He came opposite the alley.

And the hound charged.

Karsa leapt forward, twisting in mid-air to slash his sword two-handed, cleaving an arc into his wake.

The tip slashed hide, but the beast’s attack had already carried it past. It landed on one foreleg, which skidded out from under it. The hound fell onto one shoulder, then rolled right over.

Karsa scrambled back to his feet to face it.

The beast crouched, preparing to charge once again.

The horse that burst out of a side alley caught both hound and Toblakai by surprise. That the panicked animal had been galloping blind was made obvious as it collided with the hound.

There had been two riders on the horse. And both were thrown from the saddle, straight over the hound.

The impact had driven the hound down beneath the wildly stamping hoofs. Somehow, the horse stayed upright, staggering clear with heavy snorts as if seeking to draw breath into stunned lungs. Behind it, the hound’s claws gouged the cobbles as it struggled to right itself.

Snarling, Karsa lunged forward and plunged the sword’s point into the beast’s neck.

It shrieked, surged towards the Toblakai.

Karsa leapt away, dragging his sword after him.

Blood gushing from the puncture in its throat, the hound rose up on its three legs, weaving, head swaying as it coughed red spume onto the stones.

A figure darted out from the shadows. The spiked ball at the end of a flail hissed through the air, and thundered into the hound’s head. A second followed, hammering down from above to audibly crack the beast’s thick skull.

Karsa stepped forward. An overhead two-handed swing finally drove the hound from its wobbling legs.

Side by side, Leoman and Karsa closed in to finish it. A dozen blows later and the hound was dead.

Corabb Bhilan Thenu’alas then stumbled into view, a broken sword in his hand.

Karsa wiped the gore from his blade then glared at Leoman. ‘I did not need your help,’ he growled.

Leoman grinned. ‘But I need yours.’

Pearl staggered from the trench, clambering over sprawled corpses. Since his rather elegant assassination of Henaras, things had gone decidedly downhill-steeper than that trench behind me. Countless guards, then the ghostly army whose weapons were anything but illusory. His head still ached from Lostara’s kiss-damned woman, just when I thought I’d figured her out…

He’d been cut and slashed at all the way through that damned camp, and now stumbled half blind towards the ruins.

The darkness was being torn apart on all sides. Kurald Emurlahn was opening like death’s own flower, with the oasis at its dark heart. Beneath the sorcerous pressure of that manifestation, it was all he could do to pitch headlong down the trail.

So long as Lostara stayed put, they might well salvage something out of all this.

He came to the edge and paused, studying the pit where he’d left her. No movement. She was either staying low or had left. He padded forward.

I despise nights like these. Nothing goes as planned-

Something hard struck him in the side of his head. Stunned, he fell and lay unmoving, his face pressed against the cold, gritty ground.

A voice rumbled above him. ‘That was for Malaz City. Even so, you still owe me one.’

‘After Henaras?’ Pearl mumbled, his words puffing up tiny clouds of dust. ‘You should be owing me one.’

‘Her? Not worth counting.’

Something thumped heavily to the ground beside Pearl. That then groaned.

‘All right,’ the Claw sighed-more dust, a miniature Whirlwind-‘I owe you one, then.’

‘Glad we’re agreed. Now, make some more noises. Your lass over there’s bound to take a look… eventually.’

Pearl listened to the footfalls pad away. Two sets. The wizard was in no mood to talk, I suppose.

To me, that is.

I believe I am sorely humbled.

Beside him, the trussed shape groaned again.

Despite himself, Pearl smiled.

To the east, the sky paled.

And this night was done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

On this day, Raraku rises.

xxxiv.II.1.81 ‘Words of the Prophecy’

THE WHIRLWIND GODDESS HAD ONCE BEEN A RAGING STORM OF WIND and sand. A wall surrounding the young woman who had once been Felisin of House Paran, and who had become Sha’ik, Chosen One and supreme ruler of the Army of the Apocalypse.

Felisin had been her mother’s name. She had then made it her adopted daughter’s name. Yet she herself had lost it. Occasionally, however, in the deepest hours of night, in the heart of an impenetrable silence of her own making, she caught a glimpse of that girl. As she once had been, the smeared reflection from a polished mirror. Round-cheeked and flushed, a wide smile and bright eyes. A child with a brother who adored her, who would toss her about on one knee as if it was a bucking horse, and her squeals of fear and delight would fill the chamber.

Her mother had been gifted with visions. This was well known. A respected truth. And that mother’s youngest daughter had dreamed that one day she too would find that talent within her.

But that gift only came with the goddess, with this spiteful, horrific creature whose soul was far more parched and withered than any desert. And the visions that assailed Sha’ik were murky, fraught things. They were, she had come to realize, not born of any talent or gift. They were the conjurings of fear.

A goddess’s fear.

And now the Whirlwind Wall had closed, retracted, had drawn in from the outside world to rage beneath Sha’ik’s sun-darkened skin, along her veins and arteries, careening wild and deafening in her mind.

Oh, there was power there. Bitter with age, bilious with malice. And whatever fuelled it bore the sour taste of betrayal. A heart-piercing, very personal betrayal. Something that should have healed, that should have numbed beneath thick, tough scar tissue. Spiteful pleasure had kept the wound open, had fed its festering heat, until hate was all that was left. Hate for… someone, a hate so ancient it no longer possessed a face.

In moments of cold reason, Sha’ik saw it for what it was. Insane, raised to such extremity that she understood that whatever had been the crime against the goddess, whatever the source of the betrayal, it had not earned such a brutal reaction. The proportions had begun wrong. From the very start. Leading her to suspect that the proclivity for madness had already existed, dark flaws marring the soul that would one day claw its way into ascendancy.

Step by step, we walk the most horrendous paths. Stride tottering along the edge of an unsuspected abyss. Companions see nothing amiss. The world seems a normal place. Step by step, no different from anyone else-not from the outside. Not even from the inside. Apart from that tautness, that whisper of panic. The vague confusion that threatens your balance.

Felisin, who was Sha’ik, had come to comprehend this.

For she had walked that same path.

Hatred, sweet as nectar.

I have walked into the abyss.

I am as mad as that goddess. And this is why she chose me, for we are kindred souls…

Then what is this ledge to which I still cling so desperately? Why do I persist in my belief that I can save myself? That I can return… find once more the place where madness cannot be found, where confusion does not exist.

The place… of childhood.

She stood in the main chamber, the chair that would be a throne behind her, its cushions cool, its armrests dry. She stood, imprisoned in a stranger’s armour. She could almost feel the goddess reaching out to engulf her on all sides-not a mother’s embrace, no, nothing like that at all. This one would suffocate her utterly, would drown out all light, every glimmer of self-awareness.