The sun was just setting over the distant edge of the dead volcano that held every curse the world had ever known, and Runa’s clients were trying to get themselves killed again.

  It was only mostly their own fault. If she managed to get them all out of this alive, she might let herself think it was all their own fault. They were the ones who chose to adventure in the most dangerous place in all the realms, after all. At some point in their lives, they’d presumably also chosen to be the sort of scholarly-minded wizards who could conjugate ancient spells to within an inch of their lives but who couldn’t find their way out of an open field without someone dangling a book on a stick in front of them.

  And they were the ones who’d spent the past month of their journey together locked in personal and professional enmity, and had chosen this evening to wander off into the sunset and work out their issues in a way Runa suspected would need at least a half hour of privacy and a halfway comfortable bush.

  But she was the one who’d let them wander off.

  She angled a look at the horizon. It was a lot less distant than it had been a moment ago.

  And just when she’d got dinner on the fire.

  Runa dug her fingertips in between her horns and groaned.

  They were far deeper in the Cauldron than Runa’s jobs usually took her. That didn’t bother her. The Cauldron was easy, once you got the hang of all the different ways it tried to kill you. It had been created from all the curses and corruption left over after the great War of the Deathless—what most people called the Skeleton Wars, because of all the skeletons. The war had spread across the continent, corrupting the land. And now, all those corrupted bits of land were here. Grasslands. Snow-capped mountains. Swamps. Oceans. Battlefields, plenty of those. The occasional menacing tower. Places that only existed clockwise, or under moonlight, or tomorrow. There was more of it than should be able to fit in the caldera of the dead volcano they’d all been swept into, but when had magic ever let something like that stop it?

  The way to survive in the Cauldron was to always think If I was an ancient wizard who’d achieved lichdom in my search to become a god, what evil bastard thing would I have put behind that rock?

  After twenty years working as a Cauldron guide, Runa had escaped from behind a lot of rocks.

  Now, she stared at her campfire and sighed. Dinner was in the pot—another sack of dried stew, doing the sorriest impression of re-hydration she’d seen. Next to it, the dough she’d prodded to a sticky mess looked almost appetising, if you ignored the fact that those black flecks weren’t raisins.

  It would all be ready for the wizards to turn their noses up at in an hour or two. Long enough for them to work out their problems, and likely as not find some new reasons to snipe at each other instead.

  Except the mountains were going to get here first.

  She ground her tusks in frustration.

  Afterwards, she wouldn’t be able to say what made her pick up the lump of dough, wrap a cloth around it and stash it in the bag at her belt. Call it a premonition, call it a lesson learned from twenty years guiding travellers through the most cursed lands in the world. Don’t leave camp without a snack even when the Cauldron isn’t getting shifty. When it is?

  Well, ideally she wouldn’t be leaving camp at all. The wards she’d spent so much coin on kept the campsite safe from the rumblings of the cursed lands beyond. You were meant to stay inside them for a reason.

  Runa rose, one wary eye on the mountains moving like ships through the lower-lying lands. The problem would be chasing the wizards out of whatever hidey-hole they’d found without scaring them further away from camp. Even after six weeks together, the humans still jumped if she stood up too quickly. And she knew what she must look like now, as daylight swept away: a hulking shadow against the sunset, skin the fading blue of the sky not touched by the more exciting shades of dusk, tusks jutting from her lower jaws and horns like a mountain ram’s curling back from her forehead. Part troll from the northern glaciers, part something that made her eyes glow red and smoke seep from her pores in battle and which people assumed—wrongly—was a different, even more fearsome type of troll.

  Wherever she went, she towered over people.

  Even if they weren’t horizontal in a convenient bush.

  She sighed, and called, “Wizards!”

  There was no response. Runa groaned. They hated when she called them ‘wizards’, which meant they were either so far away they couldn’t hear her, or were too busy to notice her calling.

  Either way: argh.

  One eye still on those fidgety mountains, Runa grabbed her weapons—her machete and axe, as useful against the environment as they were against wandering monsters—and her lightstick, which was useful against it getting bloody dark out in the middle of nowhere.

  She noted the wizards’ staffs lying tidily next to their bedrolls, and groaned again. Six weeks. Six weeks she’d spent trying to hammer it into this lot’s heads that you never left camp without your gear, and what did they do the second they got a moment to themselves?

