‘Omtose Phellack remains active in the north. It protects them yet.

‘For how long!’ she threw back at him. ‘It is weakening. You know this! In the little time we’ve been here I have felt it weakening.’

To this Pran could only offer the wordless gesture of those who live long enough in the indifferent world: the subtle lift of the shoulders that says, who is to know?

* * *

Fisher Kel Tath found the Bone Peninsula much the same as when he’d left it so very long ago. Which is to say: insular, murderous, and savage. The pocket city-states still jostled and warred amongst themselves seeking supremacy. And each, in its turn, succeeded in grasping a taste of said supremacy only to be dragged down eventually by some new alliance of their neighbours, said alliance then flying apart in the inevitable betrayals and killings. And so it went. On and on. Endlessly repeating itself and none apparently learning a thing from it. Fisher was even more disheartened and disgusted than when he’d fled it all originally.

Yet he’d returned. Drawn not by the steep inlets and forested mountain slopes that so figured in his youth, but by hints from readings in the divinatory Dragons deck, by whispered rumours, and by plain gut instincts that told him that things were about to change here in the lands of Assail, so very ancient and clinging to the old ways of family, clan and blood-feud.

He lingered in Holly, at the top of the mountainous peninsula. It was one of the more northerly of the coastal kingdoms. They were named kingdoms here along the coast, though in any other region they would rate as little more than baronies, or minor city-states. He lingered because when he arrived he found himself anticipated by a horde of foreigners all come ashore from the outland vessels now crowding the tiny fishing harbour of this modest fortress and town.

It seemed that for all his seeking out of subtle readers of the deck, paying of noted prophets, and even time spent insinuating himself into the good graces of a certain priestess of the Queen of Dreams for hints of future events, he had failed to discover the news that was clearly common knowledge: that streams bedded in gold had been discovered in northern Assail lands.

He did not know whether to consider it a personal failing, or a sad comment on the skills of said clairvoyants. In any case, he now had a seat in a tavern quite taken over by foreigners – and he thought by everyone to be among them – while strategy was being hammered out around the captain’s table.

It was a raucous affair of banged fists, yelled insults, and daggers half drawn while their owners, hired swords, and plain men-at-arms watched one another suspiciously.