The shadows saw everything. They remembered everything. They saw and remembered the missionaries of Kina, who had fled my own world at the pinnacle of Rhaydreynak’s fury. In every world they reached, the goddess’s dark song fell upon a few eager ears, even amongst the children of those who had created the shadows.

Commerce on a plain so constrained and dangerous perforce remained light. It took determined people to hazard the crossing. Traffic peaked when the world we recalled as Khatovar launched a flurry of expeditions to other worlds to determine which would be best suited to host the cosmic ceremony called the Year of the Skulls.

Followers of Kina from other worlds joined that quest. Companies marched and countermarched. They argued and squabbled. They accomplished very little. Eventually a consensus took shape. The sacrifice ought to be the world that had treated the Children of Kina so abominably in the first place. Rhaydreynak’s descendants should reap what he had sown.

The companies sent out were not swarms of fanatics. The plain was dangerous. Few men wanted to cross it. Most of the soldiers were conscripts, or minor criminals under the rule of a few dedicated priests. They were not expected to . return. It became the custom for the conscripts’ families to hold a wake for their Bone Warriors or Stone Soldiers before they departed even though the priests always promised they would be back in a matter of months.

The few who did return usually came back so drained and changed, so bitter and hard, they came to be known as Soldiers of Darkness.

Kina’s religion was never popular anywhere it took root. Always a minority cult, it lost what power it did have as generations passed and the early fervor faded into the inevitable, tedious rule of functionaries. One world after another abandoned Kina and turned away from the plain. Dark Ages took shape everywhere. One gate after another failed and was not restored. Those that did not fail fell into disuse. The worlds were old, worn, tired, desperately in need of renewal. The ancestors of the Nyueng Bao may have been the last large party to travel from one world to another. They seemed to have been Kina worshippers fleeing persecution at a time when the rest of their people had become insanely xenophobic and determined to expunge all alien influences. The ancestors of the Nyueng Bao, the Children of the Dead, had vowed to return to their Land of Unknown Shadows in blazing triumph. But, of course, because they were safe on the far side of the plain, their descendants soon forgot who and what they were. Only a handful of priests remembered, not entirely correctly.

A voice that did not speak aloud tickled my consciousness. Sister, sister, it said. I saw nothing, felt only that featherweight touch. But it was enough to spin my soul sideways and toss it into another place where, when I caught my spiritual breath, the stench of decay filled my nostrils. A sea of bones surrounded me. Unknown tides stirred its surface.

There was something wrong with my eyes. My vision was warped and doubled. I raised a hand to rub them... and saw white feathers.

No! Impossible! I could not be following Murgen’s path. I could not be losing my moorings in time. I would not stand for it! I willed myself

Caw! Not from my beak.

A black shape popped into sight in front of me, wings spread, slowing. Talons reached toward me.

I spun, hurled myself off the dead branch where I had been perched. And was sorry instantly.

I found myself just yards from a face five feet tall. It boasted more fangs than a shark does teeth. It was darker than midnight. The odor of its breath was the stench of decaying flesh.

The triumphant grin on those wicked ebony lips faded as I evaded the swat of a gigantic, clawed hand. I, Sleepy, was in a trousers-soiling panic but something else was inside the bird with me. And it was having fun. Sister, sister, that was close. The bitch is getting sneakier. But she will never surprise me. She cannot. Nor will she understand that she cannot.

Who is “me?”

The exercise was over. I was in my body on the plain, in the rain, shuddering while my mind’s eye observed the capering dreamwalkers. I examined what I had experienced and concluded that I had been given a message, which was that Kina knew we were coming. The dreaming goddess had been pretending quiescence of recent decades. She knew patience intimately, by all its secret names. And I may have been given another message as well.

Kina still was the Mother of Deceit. Quite possibly nothing I had learned recently was entirely or even partially true if Kina had found a way to wander the shadowed reaches of my mind. I had no doubt that she could. She had managed to inform entire generations and regions with a hysterical fear of the Black Company before the advent of the Old Crew.

I swear I sensed her amusement over having quickened in me a deeper and more abiding distrust of everything around me.

Suvrin wakened me early. He sounded glum. I could not see his face in the darkness. “Trouble, Sleepy,” he whispered. And I have to give him credit. He was first to realize the implications of the fact that it was snowing. But then, he had seen more of the white stuff than any of us but Swan. And Willow had been away from it long enough to turn into an old man.

I wanted to moan and groan but that would have done no good and we needed to get a handle on the situation right away. “Good thinking,” I told him. “Thanks. Go around in that direction and wake up the sergeants. I’ll circle around to the left.” Despite my nightmares, I felt rested.

The snowfall in no way recognized the presence of the protection shielding our campsite. Which meant the boundaries were no longer obvious. I sensed a heightened killing lust amongst the shadows. They had seen this before. It would be snack time if anyone started running around nervously.

We had One-Eye and Goblin on our side. Tobo, too. They could winkle out the whereabouts of the boundaries.

But they needed a little light to do the job.

One by one I made sure everyone wakened and understood the gravity of the situation, especially the mothers. I made sure everyone understood that no one should move around until daylight.

Wonder of wonders, nobody did anything stupid. Once there was light enough, the wizards started drawing lines in the snow.

I arranged for teams to enforce the boundaries.

Everything went so well I was feeling smug before it turned time to go. Then I discovered that it was going to be a long day which, of course, I should have known instinctively.

This next leg of the journey had taken the Captured only a few hours. It would take us far longer. The shattered fortress could not be discerned behind the falling snow. The old, old men would have to mark out every step before it could be taken, walking to either side of Tobo and the Key, keeping him centered on the road but never getting ahead of him. Just in case.

A quarter mile along I was worrying about time already. We had too many mouths and too few supplies. Harsh rationing was in place. These people had to be gotten across the plain fast, excepting those of us who would bring out the Captured.

“This’s getting out of hand!” Goblin yelled. “If it gets any heavier, we’re up Shit Creek.”

He was right. If this snowfall turned into a blizzard, we were going to have no other worries. If it worsened much, we were going to die out here and make Soulcatcher the happiest girl in the world.

She probably was anyway, now that she had had time to reflect on the fact that there was no one left able to dispute her in any whim she cared to indulge. Water sleeps? So what. Those days were over.

Not while I was still standing, they were not.