A quick slice from one of the undying severed the rear of Anger’s ankle, bringing him falling to one knee and hand. His bellow of pain shook the stone ceiling and brought dust sifting down. Mist sought to wrap the undying in her coils of vapour, immobilizing them. But their stone weapons cut the ribbons and scarves just as one might rend rotten cloth. They closed upon Anger, severing his hand from its wrist. In powerful two-handed blows they chopped his head from its neck. Hot blood gushed across the flags as the giant’s oxen heart laboured yet.

Mist shrieked her horror and gripped the throne’s armrests – the mists curled away, dispersing as she gaped at the fallen corpse of her son.

Wrath swept all aside with a great wide swing of his axe. And that would have been the end but for the fact that these were undying, and so those that could stood again, re-gripped weapons, and advanced. A thrown blade of flint took him in the throat and he reared up tall, gurgling, searching for the shard at his neck. The other leader of the band, Lanas Tog, lunged in and severed the back of his knee. He tottered, swung the axe wildly to smash shards and pulverized dust from the wall, and fell. Others closed in, swinging. Before Mist’s stunned gaze they dismembered her other son.

The tip of a stone sword raised her chin. She unwillingly pulled her eyes from her fallen sons and lifted her face to the desiccated flat mien of Ut’el Anag.

‘You were … overconfident,’ he said.

Yes. She had been. Yet could she be blamed? She had faced nothing like this. And yes, the myths warned of this Army of Dust and Bone – but those were just stories, after all, weren’t they? She nodded, and said: ‘No one expects the past to reach out and destroy the present – or the future.’

The ancient’s face bore hardly any flesh that could move, yet Mist thought she caught a sort of startled flinch before furious rejection crimped the dried ligaments of the jaws and the arm drew back then thrust forward. Cold stone penetrated her chest, slid through her heart, and exited into the soft wood of the seat-back behind. She felt her muscles relaxing yet the blade supported her upright, for the moment. Her breath eased from her and in that last moment she felt no panic, no denial. She would go now to that bridge across worlds leading to where, none of her kind knew.

She, at least, had a destination.