Logen rubbed at the bridge of his nose and he gave a groan. The Dogman's Carls were gathering near them now, looking up at that mossy heap of stones and muttering to each other, far from happy. Logen could hardly blame them. It was a long, hot walk they'd had to find this at the end of it. But they had no choices, as far as he could see. 'It's a bit late to build a better one,' he grumbled. 'We'll have to do what we can with what we've got.'

'That's it Bloody-Nine, you need no wall and you know it!' Crummock clapped Logen on the arm with his great fat hand. 'You cannot die! You're beloved of the moon, my fine new friend, above all others! You cannot die, not with the moon looking over you! You cannot—'

'Shut up,' said Logen.

They crunched sourly across the slope towards the gate. Crummock called out and the old doors wobbled open. A pair of suspicious hillmen stood on the other side, watching them come in. They slogged up a steep ramp cut into the rock, all tired and grumbling, and came out into a flat space above. A saddle between the two crags, might have been a hundred strides wide and two hundred long, sheer cliffs of stone all round. There were a few wooden shacks and sheds scattered about the edges, all green with old moss, a slumping stone hall built against the rock face with smoke rising out of a squat chimney. Just next to it a narrow stair was cut into the cliff, climbing up to the platform at the top of the tower.

'Nowhere to run to,' Logen muttered, 'if things turn sour.'

Crummock only grinned the wider. 'Course not. That's the whole point, ain't it? Bethod'll think he's got us like beetles in a bottle.'

'He will have,' growled the Dogman.

'Aye, but then your friends will come up behind him and won't he get the father of all shocks, though? It'll almost be worth it for the look on his face, the shit-eating bastard!'

Logen worked his mouth and spat onto the stony ground. 'I wonder what the looks on our faces'll be by then? All slack and corpse-like would be my guess.' A herd of shaggy sheep were pressed in tight together in a pen, staring around wide-eyed, bleating to each other. Hemmed in and helpless, and Logen knew exactly how they felt. From inside the fort, where the ground was a good deal higher, there was hardly a wall at all. You could've stepped up onto its walkway, if you'd got long legs, and stood at its crumbling, moss-ridden excuse for a parapet.