Tomad nodded.

Trull glanced over at Fear. Behind him knelt the slaves that had attended the casting, heads pressed to the earth and motionless, as they had been since Uruth’s arrival. It seemed Fear’s hard eyes were fixed upon something no-one else could see.

When Binadas returns… the sons of Tomad will set forth. Into the ice wastes.

A sickly groan from Udinaas.

The Warlock King ignored it as he strode from the barn, his K’risnan flanking him, his shadow sentinel trailing a step behind. At the threshold, that monstrous wraith paused of its own accord, for a single glance back – though there was no way to tell upon whom it fixed its shapeless eyes.

Udinaas groaned a second time, and Trull saw the slave’s limbs trembling.

At the threshold, the wraith was gone.

CHAPTER TWO

A GLANCE BACK. IN THE MISTY HAZE FAR BELOW AND TO THE WEST glimmered the innermost extent of Reach Inlet, the sky’s pallid reflection thorough in disguising that black, depthless water. On all other sides, apart from the stony trail directly behind Seren Pedac, reared jagged mountains, the snow-clad peaks gilt by a sun she could not see from where she stood at the south end of the saddle pass.

The wind rushing past her stank of ice, the winter’s lingering breath of cold decay. She drew her furs tighter and swung round to gauge the progress of the train on the trail below.

Three solid-wheeled wagons, pitching and clanking. The swarming, bare-backed figures of the Nerek tribesmen as they flowed in groups around each wagon, the ones at the head straining on ropes, the ones at the rear advancing the stop-blocks to keep the awkward conveyances from rolling backward.

In those wagons, among other trade goods, were ninety ingots of iron, thirty to each wagon. Not the famed Letherii steel, of course, since sale of that beyond the borders was forbidden, but of the next highest quality grade, carbon-tempered and virtually free of impurities. Each ingot was as long as Seren’s arm, and twice as thick.

The air was bitter cold and thin. Yet those Nerek worked half naked, the sweat steaming from their slick skins. If a stop-block failed, the nearest tribesman would throw his own body beneath the wheel. And for this, Buruk the Pale paid them two docks a day. Seren Pedac was Buruk’s Acquitor, granted passage into Edur lands, one of seven so sanctioned by the last treaty. No merchant could enter Edur territory unless guided by an Acquitor. The bidding for Seren Pedac and the six others had been high. And, for Seren, Buruk’s had been highest of all, and now he owned her. Or, rather, he owned her services as guide and finder – a distinction of which he seemed increasingly unmindful.

But this was the contract’s sixth year. Only four remaining.

Maybe.

She turned once more, and studied the pass ahead. They were less than a hundred paces’ worth of elevation from the treeline. Knee-high, centuries-old dwarf oaks and spruce flanked the uneven path. Mosses and lichens covered the enormous boulders that had been dragged down by the rivers of ice in ages past. Crusted patches of snow remained, clinging to shadowed places. Here the wind moved nothing, not the wiry spruce, not even the crooked, leafless branches of the oaks.

Against such immovable stolidity, it could only howl.

The first wagon clattered onto level ground behind her, Nerek tongues shouting as it was quickly rolled ahead, past Seren Pedac, and anchored in place. The tribesmen then rushed back to help their fellows still on the ascent.

The squeal of a door, and Buruk the Pale clambered out from the lead wagon. He stood with his stance wide, as if struggling to regain the memory of balance, turning with a wince from the frigid wind, reaching up to keep his fur-lined cap on his head as he blinked over at Seren Pedac.

‘I shall etch this vision against the very bone of my skull, blessed Acquitor! There to join a host of others, of course. That umber cloak of fur, the stately, primeval grace as you stand there. The weathered majesty of your profile, so deftly etched by these wild heights.

‘You – Nerek! Find your foreman – we shall camp here. Meals must be prepared. Unload those bundles of wood in the third wagon. I want a fire, there, in the usual place. Be on with it!’

Seren Pedac set her pack down and made her way along the path. The wind quickly dragged Buruk’s words away. Thirty paces on, she came to the first of the old shrines, a widening of the trail, where level stretches of scraped bedrock reached out to the sides and the walls of the flanking mountains had been cut sheer. On each flat, boulders had been positioned to form the full-sized outline of a ship, both prow and stern pointed and marked by upright menhirs. The prow stones had been carved into a likeness of the Edur god, Father Shadow, but the winds had ground the details away. Whatever had originally occupied these two flanking ships had long vanished, although the bedrock within was strangely stained.

The sheer walls of rock alone retained something of their ancient power. Smooth and black, they were translucent, in the manner of thin, smoky obsidian. And shapes moved behind them. As if the mountains had been hollowed out, and each panel was a kind of window, revealing a mysterious, eternal world within. A world oblivious of all that surrounded it, beyond its own borders of impenetrable stone, and of these strange panels, either blind or indifferent.

The translucent obsidian defied Seren’s efforts to focus on the shapes moving on the other side, as it had the past score of times she had visited this site. But that very mystery was itself an irresistible lure, drawing her again and again.

Stepping carefully around the stern of the ship of boulders, she approached the eastern panel. She tugged the fur-lined glove from her right hand, reached and set it against the smooth stone. Warm, drinking the stiffness from her fingers, taking the ache from the joints. This was her secret, the healing powers she had discovered when she first touched the rock.

A lifetime in these hard lands stole suppleness from the body. Bones grew brittle, misshapen with pain. The endless hard rock underfoot soon sent shocks through the spine with each step taken. The Nerek, the tribe that, before kneeling to the Letherii king, had dwelt in the range’s easternmost reach, believed that they were the children of a woman and a serpent, and that the serpent dwelt still within the body, that gently curved spine, the stacked knuckles reaching up to hide its head in the centre of the brain. But the mountains despised that serpent, desired only to drag it back to the ground, to return it once more to its belly, slithering in the cracks and coiled beneath rocks. And so, in the course of a life, the serpent was made to bow, to bend and twist.

Nerek buried their dead beneath flat stones.

At least, they used to, before the king’s edict forced them to embrace the faith of the Holds.

Now they leave the bodies of their kin where they fall. Even unto abandoning their huts. It had been years ago, but Seren Pedac remembered with painful clarity coming over a rise and looking upon the vast plateau where the Nerek dwelt. The villages had lost all distinction, merging together in chaotic, dispirited confusion. Every third or fourth hut had been left to ruin, makeshift sepulchres for kin that had died of disease, old age, or too much alcohol, white nectar or durhang. Children wandered untended, trailed by feral rock rats that now bred uncontrolled and had become too disease-ridden to eat.