‘Truth and Courage,’ she snarled back at it and surged forwards. The silhouette turned, a man, head shaven to scabbed stubble. His mouth opened at the sight of Sig storming out of the darkness, hounds and warriors about her. A spear in his hands levelled at Sig but her great sword was already cutting upwards, shearing through the shaft, lopping half of his hand off with it. The man stumbled backwards, amputated digits spinning through the air, his eyes fixed on the stumps where his fingers had been. A roll of Sig’s shoulders and her sword came back down to chop into the meat of him between neck and shoulder, a wet sound like an axe cleaving damp wood, bones cracking, and the man was falling back in a spray of bloody froth. Sig ripped her blade free and stood over his twitching corpse.

A circular chamber spread before her, high and wide, the roof hidden in shadow and smoke. Braziers of fire belched red light, casting misshapen shadows. A crowd of men and women at least forty-strong gathered around a dais at the chamber’s centre, chanting in a tongue Sig had never heard before. They were all shaven-headed, and Sig glimpsed the gleam of chainmail and weapons.

These are not disgruntled farmers, or deluded dissenters, Sig thought. More like warrior-acolytes.

Upon the dais was a wooden cross-frame; a figure was bound wrist and ankle upon it, a man stripped naked.

And close as a lover to this man stood a figure, tall, head shaved, its skin pale as alabaster, mapped by dark veins. It wore a shirt of rusty mail, a sword sheathed at its hip, and from its back great wings of leather and skin were furled. Power and malice pulsed from it like a heat haze.

Kadoshim.

Something inside Sig leaped at the sight of it, a jolt of hatred racing through her, burning away any remnants of fear that lingered in her veins. Once she had seen these Kadoshim in their thousands filling the skies above Drassil, and since then she and those like her had hunted these dread creatures, over a hundred years of blood and war. At first the fighting had been constant, but in the last score of years the Kadoshim were rarely found – so much so that her Order was questioning whether the creatures had been brought close to extinction in the Banished Lands.

Not extinct yet.

As Sig stared, the Kadoshim thrust a knife into the belly of the prisoner, a gush of blood and coiled entrails splashing from the gaping wound. There was the sudden rush of blood-stink and hot metal in the air as the man screamed his agony over the fevered chanting from the crowd.

Then the Kadoshim saw Sig and the shadowed figures of her companions behind her. Their eyes met and the chanting about the chamber stuttered and died.

The Kadoshim pointed its blood-slick knife at Sig, faces turning.

‘Kill them,’ it rasped.