‘Did you sense the six T’lan Imass spirits, Cynnigig? Hovering there, beyond the hidden walls of the yard?’

‘Oh yes. Servants of the Crippled God, now, the poor things. They would tell him something, I think—’

‘Tell who? The Crippled God?’

‘No. Karsa Orlong. They possess knowledge, with which they seek to guide the Thelomen Toblakai – but they dared not approach. The presence of the House, I suspect, had them fearful.’

‘No, it is dead – all that survived of its lifespirit moved into the spear. Not the House, brother, but Karsa Orlong himself – that was who they feared.’

‘Ah.’ Cynnigig smiled as he slipped another sliver of meat into Phyrlis’s wooden mouth, where it slid from view, falling down into the hollow cavity within. There to rot, to gift the tree with its nutrients. ‘Then those Imass are not so foolish after all.’

BOOK FOUR - HOUSE OF CHAINS

BOOK FOUR - HOUSE OF CHAINS

You have barred the doors

caged the windows

every portal sealed

to the outside world,

and now you find

what you feared most –

there are killers,

and they are in the House.

House

Talanbal

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The rage of the Whirlwind Goddess was an inferno, beaten on the forge of Holy Raraku.

The legions that marched in the dust of blood burned by the eye of the sun were cold iron.

There, on the dry harbour of the dead city where the armies joined to battle Hood walked the fated ground

where he walked many times before.

The Divided Heart

Fisher

She had wormed her way alongside the carefully stacked cut stones, to the edge of the trench – knowing her mother would be furious at seeing how she had ruined her new clothes – and finally came within sight of her sister.

Tavore had claimed her brother’s bone and antler toy soldiers, and in the rubble of the torn-up estate wall, where repairs had been undertaken by the grounds workers, she had arranged a miniature battle.

Only later would Felisin learn that her nine-year-old sister had been, in fact, recreating a set battle, culled from historical accounts of a century-old clash between a Royal Untan army and the rebelling House of K’azz D’Avore. A battle that had seen the annihilation of the renegade noble family’s forces and the subjugation of the D’Avore household. And that, taking on the role of Duke Kenussen D’Avore, she was working through every possible sequence of tactics towards achieving a victory. Trapped by a series of unfortunate circumstances in a steep-sided valley, and hopelessly outnumbered, the unanimous consensus among military scholars was that such victory was impossible.