There was, Onrack realized, a strange regularity to the hills ahead. There were seven in all, arrayed in what seemed a straight line, each of equal height though uniquely misshapen. The storm clouds were piling well behind them, corkscrewing in bulging columns skyward above an enormous range of mountains.

The wind howled against Onrack’s desiccated face, snapped at the strands of his gold-streaked hair, thrummed with a low-pitched drone through the leather strips of his harness. Trull Sengar was hunched against him, head ducked away from the shrieking blast.

Lightning bridged the heaving columns, the thunder long in reaching them.

The hills were not hills at all. They were edifices, massive and hulking, constructed from a smooth black stone, seemingly each a single piece. Twenty or more man-lengths high. Dog-like beasts, broad-skulled and small-eared, thickly muscled, heads lowered towards the two travellers and the distant wall behind them, the vast pits of their eyes faintly gleaming a deep, translucent amber.

Onrack’s steps slowed.

But did not halt.

The basins had been left behind, the ground underfoot slick with wind-borne rain but otherwise solid. The T’lan Imass angled his approach towards the nearest monument. As they came closer, they moved into the statue’s lee.

The sudden falling off of the wind was accompanied by a cavernous silence, the wind to either side oddly mute and distant. Onrack set Trull Sengar down.

The Tiste Edur’s bewildered gaze found the edifice rearing before them. He was silent, slow to stand as Onrack moved past him.

‘Beyond,’ Trull quietly murmured, ‘there should be a gate.’

Pausing, Onrack slowly swung round to study his companion. ‘This is your warren,’ he said after a moment. ‘What do you sense of these . . . monuments?’

‘Nothing, but I know what they are meant to represent ... as do you. It seems the inhabitants of this realm made them into their gods.’

To that, Onrack made no reply. He faced the massive statue once more, head tilting as his gaze travelled upward, ever upward. To those gleaming, amber eyes.

‘There will be a gate,’ Trull Sengar persisted behind him. ‘A means of leaving this world. Why do you hesitate, T’lan Imass?’

‘I hesitate in the face of what you cannot see,’ Onrack replied. ‘There are seven, yes. But two of them are ... alive.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘And this is one of them.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER SEVEN

An army that waits is soon an army at war with itself.

Kellanved

The world was encircled in red. the hue of old blood, of iron rusting on a battlefield. It rose in a wall like a river turned on its side, crashing confused and uncertain against the rough cliffs that rose broken-toothed around the rim of Raraku. The Holy Desert’s most ancient guardians, those bleached limestone crags, now withering beneath the ceaseless storm of the Whirlwind, the raging goddess who could countenance no rival to her dominion. Who would devour the cliffs themselves in her fury.