Better howling than snapping at the heel. He walked on. His desire to wash himself was becoming desperate. The residue of blood and flesh had begun to dry on his clothes and on his skin. He was attracting attention as he shuffled down the aisle between the tents. Warding gestures were being made as he passed. Duiker feared he had inadvertently become a harbinger, and the fate he promised was as chilling as the soulless howls of the camp dogs.

Ahead, the morning’s light bled across the sky.

BOOK THREE – CHAIN OF DOGS

BOOK THREE – CHAIN OF DOGS

When the sands

Danced blind,

She emerged from the face

Of a raging goddess

Sha’ik

Bidithal

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

If you seek the crumbled bones

of the T’lan Imass,

gather into one hand

the sands of Raraku

The Holy Desert

Anonymous

Kulp felt like a rat in a vast chamber crowded with ogres, caged in by shadows and but moments away from being crushed underfoot. Never before when entering the Meanas Warren had it felt so ... fraught.

There were strangers here, intruders, forces so inimical to the realm that the very atmosphere bridled. The essence of himself that had slipped through the fabric was reduced to a crouching, cowering creature. And yet, all he could feel was a series of fell passages, the spun wakes that marked the paths the unwelcome had taken. His senses shouted at him that – for the moment at least – he was alone, the dun sprawled-out landscape devoid of all life.

Still he trembled with terror.

Within his mind he reached back a ghostly hand, finding the tactile reassurance of the place where his body existed, the heave and slush of blood in his veins, the solid weight of flesh and bone. He sat cross-legged in the captain’s cabin of the Silanda, watched over by a wary, restless Heboric, while the others waited on the deck, ever scanning the unbroken, remorselessly flat horizon on all sides.

They needed a way out. The entire Elder Warren they’d found themselves in was flooded, a soupy, shallow sea. The oarsmen could propel Silanda onward for a thousand years, until the wood rotted in their dead hands, the shafts snapping, until the ship began to disintegrate around them, still the drum would beat and the backs would bend. And we’d be long dead by then, nothing but mouldering dust. To escape, they must find a means of shifting warrens.

Kulp cursed his own limitations. Had he been a practitioner of Sere, or Denul or D’riss or indeed virtually any of the other warrens accessible to humans, he would find what they needed. But not Meanas. No seas, no rivers, not even a Hood-damned puddle. From within his warren, Kulp was seeking to effect a passage through to the mortal world . . . and it was proving problematic.