‘Maybe this is what Krughava could see so clearly, and Tanakalian can’t. When we war against nature, we war against ourselves. There is no distinction, no dividing line, no enemy. We devour everything in a lust for self -destruction. As if that is intelligence’s only gift.’

‘Only curse, you mean.’

He shrugged. ‘I suppose there is a gift is in being able to see what we’re doing, even as we do it. And in seeing, we come to understand.’

‘Knowledge we choose not to use, Spax.’

‘I have no answer to that, Firehair. Before our inaction, I am as helpless as the next man. But it may be that we all feel that way. Smart as we are individually, together we become stupid, appallingly stupid.’ He shrugged again. ‘Even the gods cannot find a way through this. And even if they had, we’d not listen, would we?’

‘I see her face, Spax.’

Her face. Yes . ‘It’s not much of a face, is it? So plain, so … lifeless.’

Abrastal flinched. ‘Find another word, please.’

‘Bleak, then. But she makes no effort, does she? Nothing regal in her clothes. Not a single item of jewellery. No paint on her face, or her lips, and her hair – so short, so … ah, Highness, why does any of that even bother me? But it does, and I don’t know why.’

‘Nothing … regal,’ Abrastal mused. ‘If what you say is true – and yes, so it seems to me as well – then why, when I look upon her, do I see … well, something …’

That I did not see before. Or that I did not understand. She ever grows in my mind, this Adjunct Tavore . ‘Noble,’ he said.

She gasped. ‘Yes!’

‘She doesn’t fight against nature, does she?’

‘Is it just that? Is that all it is?’

Spax shook his head. ‘Highness, you say you keep seeing her face. It is the same for me. I am haunted and I do not know why. It floats behind my eyes and I fix upon it again and again, as if I’m waiting. Waiting to see the expression it will assume, that one expression of truth. It’s coming. I know it is, and so I look upon her and I cannot stop looking upon her.’

‘She has made us all lost,’ Abrastal said. ‘I did not anticipate I would feel so troubled, Spax. It’s not in my nature. Like some prophet of old, she has indeed led us out into the wilderness.’

‘Until she leads us home.’

Abrastal turned and stepped closer, her eyes glittering. ‘And will she?’

‘In that nobility, Firehair,’ he replied in a whisper, ‘I find faith.’ Against the despair. As did Krughava. And in the Adjunct’s small hand, like a wispy seed, there is compassion .

He watched her eyes widen, and then her hand was behind his head, pulling him close. One hard kiss, and then she pushed him away. ‘It’s getting cold,’ she said, setting off for camp. Over a shoulder she added, ‘You should be able to reach the Letherii before dawn.’

Spax stared after her. Very well, it seems we will do this, after all. Hood, the Lord of Death, stood before me and spoke of fear. The fear of the dead. But if the dead know fear, what hope do we have?

Tavore, does a god stand in your shadow? Ready to offer us a gift, for the sacrifices we will make? Is this your secret, the thing that takes away all your fear? Please, lean close, and whisper it to me .

But that face, there behind his eyes, might have been as far away as the moon. And if the gods came at last to crowd round her, would they too look down, in perilous wonder, at that frail magic in the palm of her hand? Would it frighten them?

When it so frightens the rest of us?

He looked out over the Glass Desert’s offering of dead stars. Tavore, do you now shine bright among them, just one more of the fallen? And would there come a time when her bones came crawling to this shore to join all the others? Spax, Warchief of the Gilk Barghast, shivered like a child left naked in the night, and the question pursued him as he set out for the Letherii camp.

She had always considered the notion of penance to be pathetic self-indulgence, and those that set out upon such a course, choosing isolation and abnegation in some remote cave or weathered hut, were to her mind little more than cowards. The ethics of the world belonged to society, to that fraught maelstrom of relationships, where argument and fierce emotions waged eternal war.

Yet here she sat, alone beneath a green-limned sky, with a slumbering horse her only company, and all her private arguments were slowly drifting away, as if she walked through one room after another, leaving ever further behind some regal chamber echoing with raucous debate. The irritation that was futility was finally gone, and in the silence ahead she sensed the gift of peace.