Slowly, step by step, the regular infantry advanced. They scrambled up the first incline of the lowest terrace to the broached first ring of walls. Here the Imperial sappers had done their work, undermining and blasting entire sections. So far, the defenders held a death-grip on these breaches. Piled cask and timber barriers went up at night, while each day the Malazans tore them down. Scaling a siege ramp, Temper calculated that every footstep taken up the dusty rotten slope cost a thousand men. An impenetrable cloud of reddish dust obscured everything. Ahead, muted screams and the thundering clash of arms reached him through the gusting wind.

Temper scanned the next walls – no more than heaped sun-baked mud bricks. Why here at this pathetic backwater? Why had the surviving rag-ends of insurrectionist armies and a last few newly anointed Falah’d converged here? Prisoners boasted of its extraordinary antiquity and named it the hidden progenitor of all the Holy Cities themselves. A convenient claim now that all the rest had fallen, and a sad one too. It spoke of just how far a proud civilization had been reduced. The last undignified scrambling of a defeated people.

Dassem gestured to his signal corps and the messengers stopped coming; he had turned over the battle to the sub-commanders of the Third Army: Amaron, Choss, and Whiskeyjack.

Temper approached. ‘The last one then?’

Dassem glanced over, his dark eyes softening. ‘Aye. The last.’

Temper thought of all he had heard whispered from so many sources – of Pacts and Vows sworn to the Hooded One himself. Steeling himself, he ventured, ‘You can’t just walk away.’

Dassem slapped at the dust coating his long surcoat of burgundy and grey, the Imperial sceptre at its chest. ‘That’s the last of my worries, Temper. There are plenty of others all too eager to do his work. Lady knows, they’re practically lined up.’

‘It can’t be that easy.’

‘Easy!’ The First Sword’s black eyes blazed and Temper jerked back a step. Dassem passed one gauntleted hand across his eyes as if wiping away a vision of horror. His long black hair, plaited back and tied at his neck, lashed in the wind like the horsetail plume at the helmet under his arm. He shaded his gaze to scan the battle. ‘He made a mistake,’ he whispered aloud.

Temper wondered: was this meant to be overheard?

‘All that has ever mattered to me has been taken. I have nothing left to lose . . .’

Though he ached to take his commander’s shoulders and shout – But what of your own soul, Dassem? – Temper held his tongue.

He sensed he had pushed as far as he dared, had been given all that this man was prepared to give. Besides, what did he know of pacts made in his grandfather’s time? Or of Hood’s murky intentions, for that matter?

A roar went up from thousands of throats as the Malazan regulars of the Third Army pushed on through the next level of the layered defences.