Michael shrugged. “They surrendered. They are in what I can only describe as a state of shock. The messenger here tells us that they do not have a king, but a council; that their council is the leading three hundred creatures of their entire . . . Imperium. And that we seem to have captured them entire.”

“There’s always someone cockier than you are yourself,” Gabriel said. He sat up. “Tell me about the irk slaves.”

“You went and had a battle without me,” Sauce said. She smiled. “Look at that.”

There was a valley between enormous mountains; they rose into the snow and vanished into the grey clouds, and high above them there were roads, and snow-covered roofs, and fur-bundled irks came down to the roadside to stare at them; but anytime a knight looked at them, they would cast their eyes down like bashful maidens, or . . . slaves.

The irks with the company and the casa were traumatized. The abject, craven behaviour frightened them, and they were even more angered by the failure of any of the irks to respond to any spoken words in their language, which sounded like song to humans. Tangwaeri was virtually unknown among men.

None of the slaves spoke a word of it.

At least, not at first.

There were eddies of irks, but there were few salamanders about; those they saw were in thickly curtained palanquins, heated with coal stoves and borne by twenty irks. But around midday, as they passed the two huge cairns in the center of the valley, some ancient demarcation or graves perhaps, an ancient Irkish woman came down the mountain, brought on the shoulders of a dozen young Irkish men. And she spoke no words to Elaran, but she wept when he spoke to her, wept and clutched his hand. He dismounted by her on the snow-swept road as the army marched by, and he sang to her a little song that sounded very sad to Sauce.

Syr Vizirt, another irk, could not stop himself from weeping.

Gabriel watched. “What does he sing?”

“Once there was a great queen, and she had done evil, and she was barred from ever returning to her home. She laments, and she wonders if, in truth, only her own sense of wickedness keeps her from her home.” Vizirt shrugged. “It is nothing, told like that, man. In our tongue, it is the song of exile.”

The old irk was weeping uncontrollably, great racking sobs.

“Ask her how old she is,” Mortirmir said.

“You seem like yourself again,” Gabriel said.

Morgon looked at him, and their eyes locked a moment. “Isn’t it terrible?” Morgon asked. “How quickly the feeling of failure wanders off?”

Blanche laughed. “No,” she said. “If it didn’t, we’d never dare do anything.”

Mortirmir smiled at her. “Now, there’s a truth,” he said.

“Just like childbirth, then,” muttered Kaitlin.