You are nothing, child. Not a dancer. Your body is in service to Rashan, and Rashan is this realm’s manifestation of Shadow, the drawing of darkness to light. When you dance, it is not you that is watched. It is the shadow your body paints. The shadow is the dancer, Lostara Yil. Not you.

Years of discipline, of limb-stretching training that loosened every joint, that drew out the spine, that would allow the Caster to flow with seamless movement-and all for naught.

The world had been changing outside the temple’s high walls. Events unknown to Lostara were systematically crushing their entire civilization. The Malazan Empire had invaded. Cities were falling. Foreign ships had blockaded Ehrlitan’s harbour.

The cult of Rashan was spared the purges of the new, harsh masters of Seven Cities, for it was a recognized religion. Other temples did not fare as well. She recalled seeing smoke in the sky above Ehrlitan and wondering at its source, and she was awakened at night by terrible sounds of chaos in the streets.

Lostara was a middling Caster. Her shadow seemed to have a mind of its own and was a recalcitrant, halting partner in the training. She did not ask herself if she was happy or otherwise. Rashan’s Empty Throne did not draw her faith as it did the other students’. She lived, but it was an unquestioning life. Neither circular nor linear, for in her mind there was no movement at all, and the notion of progress was measured only in terms of mastering the exercises forced upon her.

The cult’s destruction was sudden, unexpected, and it came from within.

She recalled the night when it had all begun. Great excitement in the temple. A High Priest from another city was visiting. Come to speak with Master Bidithal on matters of vast importance. There would be a dance in the stranger’s honour, for which Lostara and her fellow students would provide a background sequence of rhythms to complement the Shadow Dancers.

Lostara herself had been indifferent to the whole affair, and had been nowhere close to the best of the students in their minor role in the performance. But she remembered the stranger.

So unlike sour old Bidithal. Tall, thin, a laughing face, remarkably long-fingered, almost effeminate hands-hands the sight of which awakened in her new emotions.

Emotions that stuttered her mechanical dancing, that sent her shadow twisting into a rhythm that was counterpoint to that cast by not only her fellow students, but the Shadow Dancers themselves-as if a third strain had slipped into the main chamber.

Too striking to remain unnoticed.

Bidithal himself, his face darkening, had half risen-but the stranger spoke first.

‘Pray let the Dance continue,’ he said, his eyes finding Lostara’s own. ‘The Song of the Reeds has never been performed in quite this manner before. No gentle breeze here, eh, Bidithal? Oh no, a veritable gale. The Dancers are virgins, yes?’ His laugh was low yet full. ‘Yet there is nothing virginal about this dance, now, is there? Oh, storm of desire!’

And those eyes held Lostara still, in fullest recognition of the desire that overwhelmed her-that gave shape to her shadow’s wild cavort. Recognition, and a certain pleased, but cool… acknowledgement. As if flattered, but with no invitation offered in return.

The stranger had other tasks that night-and in the nights that followed-or so Lostara would come to realize much later. At the moment, however, her face burned with shame, and she had broken off her dance to flee the chamber.

Of course, Delat had not come to steal the heart of a Caster. He had come to destroy Rashan.

Delat, who, it proved, was both a High Priest and a Bridgeburner, and whatever the Emperor’s reason for annihilating the cult, his was the hand that delivered the death-blow.

Although not alone. The night of the killings, at the bell of the third hour-two past midnight-after the Song of Reeds, there had been another, hidden in the black clothes of an assassin…

Lostara knew more of what had happened that night in the Rashan Temple of Ehrlitan than anyone else barring the players themselves, for Lostara had been the only resident to be spared. Or so she had believed for a long time, until the name of Bidithal rose once more, from Sha’ik’s Apocalypse army.

Ah, I was more than spared that night, wasn’t I?

Delat’s lovely, long-fingered hands…

Setting foot onto the city’s streets the following morning, after seven years’ absence, she had been faced with the terrifying knowledge that she was alone, truly alone. Resurrecting an ancient memory of when she was awakened following the fifth birthday, and thrust into the hands of an old man hired to take her away, to leave her in a strange neighbourhood on the other side of the city. A memory that echoed with a child’s cries for her mother.

The short time that followed her departure from the temple, before she joined the Red Blades-the newly formed company of Seven Cities natives who avowed loyalty to the Malazan Empire-held its own memories, ones she had long since repressed. Hunger, denigration, humiliation and what seemed a fatal, spiralling descent. But the recruiters had found her, or perhaps she found them. The Red Blades would be a statement to the Emperor, the marking of a new era in Seven Cities. There would be peace. None of this interested Lostara, however. Rather, it was the widely-held rumour that the Red Blades sought to become the deliverers of Malazan justice.

She had not forgotten those impassive eyes. The citizens who were indifferent to her pleas, who had watched the acolyte drag her past to an unknown fate. She had not forgotten her own parents.

Betrayal could be answered by but one thing, and one thing alone, and the once-captain Lostara Yil of the Red Blades had grown skilled in that answer’s brutal delivery.

And now, am I being made into a betrayer?

She turned away from the wooden chest. She was a Red Blade no longer. In a short while, Pearl would arrive, and they would set out to find the cold, cold trail of Tavore’s hapless sister, Felisin. Along which they might find opportunity to drive a blade into the heart of the Talons. Yet were not the Talons of the empire? Dancer’s own, his spies and killers, the deadly weapon of his will. Then what had turned them into traitors?

Betrayal was a mystery. Inexplicable to Lostara. She only knew that it delivered the deepest wounds of all.

And she had long since vowed that she would never again suffer such wounds.

She collected her sword-belt from the hook above the bed and drew the thick leather band about her hips, hooking it in place.

Then froze.

The small room before her was filled with dancing shadows.

And in their midst, a figure. A pale face of firm features, made handsome by smile lines at the corners of the eyes-and the eyes themselves, which, as he looked upon her, settled like depthless pools.

Into which she felt, in a sudden rush, she could plunge. Here, now, for ever.

The figure made a slight bow with his head, then spoke, ‘Lostara Yil. You may doubt my words, but I remember you-’

She stepped back, her back pressing up against the wall, and shook her head. ‘I do not know you,’ she whispered.

‘True. But there were three of us that night, so very long ago in Ehrlitan. I was witness to your… unexpected performance. Did you know Delat-or, rather, the man I would eventually learn was Delat-would have taken you for his own? Not just the one night. You would have joined him as a Bridgeburner, and that would well have pleased him. Or so I believe. No way to test it, alas, since it all went-outwardly-so thoroughly awry.’

‘I remember,’ she said.

The man shrugged. ‘Delat, who had a different name for that mission and was my partner’s responsibility besides-Delat let Bidithal go. I suppose it seemed a… a betrayal, yes? It certainly did to my partner. Certainly to this day Shadowthrone-who was not Shadowthrone then, simply a particularly adept and ambitious practitioner of Rashan’s sister warren, Meanas-to this day, I was saying, Shadowthrone stokes eternal fires of vengeance. But Delat proved very capable of hiding… under our very noses. Like Kalam. Just another unremarked soldier in the ranks of the Bridgeburners.’