Listar frowned, looked about for the huge wolves, but the rolling plain with its windswept drifts of old snow seemed empty of life. As if to give credence to their name, the Dog-Runners had company wherever they travelled. Twice since departing the encampment, Listar had seen a half-dozen of the enormous beasts paralleling them in the distance. But the last time had been three or four days past. He’d thought them gone. ‘What has made them restless?’ And more to the point, how do you even know?

‘They wonder,’ Vastala replied, ‘when it’s time to eat horse. As do we.’

‘We’re not starving, are we?’

‘Fresh meat better.’ She lifted one red hand and made a strange, elaborate gesture.

A step behind her, Hataras laughed. ‘Then take him, fool.’

‘Punished Man,’ said Vastala, moving up alongside him. ‘Would you like to lie with me tonight? It is privilege. Bonecasters can have anyone.’

‘I will take him night after,’ Hataras said. ‘Too much waiting. He thinks us ugly, but in dark he will feel our beauty.’

‘I’ve not told you my crime,’ Listar said, edging away from Vastala. ‘You’ll want nothing to do with me. I had a mate. I killed her.’

‘No you didn’t,’ Vastala retorted, drawing close again.

‘You know nothing of it!’

‘You have never taken a life.’

A snort from behind them, and then, ‘Insects. Lice. Gnats.’

Vastala glared back at Hataras. ‘A Tiste life, then. You know this. Nothing stains him.’

‘Mice, spiders, fish.’

In a flash, Vastala spun and launched herself at Hataras. Both went down scratching and snarling, biting and kicking.

Listar halted, the horses nervously gathering up around him. He squinted northward, waiting for the scrap to work through to its exhausted, sex-filled conclusion. It was not the first fight between these women. He could not recall what had set them at each other the first time, but he had stared at them, alarmed, and then bemused, as the vicious grappling soon found nipples and the tangled thatch between their legs, and before too long the struggling grew rhythmic, with moans and gasps instead of snarls, and he had looked away then, his face burning.

These were the women he was escorting to the Hust Legion, the women who were meant to give shape to a ritual of some kind of absolution. Beyond the unlikelihood of success, Listar was troubled by such notions of forgiveness. Some things did not deserve what captains Prazek and Dathenar sought.

He knew Rance had been the killer in the camp. He had awaited her knife, and would have welcomed it. Instead, she had danced around him, until the anticipation left holes burning in his gut. And then he had been sent away, out into the wild plains of the south, as if there’d been no thought of his fleeing, running away from all that he was.