It should have been good land for riding, reassuring land. Ferro could have seen an enemy coming from miles away, but she saw no one. Only the vast carpet of tall grass, waving and thrashing in the wind, stretching away in every direction, to the far, far, horizon. Only the track broke the monotony, a line of shorter, drier grass, pocked with patches of bare black earth, cutting across the plain straight as an arrow flies.

Ferro did not like it, this vast sameness. She frowned as they rode, peering left and right. In the Badlands of Kanta, the barren earth was full of features—broken boulders, withered valleys, dried-up trees casting their clawing shadows, distant creases in the earth full of shade, bright ridges doused in light. In the Badlands of Kanta, the sky above would be empty, still, a bright bowl holding nothing but the blinding sun in the day, the bright stars at night.

Here all was strangely reversed.

The earth was featureless, but the sky was full of movement, full of chaos. Towering clouds loomed over the plain, dark and light swirling together into colossal spirals, sweeping over the grassland with the raking wind, shifting, turning, ripping apart and flooding back together, casting monstrous, flowing shadows onto the cowering earth, threatening to crush the six tiny riders and their tiny cart with a deluge to sink the world. All hanging over Ferro's hunched up shoulders, the wrath of God made real.

This was a strange land, one in which she had no place. She needed reasons to be here, and good ones. 'You, Bayaz!' she shouted, drawing up level with him. 'Where are we going?'

'Huh,' he grunted, frowning out across the waving grass, from nothing, to nothing. 'We are going westwards, across the plain, over the great river Aos, as far as the Broken Mountains.'

'Then?'

She saw the faint lines around his eyes, across the bridge of his nose, grow deeper, watched his lips press together. Annoyance. He did not like her questions. 'Then we go further.'

'How long will it take?'

'All of winter and into spring,' he snapped. 'And then we must come back.' He dug his heels into his horse's flanks and trotted away from her, up the track towards the front of the group.

Ferro was not so easily put off. Not by this shifty old pink. She dug in her own heels and drew up level with him. 'What is the First Law?'

Bayaz looked sharply over at her. 'What do you know about it?'

'Not enough. I heard you and Yulwei talking, through the door.'

'Eavesdropping, eh?'

'You have loud voices and I have good ears.' Ferro shrugged. 'I am not sticking a bucket on my head just to keep your secrets. What is the First Law?'