They stopped at the edge of a fir forest, prudently not emerging from behind the large juniper bushes growing at the edge. A wide basin stretched out before them, beyond a belt of low spruces. Fog trailed over the tops of the grass.

‘No one,’ judged Flaut. ‘Not a soul. Let’s go back. We’re a little too far already.’

The sergeant looked at him askance. Far? We’ve barely ridden a mile. And crawling along like lame tortoises, at that.

‘It’d be worth,’ he said, ‘having a look beyond that hill, Lieutenant. I reckon the prospect will be better from there. A long way, over both valleys. If someone’s heading that way, we can’t not see them. Well then? Do we ride over, sir? It’s no more than a few furlongs.’

A few furlongs, thought Flaut. Over open ground, totally exposed. The eels squirmed, violently searching for a way out of his guts. At least one, Flaut felt clearly, was well on its way.

I heard the clank of a stirrup. The snorting of a horse. Over there, among the vivid green of young pines on a sandy slope. Did something move there? A figure?

Are they surrounding us?

A rumour was going around the camp that a few days earlier the mercenaries of the Free Company, having wiped out a patrol of the Vrihedd Brigade in an ambush, had taken an elf alive. It was said they’d castrated him, torn his tongue out and cut off all his fingers… And finally gouged out his eyes. Now, they had jeered, you won’t frolic with your elven whore in any fashion. And you won’t even be able to watch her when she frolics with others.

‘Well, sir?’ the sergeant cleared his throat. ‘Shall we nip up that hill?’

Lamarr Flaut swallowed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We cannot dally. We’ve ascertained it: there’s no enemy here. We must give a dispatch on it to headquarters. Back we go!’

Menno Coehoorn listened to the dispatch and raised his head from the maps.

‘To your companies,’ he ordered briefly. ‘Mr Braibant, Mr Mellis-Stoke. Attack!’

‘Long live the Emperor!’ yelled Tyrconnel and Eggebracht. Menno looked at them strangely.

‘To your companies,’ he repeated. ‘May the Great Sun enlighten your glory.’

Milo Vanderbeck, halfling, field surgeon, known as Rusty, greedily breathed into his nostrils the heady blend of the smells of iodine, ammonia, alcohol, ether and magical elixirs hanging beneath the tent roof. He wanted to enjoy that aroma to the full now, while it was still healthy, pure, virginally uncontaminated and clinically sterile. He knew it wouldn’t stay like that for long.

He glanced at the operating table–also virginally white–and at the surgical instruments, at the dozens of tools which inspired respect and confidence by the cool and menacing dignity of their cold steel, the pristine cleanliness of the metal sheen, the order and aesthetics of their arrangement.

His staff–three women–busied themselves around the instruments. Rusty spat and made a correction in his thoughts. One woman and two girls. He spat again. One old, though beautiful and young-looking, grandmother. And two children.