They called themselves the Werigda, and they searched for missing wives and children. Two days before they had returned to camp, warriors flushed with success in the ways of small war, and found destruction and slaughter instead of their loved ones. Invincible fighters became panicked husbands and fathers, sprinting through wreckage crying names. But when they realized their families had been taken and not killed, they became warriors again. And they'd ride driven by love and terror.

By mid-morning, colossal stoneworks resolved from the sheets [missing] and reared above them: the moss- and lichen-crowded ruins of Myclai, once the capital of Akksersia and the greatest city of the Ancient Northsave Tryse. Aengelas knew nothing of the Old Wars, or of ancient proud Akksersia, but he understood his people were descendants of the Apocalypse. They dwelt among the unearthed bones of greater things.

They followed the track over mounds, beneath headless pillars, and along walls spilling into gravel. The Sranc they followed, Aengelas knew, were neither Kig'krinaki nor Xoagi'i, the clans that had been their rivals since time immemorial. They followed a different, more wicked clan-one never before encountered. Some of them were even horsed-something unheard-of for the Sranc.

They passed through dead Myclai in silence, deaf to her rebuke for the unruined.

By evening the rains had stopped, but deepening cold was added to their horror, and their shivers became shudders. That night they found a fire-pit, and Aengelas, poking through the black ash with his knife, retrieved a small pile of little bones. Children's bones. The Werigda gnashed their teeth and howled at the dark heavens.

There could be no sleep that night, so they rode on. The plains seemed a heart-stopping hollow, a great funerary shroud, exposed at all points to abyssal portent, to impossibly cruel designs. What had they done? How had they angered the man-pummelling Gods? Had the Stag-Flame burned too low? Had the sacrificial calves been diseased?

Two more days of wet, shivering fury. Two more days of trembling horror. Aengelas would see the tracks of barefoot women and children, and he would remember their burnt homes, the bodies of the tribe's adolescents strewn amidst the wreckage, desecrated in unspeakable ways. And he would remember his wife's frightened eyes before he'd left with the others to raid the Xoagi'i. He would remember her words of premonition.

"Do not leave us, Aenga . . . The Great Ruiner hunts for us. I've seen him in my dreams."

Another fire-pit, more small bones. But this time the ashes were warm. The very ground seemed to whisper with the screams of their loved ones.

They were near. But both they and their horses, Aengelas told them, were too weary for the grim work of battle. Many were dismayed by these words. Whose child would the Sranc eat, they cried, while they tossed on the hard ground? All of them, Aengelas said, if the Werigda failed to win the morrow's battle. They must sleep.

That night anguished cries awakened him. Pale, callused hands dragged him from his mat, and he drove his knife through the belly of his assailant. The thunder of hooves crashed around him, and he was struck face-first into the turf. He struggled to his knees, crying out to his men, but the gibbering shadows were upon him. His arms were wrenched behind him and cruelly bound. He was stripped of his clothes.

With the other survivors, Aengelas was driven through the night pulled by a leather thong cut into his lips. He wept as he ran, knowing all was lost. No more would he make love to Valrissa, his wife. No longer would he tease his sons as they sat about the evening fire. Over and through the agony of his face, he asked: What have we done to deserve this? What have we done to deserve this? What have we done? What have we done?

By the wicked glare of torchlight he saw the Sranc, with their [missing] shoulders and dog-deep chests, surfacing from the night as though from the depths of the Sea. Inhumanly beautiful faces, as white as polished bone; armour of lacquered human skin; necklaces of human teeth the shrunken faces of men stitched into their round shields. He smelled their sweet stench-like feces and rotted fruit. He heard the nightmarish clacking of their laughter, and from somewhere in the night, the screams of the Werigda's horses as they were slaughtered.

And periodically he saw the Nonmen, tall upon their silk-black steeds. What Valrissa had dreamed, he realized, was true: the Great Ruiner hunted them! But why?

They reached the Sranc encampment in the grey light of day, a string of naked, brutalized men. A great chorus of wails greeted them-women crying names, children howling "Da! Daa!" The Sranc led them into the midst of their huddled loved ones, and in an act of curious mercy cut them loose. Aengelas flew to Valrissa and his only remaining son. Wracked by sobs he hugged both of them, clutched at their bent [missing]. And for an instant he felt hope in the pale warmth of degraded [missing].

"Where's Ileni?" he hissed.

But his wife could only cry "Aenga! Aengaaa!"

The respite, however, was short-lived. Those men who couldn't find their families, who either knelt alone in the frozen mud or raced scouring and searching for faces now dead, were butchered. Then those [missing] and children without husbands were also hacked to silence, until only those who had been reunited remained.

