Infayen said, ‘The wind moans its promise of—’

‘You fool!’ Tathe Lorat snapped. ‘That’s not the wind moaning. It’s the Hust swords – look, they’re drawn!’

* * *

The soft keening filled the air, as if iron could know pain, and pain could rise and twist like threads, weaving a tapestry to trap this moment, binding every soul of the Hust Legion. Wareth stood motionless, feeling himself circling an emptiness inside, wondering if the absence within him announced an end to things, a fate, his future wiped clean. A future without me, without Wareth of the Pits, the coward, the fool. Just a name now, uttered by the survivors, at least in passing, and soon to be forgotten.

Like so many others.

It was no wonder the Hust iron mourned, for surely that was what this sound was, all these voices making the noise that precedes a sob, and he waited for that wrung-out cry with trembling limbs, his hands feeling drained of blood, his legs watery beneath him.

He wore his helmet now, as did his fellow soldiers of the Hust. The hinged cheek-guards were locked in place, shutting out most of the world to left and right, barring a curved gap at eye-level that Wareth found far too narrow for his liking. The keening of the iron filled his ears, but there was a coldness to this intimacy, as if it whispered like a lover who promised nothing but grief.

His fear circled the emptiness, terrified of slipping and plunging into that unknown. Yet the panic he felt was somehow constrained, trapped in its mad circling. There was nowhere to run to, no ‘away’ in the midst of this press of bodies. He had believed that he would escape this fate, remaining among the commanders in their place at some high vantage point, well away from the actual fighting. Instead, Toras Redone had seen through him, her sodden gaze too knowing, her recollection of him uncanny in its detail. What source her omniscience? How so easily her striking home, and that smile! She knew too well my mind, this drunken goddess. Who now cups my soul in one hand, rolls me to the fore, no less and no more than just another piece in this dread game.

He imagined himself now, a skein of tangled threads at the mercy of the artist, woven in fate, just one more life made immortal in this panoply of stupidity. He saw his likeness upon a greasy wall, almost lost in some wick-addled corridor, a thing to pass in life’s bright-spark scurry, while his own colours dulled to candlesmoke and dust, and the knotted threads of his eyes faded to the senseless march of decades, and then centuries.

What manner the ritual of those Bonecaster witches? What truth now caps my soul, set down by their infernal dance? I see it blank. I circle it in terror, fearing my fall, my steps round and round in furious haste, tottering, slipping, catching, wheeling and reeling – oh, gods!