A worn leather boot sunk deep into the thick peaty bog that clung to the neck of the River Drey Haren, half a day's climb inland across the Khest Valley. Its owner swore in a thick Wardenhalese accent and attempted to pull the booted foot out of the bog without losing it. Biting midges swarmed over the man and his companion in maddening clouds.

As Golver struggled in the humidity and the mud, he couldn't help wonder if he and Rysinde were being punished for something.

As Haali Dreskoe had struggled with the fateful choices presented to him by Cutter, Golver and Rysinde had stepped over the still warm corpse of the resident and disappeared into the backstreets of Inktown. They had hurried incognito across the Vinderhon Bridge, past Vinderhove and into the woods that rose up into the Khest Valley. Neither of them had any idea as to where they were going and at this point destinations were a secondary consideration. Getting as far away from Harenis as possible was the key objective.

Rysinde reflected as they made their way through the undergrowth, that Golver seemed remarkably calm given the fact that he, Rysinde, had effectively condemned the pair of them to death. He had little recollection of the act, it was over almost as soon as he had taken the decision to kill the resident. For a moment afterwards Rysinde was unsure whether it had actually happened it all. It was Golver's words that had made it real.

As Rysinde stumbled over the rough ground, it occurred to him that Golver had probably lived under one kind of a death sentence or another for years and so this experience was hardly novel. He was wise enough, however, not to mistake Golver's silence for forgiveness; Golver had realised in the resident's home that they would never make it back to Mordikhaan alive, but that didn't mean that he wasn't capable of mentally re-writing history in his head now. Rysinde could almost hear Golver's inner mental processes developing a coherent narrative that would sooner or later explode in unpredictable retribution. I would be half way home now if it wasn't for you, would be the general direction Golver would take and Rysinde had to be out of range of whatever implement of pain he was equipped with at the time.

Golver's hammer, Lady, had been sliced in two by Frangka, thus depriving him of his preferred maiming tool. It was this memory that provided Rysinde with the answer to his dilemma. Golver hated Frangka far more than he hated Rysinde at this present moment in time. He would simply shift the conversation on to the Ghothar and hope that Golver's rage would be channelled in a different direction. With any luck, they'd catch up with her again and Golver could cut her throat. Rysinde thought that this might be quite healthy for his relationship with Golver, on balance.

As the afternoon wore on, Golver looked for any kind or trail, path or road that might point in the direction of a settlement. A man of Golver's particular skill set was all but useless in a wilderness where there were no people. He did not understand navigation, the position of the sun or where berries and nuts might be found. He understood people though, he knew how to lie, bully and occasionally flatter to get what he wanted. Without a nearby victim, Golver was all but useless.

Contrary to Rysinde's darkest fears, Golver wasn't about to beat him to death, though even he was self aware enough to recognise that this could change in the fullness of time. Golver oscillated between indifference towards Rysinde's killing of the resident and a grudging admiration. To a man who's life was based on a series of brutal snap judgements, one after another, the speed and effectiveness of the killing was worth his respect. Golver considered himself to be a fair judge of others (this was disingenuous at best), and had temporarily permitted himself to think that he would probably have killed the resident too.

"This way," Golver barked as he spotted a packed earth road curving ahead of them, beyond the trees. It was just the sort of minor trail that connected villages, farms and markets across the Arclands. They hurried along the trail in what both men assumed was the opposite direction of Harenis. The steel colouring of the clouds gave ominous clues about an imminent change in the weather. Given the last couple of days in Harenis, both Golver and Rysinde were keen not to endure any more torrential rain.

As penny sized rain drops began to crash through the canopy of the trees overhead, they caught the first smell of woodsmoke and the tell tale sounds of civilisation. The clink of a blacksmith's anvil, the call of mothers to their children to come in from the rain. A short while later, as waves of rain drifted across the Khest Valley, Golver and Rysinde arrived in the small village of Oldwater. The cluster of farms and cottages sat on the River Drey Haren, which plunged into a thundering waterfall, supplying the lake below with summer rainwater run off.

Sat on the bridge across the river was a large tavern, which in the rain and the enveloping dark was about the most inviting and attractive place both Golver and Rysinde had seen in some time. As Golver strode in a determined manner towards the tavern, Rysinde looked on with alarm.

"What?" Golver snapped.

"Should we? Won't they be looking for us?"

"You can sleep in a barn if you want lad, I'm going in there."

"But what about, you know, them..." he said frantically, "...Mordikhaan," he whispered. Golver administered an irritated slap to the back of Rysinde's head.

"No one's listening," he said, "...and the Lady of the Crag's elite killers and hunters of scum like us, well they don't waste their time going out in the pouring rain. They'll start their search soon enough, but don't you understand? The one person this side of the ocean with the power to hunt us to the end of the earth is dead. You killed him."

Rysinde had not considered this before, but it certainly made him feel better.

"On that basis," said Golver, "who needs a drink?"

The smaller the settlement, the faster panic tends to spread, Golver had always believed. It was therefore ironic that by the time he and Rysinde had stumbled across Oldwater, the village was in a state of almost panic about strangers passing through. The relative peace of Oldwater had been shattered hours earlier when farmers found a soldier of Dran bleeding profusely from a crossbow bolt in his side and carried him to the local tavern and improvised town hall the Inn on the Bridge. The man, who had thrown away any Dranian insignia (though enterprising local children found them later), called himself Taaner Kaar in the moments when he was lucid enough to speak. He spoke nothing of who had shot him, though he didn't have to, the innkeeper Otho Derik was intelligent enough to know that real killers always finished the job. By the time Myric the smithy had extracted the crossbow bolt from Taaner's flesh and cauterised the wound with a hot iron, Otho and the rest of the village were on a state of high alert, waiting for the would be killers to come looking for their victim. It was in this context that Golver and Rysinde were to spend a most unfortunate evening at the Inn on the Bridge.