Under the dark eyes of the Nonmen, the Sranc then began binding the survivors into two rows, until the Werigda were drawn [missing] threads across snow and dead winter grasses, husbands opposite their wives and children.

Leashed to an iron spike hammered into the ground, Aengelas cringed from the cold and threw himself over and over against the braided thongs that held him from his wife and son. He spat and raged at the passing Sranc. He tried to summon heartening words, words that might let his family endure, that might grace them with dignity for what was about to come. But he could only weep their names, and curse himself for not strangling them earlier, for not saving them from what was about to happen.

And then, for the first time, he heard the question question-even though it was not spoken.

An uncanny silence fell across the Werigda, and Aengelas understood that all of them had heard the impossible voice . . . The question had resounded through the souls of all his suffering people.

Then he saw . . . it it. An abomination walking through dawn twilight.

It was half-again taller than a man, with long, folded wings curved like scythes over its powerful frame. Save where it was mottled by black, cancerous spots, its skin was translucent, and sheathed about a great flared skull shaped like an oyster set on edge. And within the gaping jaws of that skull was fused another another, more manlike, so that an almost human face grinned from its watery features.

The Sranc howled with rapture as it passed, and jerked at their groups as they fell to their knees. The mounted Nonmen lowered their shining scalps. It studied the rows of hapless humans, and then its great black eyes fell upon Aengelas. Valrissa sobbed, a mere length away.

You . . . We sense the old fire in you, manling . . .

"I am Werigda!" Aengelas roared.

Do you know what we are?

"The Great Ruiner," Aengelas gasped.

Noooo, it cooed, as though his mistake had aroused a delicious shiver. We are not He . . . We are His servant. Save my Brother, we are the last of those who descended from the void . . . We are not He . . . We are His servant. Save my Brother, we are the last of those who descended from the void . . .

"The Great Ruiner!" Aengelas cried.

The abomination had walked ever closer throughout this exchange, until it loomed over his wife and child. Valrissa clutched Bengulla to her bosom, held out a tragic warding hand against the hoary figure.

Will you tell us, manling? Tell us what we need to know?

"But I don't know!" Aengelas cried. "I know nothing of what you ask!"

Effortlessly, the Xurjranc snapped Valrissa's tether, and hoisted her before him, held her as though she were a doll. Bengulla shrieked "Mama! Mama!"

Once again the question thundered through Aengelas's soul. He [missing] tore at the turf.

"I don't know! I don't know!"

Beneath the monstrosity's claws, Valrissa went very still, like a lamb caught in the jaws of a wolf. Her terrified eyes turned from Aengelas, rolled upwards beneath their lids, as though trying to peer at the fig behind her.

"Valrissa!" Aengelas screamed. "Valrissssaa!" Holding her by the throat, the thing languorously picked her clothes away, like the skin of a rotten peach. As her breasts fell free, [garbled]with soft-pink nipples, a sheet of sunlight flickered across the horizon and illuminated her lithe curves . . . But the hunger that held her from behind remained shadowy-like glistening smoke.

Animal violence overcame Aengelas, and he strained at his leash and gagged inarticulate fury.

And a husky voice in his soul said: We are a race of lovers, manling. We are a race of lovers, manling.

"Beaaassee!" Aengelas wept. "I don't knoooowww . . ." The thing's free hand traced a thread of blood between her [missing] across the plane of her shuddering belly. Valrissa's eyes regarded Aengelas, thick with something impossible. She moaned and parted hanging legs to greet the abomination's hand. A race of lovers . . . A race of lovers . . .

"I don't know! I don't! I don't! Beaase stop! Beaasse!" The thing screeched like a thousand falcons as it plunged into [missing]. Glass thunder. Shivering sky. She bent back her head, her face contracted in pain and bliss. She convulsed and groaned, arched to meet the creature's thrusts. And when she climaxed, Aengelas crumpled, grasped his head between his hands, beat his face against the turf. The cold felt good against his broken lips.

With an inhuman, dragon gasp, the thing pressed its bruised prick up across her stomach and washed her sunlit breasts with [unclear] black seed. Another thunderous screech, woven by the thin human wail of a woman.

And again it asked the question.

I don't know . . .

These things make you weak, it said, tossing her like a sack to cold grasses. With a look, it gave her to the Sranc-to their licentious fury. Once again, it asked the question.

The abomination then gave his weeping son-sweet, innocent Bengulla-to the Sranc, and once again asked the question.

I don't know what you mean . . .

And when the Sranc made a womb of Aengelas himself, it asked-with each raper's thrust, it asked . . .

Until the gagging shrieks of his wife and child became the question. Until his own deranged howls became the question . . .

His wife and child were dead. Sacks of penetrated flesh with faces that he loved, and still . . . they did things.

Always, the same mad, incomprehensible question.

Who are the Dunyain?