly to one of the shop’s grimy windows. He peered out for a moment, then relaxed.

“It’s just Darby,” he said. “Another one of his episodes, looks like.”

“Darby?” Ringil got up and drifted toward the window, ducking the wind chimes. “What’s he, a neighbor of yours?”

“Thankfully not.” Shalak shifted slightly to give Ringil space at his side, and nodded at the scene on the other side of the glass. “Look.”

In the early-evening sunlight outside, the crowds had parted and drawn back, become a silhouetted whole, a curtain closing in a broad oval of cobbled street. In the center of this impromptu arena, a solitary figure stood isolated. His clothing was obviously ragged beneath a longish, dirty blue coat that looked somehow familiar, and he brandished some kind of crude cudgel in a two-handed ax grip. At his feet, a pair of elegantly attired forms rolled about on the cobbles, clutching at themselves where blows had obviously been delivered.

“Darby,” Shalak repeated, as if that were explanation enough.

“And the others?”

The shopkeeper pulled a face. “No idea. Clerks-at-law by their coats, they’re probably down from the courts at Lim Cross, sessions’ll be turning out about now. Darby doesn’t like lawyers much.”

That much was evident. Darby loomed over the two men he’d put on the ground, lips peeled back off his teeth, eyes staring. His hair was a tangled gray mess, visibly greasy from lack of washing, and he had a beard down to his chest to match. He was saying something to the men, but you couldn’t hear it through the window glass.

For all of that, the weapon in his hands was absolutely steady.

The sinking sun caught on an epaulet buckle, and inside Ringil’s krinzanz-tender head, familiarity leapt into recognition. He swore softly to himself.

And then the Watch arrived.

Six men strong, they forced their way through the curtaining crowd of spectators with shoulders and well-judged jolts from the ends of their day-clubs. Darby watched them come. They spilled out into the cleared space in a loose group, saw the cudgel, and maybe recognized the coat the way Ringil just had. They glanced back and forth at one another. The stunned men at Darby’s feet lay where they were, still prone, dazed in the flooding sunlight, half aware at best of what was going on. No one said anything. Then the watchmen began to spread out, sliding warily around the edge of the cleared space like coffee in the rim of a tipped saucer, skirting their target, looking to surround and overwhelm.