We stepped back out into the desert.

  Briggs was on his fourth packet of nuts, tipping them down his throat like leaves being carried over a waterfall.

  “You know each of those sachets is meant to last three days,” I said.

  He titled the bag again, deliberately spilling most of the expensive treats onto his chin and chest, and proceeded to chew aggressively.

  “You’ll last three days, if you keep up that talk,” he rumbled.

  I sat at the far end of the table, only a metre from the heavy, and yet so far from him. Tal inserted herself between the two of us, rubbing shoulders a little too closely with me. Her eyes lit up when she made the contents of the bag.

  “These are honeyed mara-mara nuts,” she said, handling a sealed jar. “And these - Doc, we were hoping for a small break from leather-tough jerky, and twice baked bread, but these are luxuries! Well, it’s morning tea for a Burgher Prince, but a feast for us Trenchers. You must have paid a small fortune to have these imported from the Core Realms.”

  She popped a nut into her mouth, savouring the taste as she used her tongue to roll it around her jaw and suck off the sweet outer shell, before crunching the core.

  “You have a good eye,” I said.

  “Used to work in a big city for a Burgher who wouldn’t shut up about the finer things in life,” she explained with a shrug. “Us urchins would try to get paid for bringing him regular fare, cut and squashed and painted to try and pass as exquisite alternatives. But he always knew. It was much easier to learn how to spot and acquire the real thing, rather than spend ages trying unsuccessfully to emulate it.”*

  Dassem stopped at the head of the table, the Captain a step back and to his left. Chuckles arrived a few moments later, wiping his knife on his pants and then secreting it back into the shadows beneath his duster. He saw me watching him, gave me a wink and the smallest of grins. I shied away.

  “Guabdi,” Dassem. “After a thorough vetting process, we’d like to formally introduce the Doc. Doc, these are the Guabdi.”

  The word was the name of the scavenger mice of the deserts of this continent. They were adept at swarming birds that were too old or too comfortably nested to fly away, picking away at them with tiny bites then skittering away, only to slink back, again and again, until the line between near corpse and carcass was finally crossed. But otherwise they burrowed away from the heat, operated at night, and went unnoticed by the rest of the desert. Not natural predators by any means, and so not a name expected of a bunch of killers. But maybe there was something in it.

  These Guabdi stared back at me as if I were a meal, not part of the mob.

  “Awfully soon to be bringing on new blood,” said Church. “Especially after we’ve just bled so much.”

  At that, the squad touched at the pieces of gear or small totems about their person that were out of place even amongst their eclectic kit.

  “Well hopefully the Doc can do something to prevent that, in the future,” said Dassem.

  “I sent the summons two weeks ago,” the Captain said. Unexpectedly, judging by the sudden straightening of backs. “Not that I anticipated our current losses, but perhaps if I’d done so earlier, Poot and the rest might still be here with us. So he’s not here to replace them. Anyone got a problem with that?”

  Briggs growled, but nothing more.

  Dassem leaned on the end of the table.

  “Right then,” said Dassem. “You just bagged yourselves a Finger, something that’s never been done in the history of this continent.”

  “Only took us three years,” said Briggs.

  Three years? Could that be true? And if it was, did it reflect more on the squad, or on the Fingers?

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  “Well, let’s make sure the next one takes half that time at least,” said Dassem. “Where will we find them?”

  The state of the Continent could hardly have changed much in the days since they took Shint, and word would certainly not have reached them out here in the wastes if anything had. So the agitating of information was purely for my benefit.

  “The Eye of Yinghan is always an option,” said Tal. “The Sunsuga aren’t shy in telling us there’s some power up there in the mountains, watching this all unfold like its laying out tiles on a Palladunn board.”

  “We’re going to need something a little better than that,” said Dassem. “We can’t go traipsing around the mountains, hoping to just stumble across a hidden temple.”

  “Ludeneshi!” said Briggs, with passion. “Let us finally descend on that place, and coax Sol out of his hole.”

  “Sol?” I said, checking he hadn’t just mispronounced the name. “Do you mean Sul?”

