The vanguard to the refugees consisted of the surviving elements of the Seventh’s attachment of medium-equipped cavalry – slightly more than two hundred riders in all. Before them rode the Malazan nobles in their carriages and wagons, flanked on either side by ten companies of the 7th Infantry. Close to a thousand additional soldiers of the Seventh – the walking wounded – provided the nobles with their own vanguard, while ahead of them rolled the wagons bearing the cutters and their more seriously injured charges. Coltaine and a thousand riders of his Crow Clan spearheaded the entire column.

But there were too many refugees and too few able combatants, and for all the Malazan efforts, Kamist Reloe’s raiding parties struck like vipers in brilliantly co-ordinated mayhem. A new commander had come to Reloe’s army of the Apocalypse, a nameless Tithansi warleader charged with harrying the train day and night as it crawled painfully westward – a bloodied and battered serpent that refused to die – and this warrior now posed the most serious threat to Coltaine.

A slow, calculated slaughter. We’re being toyed with. The endless dust had scratched the historian’s throat raw, making every swallow agony. They were running perilously low on water, the memories of Sekala River now a parched yearning. The nightly slaughter of cattle, sheep, pigs and goats had intensified, as animals were released from suffering, then butchered to flavour the vast cauldrons of blood-stew, marrow and oats that had become everyone’s main sustenance. Each night the encampment became an abattoir of screaming beasts, the air alive with rhizan and capemoths drawn to the killing stations. The cacophonous uproar and chaos each dusk had scraped Duiker’s nerves raw – and he was not alone in that. Madness haunted their days, stalking them as relentlessly as Kamist Reloe and his vast army.

Corporal List rode alongside the historian in numbed silence, his head dropped low on his chest, his shoulders slumped. He seemed to be ageing before Duiker’s eyes.

Their world had dwindled. We totter on edges seen and unseen. We are reduced, yet defiant. We’ve lost the meaning of time. Endless motion broken only by its dulled absence – the shock of rest, of those horns sounding an end to the day’s plodding. For that moment, as the dust swirls on, no-one moves. Standing in disbelief that another day has passed, and yet still we live.

He’d walked the refugee camp at night, wandering between the ragged rows of tents, lean-tos and canopied wagons, his eyes taking in all that he saw with perverse detachment. The historian, now witness, stumbling in the illusion that he will survive. Long enough to set the details down on parchment in the frail belief that truth is a worthwhile cause. That the tale will become a lesson heeded. Frail belief? Outright lie, a delusion of the worst sort. The lesson of history is that no-one learns.