A muffled, animal whimper.

A sharp inhalation of breath originated from somewhere behind a nearby building.

Dartun strode across the slippery ground, reaching in his pocket for one of his relics, though he realized suddenly it wasn’t necessary.

What remained of a young girl lay naked on the ground, her entrails emerging from a horizontal slit in her stomach, while a famished dog was loitering nearby with blood on its maw. Dartun waved his arms to scare the creature off, till it finally trotted away through a gap between the shacks, stealing a cautious glance backwards every few moments until it disappeared.

Dartun crouched next to the girl’s body; he saw several bones of her ribcage were exposed and the flesh of her scalp peeled back to reveal a tiny piece of her skull glimmering white. With gloved hands he prodded her arms in turn, and they flopped aside, half severed from her torso. Something had actually tried to remove her bones, but apparently had given up. There was no way of telling what had been used to slice her open.

Was it some creature’s claws that did this? But why was she left here and yet no others?

The whisper of feet approached through the snow behind, and then Verain was in tears, Todi and Tuung peering over her shoulder. ‘Is that…’ she sobbed. ‘What…?’

‘Stay back, Verain,’ Dartun commanded. ‘All of you, go and keep watch.’ He gestured them away.

He studied the body once again. Although he had often raised the dead, there was nothing Dartun could possibly do to help this girl. She had been torn apart too cruelly to restore to living form.

What would do such a thing, and why would they try to pull her bones out? Was it intended as some warning? No, they would’ve left her in a more prominent position. This one has been discarded, as if she was merely waste.

Although the issue intrigued him scientifically, he was emotionally disgusted by this discovery. If a new race had arrived on the islands of the Empire, what interest could they have in killing Tineag’l’s population in such a barbaric fashion? Although, from another perspective, many of the tribes in these regions had thought the same about the Empire stealing their lands.

Dartun assembled the others to follow him on a thorough tour around the town’s haphazard streets, hoping to make some sense of these disturbing scenes. They examined the smashed buildings, doors hanging off hinges, tools strewn outside doorways, fragments of splintered wood littering patches of red snow, broken swords lying abandoned in the alleys. This had clearly been a terrifying struggle.

As he studied the tracks in the snow, he began to build a picture of what must have happened. From the north, they’d come, these creatures, and had smashed their way along every house systematically, driving residents into the open where some were slaughtered. Bloodstains were not frequent enough for complete eradication on the spot, which meant the town’s population had been driven away, herded like animals. There were heavy tracks leading back to the north.

More corpses were discovered, people who had met death in their homes: two more young children, a baby with its head removed, five elderly men, six old women, their bodies dismembered at the backs of buildings. One old man’s body was lying in his yard clutching a piece of Jorsalir artwork in his frozen hands: a depiction of Bohr and Astrid embracing, and Dartun could not help reflecting on how useless that holy trinket would have been in the victim’s horrifying final moments. What faith he must have possessed to think it might protect him from the terror.

The last discovery was the most disturbing: an elderly woman stripped naked, three savage slices running down her torso. She lay in a metal bathtub filled with bloodied water. The stench was overpowering. Todi was sick so had to leave the room. Again it appeared that some of bones had been removed from her body, particularly her pelvis and tibia. Her right arm had been totally severed, lying in several pieces that were tossed aside across the room, while her left hand still clung to the rim of the bath, fixed there with ice.

Dartun opened the shutters to allow in some fresher air. The view was of rolling hills in the distance, over which several flocks of birds arced in peaceful flight patterns towards the south, escaping the cold. The air was still as the sun broke through the clouds.

‘What d’you make of all this… madness?’ Tuung asked, stepping alongside Dartun at the window. There wasn’t a great deal to look at from there, but both men had seen too much inside.

Dartun sighed. ‘Dark times, my friend. Dark times.’

‘What’s caused all this? Why is it happening?’

‘I’m beginning to see some shape in these horrors. I suspect that the human population on this island was preyed upon by an alien race of intruders those hunters saw. And they’ve all been rounded up and herded out of this town. Where to and why? Who the hell can say why?’

‘It’s all so senseless.’ Tuung slapped the windowsill in fury. This was the first time Dartun had seen someone as dogged as Tuung seem so totally frustrated.

Events such as these altered people.

Dartun said, ‘I suppose that it’s not senseless to them. You’re seeing things from a human-centric perspective. I suspect they don’t think in the same way that you and I would think.’

‘I don’t follow you. Are you getting all philosophical again?’

‘Listen. Why would they leave the bodies of just the old and the very young?’ Dartun said, gesturing at the old woman’s remains.

Tuung shrugged. ‘I guess they’re the weakest, therefore the easiest to kill? I don’t know.’

‘Exactly so,’ Dartun replied. ‘They’re the weakest. The handful of bodies we’ve seen so far have been either young children or the old. Those are the frailest forms of human or rumel. Every corpse has had its bones partially or completely removed. It’s as if they opened them up to examine the bones, and then just discarded the corpses. As if they were not considered good enough.’

‘So they’re, what, after our bones or something?’

Dartun snorted a humourless laugh. ‘That’s a strong possibility. They’ve definitely taken people captive. And appear to be deliberately hunting mankind. Maybe even rumel, too, as we haven’t seen any of them around either.’

‘Bloody sick if you ask me,’ Tuung muttered.

‘That’s life,’ Dartun said, ‘once you look at it from a viewpoint other than our own. They’re just doing what this Empire has done for thousands of years to other cultures, and to other species. Pillaging their worlds for the sake of adding value to our own.’ He added: ‘And we call ourselves an enlightened civilization.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ Tuung grumbled, running a hand over his head as if to highlight the signs of ageing.

The comment, casual though it was, struck Dartun hard as his gaze lingered on the woman’s remains. Death was such a strange phenomenon because everyone went through life hiding from it, fearing it, yet it was the only inevitable outcome. But there was nothing inevitable about the way this woman had died, butchered in her moment of relaxation while lying in a warm bath on a cold day.

Life was never long enough, was it? He understood that better than most.

‘Come on,’ Dartun said at last, and began to lead them away from the disturbing scene. ‘We now find the Realm Gates, we investigate my final theories, and only when we have done so successfully will we return.’

Dartun paused on the muddied doorstep, his breath clouding in front of his face. In that intense air he felt you could breathe the terror pervading that desolate town. You could feel it seeping deep in your bones, into your blood.

They rode away from the dead town towards their agreed meeting point with other members of the Order of the Equinox. Arriving early, they had to wait there for two days in the freezing cold. Red sunlight forced its way through the fat clouds that obscured these vast northern skies. Everything around them seemed more capacious – or rather as humans they felt smaller compared with the empty environment. Life out here was much harsher than in the city. Nature dominated. Ridges of hillsides sloped steeply, snow slanted perpetually across your vision. It was humbling. Snow-buried tundra grasses stretched for leagues in every direction, punctuated occasionally by thickets of larix or betula. Sometimes a wolf would stray past in the first or last moments of the day, imposing its long shadow over the snow, while overhead the cry of birds – terns, gulls, falcons, and nearer the coast, gannets – would add an eerie chorus that only heightened the pervasive loneliness.