The skating reavers had dragged themselves from the caustic fog, weak on their feet, coughing and grunting. The closest had kicked off his skates, a long axe gripped in one hand, the other pressed to his streaming eyes. The moment his vision cleared, he would see Chel floundering by his feet. The great cold that had gripped Chel began to crush him.

A new figure strode into his view, moving confidently over the ice past the hunched and grunting reavers. Brecki came to a stop by the floe’s jagged edge, and regarded Chel’s desperate plight with a tilt of her head, her flaxen braids swaying.

‘Brecki,’ he gasped. ‘Please! I’m … sorry …’

Her lip curled, and she shook her head with slow contempt. Beside her, the skate-less reaver had blinked himself to sight, and was staring at Brecki in surprise. From her his gaze slipped to Chel, battling to stay afloat in the freezing waves, bloodless fingertips questing for solid ice. A broad grin lit the reaver’s pale face.

‘Please, Brecki! Please!’

The reaver raised his axe to swing, and Brecki cuffed him around the head. Still weak on his feet, the man staggered and dropped to the ice, the axe skittering from his grasp. Brecki fixed Chel with a look of utter disgust, then extended her hand toward him.

‘You apologize too much, crying boy. Look weak enough already.’

SEVEN

The harbour boiled. Chel watched from the prow of the sword-shaped ship as they steered toward the icy wooden dock, freezing black water churning beneath them. Trickles of water, streams and brooks, cut dark, steaming lines down the snow-draped peak that loomed over the inlet, and the black seawater hissed and foamed where they met. The whole place stank of bad eggs and iron. On the horizon, the evening cloud hung thick and dark over the silhouettes of broken peaks, sporadic gouts of molten rock and earth-smoke clawing upwards from within, shot through with flashes of orange light. Beyond, odd wafting waves of emerald and indigo veiled the narrow band of stars that squeezed between earth and sky.

‘Truly,’ Foss said, ‘we are at the end of the world. The heavens are burning, and all the hells are here.’

‘C’mon, Fossy, don’t be so dramatic. It’s the ash-light, you can see it sometimes from Clyden.’

‘And the great bursts of flame from beneath? The smell?’ He looked around, at the clusters of large and muscular reavers at the back of the boat. ‘The company?’

Kosh was re-organizing the contents of her alchemy sack, cross-legged before the mast. ‘That is volcanic activity. It is natural.’

Foss looked unconvinced. ‘Evil days,’ he muttered. ‘Evil days.’

‘Well,’ said Loveless, joining them at the prow, ‘I’m guessing that’s the closest thing we’ll get to an apology from a Horvaun war-band.’

‘Ah, that was no war-band,’ Lemon gave a dismissive wave of her hand, ‘that was barely a scouting party.’