Defying her own overwhelming self-disgust, the Mhybe forced brutal clarity into her thoughts, listening to all that Silverfox said, to each word, to what lay between each word. She hugged herself beneath the barrage of her daughter’s pronouncements. The laying bare of secrets assailed her every instinct – such exposure was fraught with risks. Yet she finally understood something of the position in which Silverfox had found herself – the confessions were a call for help.

She needs allies. She knows I am not enough – spirits below, she has been shown that here. More, she knows that these two camps – enemies for so long – need to be bridged. Born in one, she reaches out to the other. All that was Tattersail and Nightchill cries out to old comrades. Will they answer?

She could discern nothing of Whiskeyjack’s emotions. His thoughts might well be echoing Kallor’s position. An abomination. She saw him meet Korlat’s eyes and wondered at what passed between them.

Think! It is the nature of everyone here to treat every situation tactically, to push away personal feelings, to gauge, to weigh and balance. Silverfox has stepped to the fore; she has claimed a position of power to rival Brood, Anomander Rake and Kallor. Does Dujek Onearm now wonder with whom he should be dealing? Does he realize that we were all united because of him – that, for twelve years, the clans of Barghast and Rhivi, the disparate companies from a score or more cities, the Tiste Andii, the presence of Rake, Brood and Kallor, not to mention the Crimson Guard – all of us, we stood shoulder to shoulder because of the Malazan Empire? Because of the High Fist himself.

But we have a new enemy now, and much of its nature remains unknown, and it has engendered a kind of fragility among us – oh, what an understatement – that Dujek Onearm now sees.

Silverfox states that we shall have need of the T’lan Imass. Only the vicious old Emperor could have been comfortable with such creatures as allies – even Kallor recoils from what is being forced upon us. The fragile alliance now creaks and totters. You are too wise a man, High Fist, to not now possess grave doubts.

The one-armed old man was the first to speak after Silverfox’s statement, and he addressed the child with slow, carefully measured words. ‘The T’lan Imass with whom the Malazan Empire is familiar is the army commanded by Logros. By your words we must assume there are other armies, yet no knowledge of them has ever reached us. Why is that, child?’

‘The last Gathering,’ Silverfox replied, ‘was hundreds of thousands of years ago, at which was invoked the Ritual of Tellann – the binding of the Tellann warren to each and every Imass. The ritual made them immortal, High Fist. The life force of an entire people was bound in the name of a holy war destined to last for millennia—’