‘Assuming your drape is now unmarred by unsightly bulges.’

‘In a moment.’

‘Master?’

Tehol smiled at the alarm on Bugg’s face. ‘I was just imaging her stuck there, wedged in Huldo’s alleyway. Unable to turn. Helpless, in fact.’

‘There it is,’ he said with a sigh, ‘you did indeed manage to sink lower.’

There was an old Gral legend that had begun to haunt Taralack Veed, although he could not quite grasp its relevance to this moment, here in Letheras, with the Lifestealer walking at his side as they pushed through the crowds milling outside a row of market stalls opposite the Quillas Canal.

The Gral were an ancient people; their tribes had dwelt in the wild hills of the First Empire, and there had been Gral companies serving in Dessimbelackis’s vaunted armies, as trackers, as skirmishers and as shock troops, although this manner of combat ill suited them. Even then, the Gral preferred their feuds, the spilling of blood in the name of personal honour. The pursuit of vengeance was a worthy cause. Slaughtering strangers made no sense and stained the soul, demanding tortured cleansing rituals. Further, there was no satisfaction in such murder.

Two months before the Great Fall, a commander named Vorlock Duven, leading the Karasch Legion deep into the untamed wastes of the southwest, had sent her seventy-four Gral warriors into the Tasse Hills to begin a campaign of subjugation against the tribe believed to rule that forbidding range. The Gral were to incite the Tasse to battle, then withdraw, with the savages hard on their heels, to a place of ambush at the very edge of the highlands.

Leading the Gral was a wise veteran of the Bhok’ar clan named Sidilack, called by many Snaketongue after a sword-thrust into his mouth had sliced down the length of his tongue. His warriors, well blooded after a three-year campaign of conquest among the desert and plains peoples south of Ugari, were skilled at finding the hidden trails leading into the rough heights, and before long they were coming upon rude dwellings and rock shelters in the midst of ancient ruins that hinted that some terrible descent from civilization had afflicted the Tasse long ago.

At dusk on the third day seven woad-painted savages ambushed the lead scouts, killing one before being driven off. Of the four Tasse who had fallen in the clash, only one was not already dead of his wounds. The language of his pain-stricken ravings was like nothing Sidilack and his warriors had ever heard before. Beneath the dusty blue paint the Tasse were physically unlike any other nearby tribes. Tall, lithe, with strangely small hands and feet, they had elongated faces, weak chins and oversized teeth. Their eyes were close-set, the irises tawny like dried grass, the whites blistered with so many blood vessels it seemed they might well weep red tears.

Among all four of the Tasse the signs of dehydration and malnutrition were obvious, and as fighters they had been singularly ineffective with their stone-tipped spears and knotted clubs.

The wounded savage soon died.

Resuming their hunt, the Gral pushed ever deeper, ever higher into the hills. They found ancient terraces that had once held crops, the soil now lifeless, barely able to sustain dry desert scrub. They found stone-lined channels to collect rainwater that no longer came. They found stone tombs with large capstones carved into phallic shapes. On the trail potsherds and white bleached bone fragments crunched underfoot.

At noon on the fourth day the Gral came upon the settlement of the Tasse. Twelve scraggy huts, from which rushed three warriors with spears, shrieking as they lined up in a pathetic defensive line in front of five starving females and a lone two-or three-year-old female child.

Sidilack, the wise veteran who had fought twenty battles, who had stained his soul with the slaughter of countless strangers, sent his Gral forward. The battle lasted a half-dozen heartbeats. When the Tasse men fell their women attacked with their hands and teeth. When they were all dead, the lone child crouched down and hissed at them like a cat.

A sword was raised to strike her down.

It never descended. The clearing was suddenly swallowed in shadows. Seven terrible hounds emerged to surround the child, and a man appeared. His shoulders so broad as to make him seem hunched, he was wearing an ankle-length coat of blued chain, his black hair long and unbound. Cold blue eyes fixed upon Sidilack and he spoke in the language of the First Empire: ‘They were the last. I do not decry your slaughter. They lived in fear. This land-not their home-could not feed them. Abandoned by the Deragoth and their kind, they had failed in life’s struggle.’ He turned then to regard the child. ‘But this one I will take.’

Sidilack, it was said, could feel then the deepest stain settling upon his soul. One that no cleansing ritual could eradicate. He saw, in that moment, the grim fate of his destiny, a descent into the madness of inconsolable grief. The god would take the last child, but it was most certainly the last. The blood.of the others was on Sidilack’s hands, a curse, a haunting that only death could relieve.

Yet he was Gral. Forbidden from taking his own life.

Another legend followed, that one recounting the long journey to Snaketongue’s final end, his pursuit of questions that could not be answered, the pathos of his staggering walk into the Dead Man’s Desert-realm of the fallen Gral-where even the noble spirits refused him, his soul, the hollow defence of his own crime.

Taralack Veed did not want to think of these things. Echoes of the child, that hissing, less-than-human creature who had been drawn into the shadows by a god-to what end? A mystery within the legend that would never be solved. But he did not believe there had been mercy in that god’s heart. He did not want to think of young females with small hands and feet, with sloped chins and large canines, with luminous eyes the hue of savanna grasses.

He did not want to think of Sidilack and the endless night of his doom. The warrior with slaughter’s blood staining his hands and his soul. That tragic fool was nothing like Taralack Veed, he told himself again and again. Truths did not hide in vague similarities, after all; only in the specific details, and he shared none of those with old Snaketongue.

‘You speak rarely these days, Taralack Veed.’

The Gral glanced up at Icarium. ‘1 am frightened for you,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘1 see nothing of the hardness in your eyes, friend, the hardness that perhaps none but a longtime companion would be able to detect. The hardness that bespeaks your rage. It seems to sleep, and I do not know if even Rhulad can awaken it. If he cannot, then you will die. Quickly.’

‘If all you say of me is true,’ the Jhag replied, ‘then my death would be welcome. And justified in every sense of the word.’

‘No other can defeat the Emperor-’

‘Why are you so certain 1 can? I do not wield a magical sword. I do not return to life should 1 fall. These are the rumours regarding the Tiste Edur named Rhulad, yes?’

‘When your anger is unleashed, Icarium, you cannot be stopped.’

‘Ah, but it seems I can.’

Taralack Veed’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is this the change that has come to you, Icarium? Have your memories returned to you?’

‘I believe if they had, I would not now be here,’ the Jhag replied, pausing before one stall offering cord-wrapped pottery. ‘Look upon these items here, Taralack Veed, and tell me what you see. Empty vessels? Or endless possibilities?’

‘They are naught but pots.’

Icarium smiled.

It was, the Gral decided, a far too easy smile. ‘Do you mock me, Icarium?’

‘Something awaits me. I do not mean this mad Emperor. Something else. Answer me this. How does one measure time?’,

‘By the course of the sun, the phases of the moon, the wheel of the stars. And, of course, in cities such as this one, the sounding of a bell at fixed intervals-a wholly absurd conceit and, indeed, one that is spiritually debilitating.’