A boat had somehow cleared the reef and now raced towards them, its lone sail aflame. Sorcery stabbed at the craft from all sides like vipers, then fell away as the boat neared shore. A moment later it scraped bottom and slid to a halt, canting to one side as it settled. Two figures were at the ratlines in an instant, cutting away the burning sail. The cloth swept down like a wing of flame, instantly doused as it struck the water. Two other men leapt down and waded onto shore.

‘Which one’s Duiker?’ Felisin asked.

Heboric shook his head. ‘Neither, but the one on the left is a mage.’

‘How can you tell?’

He made no reply.

The two men swiftly approached, both staggering in exhaustion. The mage, a small, red-faced man wearing a singed cape, was the first to speak – in Malazan. ‘Thank the gods! We need your help.’

Somewhere beyond the reef waited an unknown mage – a man unconnected to the rebellion, a stranger trapped within his own nightmare. As the vortex of a savage storm, he had risen from the deep on the second day out. Kulp had never before felt such unrestrained power. Its very wildness was all that saved them, as the madness that gripped the sorcerer tore and flayed his warren. There was no control, the warren’s wounds gushed, the winds howled with the mage’s own shrieks.

The Ripath was flung about like a piece of bark in a cascading mountain stream. At first Kulp countered with illusions – believing he and his companions were the object of the mage’s wrath – but it quickly became apparent that the insane wielder was oblivious to them, fighting an altogether different war. Kulp contracted his own warren into a protective shell around Ripath, then, as Gesler and his crewmen struggled to keep the craft upright, he crouched down to withstand the onslaught.

The unleashed sorcery instinctively hunted them and no illusion could deceive something so thoroughly mindless. They became its lodestone, the attacks endless and wildly fluctuating in strength, battering Kulp relentlessly for two days and nights.

They were driven westward, towards the Otataral shores. The mage’s power assailed that coastline, with little effect, and Kulp finally began to make sense of it – the mage’s mind must have been destroyed by Otataral. Likely an escaped miner, a prisoner of war who had scaled the walls only to find he took his prison with him. Losing control of his warren, it had then taken control of him. It surged with power far beyond anything the mage himself had ever wielded.

The realization left Kulp horrified. The storm threatened to fling them onto that shore. Was the same fate awaiting him?

Gesler and his crew’s skill was all that kept the Ripath from striking the reef. For eleven hours they managed to sail parallel to the razor-sharp rocks beneath the breakers.