‘The god within you,’ Nimander said, ’is a fool. My Lord will cut it down and you with it, Clip. You don’t know him. You don’t know a damned thing!’

Another laugh, this one much farther away.

Nimander wiped the tears from his cheeks with his free forearm. Beneath his palm, the pulse of blood from the wound had slowed.

Too many failures. Too many defeats.

A soul carries a vessel of courage. It cannot be refilled. Every thing that takes from it leaves less behind.

What do I have left?

Whatever it was, the time had come to drink deep, to use it all. One last time. Nimander straightened.

‘Desra? Skintick? Anyone?’

His words drew echoes, and they were the only replies he received.

Nimander drew his sword, and then set out. In the direction of that mocking laughter.

Ribbons of light swam in the air on all sides.

He encountered no walls, felt no wayward currents of air. The folded bedrock beneath his feet undulated randomly, angling neither upward nor downward for long, uneven enough to make him stumble every now and then, and once to land on his knees with a painful, stinging jolt.

Lost. Not a single sound to betray where Clip might be now.

Yes, this was a clever end for Nimander, one that must have given Clip moments of delicious anticipation. Lost in darkness. Lost to his kin. To his Lord, and to a future that now would never arrive. So perfect, so precise, this punishment-

‘Enough of that, you pathetic creature.’

Phaed.

‘They’re here, you fool. As lost as you.’

What? Who? Leave me he. I told you, I’m sorry. For what happened to you, for what I tried to do. I’m sorry-

‘Too late for that. Besides, you don’t understand. I lived in fear. I lived in per-petual terror. Of everything. Of all of you. That I’d be found out. Can you imagine, Nimander, what that was like? To live was torture, to dread an end even worse. Oh, I knew it was coming. It had to. People like me win for only so long, before someone notices-and then his face fills with disgust, and he crushes me underfoot.

‘Or throws me out of a window.’

Please, no more-

‘They’re here. Desra, Skintick. Sweet Aranatha. Find them.’

How?

‘I can’t do this for you. Shouts will go unheard. There are layers to this place. Layers and layers and layers. You could have walked right through one of them and known nothing. Nimander Golit, the blood of our Lord is within you. The blood of Eleint, too-is that the secret? Is that the one weapon Clip did not know you possess? How could he know? How could anyone? We have suppressed it within ourselves for so long now-’

Because Andarist told us to!

‘Because Andarist told us to. Because he was bitter. And hurting. He thought he could take his brother’s children and make them his own, more his own than Rake’s.’

Nenanda-

‘Had the thinnest blood of all. We knew that. You knew it, too. It made him too predictable. It killed him. Brother, father, son-these layers are so precious, aren’t they? Look on them again, my lover, my killer, but this time… with a dragon’s eyes.’

But, Phaed, I don’t know how! How do I do that?

She had no answer. No, it would never be that simple, would it? Phaed was not an easy memory, not a gentle ghost. Nor his wise conscience. She was none of that.

Just one more kin whose blood stained Nimander’s hands.

He had stopped walking. He stood now, surrounded by oblivion.

‘My hands,’ he whispered. And then slowly lifted them. ‘Stained,’ he said. ‘Yes, stained.’

The blood of kin. The blood of Tiste Andii. The blood of dragons.

That shines like beacons. That call, summon, can cast outward until-

A woman’s hand reached out as if from nowhere, closing round one of his own in a cold grip.

And all at once she was before him, her eyes like twin veils, parting to reveal a depthless, breathtaking love.

He gasped, vertiginous, and almost reeled. ‘Aranatha.’

She said, ‘There is little time, brother. We must hurry.’

Still holding his hand, she set off, pulling him along as she might a child.

But Nimander was of no mind to complain.

He had looked into her eyes. He had seen it. That love. He had seen it.

And more, he had understood.

The Dying God, he was coming. Pure as music, bright as truth, solid as certainty. A fist of power, driving onward, smashing everything in its path, until that fist uncurled and the hand opened, to close round the soul of the Redeemer. A weaker god, a god lost in its own confusion.

Salind would be that fist, she would be that hand. Delivering a gift, from which a true and perfect faith would emerge.

This is the blood of redemption. You will understand, Redeemer. Drink deep the blood of redemption, and dance.

The song is glory, and glory is a world we need never leave. And so, my beloved Itkovian, dance with me. Here, see me reaching for you-

Supine on the muddy floor of Gradithan’s hut, Salind leaked thick black mucus from her mouth and nose, from the tear ducts of her eyes. Her fingernails were black, and more inky fluid oozed out of them. She was naked, and as he knelt beside her Gradithan had paused, breathing hard, his eyes fixed on the black milk trickling down from the woman’s nipples.

Standing wrapped in his raincape close to the doorway, Monkrat looked on with flat eyes, his face devoid of expression. He could see how Gradithan struggled against the sudden thirst, the desire that was half childlike and half sexual, as he stared down at those leaking breasts. The bastard had already raped her, in some twisted consummation, a sacrifice of her virginity, so the only thing that must have been holding the man back was some kind of overriding imperative. Monkrat was not happy thinking about that.

Gradithan lifted Salind’s head with one hand and tugged open her mouth with the other. He reached for the jug of saemankelyk. ‘Time,’ he muttered, ‘and time, time, time, the time. Is now.’ He tipped the jug and the black juice poured into Salind’s gaping, stained mouth.

She swallowed, and swallowed, and it seemed she would never stop, that her body was depthless, a vessel with no bottom. She drank down her need, and that need could never find satiation.

Monkrat grunted. He’d known plenty of people like that. It was a secret poorly kept once you knew what to look for, there in their eyes. Hope and expectation and hunger and the hint of spiteful rage should a single demand be denied. They had a way of appearing, and then never leaving. Yes, he’d known people like that.

And, well, here was their god, shining from Salind’s eyes. Everyone needed a god. Slapped together and shaped with frantic hands, a thing of clay and sticks. Built up of wants and all those unanswerable questions that plagued the mortal soul. Neu-roses carved in stone. Malign obsessions given a hard, judgemental face-he had seen them, all the variations, in city after city, on the long campaigns of the Malazan Empire. They lined the friezes in temples; they leered down from balustrades. Ten thousand gods, one for every damned mood, it seemed. A pantheon of exaggerated flaws.

Salind was convulsing now, the black poison gushing from her mouth, thick as honey down her chin, and hanging in drop-heavy threads like some ghastly beard.

When she smiled, Monkrat flinched.

The convulsions found a rhythm, and Gradithan was pushed away as she un-dulated upright, a serpent rising, a thing of sweet venom.

Monkrat edged back, and before Gradithan could turn to him the ex-Bridgeburner slipped outside. Rain slanted down into his face. He paused, ankle-deep in streaming mud, and drew up his hood. That water had felt clean. If only it could wash all of this away. Oh, not the camp-it was already doing that-but everything else. Choices made, bad decisions stumbled into, years of useless living. Would he ever do anything right? His list of errors had grown so long he felt trapped by some inter-nal pell-mell momentum. Dozens more awaited him-