Lamarr Flaut was afraid. He was terribly afraid, and the fear was creeping over his innards. It seemed to him he had at least twelve slimy eels covered in stinking mucus in his intestines, doggedly searching for an opening they would be able to escape through. An hour earlier, when the patrol had received its orders and set off, Flaut had hoped deep down that the cool of the morning would drive away the terror, hoped that routine, practised ritual, the hard and severe ceremony of service would quell the fear. He was disappointed. Only now, after an hour had passed and after travelling some five miles, far, dangerously far from his comrades, deep, hazardously deep in enemy territory, close, mortally close to unknown danger, had the fear showed what it was capable of.

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!’