Mael’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

‘Because I sense a distant awakening – but not, alas, as distant as you would like.’

‘Anomander Rake.’

Gothos nodded.

Mael shrugged. ‘Anticipated. Osserc moves to stand in his path.’

The Jaghut’s smile revealed his massive tusks. ‘Again?’

The Elder god could not help but grin in answer.

And though they smiled, there was little humour on that glacial berm.

* * *
1159th Year of Burn’s Sleep

Year of the White Veins in the Ebony

Three years before the Letherii Seventh Closure

He awoke with a bellyful of salt, naked and half buried in white sand amidst the storm’s detritus. Seagulls cried overhead, their shadows wheeling across the rippled beach. Cramps spasming his gut, he groaned and slowly rolled over.

There were more bodies on the beach, he saw. And wreckage. Chunks and rafts of fast-melting ice rustled in the shallows. Crabs scuttled in their thousands.

The huge man lifted himself to his hands and knees. And then vomited bitter fluids onto the sands. Pounding throbs racked his head, fierce enough to leave him half blind, and it was some time before he finally rocked back to sit up and glare once more at the scene around him.

A shore where no shore belonged.

And the night before, mountains of ice rising up from the depths, one – the largest of them all – reaching the surface directly beneath the vast floating Meckros city. Breaking it apart as if it were a raft of sticks. Meckros histories recounted nothing remotely like the devastation he had seen wrought. Sudden and virtually absolute annihilation of a city that was home to twenty thousand. Disbelief still tormented him, as if his own memories held impossible images, the conjuring of a fevered brain.

But he knew he had imagined nothing. He had but witnessed.

And, somehow, survived.

The sun was warm, but not hot. The sky overhead was milky white rather than blue. And the seagulls, he now saw, were something else entirely. Reptilian, pale-winged.

He staggered to his feet. The headache was fading, but shivers now swept through him, and his thirst was a raging demon trying to claw up his throat.

The cries of the flying lizards changed pitch and he swung to face inland.

Three creatures had appeared, clambering through the pallid tufts of grass above the tideline. No higher than his hip, black-skinned, hairless, perfectly round heads and pointed ears. Bhoka’ral – he recalled them from his youth, when a Meckros trading ship had returned from Nemil – but these seemed to be muscle-bound versions, at least twice as heavy as the pets the merchants had brought back to the floating city. They made directly for him.

He looked round for something to use as a weapon, and found a piece of driftwood that would serve as a club. Hefting it, he waited as the bhoka’ral drew closer.

They halted, yellow-shot eyes staring up at him.

Then the middle one gestured.

Come . There was no doubting the meaning of that all-too-human beckoning.

The man scanned the strand again – none of the bodies he could see were moving, and the crabs were feeding unopposed. He stared up once more at the strange sky, then stepped towards the three creatures.

They backed away and led him up to the grassy verge. Those grasses were like nothing he had ever seen before, long tubular triangles, razor-edged – as he discovered once he passed through them when he found his low legs crisscrossed with cuts. Beyond, a level plain stretched inland, bearing only the occasional tuft of the same grass. The ground in between was salt-crusted and barren. A few chunks of stone dotted the plain, no two alike and all oddly angular, unweathered. In the distance stood a lone tent. The bhoka’ral guided him towards it.

As they drew near, he saw threads of smoke drifting out from the peak and the slitted flap that marked the doorway.

His escort halted and another wave directed him to the entrance. Shrugging, he crouched and crawled inside.

In the dim light sat a shrouded figure, a hood disguising its features. A brazier was before it, from which heady fumes drifted. Beside the entrance stood a crystal bottle, some dried fruit and a loaf of dark bread.

‘The bottle holds spring water,’ the figure rasped in the Meckros tongue. ‘Please, take time to recover from your ordeal.’ He grunted his thanks and quickly took the bottle. Thirst blissfully slaked, he reached for the bread. ‘I thank you, stranger,’ he rumbled, then shook his head. ‘That smoke makes you swim before my eyes.’

A hacking cough that might have been laughter, then something resembling a shrug. ‘Better than drowning. Alas, it eases my pain. I shall not keep you long. You are Withal, the Swordmaker.’