To make it worse, it was now blowing snow. The fat flakes came out of the heights, driven by a cutting wind that only grew in intensity. Far to the east and west, all along the uplands as far as Jute could see, the thinning clouds hinted at a wall of white covering the heights – an unbroken sheath of snow that was utterly featureless except where tall ridges of black rock poked through like knife-edges.

He scanned the curved rock before the fortress where it descended to the north; the bedrock carried only low brush and dwarf trees, but it combed downward into a forest of cedar, fir, and birch. Just at the fringe of these woods was where Giana and her team were supposed to be digging. He could see no sign of them, however.

The vibration punishing everyone’s feet was becoming almost unbearable. One of the pounded dirt ramps collapsed into a heap of soil, it seemed soundlessly, as the cacophony of the leagues-wide avalanche grinding down upon them drowned everything out.

Squinting into the blowing snow he could make out entire swaths of forest disappearing as if swept down by an invisible hand. The enormous blocks of the wall juddered and bounced as if toys. The last screen of trees between them and the avalanche fell towards them, their crowns swinging down as if bowing in farewell. Come on! he urged Giana. Run!

Something appeared through the curtain of snow but it was not what Jute expected. To all appearances it looked like a flood of extremely muddy water creeping up the slope of the bedrock. Sticks and detritus roiled amid the froth of the approaching tide. It took him a moment to grasp that the sticks were in fact the stripped trunks of mature trees, and that the coming tide was a churned froth of mud, silts, soil, and sand, all being scooped downslope towards them in front of a solid wall of one of the ice-tongues. And before this flood emerged six figures, running pell-mell for the high land and the wall.

Jute tottered and stumbled his way down the ramp to the gates, where a team of locals waited to swing closed the twin leaves. The figures, completely mud-covered, ran on while the very earth jumped and shuddered beneath them. Now Jute counted only four.

The quartet came barrelling in, dripping, sheathed in mud and streaks of blood, and fall to the ground, panting and gasping. King Voti’s people pulled shut the leaves. Jute and a number of Malazans stooped to the four, rubbing away muck, pulling a shattered length of wood the size of a dagger from the arm of one of them. To Jute’s immense relief Lieutenant Jalaz emerged, bruised and bloodied, from the layers of clinging muck encasing another of them.