  She stepped over the camp wards, reassured by the gentle zing of protective magic. Cauldron camp wards cost more than most guides made in a year, but they did help you survive long enough to earn the cost back. Wards stopped things from getting into your camp, but they also stopped your camp from being ground up between the various cursed lands bubbling and sliding against each other in the Cauldron, or sinking beneath its surface while you were asleep.

  All she had to do was find the wandering wizards, haul them back into camp, and they would survive whatever number of mountains threw themselves their way.

  “All”.

  “Ninnius! Anklopher!” she yelled this time, because the last month had made it clear that Anklopher would kick up the biggest fuss at his name being called second. “The Cauldron’s stirring. Need to get back behind the wards before it catches us.”

  No response.

  It was easy enough to follow their trail, at least. Ninnius never bothered to walk anywhere at anything less than an over-confident stride, and Anklopher’s charms left magic fizzing in their wake wherever they brushed up against a curse or hex, which around here was everything. Runa sniffed at the magic in the air, and made her way down the scrubby path.

  This was the Thornwaste. A zig-zagging scrabble of low brushland, spotted with boulders like broken fangs pushing up out of the dirt and strangled by the vines that gave the region its name. Despite its dire appearance there was less to actively kill you in this region than most of the other parts of the Cauldron, which was why she’d let the wizards skulk off by themselves in the first place. They were grown men, with the uncanny power to set things on fire with their minds; they could defend themselves against a few winged snakes or killer kangaroo-mice, and even the thorns only tried to tangle you up and eat you during the full moon.

  So she’d thought.

  Could have done with thinking harder, she grumbled to herself.

  A flutter of purple-blue fabric caught her eye. A stray thread from the entirely unsuitable for travel over-robe Anklopher refused to take off.

  The robe itself was flung over a shrub around the next corner.

  Oh, gods above and below.

  “You there, Anklopher?” she called. “You, uh. Uhh.”

  Long experience had taught her that if there was one thing adventurers of all sorts liked less than discovering how many biting insects existed in all regions of the Cauldron, it was being interrupted doing the activities most likely to lead to them discovering the existence of those insects.

  “You seen Ninnius around anywhere?” she called, and winced.

  There were some muffled curses from the other side of a large boulder—the oh-shit-oh-shit sort of curse, not the magical sort—and the sounds of two bodies becoming hurriedly disentangled.

  “Yes! What is it?” Anklopher stalked out from behind the rock. Compact and sour-faced, he only came up to Runa’s chest but made up for it with his incredibly unpleasant aura.

  He bent to brush dirt off his knees, realized that gave the game away, and straightened with a peevish expression. “What do you want? What merits disturbing—hmph—”

  As if on cue, Ninnius wandered into sight around the other side of the boulder, a dazed expression on his handsome face. A head taller than Anklopher, and gold to the shorter wizard’s snarling dark, Ninnius would have been the ideal client if it wasn’t for—

  “Some sort of trouble, oh flower among trackers?”

  —that.

  Runa had long since given up trying to explain the difference between trackers and guides. Jerking her head back towards camp, she said, “Something’s stirred the pot. We need to get back behind the wards.”

  “Nonsense.” Anklopher sneered. “As you well know, I carry a device to alert me of such things. if there were any risk of the Cauldron’s natural activity interrupting my—our—er—”

  “Activities?” Runa suggested flatly.

  “—my geo-magical detector would—”

  He patted fruitlessly at his under-robes. His eye fell on a small golden object on the ground.

  Its many intricate dials were whirring.

  As the three of them watched, it burst into flame.

  Anklopher went pale.

  “Camp,” Runa ordered.

  Anklopher looked like he was going to waste time figuring out how to pick up the burning trinket, so she stomped the fire out and grabbed it. “Now.”

  “Do you have any idea which mountains are heading for us, you wondrous creature?” Ninnius asked, fixing the darkening horizon with an interested, unhurried stare. “If it’s the Knuckle, it’s nothing to me, of course, but if it’s the Gloaming Range—”

  “Not this again!” Anklopher made a frustrated sound. “I don’t care how many prophecies you convinced drunks in taverns to make up for you, there is no real evidence connecting the Blood Lord to the Gloaming Range, even if—”

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  Runa put one hand on each wizard’s shoulders and pushed them ahead of her. The moving mountain range was behind them now, but still…

  She quickened her pace.

  Ninnius spoke over Anklopher’s interruption. “—though, if it’s the Moonshroud, I might be convinced to take a sneaky detour.”

