All the soldiers were gone. Wreneck hurried through a city emptied of almost everyone except ghosts, and they too had begun a march, eastward, in a silent progression of damaged and diseased figures. He saw children with bloated faces, bruised by the pillows that had stilled their last breath. Others, much younger than Wreneck himself, bore broken limbs, from beatings, he imagined, as he recalled the cane coming down upon his own body, and all this made him rush through the city of Kharkanas, barely seeing the magnificent buildings on either side of the street. He drew his spear around so that he could find strength in its solid shaft of dark wood, gripping it with both hands. As if, with this weapon, he could fend off his own memories.

There were so many ghosts who had been hurt somehow. He wondered at that, fighting a chill that burgeoned from somewhere deep inside him. He wondered at all the broken people, and all their secret histories, and at how none seemed able to hide their hurts now that they were dead. Yet none wept. They walked, instead, with eyes like dusty stones plucked from a dry riverbed. They were too pathetic to frighten him, too hopeless to make him think he could in any way help them.

The world was a big place, bigger than he’d ever imagined. And it was old, too, impossibly old. The dead never went away, he knew now, and they crowded him, moving in a noiseless mass, spilling out through the gate in the outer wall, and on to the road. He didn’t want to be seeing any of this, and he wondered at the curse that now afflicted him. I must have done something wrong. All those times I failed. All the times I proved too weak, and because of my weakness people got hurt. This is where it comes from. It must be. I was never good enough.

His breaths harsh, he ran through the ghosts, striving to win free of them all, to find a clear space on the track. A few turned to follow him with their dull eyes. One or two reached out as if to take hold of him, but he evaded their grasp even though he knew their efforts were useless – their flailing hands simply slipped through him, no different from the last of the bodies he pushed through as he finally outraced them and found himself alone on the cobbled road.

Some distance ahead, he saw another lone figure, tall, dressed in heavy robes, hobbling like a man with broken feet. It did not take long before Wreneck caught up and came alongside the man.