She smiled. ‘The inclusion of orgies in the worship of Azash was a part of Otha’s original strategy. It brought in the Elenes. Otha’s an Elene himself, and he knows how strong those appetites are in your race. We Styrics have more exotic perversions. Azash really prefers those, but the primitives in the back country still hold to the old ways. They’re relatively harmless.’

Talen drew in beside them. ‘What do you want me to do with the pieces of that idol?’ he asked.

‘Throw them away,’ she replied, ‘– one piece every mile or so. Scatter them thoroughly. The rite had already begun, and we don’t want someone to gather up the pieces and put them back together again. The cloud’s trouble enough. We don’t want Azash Himself behind us as well.’

‘Amen,’ the boy said fervently. He rode off to one side, stood up in his stirrups and hurled a fragment of mud some distance away.

‘We’re safe then, aren’t we?’ Sparhawk said. ‘Now that the idol’s smashed, I mean? And as soon as Talen finishes scattering it?’

‘Hardly, dear one. That cloud’s still there.’

‘But the cloud’s never really hurt us, Sephrenia. It tried to make us melancholy and afraid, but that’s about all – and Flute took care of that for us. If that’s the best it can really do, it’s not much of a threat.’

‘Don’t let yourself grow overconfident, Sparhawk,’ she warned. ‘The cloud – or shadow, whichever it is – is probably a creature of Azash, and that would make it at least as dangerous as the Damork or the Seeker.’

The countryside did not improve as they rode eastward, nor did the weather. It was bitterly cold, and the billowing clouds of black dust erased the sky. What little vegetation they saw was stunted and sickly. They were following something that sort of looked like a trail, though its drunken meanderings suggested wild cattle rather than men. The waterholes were infrequent, and the water in them was ice which had to be melted down to water the horses.

‘Cursed dust!’ Ulath suddenly bellowed at the sky, throwing aside the cloth which covered his mouth and nose.

‘Steady,’ Tynian said to him.

‘What’s the use of all this?’ Ulath demanded, spitting out dust. ‘We can’t even tell which way we’re going!’ He pulled the cloth back across his face and rode on, muttering to himself.

The horses continued to plod on, their hooves kicking up little puffs of frozen dust.

The melancholy which had beset them in the mountains lying to the west of the Gulf of Merjuk was obviously returning, and Sparhawk rode on cautiously, watching with chagrin as the mood of his companions rapidly deteriorated even as he kept a wary eye on nearby ravines and rocky outcrops.