They couldn’t pay us enough to go back into the jungle after that. We protected mansions and guarded forts but we never did any more sweeps. The tribesmen count on that. I think they count on the fact that in the jungle they are much more dangerous than we are.”

“We won’t be in the jungle,” Kormak said. “We’ll be on the road.”

“The road goes through the jungle,” Anders said. “But I take your point.”

“Is there anything you think we could do to make ourselves safer?” Rhiana asked.

“Don’t go in,” Anders said. He said it with a smile, but there was an underlying seriousness to his tone that told Kormak he meant it.

* * *

They pushed on. All around them sharp-edged hills, steep and covered in trees, loomed.

“This must remind you of home,” Anders said.

“Not really,” Kormak said. “What makes you think so?”

“Well, it’s hilly, and it looks threatening.”

“Have you ever been to Aquilea?” Kormak asked.

“I’ve not had that pleasure,” Anders said. He made it sound as if he considered the idea anything but a pleasure. Kormak could not blame him for that. Any Sunlander entering the Aquilean Highlands was likely to get a taste of steel in his gut.

“Well the hills are a lot barer than this, and the sky is a lot greyer, and it’s a lot colder and a lot wetter.”

“You’ve obviously not been here in the rainy season,” Anders said. “It rains for days and not little showers either. The sky opens. Thunder bellows. Lightning flashes. Floods can wash away entire villages.”

“And yet there is plenty of vegetation,” Kormak said.

“It grows fast here,” Anders explained. “And what doesn’t get washed away develops very strong roots.”

“There is a lesson for life there,” Kormak said.

“That’s a lot more philosophical than I would have expected of you,” Anders said.

“He is full of surprises,” Rhiana said. “To look at him, you would think he never thinks it all.”

“Thanks,” Kormak said.

“I’ve been doing some thinking of my own,” Anders said. “I’ve been thinking about Count Balthazar.”

Kormak heard the nervous note in the mercenary’s voice. “It sounds like you’ve thought of something else to worry about.”

“No. I’m still worrying about the same things. What was that thing that he conjured up on the last night of the Masque of Death?”

“He called it a Servant,” Kormak said. “That’s what its name meant in the language of the eldrim.”

“I am none the wiser,” Anders said.

“It was a creature summoned from the Outer Dark,” Kormak said. “A spirit of some sort. That’s perhaps the best way of thinking about it.”

“Not sure I want to think about it at all,” Anders said. “You mean it was something like a ghost.”

“It was a creature of magical energy, from the Planes of Shadow, or so some philosophers would have you believe. They call them Umbrals. It took possession of the dead bodies and it changed them into something it could use in our world. If we had not closed the portal, more like it would have come through.