Lahanis crouched down over the dying soldier, stabbing one slick blade into the snow to one side and using the freed hand to reach into the wide gash in the man’s throat. Cupping the hot blood, she brought it up to smear it across her face. Licking her lips, she smiled down at the soldier. The wound frothed as he struggled to breathe, but she could see he was drowning. Slowly, yes? Good. Know your end is coming. Know it in your soul. Look well on your slayer.

Sometimes when you chase the girl, she turns on you.

There had been a rush of retreating soldiers, only a few of them wounded. Someone had finally ordered a withdrawal. Some had pushed through their ambush, but Glyph and his archers had been close on the Legion’s heels. Arrows thudded into exposed backs, the sound of their impacts all around her like a sudden hailstorm. She found herself running after soldiers who had flung away their swords and bucklers, pulling off their helms to see better, and she cut down one after another from behind, whilst her fellow Butchers did much the same, many using hatchets and axes, crushing skulls and shattering knees.

On all sides, carnage, as the retreat became a rout, and the rout a slaughter.

Laughing, Lahanis moved away from the drowning man, seeking another victim.

* * *

Glyph reached for another arrow but found the hide quiver empty. Letting the bow drop, he drew his hunting knife as he began moving from one Legion body to the next, checking for signs of life. Where he found them, his blade extinguished them.

He had never seen so many bodies, had never imagined what it would be like to move through a battlefield, seeing the blood, the excrement, the food-flecked fluids that had spilled out from gutted men and women. He could not have imagined mortal faces capable of finding so many different expressions for death, as if an artist had gone mad in this forest, carving one white visage after another, chiselled from the frozen snow itself, splashed with crimson as if from bleeding hands.

Glyph found himself staggering among the corpses, no longer examining bodies, no longer caring if he saw the faint stream of breath.

The day was getting colder. Shivering, he paused to lean against the bole of a blackened tree. A hunter stood before him, speaking, but Glyph could find no meaning in the words he heard, as if some other language was spoken in this terrible place.

Slowly, however, as if from a vast distance, comprehension returned to him.

‘… breathes still, war-master. He begs for his life.’

‘Who?’

‘Their leader,’ the hunter replied. ‘He names himself Captain Hallyd Bahann. We found him hiding in the hollow of a fallen tree.’

‘Bind him. Send him back to the Watch. Begin stripping armour and recovering weapons, and arrows.’

‘This is a great victory, war-master!’