‘I should have left this to you, Galar,’ Toras Redone said, her words thick and low. ‘But that cell made me bored. You’d think I’d welcome such solitude, just me and my… wine. And now, well, look at us. If the corpses had been raised up, by swords refusing death itself, I would have led them. Vengeance was a fire I could have stoked, fury a storm I would have ridden. We would have caught Hunn Raal unawares, and descended upon Neret Sorr. An army of undead, silent but for their screaming weapons, to deliver righteous slaughter.’ She lifted the jug, sloshed it to gauge how much was left, and then drained it. When done, she let the jug fall to the floor beside the chair, loosed a heavy sigh, and continued, ‘But the dead don’t care. Neither lust nor vengeance stirs their motionless limbs. No indignant rage flashes in their lifeless eyes. I walked among them, and with each body I stepped over, I felt something more taken away from me. Some… essence. Dathenar, bring me another jug – there, against the back wall. Excellent, a man who knows to follow orders. We’ll need that.’

Prazek looked over from where he sat by the table. ‘And so each death surrenders its name, choosing but one, whispered again and again, from countless pale lips. And that name is Loss, and to utter it is to feel it. Diminished, death by death, this essence of what we once were.’

Dathenar stood near her, watching as she tugged free the jug’s stopper. Then he said, ‘Fallen friends cease to ask how you fare, cease to answer in kind. They may retreat from your thoughts, but never quite far enough. If in our minds we walk as one among many, in the midst of families knotted by blood and by choice, and witness, as years pass, the crowd grow ever smaller, then we come to comprehend – as we must – a day when we walk alone, abandoned by all.’

‘Or contemplate another kind of abandonment,’ Prazek said, nodding, ‘when it is we who must leave the others. A last step comes to us all. Regret and sorrow will ride the final breaths of each of us, moments of pity perhaps for those who must remain, those who must take another step, and then another, trailed by none but ghosts.’

‘They were my friends,’ said Toras Redone in a ragged whisper. ‘One and all. My family.’

‘You are not entirely alone,’ Galar Baras pointed out.

She smiled, but her eyes remained fixed on the dry earthen floor. ‘I walk no reasonable path. The fewer that remain, the more easily we find ourselves lost.’ She drank again. ‘But this womb is red and sweet. It bears the colour of blood, but is quick to lose its warmth. It enlivens the mind, in the instant before it dulls every thought. It licks the cunt, only to take all feeling away. For all that, I am eager for the insensibility, so easily mistaken for lust.’