Then he screamed as a shape darkened the doorway. His mother burst within. Her head was bloodied, her hide trousers slit at the leg, streaming blood. She scanned the hut, her eyes wild, found him, took his arm and thrust him amid piled hides and blankets.

Tears streamed down her face. ‘Quiet, love,’ she croaked, hoarse.

‘Mama –what …?’

‘Quiet now as a woodlouse, yes?’

She pressed her hand over his face, left behind a smear of warm blood, pulled the hides over his head.

Through a gap in the layered hides he watched her feet as she crossed to the doorway. From her stance he could see she was crouched, blades ready. The feet shifted, scuffing. He heard blades clash and scrape, heard his mother growl and gasp. The feet shifted anew, weakly. Blood came running down one leg. Something hissed through the air and his mother’s feet tilted and she fell.

New feet entered the hut. Inhuman. Earth-brown bone and sinew in tatters of thick leather hide. The skins were yanked aside and he stared up at a demon face of bone, dark empty sockets, and naked amber teeth. Riding atop the head of patchy hair was another skull of some sort of gigantic horned beast.

‘This one?’ the demon asked someone outside.

‘Nay – the scent is too thin. Come, they are fleeing.’

This demon thrust him back into the hides, stalked from the hut, was swallowed by the swirling dust. Aiken crawled to his mother. She lay staring sightlessly skyward, thrust through the chest. He rested his head upon her breast, and weeping, gently closed her staring eyes.

Three days later a lone rider came galloping up from the south. Aiken happened to be with the mourners that day. He’d brought flowers to his mother where she lay in her tall raised bier, exposed to the sun’s kiss and the wind’s embrace. Others were out as well, his neighbours, cousins, and aunts. Those who’d survived the demons’ attack.

Everyone snatched up their weapons, of course. Even Aiken: as warriors were few now.

But it was an old woman. She threw herself from her lathered mount and ran to them. Her hunting leathers were dust-caked. Bead necklaces rattled about her neck. Her hair was a thick tangled nest.

‘How many?’ she gasped; she clutched a thin weathered hand to her throat. Aiken thought her a maddened survivor from another village.

‘A full third of our people,’ answered Jalia, Aiken’s great-aunt. Then she hissed, flinching from the newcomer. She pointed to her waist. Aiken glanced there and saw that the knives thrust through the old woman’s leather belt were of nut-brown stone, knapped, the grip leather-wrapped.

‘Demon weapons …’ Jalia snarled, and she went for her own daggers.