No-one should be able to treat them like this!

What was most disturbing was the knowledge that this land still harboured magic that their destructiveness had not touched.

Even the rocks and the ice, it appeared, sheltered secrets.

Qeteb was the first to regain some form of control over both his physical and his magical self. With an effort he'd not had to make since he'd fought (unsuccessfully) against the Enemy's original dismemberment, he managed to slow their passage through space until he could feel the other Demons regain some control as well.

Iwill put a stop to this, Qeteb began to say to them, when suddenly, horribly, they did stop. The rock and earth and ice walls disintegrated about them, and they felt themselves falling through cold, dark air.

"Ugh!" Qeteb said as he hit very, very solid rock.

Beside him he heard another five impacts, and low curses and moans of pain filled the dark air about them.

Qeteb struggled into a sitting position — he'd assumed his metalled, armoured visage — and felt about him with his power, ignoring the mutters and moans of the other Demons.

Where were they?

Dark, deep, cold, barren.

It felt like the most distant of interstellar wastes, but Qeteb understood they'd not travelled beyond the boundaries of Tencendor itself.

Where were they?

Underground, with the weight of millions upon millions of tons of rock above them.

"We're in a mine," Sheol said beside him, and Qeteb felt her body crowd his, almost as if she needed the comfort of what physical warmth she could draw from his armour.

He shoved her away roughly.

"And we have a mountain atop us," Mot added, and Qeteb snarled, finally orientating himself within the geography of Tencendor.

They were deep underground in what the Tencendorians had called the Murkle Mountains.

Deep in the former home, if Qeteb had but known it, of the Chitter Chatters.

Qeteb cursed foully, and struck the rock he sat on with his mailed fist.

The sound of the impact echoed about them until its growing melody drove the Demons to a shrieking, capering dance of frustration and fury.

How dare anyone do this to them!

Silence, and Axis tensed, wondering what had happened.

"Forty-two thousand!" Azhure whispered beside him, "Ur said there were forty-two thousand Skraelings!"

"Yes, but —" Axis began.

"Don't you see?" Azhure whispered furiously, and Katie laughed again, a sweet, happy sound.

"What?" Axis said.

Azhure sighed impatiently. "There were forty-two thousand souls that Faraday transplanted out as the Minstrelsea forest."

"Yes ..."

"And Ur was their guardian during their years as seedlings."

"Yes ..."

"Don't you understand yet'}" Azhure cried, and Zared jumped in, his voice excited.

"When Qeteb destroyed the forests, the souls went back to Ur!" he cried, and Axis felt Azhure nod her head enthusiastically.

"Yes! That's what she has been carrying about in that pot — the forty-two thousand souls who fled back to her when their physical forms, the trees, were destroyed."

"And now Ur has used the Song of the Trees to destroy the Skraelings," Axis said.

"Oh!" Azhure exclaimed, and wriggled about in further impatience. "Don't you see? Forty-two thousand Skraelings ... and forty-two thousand souls?"

Axis huddled in stunned silence as the import of what Azhure had said sank in.

"Ur has given her souls a new home," Azhure said into the silence. "The Skraelings."

"That's why she needed them drunk," Katie put in. "Drunken Skraelings put up no resistance to the souls of the trees."

"But where have the souls of the Skraelings gone," Zared said, "if their bodies are now occupied by the souls of the trees?"

"Fled to wander weeping and wailing across the ice drifts of the extreme north," said a voice above them. "Only the most foolhardy of wanderers will ever be bothered by them."

The blanket lifted, and there was Ur. "Would you like to meet your army, Axis StarMan?"

Chapter 41

The Avenue

Axis helped Azhure and Katie out of the cart as Zared leapt down into the snow. The wind still blew frighteningly hard and cold, and Axis wrapped his cloak, and a blanket over that, as tight about him as he could.

He did not say anything.

As far as he could see in the snowstorm, the entire column was flanked on either side by lines of Skraelings. They stood some four paces apart, several deep, each Skraeling staggered so that it stood in the space between the two in front of it, rather than in direct line with them.

Without exception the Skraelings stood with their feet buried deep into the drifting snow, their bodies and arms and loathsome heads drifting as they were tugged by the wind.

Their silver-orbed eyes were lively with intelligence rather than malice, and their toothsome grins were cheerful, rather than malicious.

For the first time in his life, Axis felt only curiosity as he stared at a Skraeling, not fear or the desire to kill.

But...