Bale keeps a steady hold of his gun. That reassures him. It re-assures him more than his friend Krank's banter. The gun is solid, the last solid thing in the world, whichever world it is.

The gun is an Imperial Army-issue lasrifle, with a wooden stock and furniture, and blue metal fittings. It is clean and brand new. Bale has a musette bag of clips to fit it. It is not the shoddy hand-me-down weapon he was issued with at the founding.

Krank has a similar, spotless weapon. So does Zybes, though his is the cut-down bull-pup carbine. Katt has a short-frame autopistol. They all got their weapons from the same place.

It was just after they had stepped through and left Calth, left that night-shrouded beach on Calth where the air rang with the distant whoops and howls of the things they call, for sanity's sake, daemons. It was the first place Oll took them to, via another knife-slash in the world. It was lowland, a fen. There had been a battle there, a terrible running skirmish through the reedy dykes and water-logged channels. There were bodies all around, two- or three-days dead, turning black and bloating in the heat. The uniforms they were stretching and straining were those of an Imperial Army unit that neither Bale nor Krank knew had been serving on Calth.

'This isn't Calth,' Oll told them. 'This is another where, another when. Don't ask me. I don't recognise it.'

He bent down, fished a set of dog tags out from under a swollen throat.

'Mohindas Eleventh,' he said. He sighed. 'Mohindas Eleventh. God. Wiped out, to a man, by the Nephratil on Diurnus, in the sixth year of the Great Crusade.'

'That was more than two centuries ago,' said Bale.

'These bodies are fresh!' Krank exclaimed. He looked at the inflated meat-sack at his feet and shrugged. 'Fresh-ish. A day old. Two maybe.'

'They are,' said Oll, rising.

'But' said Krank.

'As I said,' said Oll. 'Another where, another when.'

They looked at him.

'I don't make this stuff up,' he said, shrugging. 'I just endure it, like you. I'll check the compass. We might have to change direction again.'

'Why do you trust that compass thing?' asked Zybes.

'Why wouldn't I?' asked Oll. 'It's God's own compass.'

Katt was looking at the bodies littering the ground, the brooks, the ditches.

'We should stop here,' she said. 'We should bury them all. They deserve respect.'

It was only the second or third thing they had ever heard her say, and they were already beginning to realise that Katt spoke rarely, but what she said was honest.

'We should,' Oll said, nodding. 'Heaven knows, you're right, but this is another when, and another war. Trust me, girl. There's a terrible darkness coming, and it will leave so many dead, so very, very many, there won't be enough left alive to bury them all, even if they dig day and night. Only thing we can do is keep going, and fight for the living. We don't have time to care about the dead. Sorry, that's the way it is.'

Katt started to cry a little, but she nodded. Just as they had come to see the honesty in her infrequent pronouncements, she had come to appreciate the honesty in him.

Oll stooped again, took a mag clip out of the corpse's bandolier, and checked the fit to his old, old service weapon.

'Gun up,' he said, filling his bag with recharges.

They hesitated.

'Come on,' he said. 'These poor souls don't need guns where they are going. We need them more. Besides, these are new patterns Crusade issue, brand new, just two or three years old, not like the re-furb crap they handed out at Numinus. We're lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on. So get your hands on them.'

They helped themselves. Bale had to get the pistol for Katt, and persuade her it was all right to touch it. That is was 'okay' to touch it. 'Okay' was an odd word, but Oll Persson used it, and they had learned that it meant 'all right'.

Oll stood to one side, and smelled the wind. He thought about what he had just told them. We're lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on.

'Very damn lucky,' he said softly to the wind. 'Who made sure we'd wind up here?'

Oll Persson and his fellow survivors upon the battlefield of Diurnus [mark: ?]

The trumpeters sound, booming up from the invisible valleys below, they all know that there are better places to be.

'Can't you make another hole?' asks Zybes, wiping rain off his face.

'A hole?' Oll asks, frowning.

