‘The plan’s fucked, little man,’ Rennic roared, kicking at a heap of loose earth, sending it spraying down the hillside. ‘King Corvel of Fuck-Town has come west already, our band are split either side of the river, the wrong people in the wrong places, and we’ve got barely three weeks before Ruumi lands her reavers. We can’t get everywhere in that time!’

Whisper had one hand raised, then placed it slowly on his shoulder. She followed it with a quick set of signs. Chel was fairly sure he saw ‘trust’ in there.

Rennic took a long breath. ‘Right. Right. They know what they’re doing. We do our part, they do theirs.’

Tarfel was looking back, his nose wrinkled. ‘Can anyone smell burning?’

The sun was already getting low in the north-western sky, but the eastern horizon behind them had a curious glow to it. They stood in silence for a moment, ears cocked against the wind’s soft moan. It sounded a little like … screaming.

Chel shivered. ‘Let’s keep moving’.

TWELVE

The walls of the city rose like teal tombstones from a pallid landscape, its snow-coat torn and bristling with brown, stubby growth, parts worn clean away in great ugly stripes. A handful of peasants tilled in the fields before the walls, a couple trying to drive an ox-plough over the rocky ground, others spreading fresh muck and marl from a steaming cart, their flimsy shovels bending with each stinking load. Unseen animals lowed and stamped in the shack-like barns that nestled at the feet of the looming walls, while poultry pecked at the crusty earth in pens surrounding them. Occasional guards, watchmen most likely, paced the ramparts between blocky turrets, the steam of their breath rising into the silver morning, merging and lost. A knot of mail-coated heavies, their dark colours emblazoned with a silver many-petalled flower, stood before the great gatehouse, jostling and menacing any who tried to enter or leave the city. The same silver flower adorned the long pennants that fluttered from the turrets, their points curling and snapping in the cold breeze.

‘Merenghi is the closest thing to a free city left in this part of the world,’ Rennic said as if reading Chel’s thoughts as he gazed down at the city across the hollow. ‘Loveless reckons there are people here who could be of use.’

Over the city wall, a looming blue curtain of dark stone, poked a dark, corrugated church, seeming oddly squat from their hillside elevation, its angles diminished. Around it lay slums, heaving and smoking, and beyond the other districts of the city, rooflines and construction varying by area, punctuated by the great erections of blue-grey stone that littered the city, the towers, the temples, the blocks. It dawned on Chel that nowhere did he see any of that pale, northern stone so prized by their Taneru forebears. Merenghi was its own.