  She risked a glance behind, and wished she hadn’t.

  Leaves shivered on branches, making the low bushes seem like hunched-over animals frozen in fear. Pebbles danced on the hard dirt.

  Runa’s jaw tightened. That should only be happening if the Thornwaste was getting ready to haul ass, too.

  If she picked the wizards up and flung them over her shoulders, would the guild take a cut off her fee for rough handling?

  “That’s the Lowering Silver Range,” she gritted out, beginning to run, or as close as she could manage while letting the humans keep pace.

  Anklopher tried, unsuccessfully, to plant his feet. “Highly unlikely. I would recognise Silvers of any height anywhere. And while the mountain does appear to be approaching, it is not doing so nearly fast enough to merit this sort of fuss!”

  “What?”

  Runa followed the scathing jerk of Anklopher’s chin to the horizon in front of them.

  Her stomach sank.

  “Not those mountains. The ones behind us,” she managed to say.

  If two cursed mountain ranges were heading towards them, converging on the same spot…

  She risked a glance to the right.

  Make that three.

  How had she missed them? The borders between the Cauldron’s patchwork of cursed lands dulled the senses to an extent, but she usually knew if something this big was happening.

  Because the Cauldron told her.

  It wasn’t a good thing, being the sort of person an enchanted dead volcano communicated things to. But there were times when it would be useful.

  “MOVE!” she roared as the ground split beneath her feet.

  The world surged around them, shaking as though the rocky soil itself was trying to shrug something off. Small, many-fanged creatures scuttled and bounded away. Ninnius stumbled. She grabbed him.

  The merry glow of the campfire was a dozen paces away. Close enough. She hauled Ninnius up and half-thrust, half-threw him past the wards. Gold limned his body for the briefest moment as he passed through them.

  One down.

  She still had her hand on Anklopher’s shoulder as they ran. “Just a bit further,” she grunted.

  Something small and furry streaked past them at knee-height. Anklopher made a strangled noise and magic filled the air around him.

  “Hey—” Runa cut herself off as the wizard disappeared.

  He wanted to teleport himself to safety? Fine. Better late than never.

  Except he didn’t reappear in camp.

  A dismayed cry warbled out behind her.

  “You zapped yourself backwards?” she growled, and sprinted to him.

  A black spike burst through the ground between them. She skidded to a halt before she impaled herself on it.

  “No—that’s impossible!” Anklopher stared white-faced at the spike. It grew, thrusting up from the earth, a black metal steeple that sucked the remaining light from the dusk. Runa grabbed it for balance and swung herself over the crumbling ground to where Anklopher was standing gaping. “It can’t be…”

  The steeple rose higher, revealing the sloped roof of a tower. Dry, thorn-tangled earth fell away on all sides. Runa let out a slow hiss of breath.

  It was another corruption, bursting up in the middle of the Thornwaste.

  This wasn’t meant to happen.

  Their campsite, protected by the wards, slid away on the far side of the tower like an egg on a greased pan.

  She grabbed Anklopher. “Can you get us both back to camp?”

  “What?”

  “Teleporting. Can you reach camp?” He still looked dazed, and she took a risk. “Can you get us over to Ninnius?”

  His expression firmed. “Yes.”

  He raised his hands, weaving magic as he muttered a spell. Magic surrounded them both, and the fact that the spell picked her up as well as him was the best thing to happen all day.

  She blinked. The world reformed itself around her, a few feet from the campsite. Of course the spell couldn’t put them inside the wards.

  Before anything else could go wrong, she shoved Anklopher through the wards and stepped in after him.

  The wizards fell together and then didn’t seem to know whether to embrace or insult one other. Runa ignored them, kneeling to check the position of the five outer wards and the central pole.

  “We’ll be safe in here, won’t we?”

  She’d never heard Anklopher ask a question in a way that admitted he didn’t already know the answer.

  Runa straightened. “So long as the wards hold.”

  “One hates to wonder, beloved saviour, but … How deep do they go?” Ninnius asked.

  She and Anklopher exchanged a look. Anklopher had shown a particular interest in the wards. She’d had to shoo him away from disassembling them too many times already. Which meant he probably already knew the answer to Ninnius’s question.

  “About six feet,” she said.

  “The depth of a grave! Charming.”

  “They’re designed to withstand the temperaments of the Cauldron.” Anklopher sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  “Including that?”

