though it was still small and cramped. It centred on a crudely built circle of stones that resembled a cairn. There was a hump-backed chimney arrangement that diverted the smoke away and over the earthen walls to disperse less obtrusively, which made Venn guess it was a communal fire.
The ground was littered with bodies, not long dead and as yet unmolested by scavengers, but that did not surprise him. The Elves hadn’t been attacked and slaughtered, though some had weapons in their hands, and there were no signs of violence - other than the brutal effects of disease, including protruding black nodules on their necks, wide white blisters on any exposed flesh and strange orange-tinted scabs on the flesh of their fingernails.
Venn had no idea what diseases caused such outbreaks, but whatever they were, they had obviously come on too fast for the Elves to bury - or even move - the first afflicted. There were fifty or more bodies on the floor of the camp, adults and children alike, and whatever had killed them, it had been swift and terrible.
‘This cannot be natural,’ moaned Jackdaw. Venn could feel the man’s revulsion, increased by the fact he had no body of his own with which to retch and shudder.
‘I doubt it is,’ Rojak said, his voice betraying his fascination. ‘I smell magic on the air.’
Venn looked around. Bodies, roughly made tables, discarded and rotten food - nothing he wouldn’t expect to see here. All the Elves were dressed the same. If any of them had been mages, they lacked the human inclination to marry power with grandeur, which he found unlikely.
‘Jackdaw,’ Venn said in the privacy of his mind, ‘what can you sense?’
There was a long pause before the Crystal Skull he’d retrieved from the cavern’s entrance-shrine one night gave out a pulse of warmth.
‘There is something here,’ Jackdaw said with a horrified whisper, ‘like nothing I have ever seen - and it is not alone, it’s like there are fireflies dancing all around the camp, all watching us.’
‘Capan, leave me.’
The scout had advanced further into the camp than Venn, picking his way through the piled bodies with balletic grace, but at Venn’s words he at last showed some emotion, tilting his head in surprise to look at Venn, but when he said no more Capan ducked his head in acknowledgement and left, careful not to touch any of the bodies as he went.
Venn looked around at the scene of horror, frozen in time and undisturbed by wind, predator, scavenger or insect. As he wondered who or what had the power to do this, and who would bother with just a tiny camp, Rojak’s mocking little laugh echoed through his head.
The minstrel had been quiet since first revealing himself, speaking to Venn only a handful of times, and refusing to answer the hows or whys of what had happened since his body had been consumed by a firestorm in Scree. Venn could guess, however: Rojak’s soul had been bound so tightly to Azaer that it had not been his own for many years before his death. No doubt the day the minstrel had lost his shadow he’d suspected that instead of receiving his Last Judgment, he would continue as some subordinate shadow-Aspect of Azaer.
But Azaer had taken mortal form, and when Jackdaw started playing with magic to hide himself in Venn’s own shadow, there had been a transference, whether intentional or not.
‘Well my pretty, won’t you come out to play?’
Venn blinked, and felt Jackdaw recoil in his mind. Nothing changed at first, then he noticed a pale wisp of light hanging in the air. He looked up and saw more, a spray of dozens in the late-afternoon air, some almost hidden by the pale sky behind, others clearly visible against the trees.
‘Created in the image of your Gods,’ came a whisper from nowhere, a woman’s voice, soft and ancient, ‘and like your Gods, you enslave those around you.’
From the mud-bank opposite him suddenly appeared a woman as terrible to behold as the ruined bodies all around him. Cold eyes shone out from a pale, emaciated face half-obscured by a curtain of tangled greying hair.
She wore a small crown of grey metal, as ragged and dull as her clothes. After the first moment of shock, Venn realised who she was, and a cold sweat broke out down his back. The Wither Queen was not known for her welcoming nature.