Karsa grunted, stepping carefully on the treacherous ground as he approached the nominal centre of the stone ring. Four smaller slabs had been tilted together there, the wiry grasses stopping a pace away on all sides, leaving only bare earth flecked with bits of charcoal.

And fragments, Karsa noted as he crouched, of bone. He picked one up and studied it in the starlight. From a skull, lowlander in scale though somewhat more robust, the outer edge of an eye socket. Thick ... like that of my gods ... ‘Bairoth Gild. Delum Thord. Do either of you sense the presence of a spirit or a god here?’

‘No,’ Delum Thord replied.

Bairoth spoke. ‘A shaman was buried here, Warleader. His head was severed and left fixed in the apex of the four cardinal stones. Whoever shattered it did so long afterwards. Centuries. Perhaps millennia. So that it would no longer see. No longer watch.’

‘Then why is this place of value to me?’

‘For the way through it offers, Warleader.’

‘The way through what, Bairoth Gild?’

‘Passage westward, into the Jhag Odhan. A trail in the dreamworld. A journey of months will become one of mere days, should you choose to walk it. It lives still, for it was used not long ago. By an army.’

‘And how can I walk this trail?’

Delum Thord replied, ‘We can lead you, Karsa Orlong. For, like the one once buried here, we are neither dead nor alive. The lord Hood cannot find our spirits, for they are here with you. Our presence adds to the god of death’s hatred of you, Warleader.’

‘Hatred?’

‘For what you have taken and would not give to him. Will not. Would you become your own Keeper of Souls? So he must now fear. When last did Hood know a rival?’

Karsa scowled and spat onto the ground. ‘I have no interest in being his rival. I would break these chains. I would free even you and Bairoth Gild.’

‘We would rather you did not, Warleader.’

‘You and Bairoth Gild are perhaps alone in that sentiment, Delum Thord.’

‘What of it?’ Bairoth snapped.

Karsa said nothing, for he had begun to understand the choice that lay ahead, sometime in the future. To cast off my enemies ... I must also cast off my friends. And so Hood follows, and waits. For the day that must come.

‘You hide your thoughts now, Karsa Orlong. This new talent does not please us.’

‘I am warleader,’ Karsa growled. ‘It is not my task to please you. Do you now regret that you follow?’

‘No, Karsa Orlong. Not yet.’

‘Take me into this trail in the dreamworld, Delum Thord.’

The air grew suddenly colder, the smell reminding Karsa of the sloped clearings on high mountain sides when spring arrived, the smell of enlivened, softened lichen and moss. And before him, where there had been night-softened farmland a moment ago, there was now tundra, beneath a heavily overcast sky.