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weapons, but he could not. She smiled directly in his face.
    “Do you have a wife?” Her words were soft.
    He gave a nod.
    “And children?”
    Again, a nod. He fought again to raise his long knives, but Kiki jerked her own blade and he groaned. No doubt the pain bit him like acid. No doubt it filled his mind with a bright hot fire and everything else was receding to a dull world of nothing; all that remained was the pain and the knife in his flesh like molten iron.
    And the knowledge. The knowledge he was going to die.
    “Sometimes,” said Kiki, leaning close, her mouth by his ear, aware he could smell her scent, her perfume, her stench of recent sex, “sometimes, I hate to kill. Not like you. For me, it is a duty. Sometimes, I kill to stay alive. I kill for honour, for king, and for country. I kill so that I may live.”
    “Yes,” he managed. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
    “But this time,” said Kiki, shifting back a little so she could face him, to look deep into his eyes, and she kissed him then, a full bodied kiss, tasting him, tasting his decadence, “this time I love it. This time, Jahrell, you lost the game. But I will find your wife. I will find your children. I will tell them what you did. What you were. I have friends in the military; I’m an Iron Wolf, after all.” The irony was not lost on her. “And I will have your name scraped from the Hall of Heroes in Vagan.” She began to cut with the dagger, sawing upwards, opening him like a gutted fish. He moaned, dropping his knives, fingers grasping at her, clawing her, and she continued to saw like a butcher with a slab on the block, and his insides came spilling out and he stank like the dead he would soon become.
    Kiki pushed away the corpse, moved away, pulled on and laced up her boots. She grabbed a sword as she heard boots on the stairs and, giving one final glance at Lars – poor dumb back-stabbing pointless Lars, whom she did consider murdering for a moment, putting him out of his misery, but then decided against it. His petty existence was his punishment, and he fucking knew it. She moved swiftly to the window. She prized open the latch with her knife, slid up the six panes and climbed out onto the narrow stone ledge.
    Wind and rain and ice slapped her. She gasped, and laughed.
    She was alive. Alive.
    Alive for now, bitch, whispered her dark sister in the mirror.
    For a moment, vertigo gripped her and it felt as if the whole world was moving; the whole world was crumbling, falling down in some incredible vast collapsing earthquake. Kiki breathed deeply and controlled herself, and controlled the world around her, and the vertigo drifted away like smoke from a fire.
    She climbed swiftly to the roof, strong fingers finding gaps in crumbling brickwork and stone lintels, and then she was running fast across ice-slick slates. Shouts echoed hollow behind her. Shock, awe, horror. She’d emptied Jahrell like a knife-cut sack of shit.
    You were right, she thought, as she sprinted through the rain and icy hail.
    There is an intimacy in death. An intimacy I do not care for.
     

THE PASS OF SPLINTERED BONES
    The Pass of Splintered Bones cut like a knife wound through the vast, savage mountain range named the Mountains of Skarandos. Acting as a natural border between the lands of Vagandrak to the north, and the deserts and grasslands of Zakora to the south, the Mountains of Skarandos numbered perhaps a thousand peaks, many reaching three or four leagues up into the heavens, the lower slopes jet black, and dark grey granite and slate, angular, steep, unforgiving, sporting little life and many dark valleys into which an unwary explorer could tumble and die and rot and turn to dust. The upper flanks and towering peaks were permanently shrouded in snow, split by vast narrow crevasses like deep throats spiralling down into Hell or the Furnace. What few routes did exist through the mountains were few and far between, high and narrow and treacherous