We made camp just off the foreshore, where there were not too many rocks, and the carpet of grass was still moist and comfortably soft, not yet turned brittle and scratchy by the drought.

  In the dying light, with no sun to betray their shadows, seabirds hung on lingering thermals above the waves, so still that they seemed painted against the sky. Only their keen eyes twitched, scanning below for fish that flirted too closely with breaking the waves.

  Drakes hung above the seabirds, hunting the hunters. Were they aware? They had to be. And yet the fish had no comprehension of them.

  Dassem assigned pairs to the watch. He and I would take the last, right before dawn. I appreciated that he anticipated me, but I also think he was hoping I would sleep through the change of shifts and leave him unbothered. Instead I lay awake behind closed eyes all night, until Briggs kicked me at the change.

  The Sargeant had sat himself upon a high dune, his back to an outcropping of rock so that he could look out across the camp and the way we’d come without the risk of anything coming up behind him. Though the position, as tactical as it was, felt more like a final test of my desire to converse with him.

  He was smoking a pipe, two thin tendrils of smoke leaking from the corners of his mouth and staying connected there for metres as they drifted into the night air, so that he looked like one of those Gordbi that used such whiskers to lure birds, putting out those sweet smelling, slightly writhing lures as their great maws lurked just below the surface of the mudflat. It suited him. He was a killer, as good as any, but in a different way to Briggs’s headlong charges, and Tal’s distant sniping. He was happy to lure you in, have you pierce yourself slowly upon his blade without even realising it.

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “Fuck me raw,” said Dassem. “No ‘good evening, sergeant’. No ‘forgot how tough the march was’. Do they dock your pay for every word you waste?”

  I said nothing, forcing a grin from Dassem. He rummaged in the breast pocket of his duster, and drew out another pipe, holding it out to me. It was oak, I’d wager, by the dark colour, which meant it would have had to come the way from the Core Realms. Expensive enough already, even before considering how the stem curled up and over the bowl, then back down itself, before poking out into the mouthpiece, all in one cut of wood. That kind of skill demanded a lot of money.

  “Come and sit down,” he said. “You’re starting to hurt my neck.”

  I took the pipe and struggled to settle myself down into a spot beside him. There was a taper poking up from the sand in front of him. He pulled it up and brought it across to light me, and we sat in the dark for a time, creating briefly flaring stars by our chins and exhaling the remnants of those suns up to share the black with their brethren.

  “He’s dangerous,” I finally ventured again.

  “I would hope so,” said Dassem. “We have no need of a dull sword, or a bent arrow. Isn’t that why you came? Because you heard we had a weapon capable of truly defeating the Fingers.”

  “I was picturing something a little more… hand-held.”

  Dassem shrugged.

  “We wield the man just the same.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “Even the whip turns on the whiphand’s cheek occasionally. You think you have a better chance of handling a man, with a mind of his own?”

  Dassem drew on his pipe, flaring the embers, allowing me to see the two fingers he wiggled above the bowl.

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  “One down, Doc,” he said. “One down, and no betrayal. One more, and I’ll consider the ledger ahead, no matter what else happens. Any more than that, and we’ll be absolutely laughing.”

  “But how can you trust him, even ‘til then?”

  The dying pipe-bowl drew shadows into the hollows of Dassem’s face, making him seem tortured.

  “He crossed the Ghenk-rabbis with us.”

  Did he now? The crossing of the centre of this land, inhospitable even before Anoushara’s Folly, was a matter of modern legend.

  “And before that?”

  Dassem shrugged.

  “Couldn’t tell you much about him, really.”

  “See, that’s what worries me,” I said. “A good Sargeant like you knows every one of the men under his command.”

  “True enough,” said Dassem. “But honestly, I think he was just that unremarkable. He was shy. One of the few to earn his trenchname unironically: he would stay on the fringes of the campfire and laugh quietly at the jokes of the rest of his troop. Never did anything else to distinguish himself.”

  That seemed… unlikely. But I asked a different question.

  “How does he know all of what he says? About Signs, and the like?”

  Dassem took a deep drag, obviously weighing whether to be honest with me.

  “He says he learnt from Azhur.”

  “Piss off.”

  “That’s what he says.”

  I wrestled with the implications. There were only eight ever granted the honour of studying at the feet of Azhur. But the night was quickly turning cold, and I didn’t want to give voice to my fears.

  “What about the rest of them?” I asked instead.

  “A few more besides Chuckles made it out with me and the Captain, though we lost track of them soon after. Heard that plenty of them hung themselves, which, let me tell you, felt like a real kick in the dick given how hard we’d worked to keep them alive. Maybe they didn’t really make it out of that blasted desert after all. Certainly none of them were keen to head back out with us. So that lot down there Cap and I cobbled together over the years.”

  “Church and Briggs are veterans.”

  “Most of them are. Tal is a special case, but most commoners can’t keep their heads for five seconds in the shieldwall. We find the ones that are useful to us and weed them out.”

  “But surely you can’t just go stealing trenchers from formed Troops without someone noticing.”

  “They notice,” said Dassem. “But they’re listed as deserters, or amongst the dead. Guabdi gains hardly make a dent in the reality of those numbers.”

  “A man like Tor Alain doesn’t seem one to let any of his command just walk.”

  “You’re wrong. Some stones don’t sink into the mire of a Troop. Each member of this squad is a dangerous mystery in their own way. Men like Alain are always looking for the easiest path of command, which in this case is making his problems mine. But I’m happy to accept them. They’re all dangerous mysteries, in their own way. You included.”

  “I’m just a Cutter who’s done a bit of travelling.”

  “Don’t piss in my eye, I’ve only got one. I see past the person you want us to. Who sent you? And why?”

  I tried not to answer too quickly.

  “The Captain’s summons -”

  “Mighty convenient someone with all the skills and drive we might be seeking suddenly comes to our attention.”

  “Then perhaps you ought to get that one eye checked, because I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Maybe. But my guess is Magdren. He’s always been on the edge of the table, always looking for some longshot to try to reassert himself over the other Burgher Princes.”

  “You mean Magdren’s wife, using him as a face while pulling the strings from behind.”

  “Spoken like someone who knows the truth on account of working for the Lady Magdren.”

  “That truth is common knowledge,” I said. “Or have you been away for that long.”

  Dassem frowned.

  “I have, actually,” he said. “I keep happening to miss the boat.”

  “Deliberately?” I said.

  I thought I saw the slightest twitch of a smile, though that was impossible in the dark.

  “Bones like mine are meant to nourish foreign soil,” he said. “That’s the only way we truly convert these places: one little patch at a time.”