‘Your wounds-’

Timmel waved aside the captain of her bodyguard. ‘The battle?’

The officer bowed to her. Timmel searched for his name… Regar Y'linn.

‘Brief me, Regar.’

The man bowed again. ‘The shield formation makes progress. The second line of defences has been breached. Commander Fanell has been assassinated.’

Timmel cast her senses about the valley, searched for any hint of the Shadow mysteries. Nothing. Gone to ground. ‘Direction?’

Regar frowned his uncertainty. ‘I'm sorry, Primogenatrix?’

‘Direction of the shield-dome?’

‘Ah! South-east, towards the river.’

Timmel nodded to herself. Yes, just as before. Down slope, to water. Ever to water. T'enet had strenuously opposed her before and against her better judgment she had acceded to his council. Now she would do things her way. ‘Have the ranks thinned to the south-east, commander. Then report back.’

Regar hesitated.

‘Commander?’

‘As you order, Primogenatrix.’

Timmel sat heavily in her chair. ‘Circlet?’

‘Yes, Primogenatrix,’ the voice of every thaumaturg, slowly and emotionlessly, responded.

Timmel threw off the shivering terror their shared awarenesses clawed at her. ‘Ease off your efforts.’

‘Yes, Primogenatrix.’

She rested. Her blood dripped from the tips of her numb fingers then ceased as her family lineage's healing abilities knitted the wound. The clash of battle receded as the shield-dome edged ever farther away. That word, that forbidden word. So, all has not been forgotten out there in the wider world. Ancient truths remain alive somewhere. One place too many for her and her kind.

Footsteps approaching roused her. She raised her head to see Regar. ‘Yes?’

‘They are following the course of the river.’

‘Downstream?’

‘Yes.’

Timmel felt a tension slip away that had held her rigid in her chair the entire night. High above, dawn now touched the inland mountain peaks gold and pink. ‘Send a rider to the city, Regar. Have a ship – our sturdiest – waiting at the mouth of the river. Unmanned. Anchored.’

‘I'm sorry, Primogenatrix?’

Timmel straightened in her chair, bringing her almost eye to eye with the soldier. ‘Did you hear me, Commander?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do so. Immediately.’

Regar saluted, turned smartly and hurried off.

‘Circlet?’

‘Yes, Primogenatrix?’

‘Harry them, Circlet. Ride them all the way. Let them know. Let them know they're not wanted here.’ Yes, go. Go with all our curses. You invaders. You Crimson Guardsmen.

‘Yes, Primogenatrix.’

Kital E'sh Oll, newly initiated as full Claw under Commander Urs, straightened from the mummified corpse to scan the layered rock walls of the surrounding canyon here in the Imperial Warren. It seemed eerie to him, the way the smoothly sculpted stone resembled water frozen in mid-fall. How could this be the work of wind alone? Yet things did not always work the same from Realm to Realm.

The remains at his feet were not that old. A few months at most. Scavengers had disturbed the site obscuring any hint of the means of death – and just what those scavengers might be, here in the seemingly lifeless Imperial Warren, was yet another mystery of this place likely never to be solved.

Whoever this had been in life, all indications were that he had been a Malazan Claw. Yet another vital message, and messenger, lost. Kital examined the surrounding dust-laden rock. Who was intercepting Imperial traffic? One of the unknown local denizens? Hood knew they were legion – demons, revenants, spirits lingering from the Warren's cursed past. Yet all these threats were nothing new. Everyone agreed the Warren was haunted. No one walked its paths for longer than absolutely necessary. Why should it suddenly have become so much more perilous?

A faint scratching brought his attention around. A man – or what appeared to be a man – now crouched on a ledge of rock behind. Dust-hued rags of what might have once been rich clothes hung from him and his hair was a tangled white matting. Kital drew his long-knives. ‘You are…?’ The man stood – tallish, Kital noted, with a good reach, though emaciated.

‘Surprised,’ the stranger answered alike in Talian.

‘Surprised? How so?’ Kital glanced about for any others. The man's bearing was unnerving; could he really be alone?

The stranger jumped down, bringing himself almost within striking range. ‘That you keep coming.’

Despite himself, Kital gave ground to the apparition. Rumours of the Warren's hidden past whispered in his ears. Who, or what, was this? What was it talking about? Coming? ‘What do you mean?’

The figure looked down at the half-buried corpse now at his sandalled feet. ‘I mean when will that toad you call your master ever learn.’

‘Toad? I serve the Empress!’

‘So you think, lad. So you think.’ He stretched out his arms. ‘Come. I am unarmed. I will make it quick.’

Kital took in the long thin limbs, the dusky hue of the man's skin beneath the ash-laden dust. Stories whispered beneath breaths in the Claw training halls and dormitories stirred in his memories. ‘Who are you?’

The man assumed a ready stance, hands open. ‘Good question. I have been many men. I was one for some time, then another, and then another, though that last one was a lie. Now, out here for so long alone, I have begun to wonder myself… and I have decided to become the man I could have been and to test myself against the only one who is my peer. That is my goal. For the meantime, I have no name.’

Kital stared. Deranged. The fellow was completely deranged. But then, becoming lost here in the Imperial Warren would do that to anyone.

‘You should have attacked me by now, young initiate. While I so obligingly talked.’

‘My mission is to gather intelligence.’

The madman hung his head for a moment. ‘I understand. You are following your protocols. Well done, Initiate. Well done. A pity.’ He exhaled a long slow breath. ‘You would have been a great asset to the ranks. Now I regret what I must do-’

The man sprang upon him. Parrying, Kital yielded ground. The fool was unarmed! Yet every cut and strike Kital directed at him touched no skin. Knuckles struck his elbow and a long-knife flew from numbed fingers. A blow to his head disoriented him then pain erupted at his chest as his breath was driven from him as if he'd been kicked by a horse. He lay staring up at the dull, slate-hued sky, unable to inhale, his chest aflame. The stranger's face occluded the sky.

‘I am sorry,’ Kital heard him say through the roaring in his ears.

The face so close – those eyes! – Kital guessed the name and mouthed it. The man nodded, placed his hands on either side of Kital's head, hands so warm, and twisted.

Alone once more, flanked by corpses, one fresh, one old, the man straightened. He stood for a time, head cocked, listening, perhaps only to the dreary wind. The shifting of dry soil brought his attention to the older of the two bodies. That corpse's ravaged fingers of tattered sinew and bone now spasmed in the dust. The man edged away, his hands at his sides twitching. The bare broken ribs rose. Air whistled into the cadaver's torn cavities. It lurched up, its desiccated skin creaking like the leather it had become. Gaping eye sockets regarded the man.

Uncertain whether to leap on the body or away, the man offered, warily, ‘Whom am I addressing?’

‘Not the prior occupant.’

‘Hood's messenger, then?’

A laugh no more than air whistling. ‘A message. But not from him.’

‘Who then?’

The corpse jerked its arms, which swung loose from frayed ligaments. ‘Look closely, fool in rags… You see the inevitable. Flesh imperfect. The spirit failing. All is for naught.’ Again the whistling laugh. ‘Come, you are not one to delude yourself like the rest of the common herd. Why pretend? Everything human is flawed and preordained to failure.’