“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I shook my head. “Rosarn?”

The mercenary woman looked up as she knelt, sorting through the pile of stained and broken bones. “No, never. I’ll tell you something, though. This is a den of some kind. Look, these are chewed, you can see the teeth marks where they’ve been cracked open for the marrow.”

Livak turned the great skull thoughtfully in her hands.

“What size would you say something would have to be to bring down a beast this big?”

“Big enough that I don’t want to meet it,” said Rosarn briskly. “Let’s go.”

“Is there anything other than bone?” Naldeth was stirring a heap of fragments with a foot. “If we can find a pot or something, I can try and use fire to make it reflect its origins. It’s something I’ve been working on and Planir said—”

“You shine magelight on it or some such?” Rosarn sounded politely skeptical.

Naldeth shook his head impatiently. “No, you set it afire and the magelight sometimes reflects things of interest before it consumes the object.”

I felt suddenly sick. “Tell me you haven’t been doing this with any of the colony artifacts?”

“What? No, no, we did consider it but Planir forbade it until I had more consistent results.” Naldeth smiled sunnily. “It’s a good thing, he did, really, isn’t it?”

“There’s no fresh spoor,” Livak pointed out. “I’d say whatever’s lived here is long gone by now.” She poked at a smaller skull, pointed with a central ridge. I would have called it a badger at home but the teeth were all wrong.

“There are other caves we could explore,” said Naldeth eagerly.

“Maybe so, when we’ve checked with the scholars. Otherwise all we’re going to do is raise more pointless questions.” Rosarn shook her head firmly.

“But we’re supposed to be looking for this cavern, for the colonists,” objected Naldeth.

“It’s not here,” I said, stopping to wonder at the certainty with which I spoke.

“Then where is it?” demanded Rosarn.

All I could do was shake my head helplessly. “I don’t know, not yet.”

We all blinked, rubbing our eyes when we left the cave for the bright sunlight outside.

“Right, you two carry on over yonder.” Rosarn strode briskly away to deal with a couple of mercenaries who were taunting some creature cowering in the angle of two collapsed walls.

Livak looked at me and shrugged. We continued hacking down the all pervasive vines to reveal nothing more exciting than more empty and broken buildings. I was becoming tired, thirsty and frustrated when Livak stood abruptly upright and pointed.

“Smoke!”

I turned to see the thin blue spiral of a camp fire twisting upwards into the still air and realized that the sun was high in a noonday sky. As I did so, we heard Rosarn shouting to us.

“Food! Everyone back to the camp!”

We pushed our way back through the increasingly battered undergrowth and entered the walls of the Den Rannion steading to see a well-organized encampment taking shape.

“So who’s got something to tell?” Halice was asking as she took her belt-knife to a row of small creatures spitted and browning nicely over a good fire. Livak and I joined the line to get our share.

“Lots of nothing special,” one of the older mercenaries said as he stripped a mouthful of meat off the leg he held. “All empty.”

“That’s a bit off, if you ask me.” A thin-faced man who had dealt with receding hair by shaving his head clean was passing rough flatbread from a linen sack. “This place was supposed to have been sacked, wasn’t it? Dawn attack, lots of people killed in their night-gowns, that kind of thing?”

I nodded as he looked enquiringly at me, not trusting myself to speak as I held the doors to Temar’s memories firmly shut.

“So where are the bones?” the bald-headed man asked, looking around the circle of mercenaries. “All right, so there’d have been scavengers and I know it was a long time ago, but Saedrin’s stones, you’d have thought we’d have found some bones, inside these buildings maybe, certainly in the ones that were burned out.”

“Scavengers would have scattered bones but they’d still be around. Carrion feeders eat where they find a meal,” one of the older women agreed, gnawing unconcernedly on her meat.

“That is a shame,” frowned a middle-aged man in the robes of a scholar. “If you could find us a skull, there are some necromantic rituals we might try. I’d have liked to see what that would raise.”

That silenced everyone for a long moment.

“Never mind the bones, what about other things?” A burly man looked over his shoulder since he was sitting with his back to the circle, facing toward the entrance in case of unexpected threats. “I was at Thurscate when the Draximal retook it, four years back. Now that had fallen close on a generation before and not been touched since, and there was all manner of stuff everywhere. Lots of things will rot, granted, but not pots, coin and suchlike. I reckon this place was stripped, not just abandoned.”

“Who would have done that?” I was curious to see how far these supposedly untutored warriors would pursue these questions. They’d clearly been keeping their ears open on the voyage over the ocean.

Rosarn passed me a joint of meat from the fire which I split with Livak. “We were talking the other evening about what could have happened to those Elietimm that were here when the old magic failed,” she mused, “me and Lessay. They’d not have been able to return home, not without their magic. It doesn’t look as if they set up here, so where did they go?”

“Does it matter?” Livak said indistinctly, licking hot fat from her fingers. “They were all men, weren’t they? They’d all have been dead inside a couple of generations, no matter how many of them took to dancing on the other side of the floor.”

That raised smiles all around and the talk turned to more general matters as the other groups of mercenaries drifted in, summoned by the tempting smell of roasting meat. I noticed Livak looking pensive as she stared into the impenetrable forest and I tapped her on the shoulder to offer her some more of the unleavened bread.

“Oh, thank you.” She tore off a mouthful and chewed, still looking thoughtful.

“Misaen borrowing your wits for something?” I asked lightly.

“What? Oh, it’s just that I was wondering how far this land goes. Do you know?”

I shook my head, “No, no one had the time to find out before the colony was lost.”

“I mean, I like being out in the country well enough, for all that I’m city-bred, as long as it’s farms or forest,” continued Livak, “but I’ve never been anywhere like this, where there are no roads no matter how far you travel, no villages or towns to get a bed and a bath when you really need one, nothing but wilderness in every direction. It’s worse than Dalasor.” She sounded more intrigued than dubious and I followed her gaze into the mysterious forest, distant heights rising beyond it leading to Misaen alone knew where. Where had the forge god and the lord of the sea settled on dividing this land? How far was it before Dastennin’s realm took over once more and some as yet unseen ocean lapped against an untrodden shore?

“That’s why they came here, the colonists, to find empty land, enough for all those dispossessed as the Empire contracted.” I settled myself against a convenient fallen tree and took a long drink of well-watered wine from my belt flask. “I suppose that’s why the Elietimm wanted it so badly too, you remember how poor and cramped their islands are.”

I offered Livak the bottle, and she looked as if she were about to say something more but Arest’s harsh voice overrode her.

“Right, let’s get on with it. Listen for my horn at sunset.”

There were a fair number of reluctant glances as we all stood up, and the kind of muttering that any competent sergeant at arms would quell with a look or, in Messire’s militia, his baton. Sworn men would never dream of tarnishing their oaths by voicing such dissent either. I sighed; all of that was starting to seem increasingly irrelevant given my own concerns. Arest simply ignored the murmurs and no overt protest arose as everyone returned to the tedious and ultimately fruitless task. As the afternoon wore on I found it increasingly hard to maintain either concentration or patience, venting my annoyance with long and complex muttered curses on Temar, Planir and even Messire for getting me into this mire. For all my efforts, I only seemed to get bogged further and further down. But of course the first thing you’re told about getting out of a marsh is not to struggle, to wait for help. Where did that leave me? Who was going to pull me out of this morass but myself? Planir was more likely to use my sunken head as a support for a walkway if it suited his purposes, and Messire had given me over entirely to the Archmage’s use, hadn’t he? What price our oaths now?