After a moment Heboric gestured Scillara to follow and he set out down the alley. The song seemed suspended in the very air, raising a haze of dust that seemed to shiver before his eyes. Sweat ran down his limbs. Fear. Fear has driven this entire city from the streets. Those voices are the sound of war.

‘There should be children,’ Scillara said. ‘Girls ...’

‘Why girls more than anyone else, lass?’

‘Bidithal’s spies. His chosen servants.’

He glanced back at her. ‘Those he ... scars?’

‘Yes. They should be ... everywhere. Without them—’

‘Bidithal is blind. It may well be he has sent them elsewhere, or even withdrawn them entirely. There will be ... events this night, Scillara. Blood will be spilled. The players are, no doubt, even now drawing into position.’

‘He spoke of this night,’ she said. ‘The hours of darkness before the battle. He said the world will change this night.’

Heboric bared his teeth. ‘The fool has sunk to the bottom of the Abyss, and now stirs the black mud.’

‘He dreams of true Darkness unfolding, Destriant. Shadow is but an upstart, a realm born of compromise and filled with impostors. The fragments must be returned to the First Mother.’

‘Not just a fool, then, but mad. To speak of the most ancient of battles, as if he himself is a force worthy of it – Bidithal has lost his mind.’

‘He says something is coming,’ Scillara said, shrugging. ‘Suspected by no-one, and only Bidithal himself has any hope of controlling it, for he alone remembers the Dark.’

Heboric halted. ‘Hood take his soul. I must go to him. Now.’

‘We will find him—’

‘In his damned temple, aye. Come on.’

They swung about.

Even as two figures emerged from the gloom of an alley mouth, blades flickering out.

With a snarl, Heboric closed on them. One taloned hand shot out, tore under and into an assassin’s neck, then snapped upward, lifting the man’s head clean from his shoulders.

The other killer lunged, knife-point darting for Heboric’s left eye. The Destriant caught the man’s wrist and crushed both bones. A slash from his other hand spilled the assassin’s entrails onto the dusty street.

Flinging the body away, Heboric glared about. Scillara stood a few paces back, her eyes wide. Ignoring her, the Destriant crouched down over the nearest corpse. ‘Korbolo Dom’s. Too impatient by far—’

Three quarrels struck him simultaneously. One deep into his right hip, shattering bone. Another plunging beneath his right shoulder blade to draw short a finger’s breadth from his spine. The third, arriving from the opposite direction, took him high on his left shoulder with enough force to spin him round, so that he tumbled back-ward over the corpse.

Scillara scrabbled down beside him. ‘Old man? Do you live?’

‘Bastards,’ he growled. ‘That hurts.’

‘They’re coming—’

‘To finish me off, aye. Flee, lass. To the stone forest. Go!’