The man's gaze flicked to the clarified hide tents, where his fellow lamb brothers were sleeping, Raif shook his head. "Leave them."

The lamb brother seemed to understand and fell in step beside Raif. He handled the nine-foot spear well, Raif observed, balancing it lightly at his waist. Raif's own weapon felt strange in his hand. Plunged deep into shadowflesh, the Forsworn sword's weight had shifted downblade. He knew he should probably knock out the crystal mounted on the pommel to restore balance, but he couldn't bring himself to deface the Listener's gift. Besides, he had the Sull bow. Slung crossways over his back, the six-foot longbow slapped against his right shoulder blade and buttocks as he walked. The horn case containing his arrows should have been suspended high on his left shoulder for ease of draw, but instead hung from the gear belt at his waist. The shoulder wound still bothered him. He could feel it now. It was tight.

Heading away from the tent circle, he tried to make sense of what was happening. The raven lore, given to him at birth by the old clan guide Beardy Hail, felt like a chunk of fuel ice at his throat. Here it is, Raif Sevrance. One day you might be glad of it. Beardy's words echoed in the hollow space between Raif's thoughts.

Drawn, that was the word. He'd been woken by something and drawn outside.

Back at the tent circle one of the mules began to bray. Raif glanced at the lamb brother. Easy, he mouthed. Again, probably to himself. Cold muscled in to his chest, freezing the little pockets where air waited to slip inside the blood. Underfoot the pumice dunes were as soft as flour. Every step raised a puff of dust.

Starlight blued the Want. Raif looked over a seabed landscape where shadows did not exist It occurred to him that he should be afraid of walking too far from the camp, but his mind was rationing fear. Odds were he would need it later. If he was unable to return to the tent circle then so be it. There was no choice here. The raven lore had called.

At his side, Raif could hear the lamb brother breathing hard. In cold this intense it took effort to expel the breath. Raif was glad the man was here, grateful not to be alone in the twilight world that had become his life. Tallal had said the lamb brothers search for the lost souls of the dead. Morah, he called them. The flesh of God. Raif did not know whether that meant tracking down rotting corpses and defleshed bones, or hunting ghosts. He did know they were here to do their work. Tallal had told him as much yesterday as they had walked the perimeter of the camp looking for driftwood. Raif had asked him why they called themselves the lamb brothers, and Tallal had replied, To my people the lamb is a symbol of hope. Lambing season is a time of celebration. Spring comes and life is renewed after the long hardship of winter. Without lambs there would be no milk, no wool, no meat. Our bodies would perish. We who seek morah honor the lambs. Every morning we when he leave our tents we offer thanks. May the nourishment they provide give us strength to continue our search."

Rait found it surprisingly easy to imagine why the lamb brothers were here. The Want seemed as good a place as any to find lost souls. "Shayo!"

The lamb brother's urgent whisper cut off Raif's thoughts. The word was unknown to him, but the meaning was clear. Following the lamb brother's gaze, Raif peered into the eerie blue landscape of dunes.

Nothing moved. Both men came to a halt. The lamb brother held his breath. The silence was immense, unlike any other silence Raif had experienced. Stand and listen long enough and you might hear the stars burning.

Firming his grip on the sword, Raif scanned the horizon. At the far edge of his vision the mounded pumice gave way to rubble and crum-bling cinder cones. The cones' shapes reminded him of frost boils in the Badlands. Tem said boils were formed by frozen earth pushing up rock. They were hollow tn the center, Raif knew that much. As boys he and Drey would play charge the castle in them, and a game they'd made up themselves called double death to Dhoone that involved, as far as Raif could recall, a lot; at shouting and throwing sticks. Raif swallowed the memory before it could hurt him, and replaced it with something else.

What came to mind was the frost boil Sadaluk, the Listener of the Ice Trappers, had shown him many months ago in the west. Sadaluk had made him scrape at the ice that had collected in the hollow center of the boil. Something dread had died there. A creature from a time of nightmares, its grotesquely enlarged jaws sprung open and packed with ice. Raif shook himself. While his mind was wandering he had not blinked and his eyeballs ached with cold. Blinking now made them sting.

As his eyesight cleared he spotted a movement at the base of one of the dunes. A puff of powder rose from the surface. The skin across Raif's back pulled tight. At his side the lamb brother flexed his spear. They watched the dust mushroom lazily in the still air. Raif wished for more light. The Want was as dim as murky water. Where was the damn moon?

Something glinted. A beam of starlight ran along a straight line and disappeared. The lamb brother spoke the name of his maker and began to move forward. Raif made his best guess of the distance between himself and the puff of dust. A hundred and sixty paces.

He remembered the Shatan Maer. Sword or bow? The Listener had advised him to learn how to kill with a sword, look his victims in the eyes as he took their lives. Raif had learned. He could list the men he had killed with his sword. Chokko of Clan Bludd. The Forsworn knight. Bitty Shank. Deep in his core Raif knew the Listener had been right. It was too easy for him to kill with a bow. It was swift and unin-volved and he could do it from a distance of a hundred and sixty paces. Yet the Listener had been speaking of men. Raif had slain the Shatan Maer with his sword. It had been sickening and exhausting, and it had not made him a better man. Heritas Cant had told him the Unmade were already dead. They might look like men, but they were not men. Their flesh had been claimed by the Endlords, and changed in ways Raif did not understand. They had hearts, he had learned that for himself, but those hearts did not pump blood.

A tingle of pain sounded in the muscle of Raif's shoulder. Ignoring it, he sheathed his sword. As he reached for the Sull bow he glanced briefly at that lamb brother walking woozily across the dunes. The man had his spear lightly balanced above his shoulder, but his mind was on his footing and he'd allowed the point to droop. Better to stay put, Raif decided. Let whatever was out there come to you.

"To me!" he called out, running numb fingers over the finely waxed twine that braced the bow. When the lamb brother's course failed to change, Raif yelled, "Get back." The lamb brother heard him this time, acknowledging the noise with a slight sideways motion of his veiled head, but he did not stop. He'd halved the distance between his original position and the puff of the dust, and was accelerating down a dune. Raif guessed the lamb brother had understood the instruction well enough, and had chosen not to heed it.

He did not know then; had no experience to warn him what might be out there. Raif thought starkly, Who has?

Unable to warm the wax with his fingers, he settled for smoothing the twine. The Sull bow felt as light as a stalk of grass. Out of habit he flexed the belly before drawing. Nights as cold as this killed bows. Self bows, those made from a single stave of wood, could simply snap. Built ones would curl and come unglued. The Sull bow was a built recurve, constructed from layers of horn laid down in alternating strips. If it were a clan-made bow it would have felt stiff and brittle and a clansman might think twice about using it. The Sull bow bent as easily as a dancer's spine, ticking once as the recurve popped out. Made for nights like this, it was ready.