  The squad paused and turned to look at me, annoyed their rhythm had been interrupted. Briggs gave me a scathing look, then shrugged.

  “Name changes every second time it’s mentioned,” he said, not quite conceding.

  “So it’s probably the same person,” said Church.

  “But the location stays the same.”

  “Which is the important part,” said Dassem. “Last I heard there was a whole battalion under Tor Forneir keeping him pinned in that hole.”

  “Then this Forneir has softened him up!”

  “And put twenty fucking kilometres of trenches between us and the target,” said Dassem. “We’re not under any pressure to rush over there, Briggs. It’s a no.”

  “There’s those new rumours that have been trickling in,” said Church. “The Maiden, performing miracles in shanties in random desert towns. Sounds like a Finger to me.”

  “An unusually modest one,” said Dassem. “And impossible to track. Same problem as Yingham.”

  “I suppose there’s always Ganorvaan,” said Chuckles.

  “Don’t even joke,” Church admonished.

  “No joke,” said Chuckles. “We know where to go: just straight to the middle. And we’re pretty sure Anoushka’s still in there…”

  “She doesn’t currently pose any threat,” said Dassem. “Let her rot.”

  “It was only a suggestion,” said Chuckles. “All of which you have dismissed.”

  Slowly they each turned to me. This is why they’d brought me on. They’d caught wind that our hunts were running parallel, and they were hoping I knew something they didn’t, that I could get them closer to a Finger than they had run before. Well, I did, and I could, but not in the way they anticipated. They had told me everything they knew, and it had been much less than I expected. And everyone knows that you don’t expend your best tiles on the Palladunn board when a much lesser one will turn the game in your favour all the same. So I gave them that lesser tile.

  “Siat Vort will be in Yadesh in three days.”

  Everyone stared at me.

  “How can you know that?” said Dassem.

  “How can you not?”

  “We’re not as embedded in the local workings as we’d like to be,” said Dassem. “That’s why you’re here. So answer the question.”

  “Every local knows that whenever Siat Vort is on his way you can see the green curtains in the top windows of his apartment blowing in the breeze. Apparently he likes his apartment thoroughly aired before his arrival. Three days after the curtains are opened, Vort arrives.”

  Briggs slammed his fist on the table, making us all jump.

  “We were only just staking out Yadesh! Twenty days of no ale, sleeping in that shithole of an inn, poking around at nothing. And you’re telling me the Grand Theologian just announces his presence like a pisshead singing in the streets?” He crossed his arms. “I’m not going back.”

  “You’ll go where the Captain tells you to!” Dassem growled.

  “No,” said the Captain.

  Fleetingly she laid a hand on Dassem’s shoulder, and the man’s anger receded just as quickly as it had boiled.

  “No order here, you know that,” she said. “You all agreed to follow on good faith, and I agreed to have you follow because I value your initiative, not your blind obedience. So, what does the mob think, as a whole?”

  The mob was mixed. Not spawned from the matriarch, not blindly loyal due to that bloodline, but each brought to her bosom until the guabdi found and formed themselves. Church was so stoic she was almost serene. Tal was chafing, fidgeting, keen for action so long as it was movement. Chuckles wore his perpetually amused grimace. They all had the right to make the call, if they were the ones who popped their head up out of the burrow and spotted something. Even with a Captain and a Sargeant present. But on this occasion, the choice fell to a frontline Heavy, as thick as the broadsword he wielded.

  He was grinding his jaw and flaring his nostrils, like a riled up ourobok. And I was in his charging lane. It was a difficult thing to stare back at those eyes.

  Finally he thumped the table again with his fist.

  “If the Doc says there’s killing behind the curtains back in Yadesh, then that’s where we go. But the promise better be good, because I promise you, there will be blood spilled either way.”

  I opened my mouth to say that I hadn’t made any such promise, but Dassem shot me such a fierce look that I turned it into a yawn.

  “Right then,” said the Captain. “Let’s not wait another however long for the curtains to signal again. Pack it up. We march in ten.”

  The squad was ready in eight.