They set out once more. The sky was paling with false dawn and the air was bitterly cold. Breaths plumed. Wending between crags again, the path began a stuttered descent and she guessed that they were nearing the road. The hoofs of the two horses ahead clopped and scrabbled on loose stones; the riders’ silhouettes were hunched over, one to each side, eyes on the trail although surely it was too dark to see much. In any case, they were all making noise, loud enough to Risp’s ears to announce their presence to anyone within a thousand paces in these hills.

The track levelled and a short time later they reached the road, riding up on to it. Here the stench of foul smoke was acrid in the air. ‘East, I think,’ said the sergeant.

They reached the site of the battle where the road made a sharp bend. The two wagons had burned down, although embers still gleamed amidst the charred wreckage and ash. The beasts that had drawn them were nowhere to be seen. The bodies of the slain formed a kind of row on the road, two of them blackened by their proximity to the fired wagons, their clothes burned off to reveal swollen limbs and split torsos, the hair roasted away and the skin of their pates curled back to expose smoke-blackened skulls.

Dismounting beside the two scorched corpses, Risp could feel the heat from the embers just beyond them, and the pleasure she gained from that warm breath felt perverse. Silann was a liability, and the proof of that was all around them. Gripp might well have been one of Anomander’s spies, but to Risp’s mind the news of a troop of disbanded Legion soldiers on the road heading west was not a back-breaker – both Gripp and his lord would have little more than questions, with few answers forthcoming. Besides, if Anomander was not yet prowling with hackles raised, then he was both blind and a fool, and that man was neither.

The spilling of blood here was the real disaster to her mind. Especially if old Gripp had escaped the carnage.

‘Here, sir,’ said the sergeant, and she saw him standing a dozen or so paces away, where the road’s ditch dropped down against the out-cropping that marked the bend.

Risp joined him. The man gestured to a crack at the base of the out-crop. ‘He went down there, and I’d wager he rolled.’

‘Rather than fell? Why?’

‘There’s a rise before the edge, rubble and dirt sifting down from the cliff. You don’t slip uphill, sir. He’d have needed to work to get over that.’

She went to stand on the edge, leaning over to peer down. ‘But he couldn’t have guessed how deep, though.’

‘True enough,’ the man agreed. ‘It’s a good chance he broke his neck, if that goes down any distance. Or his legs, depending on how he landed.’

‘They couldn’t see all the way down,’ Risp muttered. ‘But they didn’t drop a rope and make sure either.’