'And then?'

'Darujhistan. I think I want to see this magnificent city of yours.

You said rooftops and alleys – what were you there? A thief? Must have been. Who else knows alleys and rooftops? So, you can teach me the ways of a thief, Cutter. I'll follow in your shadow. Hood knows, stealing what we can from this insane world makes as much sense as anything else.'

Cutter looked away. 'It's not good,' he said, 'following anyone's shadow. There's better people there… for you to get along with.

Murillio, maybe, or even Coll.'

'Will I one day discover,' she asked, 'that you've just insulted me?'

'No! Of course not. I like Murillio! And Coll's a Councilman. He owns an estate and everything.'

Barathol said, 'Ever seen an animal led to slaughter, Cutter?'

'What do you mean?'

But the big man simply shook his head.

After repacking her pipe, Scillara settled back in her saddle, a small measure of mercy silencing, for the moment at least, her baiting of Cutter. Mercy and, she admitted, Barathol's subtle warning to ease up on the young man.

That old killer was a sharp one.

It wasn't that she held anything against Cutter. The very opposite, in fact. That small glimmer of enthusiasm – when he spoke of Darujhistan – had surprised her. Cutter was reaching out to the comfort of old memories, suggesting to her that he was suffering from loneliness.

That woman who left him. The one for whom he departed Darujhistan in the first place, I suspect. Loneliness, then, and a certain loss of purpose, now that Heboric was dead and Felisin Younger stolen away.

Maybe there was some guilt thrown in – he'd failed in protecting Felisin, after all, failed in protecting Scillara too, for that matter – not that she was the kind to hold such a thing against him. They'd been T'lan Imass, for Hood's sake.

But Cutter, being young and being a man, would see it differently. A multitude of swords that he would happily fall on, with a nudge from the wrong person. A person who mattered to him. Better to keep him away from such notions, and a little flirtation on her part, yielding charming confusion on his, should suffice.

She hoped he would consider her advice on burying Heboric. She'd had enough of deserts. Thoughts of a city lit by blue fire, a place filled with people, none of whom expected anything of her, and the possibility of new friends – with Cutter at her side – were in truth rather enticing. A new adventure, and a civilized one at that. Exotic foods, plenty of rustleaf…

She had wondered, briefly, if the absence of regret or sorrow within her at the surrendering of the child she had carried inside all those months was truly indicative of some essential lack of morality in her soul, some kind of flaw that would bring horror into the eyes of mothers, grandmothers and even little girls as they looked upon her.

But such thoughts had not lasted long. The truth of the matter was, she didn't care what other people thought, and if most of them saw that as a threat to… whatever… to their view on how things should be… well, that was just too bad, wasn't it? As if her very existence could lure others into a life of acts without consequence.

Now that's a laugh, isn't it? The most deadly seducers are the ones encouraging conformity. If you can only feel safe when everybody else feels, thinks and looks the same as you, then you're a Hood-damned coward… not to mention a vicious tyrant in the making.

'So, Barathol Mekhar, what awaits you on the coast?'

'Probably plague,' he said.

'Oh now that's a pleasant thought. And if you survive that?'

He shrugged. 'A ship, going somewhere else. I've never been to Genabackis. Nor Falar.'

'If you go to Falar,' Scillara said, 'or empire-held Genabackis, your old crimes might catch up with you.'

'They've caught up with me before.'

'So, either you're indifferent to your own death, Barathol, or your confidence is supreme and unassailable. Which is it?'

'Take your pick.'

A sharp one. I won't get any rise from him, no point in trying. 'What do you think it will be like, crossing an ocean?'

'Like a desert,' Cutter said, 'only wetter.'

She probably should have glared at him for that, but she had to admit, it was a good answer. All right, so maybe they're both sharp, in their own ways. I think I'm going to enjoy this journey.

They rode the track, the heat and sunlight burgeoning into a conflagration, and in their wake clumped Chaur, still smiling.

The Jaghut Ganath stood looking into the chasm. The sorcerous weaving she had set upon this… intrusion had shattered. She did not need to descend that vast fissure, nor enter the buried sky keep itself, to know the cause of that shattering. Draconean blood had been spilled, although that in itself was not enough. The chaos between the warrens had also been unleashed, and it had devoured Omtose Phellack as boiling water does ice.

Yet her sense of the sequence of events necessary for such a thing to happen remained clouded, as if time itself had been twisted within that once-floating fortress. There was outrage locked in the very bedrock, and now, a most peculiar imposition of… order.

She wished for companions here, at her side. Cynnigig, especially. And Phyrlis. As it was, in this place, alone as she was, she felt oddly vulnerable.

Perhaps most of all, would that Ganoes Paran, Master of the Deck, was with me. A surprisingly formidable human. A little too prone to take risks, however, and there was something here that invited a certain caution. She would need to heal this – there could be no doubt of that. Still…

Ganath pulled her unhuman gaze from the dark fissure – in time to see, flowing across the flat rock to either side, and behind her, a swarm of shadows – and now figures, huge, reptilian, all closing in on where she stood.

She cried out, her warren of Omtose Phellack rising within her, an instinctive response to panic, as the creatures closed.

There was no escape – no timeHeavy mattocks slashed down, chopping through flesh, then bone. The blows drove her to the ground amidst gushes of her own blood. She saw before her the edge of the chasm, sought to reach out towards it. To drag herself over it, and fall – a better deathMassive clawed feet, scaled, wrapped in strips of thick hide, kicking up dust close to her face. Unable to move, feeling her life drain away, she watched as that dust settled in a dull patina over the pool of her blood, coating it like the thinnest skin. Too much dirt, the blood wouldn't like that, it would sicken with all that dirt.

She needed to clean it. She needed to gather it up, somehow pour it back into her body, back in through these gaping wounds, and hope that her heart would burn clean every drop.

But now even her heart was failing, and blood was sputtering, filled with froth, from her nose and mouth.

She understood, suddenly, that strange sense of order. K'Chain Che'

Malle, a recollection stirred to life once more, after all this time.

They had returned, then. But not the truly chaotic ones. No, not the Long-Tails. These were the others, servants of machines, of order in all its brutality. Nah'Ruk.

They had returned. Why?

The pool of blood was sinking down into the white, chalky dust where furrows had been carved by talons, and into these furrows the rest of the blood drained in turgid rivulets. The inexorable laws of erosion, writ small, and yet… yes, I suppose, most poignant.

She was cold, and that felt good. Comforting. She was, after all, a Jaghut.

And now I leave.

The woman stood facing landwards, strangely alert. Mappo Runt rubbed at his face, driven to exhaustion by Iskaral Pust's manic tirade at the crew of the broad-beamed caravel as they scurried about with what seemed a complete absence of reason: through the rigging, bounding wild over the deck and clinging – with frantic screams – to various precarious perches here and there. Yet somehow the small but seaworthy trader craft was full before the wind, cutting clean on a northeasterly course.