Nomi slipped past the trees to piss, and when she returned to the influence of the firelight, Beko was standing outside the tent he would share with Noon, stripping off his tunic and undershirt and preparing for sleep. She caught his eyes, he stared back, and then she felt Rhiana watching them both.

“Dawn?” Nomi asked.

Beko nodded. “Dawn, and a full day's travel tomorrow.”

“Good dreams, Beko.”

“Always,” he said. “I have a clear conscience.”

Nomi nodded at Rhiana, then knelt to crawl into her tent.

Good dreams, she thought. But it took her a long time to get to sleep.

NOMI’S NIGHT WAS unsettled, haunted by dreams of vicious raiders, and seethe-gators trailing the black remembrance cloth strips of the Sleeping Gods. She and Ramus sat by a large pool and looked at the map he had made, and though they had been traveling for years, still their destination was no closer. It seemed that Noreela had stretched to ten thousand miles long, and the dotted line of their progress on the map was almost invisible. Ramus's skin was scarred with seethe-gator stings, his arms crisscrossed with battle wounds, one eye gouged out and all his teeth rotten or fallen from his head. In the socket of his lost eye, there was something moving, and as she urged him closer a small tentacle protruded from the bloody hole, searching this way and that, as if looking for her. Nomi recognized the sickness inside him. She pointed at the map, wanting to shout and scream that it was time to go, but Ramus only laughed. He opened his jacket and showed her the scores of charms he had collected, all of them withered, dead and ineffectual. She looked around the rough camp they had made by the pool, and although there were five tents, three of them had started rotting. She could make out the vague forms of the Serians and she was sure that they were rotting too, the insides of the canvas slick and warm. Ramus laughed again, silent mirth that she could hear in her head even though he made no noise. She looked at the map. They had ten thousand miles to go. And she knew that Ramus, now mad, would voyage forever.

RAMUS SLEPT WELL. When he woke before dawn he sat up in his tent, cricked his neck and sighed. It seemed that his nightmares were now confined to daylight.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

RAMUS SPENT THE first part of the morning—whilst gathering wood for a fire, tending his horse and washing and dressing by the stream—trying to imagine what could be held within the rope charm he had given Nomi.