‘It would be foolish to think no one will escape the slaughter, sergeant. And yes, we are relying upon that.’ She met his eyes. ‘We must do what is necessary.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘As every soldier understands.’

He nodded, reaching up to adjust the strap on his helm.

The command rippled out from unit to unit to begin the advance. Behind them, the sun was just beginning its rise, copper red from the smoke above the forest to the east. She readied her lance. My first battle. My first engagement. Today I will spill blood for the first time. Her mouth was dry and she could feel her heart thumping in her chest. She set her heels to her mount’s flanks and they began to move.

Krissen let the scroll fall fluttering to the floor, joining a dozen others, and reached up to rub her eyes. She felt exhausted in her mind and weak in her flesh, but currents of excitement remained. There was no doubt in her mind now. Forty years ago she had travelled alone among the Jhelarkan, into the fastnesses high in the mountains and to the tundra beyond. Moving from clan to clan, she had made her way westward until arriving among the giant Thel Akai, the Keepers of Songs, and from there southward, into Jaghut lands. She had collected stories, legends and songs from the Jhelarkan and the Thel Akai, and had read through the dispirited but enlightened writings of the Jaghut before the originals had been destroyed following the Lord of Hate’s murdering of Jaghut civilization.

In every tale, truths could be found, dull as river stones in a gem-laden mosaic. They needed only prising loose, out of the gaudy clutter and poetic trappings. Among the ancient songs, locked by the extraordinary memory of the Thel Akai, secrets waited.

Krissen understood the First Age now; not in its details, but in its broadest strokes. Everything began with the Azathanai, who walked worlds in the guise of mortals, but were in truth gods. They created. They destroyed. They set things into motion, driven by a curiosity which often waned, leaving to the fates all that followed. They displayed perverse impulses; they viewed one another with indifference or suspicion, yet upon meeting often displayed extraordinary empathy. They held to unwritten laws on sanctity, territorial interests and liberty, and they played with power as would a child a toy.

She could not be certain, but she suspected that one of them had created the Jaghut. That another had answered in kind with the Tiste. Forulkan, Thel Akai, perhaps even the Dog-Runners, were all fashioned by the will of an Azathanai. Created like game pieces in an eternal contest, mysterious in its conditions of victory, in which few strategies were observable. Their interest in this contest rarely accounted outcomes.

But even as they stood outside time, so too did time prove immune to their manipulations, and now, at last, they had begun suffering its depredations. Deeds accumulated, and each one carried weight. She was certain that the Jaghut had created the Jhelarkan, elaborating on the Azathanai gift of Soletaken, and among the Dog-Runners there were now Bonecasters, shamans powerful enough to challenge the Azathanai. Gods were rising from the created peoples — their own gods. Whatever control the Azathanai had once held over their creations was fast tearing free.

She had heard about the mysterious Azathanai who had come to Kharkanas, and even now, among sages and priests, an awareness was emerging that unknown powers were within the reach of mortals. The world was changing. The game had broken away from the players.

Krissen saw before them now the beginning of a new age, one in which all the created peoples could define their own rules.

Hearing something like low thunder from the window, she rose, arching to work the kinks out of her back, and then walked to the lone window where the dawn’s light now paled the sky beyond. She looked down to see hundreds of riders converging on the village below.

For a long moment she simply stared, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. The riders broke up to pour into the streets, and down alleys and tracks. She saw figures appearing from their homes, saw some running from the path of the riders, and then came the flash of iron, or the thrust of lances, and bodies fell to the dirt.

Like pieces on a board. Moves made and then countered. Pieces falling. Faintly now, she could hear screams, and the first column of smoke lifted into the morning sky.

She had nothing of Gallan’s artistry with words, and the more she saw, the more words failed her, each one arriving in her mind listless and pallid. She was a scholar, one whom ideas inspired more than execution, and to put her thoughts into words, upon parchment, had always been a struggle.

Even in her head, her sense of the Azathanai was almost formless, a thing of impressions and strange upwelling emotions. Her failure had always been in the marriage of imagination with the pragmatic. And now, as she watched the slaughter below, and saw the first riders climbing the cobbled track leading up to Riven Keep — an edifice undefended and virtually unoccupied — she felt incapable of binding these details to any personal impetus.