The damned sword had been out of its scabbard faster than an eye-blink, the deadly edge slicing across her belly even as she lunged with her obsidian dagger.

Such stupidity. But lessons only became lessons when one has reached the state of humility required to heed them. When one is past all the egotistical ex-cuses and explanations flung up to fend off honest culpability. It was nature to at-tack first, abjuring all notions of guilt and shame. Lash out, white with rage, then strut away convinced of one’s own righteousness.

She had long since left such imbecilic posturing behind. A journey of enlight-

enment, and it had begun with her last mortal breath, as she found herself lying on the hard stone floor, looking up into the eyes of Anomander Rake, and seeing his dismay, his regret, his sorrow.

She could feel the growing heat of the storm, could feel its eternal hunger. Not long now, and then all her efforts would be for naught. The kinks of the chain fi-nally showed some wear, but not enough, not nearly enough. She would be de-stroyed along with everyone else. She was not unique. She was, in fact, no different from every other idiot who’d tried to kill Rake, or Draconus.

The rain trickling down from the wagon bed was warmer than usual, foul with sweat, blood and worse. It streamed over her body. Her skin had been wet for so long it was coming away in ragged pieces, white with death, revealing raw red meat underneath. She was rotting.

The time was coming when she would have to drop down once more, emerge from under the wagon, and see for herself the arrival of oblivion. There would be no pity in its eyes-not that it had any-just the indifference that was the other face of the universe, the one all would have for ever turned away. The regard of chaos was the true source of terror-all the rest were but flavours, variations.

/ was a child once. I am certain of it. A child. I have a memory, one memory of that time. On a barren bank of a broad river. The sky was blue perfection. The caribou were crossing the river, in their tens and tens of thousands.

I remember their up-thrust heads. I remember seeing the weaker ones crowded in; pushed down to vanish in the murky water. These carcasses would wash up down current, where the short-nosed bears and the wolves and eagles and ravens waited for them. But I stood with others. Father, mother, perhaps sisters and brothers-just others-my eyes on the vast herd.

Their seasonal migration, and this was but one of many places of crossing. The caribou often choose different paths. Still, the river had to be crossed, and the beasts would mill for half a morning on the bank, until they plunged into the current, until all at once they were flooding the river, a surging tide of hide and flesh, of breaths drawn in and gusted out.

Not even the beasts display eagerness when accosting the inevitable, when it seems numbers alone can possibly confuse fate, and so each life strikes, strives out into the icy flow. ‘Save me.’ That is what is written in their eyes. ‘Save me above all the others. Save me, so that I may live. Give me this moment, this day, this season. I will follow the laws of my kind

She remembered that one moment when she was a child, and she remembered her sense of awe in witnessing the crossing, in that force of nature, that imposi-tion of will, its profound implacability. She remembered, too, the terror she had felt.

Caribou are not just caribou. The crossing is not just this crossing. The cari-bou are all life. The river is the passing world. Life swims through; riding the cur-rent, swims, drowns, triumphs. Life can ask questions. Life-some of it-can even ask: how is it that I can ask anything at all? And: how is it that I believe that answers answer anything worthwhile? What value this exchange, this pre-cious dialogue, when the truth is unchanged, when some live for a time while others drown, when in the next season there are new caribou while others are for ever gone?

The truth is unchanged.

Each spring, in the time of crossing, the river is in flood. Chaos swirls beneath the surface. It is the worst time.

Watch us.

The child had not wanted to see. The child had wailed and fled inland. Broth-ers and sisters pursued, laughing maybe, not understanding her fear, her despair. Someone pursued, anyway. Laughing, unless it was the river that laughed, and it was the herd of caribou that surged up from the bank and lunged forward, driving the watchers to scatter, shouting their surprise. Perhaps that was what had made her run. She wasn’t sure.

The memory ended with her panic, her cries, her confusion.

Lying on the crossbeam, the wood sweating beneath her, Apsal’ara felt like that child once again. The season was coming. The river awaited her, in fullest flood, and she was but one among many, praying for fate’s confusion.

A hundred stones flung into a pond will shatter the smooth surface, will launch a clash of ripples and waves until the eye loses all sense of order in what it sees. And this discordant moment perturbs the self, awakens unease in the spirit and leaves one restive. So it was that morning in Darujhistan. Surfaces had been shat-tered. People moved and every move betrayed agitation. People spoke and they were abrupt in their speech and they were short with others, strangers and dear ones alike.

A squall of rumours rode the turgid currents, and some held more truth than others, but all of them hinted of something unpleasant, something unwelcome and disorderly. Such sensibilities can grip a city and hold tight for days, some-times weeks, sometimes for ever. Such sensibilities could spread like a plague to infect an entire nation, an entire people, leaving them habituated in their anger, perpetually belligerent, inclined to cruelty and miserly with their com-passion.

Blood had been spilled in the night. More corpses than usual had been found in the morning, a score or more of them in the Estates District, delivering a thun-derous shock to the coddled highborn citizens in their walled homes. Spurred by frantic demands for investigation, the City Guard brought in court mages to con-duct magical examinations. Before long a new detail was whispered that widened eyes, that made citizens gasp. Assassins! One and all-the Guild has been dev-astated! And, following this, on a few faces, a sly smile of pleasure-quickly hid-den or saved for private moments, since one could never be too careful. Still, the evil killers had clearly taken on someone nastier than them, and had paid for it with dozens of lives.

Some then grew somewhat more thoughtful-oh, they were rare enough to make one, well, depressed. None the less, for these there followed a rather omi-

nous question: precisely who is in this city who can with impunity cut down a score of deadly assassins?

As chaotic as that morning was, what with official carriages and corpse-wagons rattling this way and that; with squads of guards and crowds of gawping onlookers and the hawkers who descended among them with sweetened drinks and sticky candies and whatnot; with all this, none made note of the closed, boarded-up K’rul’s Bar with its freshly washed walls and flushed gutters.

It was just as well.

Krute of Talient stepped into his squalid room and saw Rallick Nom slouched in a chair. Grunting, Krute walked over to the niche that passed for a kitchen and set down the burlap sack with its load of vegetables, fruit and wrapped fish. ‘Not seen you much of late,’ he said.

‘It’s a foolish war,’ Rallick Nom said without looking up.

‘I’m sure Seba Krafar agrees with you this morning. They struck, in what they must have imagined was overwhelming force, only to get mauled. If this keeps up Seba will be Master in a Guild of one.’

‘You sound foul of mood, Krute. Why does it matter to you that Seba is mak-ing mistakes?’