  They all stared at the tower. It was taller than Runa, now, slicing up through the dirt like a shark’s fin through murky water. A shark’s fin with a lot of spikes on it.

  And more. The Thornwaste shook and splintered. All around them, roofs, towers, crenelated half-walls curved out like claws. Runa traced the shapes that bulged beneath the Thornwaste, made a few quick calculations, and swore.

  Something beneath them grated, so close she felt the rumble of dirt against her feet. She leapt away and saw black stone break through the earth, pushing up beneath the magical weave of the ward like a needle against a soap bubble.

  “Shit,” she muttered, at the same moment Ninnius yelped “Six feet?”

  He thrust out his hands. Magic twisted around each of the wards. Runa yelled a warning. The campsite lurched sideways and suddenly they were adrift on the only remaining fragment of the Thornwaste Runa could see.

  The rest had shattered around the nightmare rising from the depths. A fortress of solid black stone, the sort that sucked the light from everything around it.

  And night was falling. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see anything.

  The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

  Anklopher and Ninnius were exchanging a barrage of scared insults.

  “And those wards will hold, will they?” Ninnius asked, uncharacteristically grim-faced. “Against an ancient sepulchre literally breaking through the fabric of the land?”

  “If you’re suggesting my spellcasting is insufficient—”

  “Certainly not.”

  Runa wouldn’t have believed it if she wasn’t looking right at him, but Ninnius’s face softened. His eyes, for once, focused on the face in front of him, not the magical marvels offered by every other piece of the world except the bit of it talking to him. “My mistrust is for the base design,” he said, almost apologetically.

  They both looked up at her, gentleness making way for suspicion. In the no longer even slightly distant distance, rock boomed against rock, and in front of them, dark spires pierced the sky.

  She didn’t blame them for the mistrust in their eyes. It was hard to believe any ward could stand against this.

  “Take it up with the guild,” she said vaguely.

  The fortress slowed as it rose higher and higher. Runa squinted into the growing shadows. Was she imagining that the other scraps of the Thornwaste still clinging around the fortress’s edges were trying to squirm away from it?

  The wizards were both still looking at her. And she was the expert.

  She took a deep breath.

  “I’ve seen this before. Not this castle, but other invasive domains. The other lands always sense when a new curse gets pulled in. They gang up on it.”

  Those wriggling clumps of thorns didn’t look like they were ganging up on anything. They were getting away, while there was still anything left of them to get.

  The mountains, though?

  This intrusive curseland explained why what looked like every mountain range in the Cauldron was slamming towards them.

  “Never seen them face down anything this big before, though,” she added. “This might not be good news.”

  Ninnius licked his lips. “From a certain, admittedly selfish perspective—”

  “It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for,” Anklopher admitted wearily from behind them both. “We might as well admit it.”

  She turned to him. “What?”

  His face wasn’t pale anymore. It was gray. He ran one hand down it, unable to take his eyes off the fortress spewing itself from the earth. “This is the tomb we’ve been searching for. The last resting place of… Well.”

  The hairs on the back of Runa’s neck prickled. Guilt was not an expression she was used to seeing on the peevish Anklopher’s face.

  She knew they’d been looking for a tomb. It was on the paperwork. Wizards Anklopher of the Something Tower and Ninnius of Some Other Place, research trip for evidence of burial practices in sepulchres exploited by the Seven during the War of the Deathless, sponsorship for a Cauldron guide supplied by the Arch-Wizards of both their towers, who were no doubt glad to be rid of them both for a few months. The usual.

  Easy. Not particularly dangerous, for localised scales of danger.

  And now, clearly, a lie.

  She got the feeling she really didn’t want to know whose tomb they’d actually been searching for.

  Unfortunately, wanting to wasn’t the same as better find out in case it gets us all dead.

  “That’s what you’ve been dragging yourselves around every corner of the Cauldron for?” she growled, pointing up at the towering black fortress.

  Ninnius waved in what might have been a calming manner if he wasn’t gray-faced with fear. “If it is—it isn’t meant to be here!”

  “It isn’t meant to be anywhere,” Anklopher interjected. “The theory that any of the Deathless survived the shriving of their souls by—”

  “You’re looking for a tomb holding one of the Deathless?” Runa burst out, and the Cauldron roared.

  Runa turned full circle, counting mountain peaks, not letting the wizards see the smoke curling behind her eyes. “Feels like every mountain range in the Cauldron is coming at us,” she muttered. Their little scrap of the Thornwaste had slipped onto the borders of something she couldn’t see in the dark but felt… slithery. The Gar-ghost Bog?

