Scattered to either side of the dark storm front, grey clouds skidded across the sky, dragging slanting sheets of rain. The plains were greening along hillsides and in the troughs of valleys, a mottled patchwork of lichen, mosses and matted grasses. On the summit of a nearby hill was the carcass of a wild bhederin, hastily butchered after dying to a lightning strike. The beast’s legs were sticking up into the air and on one hoof was perched a storm-bedraggled crow. Eviscerated entrails stretched out and down the slope facing Brohl Handar and his troop as they rode past.

The Awl were on the run. Warriors who had died of their wounds were left under heaps of stones, and they were as road-markers for the fleeing tribe, although in truth unnecessary since with the rains the trail was a broad swath of churned ground. In many ways, this uncharacteristic carelessness worried the Overseer, but perhaps it was as Bivatt had said: the unseasonal bank of storms that had rolled across the plains in the past three days had caught Redmask unprepared-there could be no hiding the passage of thousands of warriors, their families, and the herds that moved with them. That, and the bloody, disastrous battle at Praedegar had shown Redmask to be fallible; indeed, it was quite possible that the masked war leader was now struggling with incipient mutiny among his people.

They needed an end to this, and soon. The supply train out of Drene had been disrupted, the cause unknown. Bivatt had this day despatched a hundred Bluerose lancers onto their back-trail, seeking out those burdened wagons and their escort. Food shortage was imminent and no army, no matter how loyal and well trained, would fight on an empty stomach. Of course, bounteous feasts were just ahead-the herds of rodara and myrid. Battle needed to be joined. Redmask and his Awl needed to be destroyed.

A cloud scudded into their path with sleeting rain. Surprisingly cold for this late in the season. Brohl Handar and his Tiste Edur rode on, silent-this was not the rain of their homeland, nothing soft, gentle with mists. Here, the water lanced down, hard, and left one drenched in a score of heartbeats. We are truly strangers here.

But in that we are not alone.

They were finding odd cairns, bearing ghastly faces painted in white, and in the cracks and fissures of those tumuli there were peculiar offerings-tufts of wolf fur, teeth, the tusks from some unknown beast and antlers bearing rows of pecules and grooves. None of this was Awl-even the Awl scouts among Bivatt’s army had never before seen the like.

Some wandering people from the eastern wastelands, perhaps, yet when Brohl had suggested that, the Atri-Preda had simply shaken her head. She knows something. Another damned secret.

…

They rode out of the rain, into steaming hot sunlight, the rich smell of soaked lichen and moss.

The broad swath of churned ground was on their right. To draw any closer was to catch the stench of manure and human faeces, a smell he had come to associate with desperation. We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery. These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land-Father Shadow knows, no-one realty owns it. The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.

A bolt of lightning descends. A wild bhederin is struck and nearly explodes, as if life itself is too much to bear.

The world is harsh enough. It does not need our deliberate cruelties. Our celebration of viciousness.

His scout was returning at the gallop. Brohl Handar raised a hand to halt his troop.

The young warrior reined in with impressive grace. ‘Overseer, they are on Q’uson Tapi. They did not go round it, sir-we have them!’

Q’uson Tapi, a name that was found only on the oldest Letherii maps; the words themselves were so archaic that even their meaning was unknown. The bed of a dead inland sea or vast salt lake. Flat, not a single rise or feature spanning leagues-or so the maps indicated. ‘How far ahead is this Q’uson Tapi?’

The scout studied the sky, eyes narrowing on the sun to the west. ‘We can reach it before dusk,’ he said.

‘And the Awl?’

‘They were less than a league out from the old shoreline, Overseer. Where they go, there is no forage-the herds are doomed, as are the Awl themselves.’

‘Has the rain reached Q’uson Tapi?’

‘Not yet, but it will, and those clays will turn into slime-the great wagons will be useless against us.’

As will cavalry on both sides, I would wager.

‘Ride back to the column,’ Brohl Handar told the scout, ‘and report to the Atri-Preda. We will await her at the old shoreline.’

A Letherii salute-yes, the younger Edur had taken quickly to such things-and the scout nudged his horse into motion.

Redmask, what have you done now?

Atri-Preda Bivatt had tried, for most of the day, to convince herself that what she had seen had been conjured from an exhausted, overwrought mind, the proclivity of the eye to find shapes in nothing, all in gleeful service to a trembling imagination. With dawn’s light barely a hint in the air she had walked out, alone, to stand before a cairn-these strange constructions they now came across as they pushed ever further east. Demonic faces in white on the flatter sides of the huge boulders. Votive offerings on niches and between the roughly stacked stones.

They had pried apart one such cairn two days earlier, finding at its core… very little. A single flat stone on which rested a splintered fragment of weathered wood-seemingly accidental, but Bivatt knew differently. She could recall, long ago on the north shores, on a day of fierce seas crashing that coast, a row of war canoes, their prows dismantled-and the wood, the wood was as this, here in the centre of a cairn on the Awl’dan.

Standing before this new cairn, with dawn attempting to crawl skyward as grey sheets of rain hammered down, she had happened to glance up. And saw-a darker grey, man-shaped yet huge, twenty, thirty paces away. Solitary, motionless, watching her. The blood in her veins lost all heat and all at once the rain was as cold as those thrashing seas on the north coast years past.

A gust of wind, momentarily making the wall of water opaque, and when it had passed, the figure was gone.

Alas, the chill would not leave her, the sense of gauging, almost unhuman regard.

A ghost. A shape cast by her mind, a trick of the rain and wind and dawn’s uncertain birth. But no, he was there. Watching. The maker of the cairns.

Redmask. Myself. The Awl and the Letherii and Tiste Edur, here we duel on this plain. Assuming we are alone in this deadly game. Witnessed by naught but carrion birds, coyotes and the antelope gracing on the valley /loors that watch its pass by day after day.

But we are not alone.

The thought frightened her, in a deep, childlike way-the fear born in a mind too young to cast anything away, be it dreams, nightmares, terrors or dread of all that was for ever unknowable. She felt no different now.

There were thousands. There must have been. How, then, could they hide? How could they have hidden for so long, all this time, invisible to us, invisible to the Awl?

Unless Redmask knows. And now, working in league with the strangers from the sea, they prepare an ambush. Our annihilation.

She was right to be frightened.

There would be one more battle. Neither side had anything left for more than that. And, barring more appalling displays of murderous skill from the mage-killer, Letherii sorcery would achieve victory. Brohl Handar’s scout had returned with the stunning news that Redmask had led his people out onto Q’uson Tapi, and there would be no negation of magic on the flat floor of a dead sea. Redmask forces the issue. Once we clash on Q’uson Tapi, our fates will be decided. No more fleeing, no more ambushes-even those Kechra will have nowhere to hide.