‘You are no friend of mine,’ he growled. He had seen her breath in her words, pluming up into the night, and he could just make out the spike buried in the base of her skull. If that stake was the same height as all the others, then its tip pressed against the bone of her forehead, driven straight through her brain. She could not be alive.

‘It is, I think,’ she said, ‘the other way round. But then, I did not invite you. You are the intruder here, Tiste. You are the unwelcome guest. But I am here and that cannot be denied, and so I am bound to answer your questions.’

He shook his head.

‘The others are done with me,’ she said.

‘What are you?’

‘I am you when you sleep. When your thoughts drift and time is lost. I am there in each blink of your eyes – so swift, so brief. In that blink is the faith that all will remain as it was before, and the fear that it won’t. I lie with you when you’re drunk, when you are senseless, and your flesh meets mine and I rut with you all unknown, and take from you one more sliver of your life, for ever gone. And so you awaken less than what you were, each time, every time. I am—’

‘Stop!’

She fell silent.

He saw runnels of blood flow down the shafts beneath her, saw the gleaming pool those runnels flowed into. But none of this could be real. ‘Tell me your name.’

‘The Tiste have no name for me.’

‘Are you a goddess of the forest?’

‘The forest knows no goddess. The trees are too busy singing. Even as they die, they sing. They have no time for gods in the face of all this death.’

‘Who did this to you?’

‘Did what?’

He slashed with his sword, hacked through a broad sweep of the stakes. Splinters flew. He kicked at the stubs, pushed them aside, and stepped into the maze.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

He did not reply. Some things could not be countenanced. No decent man or woman could withstand the brutality of this apparition. Ivis no longer believed his own eyes. He did not think this night was his own. He did not think he was still in the world he knew. Something had happened; something had stolen his soul, or guided it astray. He was lost.

His blade scythed through stakes. He drew closer to her.

‘Iron and wood,’ she said.

Limbs aching, sweat sheathing his face, he reached her side. He looked down at her face and met the woman’s eyes.

She was not Tiste. He did not know what she was. Her eyes were slits, tilted upward at the outer corners. Her skin was white with blood loss. The tip of the stake piercing her skull had pushed through her forehead just above the eyes, breaking the skin. She smiled.