‘Something,’ he repeated, wary, as if unwilling to say more.

The local people had formed a line inland. They yelled and shook their weapons. Shalt studied them: much taller than she and her stock. Prominent jaws, large teeth. Similar in features – probably the descendants of a small breeding population. Such was not so unusual among her own kind, long ago.

Her band was disappearing one by one, moving on, when one of the locals shouted something Shalt understood: ‘Be gone, demons from the outside!’

The words used made all her remaining band reflexively draw their blades. For they were in the Jaghut tongue. Shalt stepped forward. ‘Whence came you by this language?’ she asked in the same tongue.

‘It is known to us of old, demon,’ an elder answered, sneering.

Known? she repeated, wonderingly. How can this be?

‘And we have been warned of your kind,’ he continued. ‘Be gone! You are not welcome here.’

Shalt raised her chin, the flesh worn away from one side of her mandible, and scented again, deeply. What came on the air staggered her, and were she not of the Imass she would perhaps have fainted into unconsciousness from the challenge it presented to her very core.

‘Abomination…’ J’arl breathed in an exhalation of cold air. He raised his blade.

No! Shalt cried to herself. They are human! We mustn’t slide down this path … it will lead us to annihilation.

J’arl started forward and Shalt acted without thought. Her blade sliced through vertebrae at the juncture of neck and shoulder. J’arl slumped, though she knew he was not finished utterly.

Up and down the shore her band exploded into a whirling mêlée of Imass striking Imass. Flint blades clashed and grated in a burst of clamour that sent all the nearby birds skyward in alarm. A group coalesced round Shalt who directed them into a line defending the milling locals.

‘Flee the coast!’ she shouted to the people as she blocked a strike from Guth. ‘Flee!’

‘They will be found,’ Guth promised her as he strained. ‘If not us, then others.’

Shalt cut him down as well and wept as she fought, for he had been a companion of uncountable years.

She spared the mêlée a glance and despaired. The aggressors far outnumbered the defenders. Yet she was First of the Band for a reason and she fought even as all her allies fell about her. She was last, giving ground, suffering strikes that shaved dried flesh from her limbs and cut rotted hide from her shoulders. Now her skills overcame the constraints of the attackers who fell one by one before the two-handed blade, so thin as to be translucent, that she flicked and turned as lightly as a green branch.