Beside Precious, Faint muttered something under her breath and then climbed to her feet. ‘Wake up, Sweetest, they’re finally here.’

From the town known as Reach of Woe, half a league distant, not a single glim-mer of light showed.

Precious approached Gruntle. ‘What happened back there?’

He shook his head. ‘You truly do not want to know, Witch.’

‘Why do Jaghut bother getting married at all?’ Reccanto asked, his face pale as the moon. ‘Gods below, that was the most pettytracted nefoaminous argument I ever seen! ’Twas still in full swing when we hightailed it outa there.’

‘Blaggered?’ said Faint. ‘The carriage can barely crawl, Ilk.’

‘Ain’t nothing so tensifying as running for your life at a snail’s pace, let me tell you, but if it wasn’t for Master’s protecterives we’d be nothing but flops of hairy skin and chunks of meat like everyone else back there.’

Precious Thimble shivered and made a warding gesture.

Master Quell emerged from the carriage after forcing open an ill-hung door. He was sheathed in sweat. ‘What a damned world this is,’ he said raggedly.

‘I thought we were on an island,’ Jula said, frowning.

‘We heading back to sea?’ Precious asked Quell.

‘Not a chance-the carriage wouldn’t hold. We need to find a more civil place to hole up.’

She watched him walk off the track to find a private place where he could groan and sigh as he emptied his bladder, or at least tried to-he never wandered far enough. ‘You need a practitioner of High Denul,’ she called after him.

‘As you say, Witch, as you say…’

Cartographer had found a stick from somewhere and was scraping out patterns on the dirt of the road a dozen paces ahead. Precious Thimble squinted at him. ‘What’s that thing doing?’

No one seemed to have an answer.

After a long pause, Sweetest Sufferance spoke. ‘Either of you other girls feeling a tad bloodthirsty?’

Well, that woke everyone else up fast enough, Precious Thimble observed a short while later, still struggling with her own panic. That damned lardball was still half convulsed in laughter, and Precious was of a mind to stick a knife in one of those teary eyes, and she doubted anyone would try to stop her.

Master Quell reappeared. ‘What’s so funny, Sweetest? Oh, never mind.’ He surveyed everyone else with a pinched, uncomfortable expression, like a man who’d sat on a cork. ‘The night stinks-anybody else noticed that? I was thinking of Rashan, but now I’m not so sure.’

‘You need only take me as far as a port,’ said Mappo. ‘I can find my own way from there.’

Quell squinted at him. ‘We’ll deliver you are agreed, Trell-’

‘‘The risks ‘

‘Are why we charge as much as we do. Now, no more about that, and don’t even think of just cancelling the contract-we’d take that as a grievous insult, a slur on our good name. We’ll get you there, Trell, even if it’s on one wheel behind a three-legged horse.’

Cartographer tottered back to them. ‘If it pleases,’ he said, attempting a smile that Precious decided was too ghoulish to describe without descending into insanity, ‘I have outlined a solution.’

‘Sorry I missed it,’ said Quell.

‘He meant that literally,’ said Precious, pointing up the road.

Quell in the lead, they walked up to observe the faint scouring on the pale dust of the track.

‘What in Hood’s name is that?’

‘A map, of course.’,

‘ What kind of map?’

‘Our journey to come.’

Reccanto Ilk squatted to study the effort, and then shook his head. ‘I can’t even make out the island we’re on. This is a stupid map, Cartogoplier.’ He straightened and nodded to the others. ‘That’s what you get tryin’ to work with a dead man. I swear, common sense is the first to go when you turn into the walking dead-why is that?’

The Bole brothers looked thoughtful, as if working on possible answers. Then, noticing each other’s frown, both broke into smiles. Amby snorted then had to wipe goo from his upper lip with the back of one hand.

‘I must be mad,’ Precious whispered.

Quell asked, ‘This is some kind of gate you’ve drawn here, Cartographer?’

‘Absent of investiture, but yes. I have no power to give it. But then, you do.’

‘Maybe,’ Quell mused, ‘but I don’t recognize anything you’ve drawn, and that makes me nervous.’

Cartographer walked along one side and pointed a withered finger down at the far end of the map. ‘Do you see this straight, wide groove? All the rest funnels into this path, the path we need to take. The best maps show you the right direction. The best maps are the ones that lead you to a specific destination.’

Reccanto Ilk scratched at his head, looking bewildered. ‘But that’s what maps are for-what’s he glommering on about?’

‘Not all maps,’ corrected Cartographer, with a shake of his head-and nothing, Precious concluded, could ever be as solemn as a dead man’s shake of the head. ‘Objective rendition is but one form in the art of cartography, and not even the most useful one.’

‘If you say so,’ said Master Quell. ‘I’m still uneasy.’

‘You have few other options, Wizard. The carriage is damaged. The marital ar-gument is even now extending beyond the town’s limits and will soon engulf this entire island in a conflagration of disputing versions of who-said-what.’

‘He’s smarter than he was before,’ observed Faint.

‘That’s true,’ said Reccanto.

‘I gather more of myself, yes,’ said Cartographer, giving them all another ghastly smile.

Flinches all around.

‘1 low come,’ asked Quell, ‘you never showed this talent before?’

The corpse straightened. ‘I have displayed numerous talents on this journey, each one appropriate to the situation at the time. Have you forgotten the coconuts?’

Faint rolled her eyes and said, ‘How could we forget the coconuts?’

‘Besides,’ resumed Cartographer, ’as an uninvited guest, I feel a pressing need to contribute to the enterprise.’ One ragged hand gestured at the scribbles on the track. ‘Invest power into this, Master Quell, and we can be on our way.’

‘To somewhere we can stop for a time?’

Cartographer shrugged. ‘I am not able to predict the situations awaiting us, only that in general they are not particularly threatening.’

Quell looked as if he needed to piss again. Instead, he turned back to the car-riage. ‘Everyone on board. Precious, you’re with me again. Same for you, Mappo.’ He paused. ‘The rest of you, get ready.’

‘For what?’ Gruntle asked.

‘For anything, of course.’

Reccanto, still strutting after his extraordinary on-the-knees skewering lunge, slapped one hand on the huge warrior’s back. ‘Don’t fret, friend, you’ll get used to all this eventually. Unless,’ he added, ’it kills you first.’

Cartographer held up some ropes. ‘Who will kindly tie me to a wheel?’

Night sweeps across the Dwelling Plain. Along the vast vault of the sky the stars are faint, smudged, as if reluctant to sharpen to knife points amidst the strangely heavy darkness. The coyotes mute their cries for this night. Wolves flee half blind in formless terror, and some will run until their hearts burst.

South of the western tail of the Gadrobi Hills, a lone chain-clad figure pauses in his journey, seeing at last the faint bluish glow that is the ever-beating heart of the great, legendary city.

Darujhistan.

Three leagues west of him, three more strangers gaze upon that selfsame glow, and in the eyes of one of them-unseen by the others-there is such dread, such an-guish, as would crush the soul of a lesser man. His gauntleted hand steals again and again to the leather-wrapped grip of his sword.

He tells himself that vengeance answered is peace won, but even he does not quite believe that. Beyond the city awaiting him, the future is a vast absence, a void he now believes he will never see, much less stride into.

Yet, for all the tumultuous, seething forces of will within these arrayed strangers, none among them is the cause for the night’s thick, palpable silence.