‘You mean to slaughter ten thousand unarmed men and women, Korbolo Dom?’

‘I mean to cripple Tavore before she even sets foot on this continent. I mean to make her too furious to think. I mean to crack that façade so she dreams of vengeance day and night, poisoning her every decision.’

‘You always fashioned yourself as the Empire’s harshest Fist, didn’t you, Korbolo Dom? As if cruelty’s a virtue ...’

The pale-blue-skinned commander simply shrugged. ‘Best join the others now, Duiker – a soldier of Coltaine’s army deserves that much.’ Korbolo then turned to Mallick. ‘My mercy, however, does not extend to that one soldier whose arrow stole Coltaine from our pleasure. Where is he, Priest?’

‘He went missing, alas. Last seen an hour after the deed – Blistig had his soldiers search everywhere, without success. Even if he has now found him, he is with the garrison, afraid to say.’

The renegade Fist scowled. ‘There have been disappointments this day, Mallick Rel.’

‘Korbolo Dom, sir!’ Pormqual said, still bearing an expression of disbelief. ‘I do not understand—’

‘Clearly you do not,’ the commander agreed, his face twisting in disgust. ‘Jhistal, have you any particular fate in mind for this fool?’

‘None. He is yours.’

‘I cannot grant him the dignified sacrifice I have in mind for his soldiers. That would leave too bitter a taste in my mouth, I’m afraid.’ Korbolo Dom hesitated, then sighed and made a slight gesture with one hand.

A war chief’s tulwar flashed behind the High Fist, lifted the man’s head clean from his shoulders and sent it spinning. The warhorse bolted in alarm and broke through the ring of soldiers. The beautiful beast galloped down among the unarmed soldiers, carrying its headless burden into their midst. The High Fist’s corpse, Duiker saw, rode in the saddle with a grace not matched in life, weaving this way and that before hands reached up to slow the frightened horse, and Pormqual’s body slid to one side, falling into waiting arms.

It may have been his imagination, but Duiker thought he could hear the harsh laughter of a god.

There was no shortage of spikes, yet it took a day and a half before the last screaming prisoner was nailed to the last crowded cedar lining Aren Way.

Ten thousand dead and dying Malazans stared down on that wide, exquisitely engineered Imperial road – eyes unseeing or eyes uncomprehending – it made little difference.

Duiker was the last, the rusty iron spikes driven through his wrists and upper arms to hold him in place high on the tree’s blood-streaked bole. More spikes were hammered through his ankles and the muscles of his outer thighs.

The pain was unlike anything the historian had ever known before. Yet even worse was the knowledge that that pain would accompany his entire final journey down into eventual unconsciousness, and with it – an added trauma – were the images burned into him: almost forty hours of being driven on foot up Aren Way, watching each and every one of those ten thousand soldiers joined to the mass crucifixion in a chain of suffering stretching over three leagues, each link scores of men and women nailed to every tree, to every available space on those tall, broad trunks.