Farl ved ten ara. Refugium indeed. ‘Shit,’ he muttered. Worse yet, she’d told him. A place without the Ritual itself.

After a long moment, Hedge turned back to the forest ahead. He stepped over the torn, severed left leg lying bleeding in the grass. Flesh and blood, aye. A woman’s leg. Damned shapely at that.

‘Shit,’ he said again, hurrying on. ‘Fid’s the soft-hearted one, that he is. Fiddler. Not me. Not me.’ Wiping at his cheeks, cursing the ghost tears on his ghost face, and alone once more in this insipid, uninspiring realm of the dead, the Bridgeburner went on. Undead for a few hundred thousand years. Broken, Fallen, then resurrected, enough to walk once more. And, finally, thirty or so paces from a return to life…

A grim lesson about keeping the wrong company.

Seeking the forest. Beneath the thick branches at last, the heavy fluttering of a new season’s painfully green leaves. Spin and whirl of insects, the chitter of birds. Into the forest, aye, beyond the sight of that severed limb, the borderland, the steaming crater.

Shit!

‘Damned soft of you, Fid. But we’re at war, like I keep telling you. We’re at war. And I don’t care if it’s a damned Jaghut Bridge of Death, it’s still a bridge, and you know what we do to bridges, don’t you?’

Refugium.

But no refuge for me.

The emlava kittens were heavy as cattle dogs but shorter of leg and nowhere near as energetic. All they wanted to do was sleep. And feed. For the first few days, carrying them invited deadly fits of lashing talons and terrifying lunges with jaws opened wide. Unmindful of macabre irony, Onrack used their mother’s skinned hide to fashion a sack. Ends affixed to a cut sapling, the Imass and either Quick Ben or Trull would then carry between them the two hissing, thrashing creatures in their ghastly bag.

The ay never came close again.

A male and a female, their grey fur not yet banded and the pale hue of ashes rather than the dark iron of their mother. In the cave there had been a third one, dead a week or more. From the condition of its body, its siblings had decided on eliminating it. So fared the weak in this and every other world.

Trull’s sense of wonder was reawakened every time he glanced across at Onrack. A friend in the flesh was truly a revelation. He had imagined himself long past such profound, prolonged astonishment. The day he had been Shorn by his brother, it had seemed to him that his heart had died. Chained to stone, awaiting the cold water and the rot that it promised, the muscle that forged the tides of his blood seemed to beat on in some kind of waning inertia.

The desiccated corpse that was Onrack, walking up to where he had been bound, had even then seemed an unlikely salvation.

Trull recalled he’d had to argue with the T’lan Imass to win his own release. The thought amused him still.

Creaking sinew and cabled muscle and torque-twisted bone, Onrack had been the personification of indifference. As unmindful of life and its struggle to persist as only a lifeless thing could be.

And so Trull had simply tagged along, unwilling to admit to himself the burgeoning truth of his salvation-his reluctant return to life in the company of an undead warrior who had begun to discover his own life, the memories once thought surrendered, to time and cruel ritual, to wilful denial spanning tens of thousands of years.

What had bound them together? What improbable menagerie of terse conversations, unanticipated emotions and the shared extremity of combat had so thoroughly entwined them together, now as brothers yet more a brother than any of those with whom Trull Sengar shared blood? We stood side by side, together facing certain defeat. Only to find blessing in the timid hand of a creature not even half human. Oh, 1 know her well, that one.

Yet she is a secret 1 find 1 cannot share with Onrack, with my friend. Now, if only he was as coy, as guarded. Not this… this open regard, this casting away of every natural, reasonable defence. This childness-by the Sisters, Trull, at least find yourself a word that exists. But he seems so young! Not of age, but of cast. A species of unmitigated innocence-is such a thing even possible?

Well, he might know the answer to that soon enough. They had found signs as they trekked this youthful world. Camps, hearthstones lining firepits. Places where stone tools had been made, a flat boulder where an Imass had sat, striking flakes from flint, leaving behind a half-circle scatter of splinters. Refuse pits, filled with bones charred white or boiled to extract the fat, leaving them crumbly and light as pumice; scorched shell fragments from the gourds used to heat the bones in water; and the shattered rocks that had been plunged hot into that water to bring it to a boil. Signs of passing this way, some only a few weeks old, by Onrack’s estimations.

Did those Imass know that strangers had come among them? To this even Onrack had no answer. His kind were shy, he explained, and cunning. They might watch from hiding places for days, nights, and only when they so chose would they reveal enough to touch Onrack’s senses, his animal awareness with its instinctive whispering. Eyes are upon us, friends. It is time.

Trull waited for those words.

The emlava kits yowled, announcing their hunger.

Trull, who had taken point whilst Onrack and the wizard carried the beasts in their sack, halted and turned about.

Time for feeding. Else not a single moment of peace.

Groaning, Quick Ben set down his end of the sling-pole, watched bemusedly as the two kits spat and clawed their way free of the skin, hissing at each other then at Onrack, who began withdrawing leaf-wrapped hunks of raw antelope. The meat was foul, but clearly this was no deterrent for the emlava cubs as they lunged towards him.

The Imass flung the meat onto the ground to spare his own hands, and then stepped away with an odd smile on his face.

Too many odd smiles these days, the wizard thought. As if the blinding wonder and joy had begun to dim-not much, only a fraction, yet Quick Ben believed it was there, a hint of dismay. He was not surprised. No-one could sus-tain such pure pleasure indefinitely. And, for all this seeming paradise-at least a paradise by Imass standards-there remained something vaguely unreal about it. As if it was no more than an illusion, already begun to fray at the edges.

No real evidence of that, however. The wizard could feel the health of this place. It was strong, and, he now suspected, it was growing. As Omtose Phellack waned on all sides. The end of an age, then. An age that had ended everywhere else long, long ago. But isn’t Tellann itself dead everywhere else? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just changed, grown into itself. Maybe, everywhere else, what we’re seeing-what we’re living in-is Tellann ascendant, victor in the war of millennia past, dominant and secure in its maturity. Is that possible?

Yet that did not mesh with Onrack, with how he had been and how he was now. Unless… gods below, unlike everywhere else, this is one fragment of Tellann that lies, somehow, beyond the Ritual. That is why he is flesh and blood here. In this place, there was no Ritual of Tellann, no severing of Imass souls. Suggesting that the Imass living here know nothing about it.

So what would happen if Logros led his thousands here? If Kron-But no, Silverfox wouldn’t permit that. She needed them for something else. For another war.

It’d be nice to know how this fragment related to the one created for the Wolves at the end of the Pannion War. From what Quick Ben had understood, that Beast Hold, or whatever it had been called, had been seeded with the souls of T’lan Imass. Or at least the memories of those souls-could be that’s all a soul really is: the bound, snarled mass of memories from one life. Huh. Might explain why mine is such a mess. Too many lives, too many disparate strands all now tangled together…