The road was more than a road. It was a river and its current was tightening, holding fast all that it carried, and the pace quickened, ever quickened. She could fight—they all could fight—and achieve nothing but drowning.

Drop by drop, she fed the river, and the road rushed them forward.

We are going home. Did I want this? Did I want to know all that we had abandoned? Did I want the truth, an end to the mysteries of our beginnings?

Was this a pilgrimage? A migration? Will we find salvation?

She had never even believed in such things. Sudden benediction, blessed release—these were momentary intoxications, as addictive as any drug, until one so hungered for the escape that the living, mindful world paled in comparison, bleached of all life, all wonder.

She was not a prophet. But they wanted a prophet. She was not holy. But they begged her blessing. Her path did not promise a road to glory. Yet they followed unquestioningly.

Her blood was not a river, but how it flowed!

No sense left for time. No passage of light to mark dawn, noon and dusk. Darkness all around them, before and behind, darkness breeding in swirls of stale air, the taste of ashes, the stench of charred wood and fire-cracked stone. How long? She had no idea.

But people behind her were falling. Dying.

Where is home? It lies ahead. Where is home? Lost far behind us.

Where is home? It is within, gutted and hollow, waiting to be filled once more.

Where is Gallan?

At this road’s end.

What is Gallan’s promise? It is home. I—I need to work through this. Round and round—madness to let it run, madness. Will the light never return? Is the joke this: that salvation is all around us, even as we remain for ever blind to it?

Because we believe . . . there must be a road. A journey, an ordeal, a place to find.

We believe in the road. And in believing we build it, stone by stone, drop by drop. We bleed for our belief, and as the blood flows, the darkness closes in—

‘The Road to Gallan is not a road. Some roads . . . are not roads at all. Gallan’s promise is not from here to there. It is from now to then. The darkness . . . the darkness comes from within.’

A truth, and most truths were revelations.

She opened her eyes.

Behind her, parched throats opened in a moaning chorus. Thousands, the sound rising to challenge the rush of black water on stony shores, to waft out and run between the charred tree-stumps climbing the hillsides to the left.

Yan Tovis stood at the shore, not seeing the river sweeping past the toes of her boots. Her gaze had lifted, vision cutting through the mottled atmosphere, to look upon the silent, unlit ruins of a vast city.

The city.

Kharkanas.

The Shake have come home.