Rik dumped the last of the branches he had gathered beside the fire and slumped down to rest.

Corporal Toby strode to the fire. Rik looked up at him. From this angle his craggy features and huge body looked even more monumental. “You dropped this,” he said in a voice only slightly less loud than a musket being fired. He handed Rik something and then strode off. Rik looked at the small cold metal object in his palm. It was a tunic button. “Thanks,” he said to the departing back.

He opened his pack and fumbled through it looking for a needle and thread, then, despite the chill, he took off his tunic, wrapped his greatcoat back around him and, by the fire’s flickering light, began to sew.

Leon sat across from him, an odd look on his face as he surveyed their surroundings. He looked out of place and wary, a city boy from Sorrow, the night out of doors in this chill place making him uncomfortable. He caught Rik’s expression and said; “Not like night in the Old Quarter is it?”

“No,” Rik said. “It’s not.”

He was half fearful that Leon was going to allude to their time running wild in that city of thieves, and that the lieutenant would hear. He looked around but the Terrarchs were sitting apart, holding themselves as aloof as always.

“We’re a long way from home, Rik,” Leon said. It had been a long time since Leon had called him by his real name twice in one day, and the fact that he did so just then seemed a measure of his unease.

“We are indeed, Leon.” Rik stressed the name, hoping his old friend would take the hint.

“You think there really are giants and spider devils in these mountains?”

Rik felt the others around the fire shift and give the conversation their attention. He guessed such thoughts were on everybody’s minds. “If there are, I am sure Master Severin can deal with them.”

“How can you be so sure? What makes you such an expert?” asked Pigeon, puffing his chest out and walking splay-footed in the way that had given him his nickname.

“Because he knows,” said Leon. “He has read more books than anyone here, maybe even including Master Severin.”

That claim provoked quiet mirth from those that did not know Rik well. The Sergeant said; “It’s most likely true. Never seen anybody read like our Halfbreed. You’d think he was studying to be a lawyer or a sorcerer or one of those other mysterious things.”

Rik wondered if this was some sort of warning. It was the sort of thing an Inquisitor would like to know about. It also showed something of the Sergeant’s ignorance.

It was not that Rik would not have read a grimoire if he got the chance, it was just that he never would. They were things their owners took a lot of pains to keep out of other people’s hands. Rik could only dream of getting a hold of one someday. The Old Witch had taught him some things during what he laughingly thought of as his apprenticeship to her. She had even claimed he showed more than a trace of the Talent but that was when she had been deep in her cups, and oddly sentimental. That had been before the business with Antonio that had driven Leon and himself to flee the city in the company of Death’s own angels.

“I like to read. What of it? You’ve all been pleased enough to have me read you stories from the chapbooks of an evening.” That too was true. They were all of them fond of a story, those who could not read most of all.

“Where did you learn to read, Halfbreed?” asked Pigeon.

“In Shadzar,” Rik said, using the old name for the Place of Sorrow. “In the Great Bazaar.”

“Bet that was not all you learned,” said somebody from the dark. The fruity voice sounded like it belonged to Handsome Jan. Sorrow did not have a good reputation even among the regiments. They might be the gutter scum of the Realms but even they had to feel superior to something, and that something was the inhabitants of Sorrow.

“Was you a thief?” asked someone else.

“Everybody in the Place of Sorrow is a thief,” said Gunther. “If they are not a whore.