The sapper eyed Mappo and Icarium, sensing a new tension between them, though they continued to work together with familiar ease. The tension was in the words unspoken between the two, Fiddler suspected. Changes are coming to us all, it seems. He glanced over at Crokus, who sat rigid with barely restrained impatience on the spare mount he had inherited. He’d caught the lad running through a gamut of close-in knife-fighting moves a short while earlier. The few times the sapper had seen him use the knives before there’d been a kind of desperation marring his technique. Crokus had some skill but he lacked maturity – he was too conscious of himself behind the blades. That had changed, Fiddler realized as he watched the lad go through his routine. Taking cuts was essential to delivering killing thrusts. Knife-fighting was a messy business. Cold determination backed Crokus now – he would do more than just hold his own from now on, the sapper knew. Nor would he be so quick to throw his knives, unless he had plenty of spares tucked within easy reach in the folds of his telaba. Now more likely, I’d hazard.

The late-afternoon sky was hazy ochre, filled with the suspended residue of the Whirlwind, which still raged in the heart of Raraku no more than ten leagues distant. The heat was made even more oppressive by that suffocating cloak.

Mappo freed the snared bhok’aral, earning a nasty bite on the wrist for his kindness. The creature half scampered, half flew back up the cliff face, voicing an abusive torrent as it went.

Fiddler called out to the Trell. ‘Set us a pace, then!’

Mappo nodded and he and Icarium set off down the trail.

The sapper was glad he was the only one to glance back to see a score of bhok’arala on the cliff face waving farewell, with Iskaral Pust almost falling from the window in his efforts to sweep the nearest creatures from the tower’s stone wall with his broom.

The renegade Korbolo Dom’s army of the Apocalypse was spread over the rumpled carpet of grassy hills that marked the south edge of the plain. On each hilltop stood command tents and the raised banners of various tribes and self-proclaimed battalions. Between small towns of tents and wagons roamed vast herds of cattle and horses.

The encampment’s pickets were marked by three ragged rows of crucified prisoners. Kites and rhizan and capemoths swarmed around each victim.

The outermost line rose above the earthworks and trench less than fifty paces away from Kalam’s position. He lay flat in the high yellow grasses, the heat of the parched ground rising up around him with a smell of dust and sage. Insects crawled over him, their prickling feet tracking aimless paths across his hands and forearms. The assassin ignored them, his eyes on the nearest of the crucified victims.