The riders were leaving, heading back up the road – and from beyond the bend two columns of thick, black smoke lifted into the sky, and Orfantal knew that his companions were all dead. Haral, Gripp, all of them. A disbanded unit, fallen into banditry and murder – but no, even that did not make sense. Those skins on the wagons were valuable. Bandits would not set them alight.

His gaze fell back to the nag.

The back end of the animal was now beneath the mud, and he could see how it struggled to breathe.

Orfantal ventured back out on to the clay, retracing his route.

When he reached the nag only its head and neck were visible. The crying left him weak, but he managed to throw his arms around that neck, holding on tight. The hide was hot and slick, almost on fire with life, and he felt the nag’s cheek settle against the side of his head, and he wept so hard he felt as if he was emptying his own soul. His wails echoed back from the cliffs behind him.

The mud touched the underside of his left arm; he felt his elbow plunging into soft coolness. The neck muscles strained and the nag lifted its head, nostrils opened wide, air gusting out in a long stream. But it had no strength with which to draw a breath inside – the weight of the clay against its ribs was too vast. As the exhalation dwindled, he felt the nag shudder, and then begin to sag, the muscles relaxing and the head settling on the clay. The horse’s eyelids dipped down half over the lifeless eyes, and stayed there.

Orfantal dragged his arms from the mud. With the nag’s death, the anguish left him, and in its place was a vast hollow, a numbness that made him feel small.

Truth cared nothing for stories. The real world was indifferent to what people wanted to be, to how they wanted everything to turn out. Betrayers came from everywhere, including inside his own body, his own mind. He could trust no one, not even himself.

He faced the broken rocks and started crawling.

Chapter Ten

TEN

RISP WATCHED CAPTAIN Esthala throw on her cloak and tug her gauntlets from her swordbelt. There was the taste of iron in the air, a pungent aura of panic spreading through the hidden camp. The day was fast drawing to a close, shadows engulfing the spaces between the crags. Esthala’s husband, Silann, had dismounted to help down one of his wounded soldiers. Risp turned and studied the battered troop, seeing faces flushed and faces pale and taut with pain, seeing the blood splashed on most of the soldiers and the tenderness with which they pulled bodies down, and the way the horses stamped and tossed heads in the aftermath of battle. A moment later Esthala walked past her to accost her husband.