The pair of noblemen retreated.

Bult glared about until he found Gesler. ‘Ready your ship, Captain.’

‘Aye, sir.’

Stormy muttered beside the historian, ‘None of this smells right, sir.’

Duiker slowly nodded.

Leoman led them unerringly across the clay plain, through impenetrable darkness, to another cache of supplies, this one stored beneath a lone slab of limestone. As he unwrapped the hardbread, dried meat and fruits, Felisin sat down on the cool ground and wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to stop shivering.

Heboric sat beside her. ‘Still no sign of the Toblakai. With Oponn’s luck bits of him are souring that Soletaken’s stomach.’

‘He fights like no other,’ Leoman said, sharing out the food. ‘And that is why Sha’ik chose him—’

‘An obvious miscalculation,’ the ex-priest said. ‘The woman’s dead.’

‘Her third guardian would have prevented that, but Sha’ik relinquished its binding. I sought to change her mind, but failed. All foreseen, each of us trapped within our roles.’

‘Convenient, that. Tell me, is the prophecy as clear on the rebellion’s end? Do we now face a triumphant age of Apocalypse unending? Granted, there’s an inherent contradiction, but never mind that.’

‘Raraku and Dryjhna are one,’ Leoman said. ‘As eternal as chaos and death. Your Malazan Empire is but a brief flare, already fading. We are born from darkness and to darkness we return. These are the truths you so fear, and in your fear discount.’

‘I am no-one’s marionette,’ Felisin snapped.

Leoman’s only reply to that was a soft laugh.

‘If this is what becoming Sha’ik demands, then you’d better go back to that withered corpse at the gate and wait for someone else to show up.’

‘Becoming Sha’ik shall not shatter your delusions of independence,’ Leoman said, ‘unless, of course, you will it.’

Listen to us. Too dark to see a thing. We are naught but three disembodied voices in futile counterpoint, here on this desert stage. Holy Raraku mocks our flesh, makes of us no more than sounds at war with a vast silence.

Soft footfalls approached.

‘Come and eat,’ Leoman called out.

Something slapped wetly to the ground close to Felisin. The stench of raw meat wafted over her.

‘A bear with white fur,’ the Toblakai rumbled. ‘For a moment, I dreamed I had returned to my home in Laederon. Nethaur, we call such beasts. But we fought on sand and rock, not snow and ice. I have brought its skin and its head and its claws, for the beast was twice as large as any I’d seen before.’

‘Oh, I just can’t wait for daylight,’ Heboric said.

‘The next dawn is the last before the oasis,’ the giant savage said to Leoman. ‘She must undertake the ritual.’

There was silence.

Heboric cleared his throat. ‘Felisin—’