‘You invent from shadows,’ Caplo said. ‘I have never trusted imagination – or if I once did, no longer. Make your idol, then, witch, and show me it is worthy of a bow and scrape. Or palsied genuflection. Make me kneel abject and humbled. But if I see the impress of your palms and fingertips in the clay, woman, I will refuse worship and call you a charlatan.’

‘The hag you still call Mother shows her teeth at last.’

To that, Caplo simply shrugged.

‘Ruvera,’ said Resh, eyeing her, ‘I see you hesitate.’

‘I have reached down before,’ she replied, ‘and brushed… something. Enough to feel its strength. Enough to know its promise.’

‘Then why decry the assassin’s presence, wife?’

‘It may be,’ she said, eyes on the depression, ‘that the power requires a sacrifice. Blood. My blood.’ She swung to Caplo. ‘Do not defend my life. We have lost our god. We possess nothing, and yet our need is vast. I am willing.’

‘Kurald Galain’s squall descends to a secular war,’ Caplo said. ‘A civil war. We can stand outside it, now. No sacrifice is necessary, Ruvera. I may not like you, but I will not see you cast away your life.’

‘Even to stand apart, assassin, will need strength.’ She waved vaguely northward. ‘They will demand we choose sides, sooner or later. Captain Finarra Stone remains as guest to Father Skelenal, and asks that we commit ourselves in Mother Dark’s name. But our family remains unruly. Our patriarch dithers. He has no strength. Sheccanto fares even worse. We must choose another god. Another power.’

Resh clawed at his beard, and then nodded. ‘It falls to us, yes. Caplo—’

‘I will decide in the moment,’ the assassin said. ‘A knife commits but once.’

Ruvera hissed in frustration, and then dismissed him with a chopping hand. Facing the depression again, she closed her eyes.

Caplo stood waiting, unsure whether to fix his attention upon the witch, or the innocuous depression before them. Beneath his heavy woollen cloak he closed gloved hands around the grips of his knives.