Karsa grinned. ‘Why, a civilized one.’

‘Indeed!’ Shadowthrone turned to Cotillion. ‘And you doubted this one!’

Cotillion grimaced. ‘I stand corrected, Shadowthrone. If the Crippled God has not yet learned his lesson with this warrior, more lessons are bound to follow. We can leave him to them. And leave this Toblakai, too.’

‘Barring one detail,’ Shadowthrone said in a rasp. ‘Toblakai, heed this warning, if you value that destiny you would seek for yourself. Do not stand in Traveller’s path. Ever.’

Karsa’s grin broadened. ‘We are agreed, he and I.’

‘You are?’

‘I will not stand in his path, and he will not stand in mine.’

Shadowthrone and Cotillion were silent then, considering.

Leaning back, Karsa collected the lone rein. Havok lifted his head, nostrils flar-ing. I killed two Deragoth,’ Karsa said.

‘We know,’ said Cotillion.

‘Their arrogance was their soft underbelly. Easy to reach. Easy to plunge in my hands. I killed them because they thought me weak.’

Cotillion’s expression grew mocking. ‘Speaking of arrogance…’

I was speaking,’ said Karsa as he swung Havok round, ‘of lessons.’ Then he twisted in the saddle. ‘You laugh at those coming to the Crippled God. Perhaps one day I will laugh at those coming to you.’

Cotillion and Shadowthrone, with the Hounds gathering close, watched the To-blakai ride away on his Jhag horse.

A thump of the cane. ‘Did you sense the ones in his sword?’

Cotillion nodded.

‘They were…’ Shadowthrone seemed to struggle with the next word, ‘… proud.’

And again, Cotillion could do little more than nod.

Abruptly, Shadowthrone giggled, the sound making the two new Hounds flinch-a detail he seemed not to notice. ‘Oh,’ he crooned, ‘all those poor clerks!’

‘Is that a cloud on the horizon?’

At Reccanto Ilk’s query, Mappo glanced up and followed the man’s squinting gaze. He rose suddenly. ‘That’s more than a cloud,’ he said.

Sweetest Sufferance, sitting nearby, grunted and wheezed herself upright, brushing sand from her ample behind. ‘Master Qu-ellll!’ she sang.

Mappo watched as the crew started scrabbling, checking the leather straps and fastening rings and clasps dangling from the carrieage. The horses shifted about, sud-denly restless, eyes rolling and ears flattening. Gruntle came up to stand beside the Troll. “That’s one ugly storm,’ he said, ‘and it looks to be bearing down right on us,’

‘These people baffle me,’ Mappo admitted. ‘We are about to get obliterated, and they look… excited.’

‘They are mad, Mappo.’ He eyed the Trell for a long moment, then said, ‘You must be desperate to have hired this mob.’

‘Why is it,’ Mappo asked, ‘that Master Quell seemed indifferent to unleashing an undead dragon into this world?’

‘Well, hardly indifferent. He said oops! At least, I think that’s what I heard, but perhaps that was but my imagination. This Trygalle Guild… these carriages, they must be dragging things across realms all the time Look at yon walking corpse.’

They did so, observing in silence as the desiccated figure, holding a collection of cast-off straps and rope, stood speculatively eyeing one of the carriage’s spoked wheels.

The wind freshened suddenly, cooler, strangely charged.

One of the horses shrilled and began stamping the sand. After a moment the others caught the same feverish anxiety. The carriage rocked, edged forward. Mauler Quell was helping Precious Thimble through the door, hastening things at the end with a hard shove to her backside. He then looked round, eyes slightly wild, until he spied Mappo.

‘Inside you go, good sir! We’re about to leave!’

‘Not a moment too soon,’ Gruntle said.

Mappo set out for the carriage, then paused and turned to Gruntle. ‘Please, be careful.’

‘I will, as soon as I figure out what’s about to happen. Quell! What warren are we using now? And hadn’t you better get the way through opened?’

Quell stared at him. ‘Get on the damned carriage!’

‘Fine, but tell me-’

‘You idiot!’ shouted Faint from where she sat on the roof. ‘Don’t you get it?’ And she jabbed a finger at the churning black cloud now almost towering over them. ‘That’s our ride!’

‘But-wait-how-’

‘Climb aboard, you oaf, or drown!’

‘Climb aboard,’ shrieked Sweetest Sufferance, ‘and maybe drown anyway!’

Gruntle saw that the corpse had tied itself to the wheel.

Gods below, what am I doing here?

A roar exploded on the reef and Gruntle whirled round to see the gust front’s devastating arrival, a wall of thrashing, spume-crested water, rising, charging, lift-ing high to devour the entire island.

He lunged for the carriage. As he scrambled up the side of the carriage and fumbled for the lashing, Reccanto Ilk, squinting, asked, ‘Is it here yet?’

The horses began screaming in earnest.

And all at once, the shortsighted idiot had his answer.

xx

You would call us weak?

Fear talks out of the side of the mouth

Each item in your list is an attack

That turns its stab upon yourself

Displaying the bright terrors ‹

That flaw the potential for wonder

You drone out your argument

As if stating naught but what is obvious

And so it is but not in the way you think

The pathos revealed is your paucity

Of wisdom disguised as plain speak

From your tower of reason

As if muscle alone bespoke strength

As if height measures the girth of will

As if the begotten snips thorns from the rose

As if the hearthfire cannot devour a forest

As if courage flows out lost monthly

In wasted streams of dead blood

Who is this to utter such doubt?

Priest of a cult false in its division

I was there on the day the mob awoke

Storming the temple of quailing half-men

You stood gape-jawed behind them

As your teachings were proved wrong

Shrink back from true anger

Flee if you can this burgeoning strength

The shape of the rage against your postulated

Justifications is my soldier’s discipline

Sure in execution and singular in purpose

Setting your head atop the spike

– Last Day Of The Man Sect, Sevelenatha Of Genabaris (Cited In ‘Treatise On Untenable Philosophies Among Cults’, Genorthu Stulk)

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience.

Bainisk was still, in the sheltered core of his being, a child. Ungainly with growth, yes, awkward in a body in which he had not yet caught up, but he had yet to surrender his love of the unknown. And so it should be wholly understandable that he and young Harllo should have shared a spark of delight and wonder, the kind that wove tight between them so that not even the occasional snarl could truly sever the binding.

In the week following that fateful tear in the trust between them, Harllo had come to believe that he was once more truly alone in the world. Wounds scabbed over and scabs fell away to reveal faint scars that soon faded almost out of exis-tence, and the boy worked on, crawling into fissures, scratching his way along fetid, gritty cracks in the deep rock. Choking at times on bad air, stung by blind centipedes and nipped by translucent spiders. Bruised by shifting stones, his eyes wide in the darkness as he searched out the glitter of ore on canted, close walls.