  Whatever it was, it was trying to slither away, the same as the Thornwaste had. Out of the way of the black fortress rising up, and the mountains coming to crush it.

  Runa made a quick calculation in her head, and swore. There were plenty of bogs in the Cauldron—something about them attracted cursed-ness—and they were all large. If this one slithered out of the way and made space for the mountains bearing down on them…

  Then the mountains would, very suddenly in the way of the Cauldron, be much, much closer.

  Anklopher waved his hands irritably. “Which is also not possible, because—”

  “No, no, don’t you see? It’s so clear now.” Ninnius interrupted. “The popular conception has always been that Vellugar created the Cauldron to save the continent from the ravages of the Skeleton War, but Lintessit argues it was meant as a cage for—”

  “Hold onto something,” Runa suggested. Neither of them appeared to hear her, so she grabbed them by the shoulders again and pushed them down.

  The first mountain hit a moment later.

  The campsite bucked, spinning along the edge of a frozen cliff-face like a leaf caught in rapids. Runa kept her head down and her clients down, too, trying to see what was going on beyond the crash of ice and rock.

  The earth was never really solid, out in the Cauldron, but it had never felt so flimsy before.

  Something dark and shapeless loomed from the shadows of a glacier. It hit the wards with a shriek and vanished. When the crack of rock on rock rang out from above and snow crashed down in a mass that would have wiped them out, it instead broke over the upper dome of the wards and raged on down the mountainside.

  “We’re safe so long as we don’t roll out of the wards, aren’t we?” Anklopher sounded hopeful.

  Runa gritted her teeth. “Wards are built to withstand the Cauldron.”

  “But…?”

  She bit back a sigh. Freaking out clients was a bad idea, but so was lying to them in the face of near and obvious danger. “But I’ve never seen the Cauldron like this. Can’t imagine the enchanters who made the wards had this in mind when they magicked them.”

  “The Thornwaste—”

  “The Thornwaste is gone. We’re on what’s left of it. And that isn’t meant to happen,” she added before Anklopher could say it for her, probably sounding more panicked. “The places here shift around, bump up against each other, but they never tear each other apart like this.”

  The acid waves of the Dead Waters might break upon the burning blossoms of Vellugar’s Folly, but they didn’t break them.

  “So none of this can possibly be happening!” Ninnius said. “That is good news. Do you think anyone told the Blood Lord that?”

  Runa’s head snapped around. “What do you mean, the Blood Lord?”

  Anklopher avoided her eyes. “He’s been dead two hundred years,” he pointed out to Ninnius.

  “Did they tell his corpse?”

  “Well, as you know, according to—”

  The roar of destruction blotted out all other sounds. Ninnius and Anklopher’s mouths moved, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. All things considered, that was probably for the best.

  The ground buckled and bulged. A glacier valley scooped up the campsite and lifted them higher.

  Into the light.

  The sun rose again, not because it was morning, but because it had set behind the mountains, and now the mountains were falling away below them.

  Wonder spiralled through her. This was what kept her coming back to the Cauldron, even on the days that felt most like she was playing with fire. She didn’t belong here—nobody belonged here—but did that matter, in the face of this?

  The heart-punch of adrenaline. The sort of adventure that didn’t exist anywhere else on the continent, because it had all been dragged here, a concentrated remnant of a world that had ended when the Skeleton War became the Scourge of Gods, and the great healing that came after.

  The Cauldron was always different. The Cauldron was always something new. It didn’t ask anything of you—it just dared you to survive.

  And then it offered you something like this.

  She could never resist it.

  She wished she could tell someone about it.

  Runa frowned. Why had she thought that? Who would she tell? Her clients? They were here with her, seeing it themselves, and screaming about it. The other guides, back in the guildhall? They all shared brags about their exploits, sure, but that wasn’t what she wanted.

  Her heart tugged on something she couldn’t name. This was the life she’d dreamed of. The life she’d built for herself. Forging her path through the worst places the world had to offer.

  Feeling the Cauldron’s call.

  Resisting it.

  So why did it feel like something was missing?

  Probably because we’re about to die, she reasoned with herself. It wasn’t like you could go bragging at the tavern about that time every mountain and the Cauldron came at you, and you thought there was no way to escape, and you were right.

  Then someone screamed.