Looping a leg over her saddle, Stonny Menackis dropped to the ground, raising a puff of dust. ‘Our captain’s too obvious with his jokes, Hetan. They end up thudding like ox dung, and smelling just as foul. Pay him no mind, lass, unless you enjoy being confused.’

‘I enjoy killing and riding men and little else,’ Hetan growled, crossing her muscled arms.

Harllo quickly clambered down from the carriage and approached her with a broad smile. ‘I am named Harllo and I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Hetan!’

‘You can kill him any time you like,’ Stonny drawled.

The two brothers were indeed miserable creatures, taciturn and, as far as Gruntle could determine, singularly thick. Harllo’s futile efforts with Hetan proved amusing enough whilst they sat around the rekindled hearth beneath a star-spattered sky. Keruli made a brief appearance shortly before everyone began bedding down, but only to share a bowl of herbal tea before once again retiring to his carriage. It fell to Gruntle – he and Hetan the last two lingering at the firepit – to pry loose more information from the Barghast.

‘These demons,’ he began, ‘how have they been described?’

She leaned forward and ritually spat into the fire. ‘Fast on two legs. Talons like an eagle’s, only much larger, at the ends of those legs. Their arms are blades—’

‘Blades? What do you mean?’

She shrugged. ‘Bladed. Blood-iron. Their eyes are hollow pits. They stink of urns in the dark circle. They make no sound, no sound at all.’

Urns in the dark circle? Cremation urns . . .in a chamber bar-row. Ah, they smell of death, then. Their arms are blades . . . how? What in Hood’s name does that mean? Blood-iron – that’s iron quenched in snow-chilled blood ... a Barghast practice when shamans invest weapons. Thus, the wielder and the weapon are linked. Merged... ‘Has anyone in your clan seen one?’

‘No, the demons have not journeyed north to our mountain fastnesses. They remain in these grasslands.’

‘Who, then, delivered the tales?’

‘Our shouldermen have seen them in their dreams. The spirits whisper to them and warn of the threat. The White Clan has chosen a warchief – our father – and await what is to come. But our father would know his enemy, so he has sent his children down onto the flatlands.’

Gruntle ruminated on this, his eyes watching the fire slowly ebb. ‘Will your father the warchief of the White Faces lead the clans south? If Capustan is besieged, the Capan territories will be vulnerable to your raids, at least until the Pannions complete their conquest.’

‘Our father has no plans to lead us south, Captain.’ She spat a second time into the fire. ‘The Pannion war will come to us, in time. So the shouldermen have read in bhederin blades. Then, there shall be war.’

‘If these demons are advance elements of the Pannion forces...’

‘Then, when they first appear in our fastnesses, we will know that the time has come.’