‘Had their heads chopped off, too,’ Stormy said, startling the historian with a bright grin. ‘Just can’t hold good sailors down, I always say.’

‘Mostly Tiste Andii,’ Gesler added, ‘only a handful of humans. And some others, in the cabin ... Stormy, what did Heboric call ‘em?’

‘Tiste Edur, sir.’

Gesler nodded, his attention now on the historian. ‘Aye, us and Kulp plucked Heboric from the island, just like you wanted. Him and two others. The bad news is we lost them in a squall—’

‘Overboard?’ Duiker asked in a croak, his thoughts a maelstrom. ‘Dead?’

‘Well,’ said Stormy, ‘we can’t be sure of that. Don’t know if they hit water when they jumped over the side – we was on fire, you see and it might have been wet waves we was riding, then again it might not.’

A part of the historian wanted to throttle both men, cursing the soldiers’ glorious and excruciating love of understatement. The other part, the rocking shock of what he was hearing, dropped him with a jarring thud to the muddy, butterfly-carpeted ground.

‘Historian, accompany these marines in the dory,’ Nether said, ‘but be sure to keep well out from shore. Their mage is exhausted, so you need not worry about him. I must understand what is happening.’

Oh, we are agreed in that, lass.

Gesler reached down and gently lifted Duiker upright. ‘Come along now, sir, and Stormy will spin the tale while we’re about it. It’s not that we’re coy, you see, we’re just stupid.’

Stormy grunted. ‘Then when I’m done, you could tell us how Coltaine and all the rest managed to live this long. Now that’ll surely be a story worth hearing.’

‘It’s the butterflies, you see,’ Stormy grunted as he pulled on the oars. ‘A solid foot of ‘em, moving slower than the current underneath. Without that, we’d be making no gain at all.’

‘We’ve paddled worse,’ Gesler added.

‘So I gather,’ Duiker said. They’d been sitting in the small rowboat for over an hour, during which time Stormy and Truth had managed to pull them a little over a hundred and fifty paces upriver through the thick sludge of drowned butterflies. The north bank had quickly risen to a steep cliff, festooned with creepers, vines covering its pitted face. They were approaching a sharp bend in the gorge created by a recent collapse on that side.