You will be a great hero, a Yhelteth fortune-teller had once read in Ringil’s spittle. You will carry many battles and best many foes.

Nothing about being a municipal exterminator in a border-town settlement not much bigger than one of Trelayne’s estuary slums.

There were torches fixed in brackets along the main streets and river frontage of Gallows Water but the rest of the town must make do with bandlight, of which there wasn’t much on a night this clouded. True to Ringil’s expectations, the crowd thinned out as soon as he stepped onto an unlit thoroughfare. When it became apparent where he was headed specifically, his escort dropped by more than half. He reached the corner of Bashka’s street still trailing a loose group of about six or eight, but by the time he drew level with the schoolmaster’s cottage—the door still gaping open, the way its owner had left it when he fled in his nightshirt—he was alone. He cocked his head back to where the rubberneckers hovered at the far end of the street. A wry grin twitched his lips.

“Stand well back now,” he called.

From among the graves, something uttered a low droning cry. Ringil’s skin goosefleshed with the sound of it. He unshipped the Ravensfriend from his shoulder and, holding it warily before him, stepped around the corner of the little house.

The rows of graves marched up the hill where the town petered out against outcroppings of mountain granite. Most of the markers were simple slabs hewn from the self-same stone as the mountain, reflecting the locals’ phlegmatic attitude to the business of dying. But here and there could be seen the more ornately carved structure of a Yhelteth tomb, or one of the cairns the northerners buried their dead under, hung with shamanistic iron talismans and daubed in the colors of the deceased’s clan ancestry.