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This night he would be working alongside Feather Witch She had visited him that one time, in his dream Apart from that, he had had no occasion to speak with her Nor, he suspected, was she likely to invite an exchange of words Beyond the mundane impropriety established by their respective class, she had seen in him the blood of the Wyval – so she had claiof dust He would, if possible, speak to her, whether invited or not

Rugs had been dragged outside and laid across trestles The thump of the clubs the slaves used to beat the dust from the thought, vague wondering where the shadoraith had gone, then sleep took hi of senses In ice A blue, rit of dirt and sand, the sainst each other Lenses of sunlight delivering heat into the depths, where it built until a thundering snap shook the world

Udinaas flowed through this frozen landscape, which to all eyes in the world beyond was lockedof the pressures, the heaved weights and disparate forces, was revealed, until that final explosive s broke

There were shapes in the ice Bodies lifted froround far below and held in aard poses Fleshed, eyes half open Blossoms of blood suspended in motionless clouds around wounds Flows of bile and waste Udinaas found hihter Tiste Edur and darker-skinned kin Enorht but blades for hands In

He came to a place where the reptilian bodies for them, he suddenly recoiled A vertical strea up and out from the heaped corpses The water was pink,as it climbed upward, as if driven by some deep, subterranean heart And that water was poison

Udinaas found hi with corpses, rock-hard flesh Then past, into fissure-twisted sweeps devoid of bodies Down solid channels Racing, ever faster, the gloo him

Massive brown-furred creatures, trapped standing upright, green plants in their mouths Herds held suspended above black earth Ivory tusks and glittering eyes Tufts of uprooted grasses Long shapes – wolves, steep-shouldered and grey – caught in the act of leaping, running alongside an enorhter, lives stolen in an instant of catastrophic alteration – the world flung onto its side, the rush of seas, breathless cold that cut through flesh down to bone

The world… the world itself betrays Errant take us, how can this be?

Udinaas had known od, no matter the cast of its features And he had seen the manner in which such belief made the world si of cold judge was possible He had seen such certainty, yet had never shared it

But he had always believed the world itself was… unquestionable Not static – never static – but capable of being understood It was undoubtedly cruel at tiCreatures frozen infrom their mouths This was beyond comprehension Sorcery It inable, for it was a tenet that the world and all that lived on it possessed a natural resistance to ods would have reshaped and probably destroyed the balance of all things long ago Thus, the land would resist The beasts that dwelt upon it would resist The flow of air, the seep of water, the growing plants and the droning insects – all would resist

Yet they failed

Then, in the depths, a shape Squatting on bedrock, a stone tower A tall narrow slash suggested a doorway, and Udinaas found hih solid ice

Into that black portal

So shattered, and, suddenly corporeal, he stuh to tear the skin froht, and his shoulder struck so that tottered with the i hi tears he saw, aure Skin like bleached velluular with too many joints Black, frosted eyes, an expression of faint surprise on its narrow, arched features The clothes it wore consisted of a harness of leather straps and nothingbut a man