‘I ain’t hiding the body,’ Gripp said. ‘I want them to find it. I want them to know. More than that, I want them to know it was Gripp Galas who did this, and it’s Gripp Galas who’ll come for them.’ He had drawn his knife with these words and now he handed Orfantal the horse’s reins and limped back to the corpse.

He hacked off the head. Blood poured on to the dusty road. Gripp then carved his initials on the forehead. Once this was done he lifted the head by the hair and flung it on to the centre of the road.

After using the cloak again to clean the knife he re-joined Orfantal. ‘Now, let me get up in the saddle before you – this knee is killing me.’

All the heroes are dead.

I am lost.

We are all lost.

The hand that reached down to pull Orfantal up was red, and the morning air filled with the smell of iron.

Part Three : The Proofs of Your Ambition

PART THREE

The proofs of your ambition

Chapter Eleven

ELEVEN

ON ALL SIDES Arathan saw desolation. Beneath a colourless sky, houses huddled in their own ruin, and to look upon them was to draw inside all the details of failure, until they clogged his thoughts like greasy dust. Between the scattered buildings, low, smoke-blackened walls of stone rose from scorched grasses like smeared teeth. He weathered their skeletal grimaces as he hunched in the saddle, Besra plodding beneath him. The walls were without any order, and none of the haphazard enclosures they made held livestock.

This was nothing like any village he had seen. Trapped between walls as if snared in a giant web, the houses were far apart, defying the notion of streets. They refused to face one another and there was something shameful in this unwilling regard, as if community offered no gifts and necessity was cause for resentment. Most doorways were without doors and the blackness they framed seemed strangely solid; even in surrender something remained that was impenetrable, mystifying. They did not invite inside with the lure of curiosity; he felt pushed away, and whatever remained in the hidden rooms, behind shuttered windows and beneath sagging ceilings, was a secret tale written in wreckage.

This was the civilization of the Azathanai, desultory and forlorn. In its impoverishment it besieged the soul, and the most horrifying thing of all, to Arathan’s eyes, was that some of these houses were still occupied. He saw solid doors, latched shut, and the smudged ember-glows of candles leaking through shutters. He saw figures standing in shadows, beneath porches made of huge granite stones so perfectly cut that no mortar was needed, and he felt the unyielding pressure of strangers’ eyes upon him and his companions as they rode slowly through the settlement.