‘Milady, this is something old Ribs here can answer. But we’re not equipped for more nights out here. So this is what I suggest.’

‘Go on.’

‘I send him on, milady.’

‘To do what?’

‘Whatever needs doing.’

‘You told me – he’s just a dog!’

Rancept shrugged. ‘That’s my suggestion, milady.’

Sukul threw up her hands. ‘Oh, very well, whatever you say. He’s your dog, after all.’

‘We can take the road back to the Hold,’ Rancept continued, ‘but it might be that we’ll meet that rider.’

‘No, I don’t want that. Find us another trail back.’

‘As you wish.’

‘Rancept,’ Sukul asked, as a sudden thought struck her, ‘there aren’t any more secret temples hereabouts, are there?’

‘Nothing we’d call such, milady.’

* * *

Corporal Renth had ridden out from Kharkanas in the depths of night. He had been dispatched to deliver Hunn Raal’s command that the unit commanders were to ensure that no violence was initiated, and that all contact was to be avoided. All plans were on hold, and Renth was relieved to hear it. He had never been easy with how things were going; even the thought of letting highborn blood to achieve their aims left him sick with dread and guilt.

It didn’t help that his captain was at his worst when drunk, shaking loose the reins on his bloodlust and saying terrible things about the highborn and anyone else who wasn’t Legion. Such guttural vehemence had a way of infecting those close to him. More than once, Renth had contemplated seeking out a soldier among Lord Anomander’s Houseblades, and betraying the whole cause.

But Urusander deserved better. Renth knew that the ugliness belonged to Hunn Raal, and if there were no irony in a man of fallen highborn blood now spouting vicious hatred against his own kind, then irony was a dead weed in the field of souls, and who would be foolish enough to claim that?

In his drunkenness, Hunn Raal revealed deeper currents; there was an ambition there that saw Lord Urusander as nothing more than a means to an end. The captain might well espouse the redress of justice when it came to the Legion and all who served or had once served in it, but something else lurked behind that pious fervour, and whatever that was, Corporal Renth did not trust it.

Changes had come to Kharkanas. The priestesses and priests had crowded the corridors and hallways deep into the night, but it seemed they had nothing but questions to exchange, a worthless currency when no answers could be found. He’d had trouble making his way out of the citadel without being noticed.

Out on the streets of Kharkanas, the residual mud of the river’s flooding earlier that day had smeared the stones and painted the walls of the torchlit buildings he rode past, as if making a sullied pronouncement bold as blasphemy. His unease had only deepened in his passage through the city to the bridge that would take him west of the river. Faith was ever on the edge of crisis, but it seemed that this fated arrival of the Azathanai, and the dark, disturbing miracles that followed, had pushed everything over the edge.