He looked over at the old lord, and saw how one side of the man’s face sagged, as if being pulled down by unseen hands. Even the utterance of his name had come out muddy, muffled. ‘Milord? What’s wrong with your face?’

‘Mask. Broken. Listen.’

‘Milord?’

The old man was slipping to one side, his right arm limp. ‘Go then. If you must. Go. To your battle. Tell them.’

‘Tell who? What?’

‘My Hust. Tell them. I’m sorry.’

‘Tell them you’re sorry? Sorry about what?’ Wreneck moved over to collect the spear. The shaft and its crusted sheath of ice bit into his palm, but as he tightened his grip, the ice melted.

The lord lurched to one side, closer to his line of lead soldiers. He struggled, face straining, to drag his left arm – the one that still worked – closer to the toys. And then, with one careless sweep of his forearm, he knocked the rest of them down. He settled on to his side then, head on his arm as if ready to sleep. When he opened his eyes, the left one was red, leaking. ‘Sorry,’ he said in a whisper. ‘All done. All done.’

He fell asleep.

Wreneck hesitated, and then set down the spear once more. He crossed the ditch, pulling off his own waxed cloak – the one given to him by Lord Anomander himself – and settling it over the lord.

The wind clawed through the weave of his tunic. Shivering, he retrieved the spear and then stiffly regained the side of the road, joining the mass of ghosts still marching along it.

By keeping to the road’s verge, he was able to avoid passing through too many of them, and once he quickened his pace, the cold went away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

AS THE FIRST FLASHES OF SORCERY LIT THE EASTERN SKY, THE historian Rise Herat fled the tower’s roof. Boots on the spiralling steps downward, taken at speed, a dizzying descent. Once upon the main level of the Citadel he traversed little-used passages and corridors, encountering no one, and then resumed his descent, until he found himself in the cavernous hall crowded with the failed sculptures of the past, the heaps of rolled-up, rotting tapestries, the forgotten portraits. Ignoring the bronze monstrosity of the snarling hounds – that had so haunted him the last time he had been here – he made his way to the stacked tapestries.

Some mindful cleric had tagged each roll, and in faded script had written the title and what was known of each piece, along with an index number of some sort. If the Citadel’s archives held any master list, Herat knew nothing of it. Kneeling, he worked his way through the leather tags dangling from the ends of the rolls, squinting at the embossed script where the ink had faded to almost nothing. At last he found the one he sought.