He waited as the last of the soldiers marched past, then stepped forward to cross the ancient road.

And saw, on the opposite side, a tall, gaunt figure in faded orange robes. Black pits for eyes. One fleshless hand gripping an ivory staff carved spirally, on which the apparition leaned as if it was the only thing holding it up.

‘Listen to them now, spirit from the future,’ it rasped, cocking its head.

And now Kalam heard it. The ghost soldiers had begun singing.

Sweat sprang out on the assassin’s midnight skin. I’ve heard that song before ... or no, something just like it. A variation. . . ‘What in the Abyss . . . You, Tanno Spiritwalker, explain this—’

‘Spiritwalker? Is that the name I will acquire? Is it an honorific? Or the acknowledgement of a curse?’

‘What do you mean, priest?’

‘I am no priest. I am Tanno, the Eleventh and last Seneschal of Yaraghatan, banished by the First Emperor for my treasonous alliance with the Nameless Ones. Did you know what he would do? Would any of us have guessed? Seven Protectors indeed, but far more than that, oh yes, far more ...’ Steps halting, the spectre walked onto the road and began dragging itself along in the wake of the column. ‘I gave them a song, to mark their last battle,’ it rasped. ‘I gave them that at least...’

Kalam watched as the figures disappeared into the darkness. He swung about. The sea was gone, the basin’s bones revealed once more. He shivered. Why am I witness to these things? I’m reasonably certain I’m not dead . . . although I soon might be, I suppose. Are these death-visions? He had heard of such things, but held little stock in them. Hood’s embrace was far too random to be knotted into the skein of fate ... until it had already occurred – or so the assassin’s experience told him.

He shook his head and crossed the road, slipping down the crumbling verge to the boulder-strewn flat beyond. This stretch had once been naught but dunes, before the Whirlwind’s rise. Its elevation was higher – perhaps twice the height of a man – than the ancient seabed he had just traversed, and here, beyond the tumbled stones, lay the gridwork foundations of a city. Deep canals cut through it, and he could make out where bridges had once spanned them here and there. Few of the wall foundations rose higher than the assassin’s shins, but some of the buildings looked to have been large – a match to anything found in Unta, or Malaz City. Deep pits marked where cisterns had been built, where the seawater from the other side of the causeway could, stripped of salt by the intervening sands, collect. The remnants of terraces indicated a proliferation of public gardens.