'You think I've got the answers? They'd come across the sea, every summer, when the ice melted, and there'd always be work fighting 'em. Lots of work.' She hacked out the last shaft, bloody but sound. 'When I was young they started coming more and more often. My father sent me south, over the mountains, to get help with the fighting of 'em…' He trailed off. 'Well. That's a long story. The High Valleys are swarming with Flatheads now.'

'It hardly matters,' she grunted, standing up and sliding the two good arrows carefully back into her quiver, 'as long as they die.'

'Oh, they die. Trouble is there's always more to kill.' He was frowning down at the three dead things, frowning down hard with a cold look in his eye. 'There's nothing left now, north of the mountains. Nothing and no one.'

Ferro did not much care about that. 'We need to move.'

'All back to the mud,' he growled, as though she had not spoken, his frown growing harder all the time.

She stepped up in front of his face. 'You hear me? We need to move, I said. '

'Eh?' He blinked at her for a moment, then he scowled. The muscles round his jaw tightened rigid under his skin, the scars stretching and shifting, face tipped forward, eyes lost in hard shadow from the light overhead. 'Alright. We move.'

Ferro frowned at him as a trickle of blood crept down from his hair and across the greasy, stubbly side of his face. He no longer looked like anyone she would trust.

'Not planning to go strange on me, are you, pink? I need you to stay cold.'

'I am cold,' he whispered.

Logen was hot. His skin prickled under his dirty clothes. He felt strange, dizzy, his head full of the stink of Shanka. He could hardly breathe for their smell. The hallway seemed to move under his feet, shifting before his eyes. He winced and hunched over, sweat running down his face, dripping onto the tipping stone below.

Ferro whispered something at him, but he couldn't make sense of the words—they echoed from the walls and round his face, but wouldn't go in. He nodded and flapped one hand at her, struggled on behind. The hallway was growing hotter and hotter, the blurry stone had taken on an orange glow. He blundered into Ferro's back and nearly fell, crawled forwards on his sore knees, gasping hard.