She shouldered her bow and crept cautiously into the cavern, keeping low, her boot crunching down in the hill of bones. She wobbled out further, arms spread wide for balance, half-walking, half-wading, up to her knees in places, bones cracking and scraping around her legs. She made it down onto the cavern floor and knelt there, staring round and licking her lips.

Nothing moved. The three Shanka lay still, dark blood pooling on the stone underneath their bodies.

'Gah!' Ninefingers tumbled down the slope, clattering splinters flying up around him, rolling over and over. He crashed down on his face in the midst of a rattling slide of bones and scrambled up. 'Shit! Ugh!' He shook half a dusty rib-cage off his arm and flung it away.

'Quiet, fool!' hissed Ferro, dragging him down beside her, staring across the cavern towards a rough archway in the far wall, expecting hordes of those things to come pouring in at any moment, keen to add their bones to the rest. But nothing came. She gave him a dark look but he was too busy nursing his bruises, so she left him be and crept over to the three corpses.

They had been gathered round a leg. A woman's leg, Ferro guessed, from the lack of hair on it. A stub of bone poked out of dry, withered flesh round the severed thigh. One of them had been going at it with a knife and it still lay nearby, the bright blade shining in the shaft of light from high above. Ninefingers stooped and picked it up.

'You can never have too many knives.'

'No? What if you fall in a river and can't swim for all that iron?'

He looked puzzled for a moment, then he shrugged and put it carefully back down on the ground. 'Fair point.'

She slipped her own blade out from her belt. 'One knife will do well enough. If you know where to stick it.' She dug the blade into one of the Flatheads' backs and started to cut out her arrow. 'What are these things anyway?' She worked the shaft out, intact, and rolled the Flathead over with her boot. It stared up at her, piggy black eyes unseeing under a low, flat forehead, lips curled back from a wide maw full of bloody teeth. 'They're even uglier than you, pink.'

'Very good. They're Shanka. Flatheads. Kanedias made them.'

'Made them?' The next arrow snapped off as she tried to twist it out.

'So Bayaz said. As a weapon, to use in a war.'

'I thought he died.'

'Seems his weapons lived on.'

The one she shot through the neck had fallen on the shaft and broken it near the head. Useless, now. 'How does a man make one of these things?'