‘You said we did not even reach Hood’s Gate,’ the barbed man said after a mo-ment. ‘And yet…’

‘Aye.’ He spat on to the sand. ‘The dead sleep no more. What a damned mess.’

‘Find us the nearest land in our own world,’ said Mappo. ‘I will walk from there. Make my own way-’

‘We stay true to the contract, Trell. We’ll deliver you where you want to go-’

‘Not at the price of you and your companions possibly dying-I cannot accept that, Master Quell.’

‘We don’t do refunds.’

‘I do not ask for one.’

Master Quell rose shakily. ‘We’ll see after our next leg. For now, it’s time for breakfast. There’s nothing worse than heaving when there’s nothing in the gut to heave.’

Gruntle also straightened. ‘You have decided on a new path?’

Quell grimaced. ‘Look around, Gruntle. It’s been decided for us.’

Mappo rose and remained at Gruntle’s side as Quell staggered to his crew, who were gathered round a brazier they had dragged out from the belly of the carriage

The Trell squinted at the modest plot of land. ‘What did he mean?’ he asked. Gruntle shrugged. When he smiled at Mappo his fangs gleamed. ‘Since I have to guess, Trell, I’d say we’re going for a swim.’

And Precious Thimble snorted. ‘Mael’s realm. And you two thought Hood was bad.’

When she was four years old, Precious Thimble was given a breathing tube and buried in peat, where she remained for two days and one night. She probably died. Most of them did, but the soul remained in the dead body, trapped by the peat and its dark, sorcerous qualities. This was how the old witches explained things. A child must be given into the peat, into that unholy union of earth and water, and the soul must be broken free of the flesh it dwelt within, for only then could that soul travel, only then could that soul wander free in the realm of dreams.

She had few memories of that time in the peat. Perhaps she screamed, sought to thrash in panic. The ropes that bound her, that would be used to pull her free at dusk of the second day, had left deep burns on her wrists and her neck, and these burns had not come from the gentle, measured pressure when the witches had drawn her back into the world. It was also whispered that sometimes the spirits that lurked in the peat sought to steal the child’s body, to make it a place of their own. And the witches who sat guarding the temporary grave told of times when the rope-its ends wrapped about their wrists-suddenly grew taut, and a battle would then begin, between the witches of the surface and the spirits of the deep. Sometimes, it was admitted, the witches lost, the ropes were gnawed unto breaking, and the child was pulled into the foul deep, emerging only once every year, on the Night of the Awakened. Children with blue-brown skin and hollowed-out eye sockets, with hair the colour of rust or blood, with long pol-ished nails-walking the swamp and singing songs of the earth that could drive a mortal mad.

Had spirits come for her? The witches would not say. Were the burns on her skin the result of panic, or something else? She did not know.

Her memories of that time were few and visceral. The weight on her chest. The seeping cold. The taste of fetid water in her mouth, the stinging in her squeezed-shut eyes. And the sounds she could hear, terrible trickling sounds, like the rush of fluids in the veins of the earth. The thumps and crunches, the crack-ling approach of… things.

It was said there was no air in the peat. That not even her skin could breathe-and such breathing was necessary to all life. And so she must have died in truth.

Since then, at night when she slept, she could rise from her flesh, could hover, invisible, above her motionless body. And look down in admiration. She was beautiful indeed, as if something of the child she had been never aged, was immune to growing old. A quality that made men desperate to claim her, not as an equal, alas, but as a possession. And the older the man the greater the need.

When she had made this discovery, about herself and about the men who most desired her, she was disgusted. Why give this gorgeous body to such wrinkled, pa-thetic creatures? She would not. Ever. Yet she found it difficult to defend herself against such needy hunters of youth-oh, she could curse them into misery, she could poison them and see them die in great pain, but such things only led her to pity, the soft kind not the nasty kind, which made being cruel just that much harder.

She had found her solution in the two young Bole brothers. Barely out of their teens, neither one well suited to staying in the Mott Irregulars, for certain reasons over which she need not concern herself. And both of them gloriously in love with her.

It did not matter that they barely had a single brain between them. They were Boles, ferocious against mages and magic of any kind, and born with the sala-mander god’s gift of survival. They protected her in all the battles one could imag-ine, from out and out fighting to the devious predations of old men.

When she was done admiring her own body, she would float over to where they slept and look down upon their slack faces, on the gaping mouths from which snores groaned out in wheezing cadence, the threads of drool and the twitching eyelids. Her pups. Her guard dogs. Her deadly hounds.

Yet now, on this night with the tropical stars peering down, Precious Thimble felt a growing unease. This Trygalle venture she’d decided on-this whim-was proving far deadlier than she had expected. In fact, she’d almost lost one of them in Hood’s realm. And losing one of them would be… bad. It would free the other one to close in and that she didn’t want, not at all. And one guard dog wasn’t nearly as effective as two.

Maybe, just maybe, she’d gone too far this time.

Gruntle opened his eyes, and watched as the faintly glowing emanation floated over to hover above the sleeping forms of the Bole brothers, where it lingered for a time before returning to sink back down into the form of Precious Thimble.

From nearby he heard the Trell’s soft grunt, and then, ‘What game does she play at, I wonder…’

Gruntle thought to reply. Instead, sleep took him suddenly, pouncing, tum-bling his mind away and down, spitting him out like a mangled rat into a damp glade of high grass. The sun blazed down like a god’s enraged eye. Feeling bat-tered, misused, he rose on to all fours-a position that did not feel at all awkward, or strike him as unusual.

Solid jungle surrounded the clearing, from which came the sounds of countless birds, monkeys and insects-a cacophony so loud and insistent that a growl of irritation rose from deep in his throat.

All at once the nearest sounds ceased, a cocoon of silence broken only by the hum of bees and a pair of long-tailed hummingbirds dancing In front of an orchid-that both then raced off in a beating whirr of wings.

Gruntle felt his hackles rise, stiff and prickling on the back of his neck-too fierce for a human-and looking down he saw the sleek banded forelimbs of a tiger where his arms and hands should have been.

Another one of these damned dreams. Listen, Trake, if you want me to be just like you, stop playing these scenes for me. I’ll be a tiger if that’s what you want-just don’t confine it to my dreams. I wake up feeling clumsy and slow and I don’t like it. I wake up remembering nothing but freedom.

Something was approaching. Things… three, no, five. Not big, not danger-ous. He slowly swung his head round, narrowing his gaze.

The creatures that came to the edge of the clearing were somewhere between apes and humans. Small as adolescents, lithe and sleek, with fine fur thickening at the armpits and crotch. The two males carried short curved batons of some sort, fire-hardened, with inset fangs from some large carnivore. The females wielded spears, one of them holding her spear in one hand and a broad flint axe head in the other, which she tossed into the clearing. The object landed with a thump, flattening the grasses, halfway between Gruntle and the band.