Thorn passed the time, as he moved his army of the Wild south in the thick, wooded hills and swamps of the southern Adnacrags, in moving things and creatures on the so-called Wyrm’s Way. On his fourth attempt, he stood holding a turtle egg in his hand, and when he arrived at the end of his displacement, his hand was empty. The turtle egg lay in a pool of yellow yolk where he had been standing. He had successfully left it behind.

A raven swept in and began to eat the egg.

A raptor fell from the sky and drove the raven off the egg and began to eat it.

A barghast fell silently on the red-tailed hawk, slew it and began to eat it. When the barghast was done, it ate the egg as a dessert.

Thorn nodded.

The risk was, on the one hand, incredible, and on the other, almost banal. Ash surely intended his demise—in fact, he suspected he was nothing but the edible outer parts of the egg.

Not far to the west, the dark-bearded magister rode to the gates of Lissen Carak, and tapped gently with his staff. Behind him, the plain by the river—burned flat by last year’s battles and now choked with raspberry bushes and alder clumps—was trampled by the Faery Knight’s chevauchée. Out on the plain were four hundred irkish knights, in magnificent harnesses of bronze and gold, some riding stags while others rode horses. Behind them came Bill Redmede and three hundred Jacks and, behind them, a veritable tide of boglins. The rear was brought up by magnificent, alien bands of Outwallers in war paint and more irks, these tall and thin as ash trees, carrying heavy axes on their bronze-byrnie’d shoulders.

When her door warden and her sergeants informed her, Miriam went to the gate in person. She went out on the hoardings alone, covered by a pair of crossbowmen in each of the gate towers.

She did not recognize the man below her outside the portcullis at all. He had black and grey hair and a heavy face with a long, aquiline nose. He rode a bony horse.

“I am the Magister Harmodius,” called the man on the bony horse.

“You’ve changed, then,” she said.

“Yes,” Harmodius said, as if impatient. “I’ve changed bodies.”

“And sides, I suspect,” Miriam said.

Harmodius shook his head. “We have fifty prisoners we wish to release to you. They have not been harmed.”

The garrison of the Westwall castle was marched up to the gate, bedraggled and terrified. They’d lived some days in an army composed of rebels and monsters, and they had, with some justice, expected to be eaten.

“And then you’ll be on your way?” Miriam asked, hiding her fears.

Harmodius, if it was indeed the magister, shook his head. “We are for our own purposes,” he said.