'Damn it.' Ninefingers pulled his horse up and clambered stiffly down from his saddle. A fallen tree trunk, wood cracked and grey, lay across the gorge, blocking the road.

'I don't like this.' Ferro shrugged her bow from her shoulder.

'Neither do I,' grumbled Ninefingers, taking a step towards the fallen tree. 'But you have to be real—'

'That's far enough!' The voice echoed back and forth around the valley, brash and confident. Quai hauled on the reins and brought the cart to a sudden halt. Jezal looked along the lip of the gorge, his heart thumping in his mouth. He saw the speaker now. A big man dressed in antique leather armour, sitting carelessly on the edge of the drop with one leg dangling, his long hair flapping softly in the breeze. A pleasant and a friendly-looking man, as far as Jezal could tell at this distance, with a wide smile on his face.

'My name is Finnius, a humble servant of the Emperor Cabrian!'

'Cabrian?' shouted Bayaz. 'I heard he'd lost his reason!'

'He's got some interesting ideas.' Finnius shrugged. 'But he's always seen us right. Let me explain matters—we're all around you!' A serious-seeming man with a short sword and shield stepped out from behind the dead tree trunk. Two more appeared, and then three more, creeping out from behind the rocks, behind the bushes, all with serious faces and serious weapons. Jezal licked his lips. He would laugh in the face of danger, of course, but now it came to it nothing seemed at all amusing. He looked over his shoulder. More men had come from behind the rocks they had passed a few moments before, blocking the valley in the other direction.

Ninefingers folded his arms. 'Just once,' he murmured, 'I'd like to take someone else by surprise.'

'There's a couple more of us,' shouted Finnius, 'up here, with me! Good hands with bows, and ready with arrows.' Jezal saw their outlines now against the white sky, the curved shapes of their weapons. 'So you see that you'll be going no further down this road!'

Bayaz spread his palms. 'Perhaps we can come to some arrangement that suits us both! You need only name your price and—'

'Your money's no good to us, old man, and I'm deeply wounded by the assumption! We're soldiers, not thieves! We have orders to find a certain group of people, a group of people wandering out in the middle of nowhere, far from the travelled roads! An old bald bastard with a sickly-looking boy, some stuck-up Union fool, a scarred whore, and an ape of a Northerner! You seen a crowd that might fit that description?'

'If I'm the whore,' shouted Ninefingers, 'who's the Northerner?'