'A cut... With that knife of yours? This isn't a good fix to be in, is it? Don't pretend it is.'

Oll Persson shrugs.

'It's not as bad a fix as Calth.'

There is something else he was going to say, but he bites it off. The trumpeters sound again ominous, like cosmic punctuation.

'I can't just cut where I like,' Oll says, making a motion with his hand as if the athame is in his grip. 'It doesn't work like that. I have to be in the right place, and make the right cut. Places touch each other in the oddest ways. I cut through the skin of one and we're into another.'

They are all looking at him.

'It's complicated. It's not even an exact science. Someone taught me the rudiments a long time ago.'

'Who?' asks Zybes.

'How long ago?' asks Katt, which is a better question.

'It doesn't matter,' replies Oll, not answering either of them. 'The point is, it's not an exact science. And the someone who taught me the rudiments... also told me it was a terrible thing ever to have to do it, that it was something no one would choose to do unless there was no other choice.'

'Because lives depended on it?' asks Bale.

Oll shakes his head.

'No,' he says, 'much more important than that.'

He starts walking again, crunching up the scarp in the dying light. He knows he has said too much, and that he has discouraged them. The veteran soldier in him in fact, there are several veteran soldiers in him knows better than that. In a 'fix' like this, a decent commander does not spit on morale. He cannot take back what he has already said, but he could cheer them by saying more, cheer them or distract them.

'The winds,' he says. 'That's the key to it. That's the key to any voyage, as any seafarer will tell you. You follow the winds, follow where they blow.'

He glances back at them.

'Not these winds,' he says, raising a palm to feel the cold mountain air run between his fingers. 'I don't mean how the air moves. I mean the primordial winds, the winds of the empyrean, the winds that keep the ever-ocean tossing and thrashing.'

He starts walking again.

'I use the Romanii names,' he says, 'because they're the ones I was taught. Right now, we're following Africus, following where that wind blows. It's a south-wester. That's why the Romanii called it Africus. But the Grekans, they knew it as Lips, and the Franks, they called it Vuestestroni.'

He looks back at them again.

'See?' he asks.

Krank raises his hand, like a child in a scholam class.

'Yes?' asks Oll.

'My question would be, what are Romaniis?' says Krank.

Oll sighs. He wonders if they have time for him to answer that, and he doubts it, because they do not have any time for anything at all.

'Never mind,' he says.

'So... we follow this wind, this Akrifus,' says Bale Rane.

'Africus,' Katt corrects.

'Yeah, that,' says Bale. 'We follow this wind to... where?'

'To the place where we make the next cut. To the next place where the skin between worlds is thin.'

'Providing the trumpeters don't catch us first?' asks Krank. He laughs, a piping ha-ha-ha that the breeze lifts away.

'Pretty much,' says Oll.

[mark: ?]

They sleep under a fold of rock near the summit of a ridge. Oll sits watch. He wants to push on, but he can tell how tired they are. They need food. They need water that does not taste like blood. They need sleep. They need a good, clean cut that will take them away from the trumpeters.

Oll does not think of them as trumpeters. Last time he met anything like them, creatures of a similar breed, it was multiple lifespans ago in the Cyclades, and they were called sirens. It is just another word, no better than trumpeters, no worse. The only thing Oll knew then, and Iason agreed at the time, was that the creatures did not come from the Cyclades. They did not belong there, no more than the trumpeters belong here. They were from an elsewhere that had nothing to do with this world or any other. They were like a damp or a rot that had leaked through a wall from outside.

The noises they made, they would drive a man mad if he had to listen to them for long. They would make him forget himself, make him forget [mark: ?]

Oll wakes up. He does not know how long he has been out. An hour? Just a few minutes? The others are still dead to the world. It is as cold as a tomb's vault under the rock. It is dark, and there is no sound except the pattering of the rain.

