Children were dying. He’d crouched, one hand on a mother’s shoulder, and watched with her as life ebbed from the baby in her arms. Like the light of an oil lamp, dimming, dimming, winking out. The moment when the struggle’s already lost, surrendered, and the tiny heart slows in its own realization, then stops in mute wonder. And never stirs again. It was then that pain filled the vast caverns within the living, destroying all it touched with its rage at inequity.

No match for the mother’s tears, he’d moved on. Wandering, smeared in dirt, sweat and blood, he was becoming a spectral presence, a self-proclaimed pariah. He’d stopped attending Coltaine’s nightly sessions, despite direct orders to the contrary. Accompanied only by List, he rode with the Wickans, to the flanks and to the rear, he marched with the Seventh, with the Hissari Loyals, the Marines, the sappers, the nobles and the mud-bloods – as the lowborn refugees had taken to calling themselves.

Through it all he said little, his presence becoming commonplace enough to permit a relaxation among the people around him. No matter what the depredations, there always seemed energy enough to expend in opinions.

Coltaine’s a demon in truth, Laseen’s dark joke on us all. He’s in league with Kamist Reloe and Sha’ik – this uprising is naught but an elaborate charade since Hood’s come to embrace the realm of humans. We’ve bowed to our skull-faced patron, and in return for all this spilled blood Coltaine, Sha’ik and Laseen will all ascend to stand alongside the Shrouded One.

Hood reveals himself in the flight of these capemoths – he shows his face again and again, greeting each dusk with a hungry grin in the dimming sky.

The Wickans have made a pact with the earth spirits. We’re here to make fertile soil—

You’ve taken the wrong path with that, friend. We’re sport for the Whirlwind goddess, nothing more. We are a lesson drawn long in the telling.

The Council of Nobles are eating children.

Where did you hear that?

Someone stumbled onto a grisly feast last night. The Council’s petitioned dark Elder gods in order to stay fat—

To what?

Fat, I said. Truth. And now bestial spirits wander the camp at night, collecting children dead or near enough to dead to make no difference, except those ones are juicier.

You’ve gone mad—

He may have something there, friend! I myself saw picked and gnawed bones this morning, all in a heap – no skulls but the bones looked human enough, only very small. Wouldn’t you do for a roasted baby right now, eh? Instead of the half-cup of brown sludge we’re getting these days?

I heard Aren’s army is only days away, led by Pormqual himself. He’s got a legion of demons with him, too—