Kamist Reloe still retained superior numbers, but the quality of the troops was beginning to tell – Coltaine’s Wickans were disciplined in their mayhem, and the Seventh was a veteran force that the new Fist had taken pains in preparing for this kind of war. There was still the likelihood that the Malazan forces would be destroyed eventually – if things were as bad elsewhere, there’d be little hope for the stranded army and the thousands of refugees that clung to it. All these minor victories cannot win the war – Reloe’s potential recruits number in the hundreds of thousands – assuming Sha’ik recognizes the threat Coltaine poses and sends them in pursuit of the High Fist.

When he came within sight of the small oasis surrounding Dryj Spring, he was shocked to see that almost every palm tree had been cut down. The stands were gone, leaving only stumps and low plants. Smoke drifted over the area, ghostly under the paling sky. Duiker rose in his stirrups, scanning for campfires, pickets, the tents of the encampment. Nothing . . . perhaps on the other side of the spring . . .

The smoke thickened as he rode into the oasis, his mount picking its way around the hacked stumps. There were signs everywhere – first the pits dug into the sand by the outlying picket stations, then the deep ruts where wagons had been positioned in a defensive line. In the hearth-places only smouldering ashes remained.

Dumbfounded and suddenly exhausted, Duiker let his horse wander through the abandoned camp. The deep sinkhole beyond was the spring – it had been virtually emptied and was only now beginning to refill: a small brownish pool surrounded by the mud-coated husks of palm bark and rotting fronds. Even the fish had been taken.

While the Wickan horsewarriors had set off to ambush the Tithansi, the Seventh and the refugees had already left the oasis. The historian struggled to comprehend that fact. He envisioned the scene of departure, the stumbling, red-eyed refugees, children piled onto wagons, the stricken gazes of the veteran soldiers guarding the exodus. Coltaine gave them no rest, no pause to assimilate the shock, to come to terms with all that had happened, was happening. They’d arrived, stripped the oasis of water and everything else that might prove useful, then they’d left.

Where?

Duiker nudged his mount forward. He came to the oasis’s southwestern edge, his eyes tracking the wide swath left behind by the wagons, cattle and horses. Off to the southeast rose the weathered range of the Lador Hills. Westward stretched the Tithansi Steppes. Nothing in that direction until the Sekala River – too far for Coltaine to contemplate. If northwest, then the village of Manot, and beyond that, Caron Tepasi, on the coast of the Karas Sea. Almost as far as Sekala River. The trail led due west, into the steppes. Hood’s breath, there’s nothing there!