Of course he need not have bothered with this awkward gesture of companionship. She of all people, Silverfox, was never alone. It was what she was. How she had been created. And she considered it her curse. Four entities resided within her. Pran Chole himself, among others, had pulled the four together to create what he hoped would become the first living T’lan Imass Bonecaster and Summoner in many millennia. And he had succeeded. Powerful beings, dead and dying, had been lashed to her soul as if by bloody sinew and dried roots: Tattersail, powerful Malazan cadre mage, indeed potent enough to be considered a potential High Mage; Bellurdan, a Thelomen giant in life and huge in soul in death; and most closed to her of all, Nightchill, a sorceress of the Malazan Empire. In life, for a time, they had served Kellanved, the first emperor. But in death they agreed to serve the child Silverfox – destined to release the T’lan Imass from their self-inflicted bondage.

And when she was at her very nadir, as on this night, she could not help but note her hands as she prodded the dying embers of the fire; their wasted bird-like lines, all sinew and bone, the skin blotched by age-spots. Not the hands of the youth she was – at least in years. By the number of seasons she had seen she should be an adolescent. Yet her purpose, what she was formed to do, arrived early. And so was she quickened to meet it. The cost had been terrible, and not just to her. The need had consumed her mother first. It had taken the many potential decades of her life. And now it was overwhelming hers.

She flexed her hands to warm them then returned to stirring the embers with a stick of broken brittle driftwood. All this Pran Chole witnessed. The low fire cast a bronze glow across his dry withered face, though the empty sockets of his eyes remained hidden in darkness beneath his headdress of weathered, broken antlers. How many such scenes had this Imass seen? The fire’s flush suited him, she decided.

Her thoughts turned then to another Imass, one who had shared many similar nights across the sea in Genabackis, and had become what Silverfox considered the closest thing to a friend among them: Lanas Tog of the Kerluhm T’lan Imass. The warrior who came bearing the message of war in Assail.

She sighed then, examining her limp useless hands, and Pran Chole, who knew her so well, broke his silence. His voice was the brushing of sand across the dunes: ‘She did what she thought she had to do, child.’

That she should be so transparent irked her and she growled, ‘She should not have lied.’

‘She did not lie. You could say she told a half-truth. What she imagined would bring us to this land.’

‘She must’ve known we would not join her.’