The old man made the other two men uneasy by taking the shortest route, which was across the great north bay of the inland sea. They walked almost thirty miles, the hardest day so far. With the intermittent fog and the flat surface of the inland sea, the day took on a mythical tinge, as though they were travelling across one of the frozen hells that most of the Outwallers feared. The presence of the lake under their feet, the groaning of the ice, the odd sounds in the fog…

From time to time the old man would stop, and turn around. Once he stopped and smoked.

To Nita Qwan, the day seemed endless and the fear increased all day—fear of drowning, fear of being lost. When the fog covered them they had no path and no landmarks, and yet the old man kept walking, barely visible a few yards in front.

Ta-se-ho stopped for the fifth or sixth time.

“Is this a break?” asked Gas-a-ho. He began to drop his pack.

“Silence,” Ta-se-ho said.

They were perfectly still.

The ice groaned, a long, low crunching sound that came from everywhere and nowhere in the frozen, fog-bound hell into which they’d stumbled.

“Something is hunting us,” Ta-se-ho said suddenly.

Gas-a-ho nodded sharply. His face became slack, like a person walking in sleep.

Nita Qwan took his bow from its deer hide case, took his best string from inside his shirt. It had been drying there for two days, and it was warm.

Carefully, trying not to display his near-panic and the trembling of his hands, Nita Qwan strung his bow. He rubbed it a little before he bent it, and he listened as he pressed it down.

It didn’t crack. Either the bow was not so very cold, or he had prepared it well.

The string bit into the grooves in the horn tips, and he was armed.

Only then did he give voice to his fears. “What is it?” he said, watching the fog around him.

Ta-se-ho shook his head. “It is only a feeling,” he said.

Gas-a-ho surfaced from inside his mind. “Flying!” he barked.

His right hand shot up, and a flash of lightning left his hand. It was an angry orange white and it left a dazzle on Nita Qwan’s eyes.

There was a detonation that made them all flinch, following Gas-a-ho’s lightning bolt by about one beat of a scared man’s heart.

Just over Nita Qwan’s head, something screeched.

The old man thrust with his spear—the spear moved faster than sight could fully perceive, and then everything happened at once—Gas-a-ho was down in the snow, blood flowering around him, and there were black feathers in the air around them, and Nita Qwan found himself fitting a broad-headed arrow of irkish steel to his bow. He was conscious that he had already drawn and loosed twice.

“Move!” Ta-se-ho said.