He had been dreaming. The remnants of the dream are still hooked in his mind, like splinters in skin: hard, fresh sunlight on moving water; light dappling; the sea green like glass. The ship is a proud ship and will be remembered for so long that it becomes a myth. There is an eye painted on the prow, a common mark in those days. All the galley warships in the Middle Sea had them.

There is laughter from the deck. Oll feels the hot sun on his bare, tanned back. He can hear Orfeus playing the sort of melody that would keep out the noises of the sirens.

It is a good life in that dream, that memory. They were better days, a better adventure than the one he has embarked upon. This new, unmarked journey, knifing a route from world to world, it will not be remembered. It will not pass into myth like that long sail to Colchis and back. This journey will not even be remembered long enough to be forgotten.

It might be more important, though. It might be more important than any adventure he has undertaken in his life.

His lives.

Oll realises he was thinking of it as his last journey, his last adventure. He realises he is expecting it to be the final exploit of his life, the closing act, one last brave outing in the twilight of his time. Except, by any means of measurement, he is supposed to live forever; unless some agency stops his life.

So, why is he thinking so fatalistically?

The last splinters of the dream are still there: the eye on the prow of the boat, staring and hard, beautiful and kohl-edged, like Medea's enchanting eyes, but terrible too. A single eye. These days, that mark means another thing. He saw it in the last dream he had, the dream where John came to him and showed him Terra on fire. That cursed eye is why this will be his last adventure.

'Damn you, John,' he whispers.

He gets up, rubbing his hands, his arms. They have to get moving, push on. They have been down too long. They are getting too cold, too damp, losing too much core temperature.

And the trumpeters have gone quiet. That is not a good sign.

'Get up!' he says, trying to rouse them. His hands are numb. It is so dark.

'Get up, come on!' he cries. 'We have to push on.'

No one is stirring, except Graft, who activates at the sound of Oll's voice.

'Trooper Persson?'

'Wake them all up. We have to move,' Oll says.

Something skitters on the stones out in the darkness.

Oll's hands are numb, but he takes up his rifle.

'Get up!' he cries. Still no one stirs. He aims in the air and fires a shot.

'Wake up!' he says.

Now they have.

[mark: ?]

They are all cold and wet, and scared, woken from unfriendly dreams to an even unfriendlier reality. Katt is crying, but it is the cold not the stress. Krank is tearful too, because he has had enough of it all and it is nasty. Oll urges them up the slope, over the back of the ridge.

There are things on the scarp behind them. Trumpeters, Oll guesses. Even trumpeters know that it is sometimes most productive to stay quiet. The damn sirens knew that too.

The ridge is a black hump ahead, suggesting better light beyond. Dawn, maybe? They crest it, and see a paleness, a pale blueness, in the sky behind. They go over the ridge. Oll has Bale lead the way, and takes the tail spot himself, swinging back to watch for things pursuing them. Parts of the darkness move, but not so much he can make a target.

'God help us,' he says. He does not doubt God's plan, because he is a man of faith, but sometimes he thinks God has put them up to all of this. All the holy books, all of them from every creed he has ever studied, they are full of stories about souls being made to suffer and endure, just so they can attain salvation.

This is his time to be Job, his time to be Sisyphus, his time to be Prometheus, to be Odin, to be Osiris. This is his time to endure.

What is more, it is not even his own salvation he is suffering for.

Oll thinks he should not have to be tested any more, not after the life he has led.

They go down the slope and onto the back of the next scarp. It is much lighter; a pre-dawn glow makes the sky ahead of them translucent like smoked glass. Oll has a sudden, bright feeling that they are close to where they need to be. It is like seeing a single star low in the sky on a lightless night and realising there is something to navigate by.

He glances back. There are trumpeters on the ridge behind them. They are huge bipeds, swollen and heavy, with long counterbalance tails held up, swishing the air behind them. Their throats rise into heads like floral blooms or pitcher plants, like fleshy mechanisms that part and extend and broaden. They begin to make the noises again at the dawn sky. The volume is incredible. The strange, wet flanges and crests of the heads move and bunch to modulate the expelled notes.