“You jest, of course. This mission is important. The King himself entrusted it to you, and if there’s glory to be had, I want part of it. Not to mention any of the treasure. My family may be old and respectable and distant cousins to royalty, but they are not rich. I intend to rectify that.”

Kormak sensed something evasive in the Admiral’s manner, but he decided not to push it. Maybe it was just the heat. The Admiral’s face was flushed, and his forehead glistened with sweat. Dark circles of moisture stained his heavy gold-braided tunic under the armpits.

“Are you sure this road is safe?” Zamara asked. They looked at the intricate stonework which had somehow survived all the years of neglect between the fall of Xothak and the coming of the Sidereans. Kormak understood his unease. There were lunar glyphs woven into the stonework and horrifying-looking pillars marked every league.

“As far as I can tell these runes are only intended to bind the paving stones and protect them from weather and erosion.”

Zamara indicated one of the league markers. It stood taller than a man and was carved with demonic skull faces. “I keep thinking those things are watching me.”

“Maybe once they did. Certain of the Old Ones used such pillars to channel magic. They are not active now. If they were, my amulets would tell me.”

“And if they did not, I would be able to sense them,” said Rhiana, poking her head out from beneath the canopy. “There’s no spell active here.”

“I am reassured and yet . . . I cannot help but feel that we should have uprooted those markers.”

“It’s a lot of work,” said Rhiana, “in this heat, and no doubt the locals find them useful.”

Anders poked his head out beside Rhiana’s. “The locals believe they’ll be cursed if they disturb the pillars. You hear stories about people who have done such things. They always die curious deaths soon after, and someone always raises the pillars back into their usual place.”

He mopped his brow with his sleeve and stared at Kormak, waiting to hear what he had to say.

“Stranger things have happened,” Kormak said. He leaned forward and felt his tunic come unstuck from the backboard of the seat.

“You just said there was no magic in the pillars,” said Zamara.

“Nothing active,” said Kormak. “Who knows what might happen if you disturbed them?”

The Admiral said, “It is not a pleasant thought, a network of magic channelling runestones laid out across this land.”

Zamara sounded uneasy. Perhaps because like many Sidereans he liked to pretend that all of the Old Ones were aligned with the Shadow. It was little over a century ago that his nation had been ruled by the eldrim and freed only by great sacrifice. In Siderea, until recently, it was the Sun worshippers who had once been the serfs and the Lunars the overlords.

“Damned if I like the look of those jungles either,” Zamara said, pointing at the green mass covering the distant hills. “They could hide anything.