Vastly Blank stared a moment longer, then he laughed his slow ha ha ha laugh and said, ‘Yesterday! I remember yesterday!’

‘Then pick up your sword and wipe the mud off it, Vastly. And take your shield-no, not mine, yours, the one on your back. Yes, bring it round. That’s it-no, sword in the other hand. There, perfect. You ready?’

‘Who do I kill?’

‘I’ll show you soon enough.’

‘Good.’

‘Seti should never breed with bhederin, I think.’

‘What?’

‘A joke, Vastly.’

‘Oh. Ha ha ha! Ha.’

‘Let’s go join up with Lookback-we’ll be on point.’

‘Lookback’s on point?’

‘He’s always on point for this kind of thing, Vastly.’

‘Oh. Good.’

‘Drawfirst and Shoaly at our backs, right? Like yesterday.’

‘Right. Reliko, what happened yesterday?’

Strap Mull stepped close to Neiler and they both eyed their corporal, Pravalak Rim, who was just sending Drawfirst and Shoaly up to the other heavies.

The two soldiers spoke in their native Dal Honese. ‘Broke-hearted,’ Strap said.

‘Broker than broke,’ Neiler agreed.

‘Kisswhere, she was lovely’

‘Lovelier than lovely’

‘Like Badan says, though.’

‘Like he says, yes.’

‘And that’s that, is what he says.’

‘I know that, Strap, you don’t need to tell me anything. You think Letheras will be like Y’Ghatan? We didn’t do nothing in Y’Ghatan. And,’ Neiler suddenly added, as if struck by something, ‘we haven’t done nothing here either, have we? Nothing not yet, anyway. If it’s going to be like Y’Ghatan, though-’

‘We’re not even there yet,’ Strap Mull said. ‘Which sword you going to use?’

‘This one.’

‘The one with the broken handle?’

Neller looked down, frowned, then threw the weapon into the bushes and drew out another one. ‘This one. It’s Letherii, was on the cabin wall-’

‘I know. I gave it to you.’

‘You gave it to me because it howls like a wild woman every time I hit something with it.’

‘That’s right, Neller, and that’s why I asked what sword you were going to use.’

‘Now you know.’

‘Now I know so I’m stuffing my ears with moss.’

‘Thought they already were.’

‘I’m adding more. See?’

Corporal Pravalak Rim was a haunted man. Born in a northern province of Gris to poor farmers, he had seen nothing of the world for most of his life, until the day a marine recruiter had come through the nearby village on the very day Pravalak was there with his older brothers, all of whom sneered at the marine on their way to the tavern. But Pravalak himself, well, he had stared in disbelief. His first sight of someone from Dal Hon. She had been big and round and though she was decades older than him and her hair had gone grey he could see how she had been beautiful and indeed, to his eyes, she still was.

Such dark skin. Such dark eyes, and oh, she spied him out and gave him that gleaming smile, before leading him by the hand into a back room of the local gaol and delivering her recruiting pitch sitting on him and rocking with exalted glee until he exploded right into the Mala2an military.

His brothers had expressed their disbelief and were in a panic about how to explain to their ma and da how their youngest son had gone and got himself signed up and lost his virginity to a fifty-year-old demoness in the process-and was, in fact, not coming home at all. But that was their problem, and Pravalak had trundled off in the recruiter’s wagon, one hand firmly snuggled between her ample legs, without a backward look.

That first great love affair had lasted the distance to the next town, where he’d found himself transferred onto a train of about fifty other Grisian farm boys and girls and marching an imperial road down to Unta, and from there out to Malaz Island for training as a marine. But he had not been as heartbroken as he would have thought, for the Malazan forces were crowded for a time with Dal Honese recruits-some mysterious population explosion or political upheaval had triggered an exodus from the savanna and jungles of Dal Hon. And he had soon realized that his worship of midnight skin and midnight eyes did not doom him to abject longing and eternal solitude.

Until he first met Kisswhere, who had but laughed at his attempts, as smooth and honed as they had become by then. And it was this rejection that stole his heart for all time.

Yet what haunted him now was, perhaps surprisingly, not all of that unrequited adoration. It was what he had seen, or maybe but imagined, in that dark night on the river, after the blinding flash of the munitions and the roar that shook the water, that one black-skinned hand, reaching up out of the choppy waves, the spinning swirl of the current awakening once more in the wake of the tumult, parting round the elegant wrist-and then that hand slipped away, or was simply lost to his straining sight, his desperate, anguished search in the grainy darkness-the hand, the skin, the dark, dark skin that so defeated him that night…

Oh, he wanted to die, now. To end his misery. She was gone. Her sister was gone, too-a sister who had drawn him to one side just two nights earlier and had whispered in his ear, ‘Don’t give up on her, Prav. I know my sister, you see, and there’s a look growing in her eyes when she glances your way… so, don’t give up…’

Both gone, and that, as Badan repeated again and again when he thought no-one else was close enough to hear him, is that. And that is that.

Sergeant Primly came up then and slapped Pravalak on one shoulder. ‘Ready, Corporal? Good. Lead your squad, just like Sinter would’ve done. Lead ‘em, Prav, and let’s go gut some Edur.’

Skulldeath, whose name had once been Tribole Futan, last surviving male of the Futani royal line of the Gilani tribe of southeast Seven Cities, slowly straightened as he watched the heavies work their way up the slope towards the sounds of fighting.

He readied his two Gilani tulwars, which had once belonged to a Falah’dan champion-his great-uncle-who had fallen to an assassin’s poison three years before the Malazan invasion, when Tribole had been a child not yet cast out onto the mortal sands. Weapons he had inherited as last of the line in a family shattered by a feud, such as were common throughout all of Seven Cities before the conquest. The tulwars seemed large in his hands, almost oversized for his wrists-but he was Gilani and his tribe were a people characterized by bodies virtually devoid of fat. Muscles like ropes, long, gracile and far stronger than they appeared.

The softness of his feminine eyes did not change as he studied the tulwars, remembering when he had been a very young child and these weapons, if balanced on their curved tips, could be made to stand if he set the silver pommels into his armpits, and, gripping the handles just above the hilts, he would pitch himself round the camp like an imp with but one leg. Not long after that, he was using weighted sticks carved to match these tulwars of his great-uncle’s. Working the patterns in the Gilani style, both afoot and atop a desert horse where he learned to perch ori the balls of his feet and practise the lishgar efhanah, the leaping attack, the Edged Net. Many a night with bruised shoulders, then, until he learned how to roll clean after the mid-air attack was done, the three stuffed-grass dummies each sliced into pieces, the wind plucking at those golden grasses as they drifted in the dusty air. And he, rolling, upright once more, weapons at the ready.

He was not tall. He was not outspoken and his smile-rare as it was-was as shy as a young maiden’s. Men wanted him in their beds. So did women. But he was of the royal line, and his seed was the last seed, and one day he would give it to a queen, perhaps even an empress, as befitted his true station. In the meantime, he would let men use him as they would, and even find pleasure in that, harmless as it was. But he refused’ to spill his seed.