‘Yet these are not Forkrul Assail. Many are dead, for they had not the power their kind once possessed. While others remain alive, and will not die for a long time. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Karsa Orlong, do you no longer believe in mercy?’

‘My beliefs are my own, Delum Thord. I shall not undo what I do not understand, and that is all.’

He travelled on, and soon left the terrible plain behind.

Before him now stretched a field of ice, crack-riven, with pools of water reflecting the silver sky. Bones were scattered on it, from hundreds, perhaps thousands of figures. Bones of a type he had seen before. Some still sheathed in withered skin and muscle. Shards of stone weapons lay among them, along with fragments of fur, antlered helms and torn, rotting hides.

The fallen warriors formed a vast semicircle around a low, square-walled tower. Its battered stones were limned in runnelled ice, its doorway gaping, the interior dark.

Karsa picked his way across the field, his moccasins crunching through the ice and snow.

The tower’s doorway was tall enough to permit the Teblor to stride through without ducking. A single room lay within. Broken furniture and the pieces of more fallen warriors cluttered the stone floor. A spiral staircase that seemed made entirely of iron rose from the centre.

From what he could determine from the wreckage, the furniture was of a scale to suit a Teblor, rather than a lowlander.

Karsa made his way up the ice-sheathed staircase.

There was a single level above, a high-ceilinged chamber that had once held wooden shelves on all four walls. Tom scrolls, bound books ripped apart, vials and clay jars containing various pungent mixes crushed underfoot, a large table split in half and pushed up against one wall, and on a cleared space on the floor ...

Karsa stepped off the landing and looked down.

‘Thelomen Toblakai, welcome to my humble abode.’

Karsa scowled. ‘I crossed blades with one much like you. He was named Icarium. Like you, yet less so.’

‘Because he is a half-blood, of course. Whilst I am not. Jaghut, not Jhag.’

She lay spread-eagled within a ring of fist-sized stones. A larger stone rested on her chest, from which heat rose in waves. The air in the chamber was a swirling mix of steam and suspended frost.

‘You are trapped within sorcery. The army was seeking you, yet they did not kill you.’

‘Could not would be more accurate. Not immediately, in any case. But eventually, this Tellann Ritual will destroy this core of Omtose Phellack, which will in turn lead to the death of the Jhag Odhan – even now, the north forest creeps onto the plains, whilst from the south the desert claims ever more of the odhan that was my home.’

‘Your refuge.’

She bared her tusks in something like a smile. ‘Among the Jaghut, they are now one and the same, Thelomen Toblakai.’