Guff stepped into the shallows and the hunt was on.

He turned back to his friend. Venn was waiting on the bank. His green hide was barely visible beneath the strips of bark and chunks of driftwood pinned flat against his skin by his spines. Just another filthy mouse-man tactic to use against them, he had said the first time, thinking of the shelled one back in the Green. “What are you doing?” Guff hissed anxiously.

Venn smiled. “Just soaking up a last few rays. We don’t know how long this will go on for.” He sloshed into the water by his companion’s side. Jiharu lay in front of them, towering and imposing and overwhelming but unsuspecting. “Just remember, we have moons, seasons, years to make it fall if we have to. We need to keep trace of the way out.”

Guff shook his maw. “No, we kill and kill until there’s none left. We only have one chance to get here before the dragons learn our surprise. Once we’re inside, they can’t touch us. It needs to be a massacre.” He had prepared for that by sharpening his claws and pointing his teeth against the pebbles this morning. They were going to be overworked.

“It’s too big. We might get lost. We need to play the long-”

“Now!” shrieked Guff.

A huge shadow swept the bank. Something grey and hulking shot by them like a hawk. Alguan had been watching and waiting. First was his end of the pact.

They charged into the water, splashing and thrashing their tails for balance. They felt a wind above. The flash and brilliant white of winter. Then they were rising from the depths upon wings of ice. Sheets of cold earth raced out before them. They plunged on. The dragon’s breath buckled beneath them but held.

Venn looked ahead. There was a bridge across the lake. A slippery and cold bridge, with fathoms of watery death close on either side. But there was no going back now.

They ran on to Jiharu, and as they went, the bloodlust took them. There would be no retreat now, Venn knew. Only blood and mouse-meat and victory.

The ice-sheet endured before them, but the frost dragon was gone. It was then that they saw the dazzling plume of light off to the left. Black shapes hung in the sun, clawing and screeching. More detached from the balconies and towers of the city and rowed through the air towards the battle. Alguan was outnumbered twenty to one at least. But it was not their concern. He had drawn the powers of the air from their narrow bridge, and all their focus was now on reaching its end.

They passed rafts of wailing levin on each side. One boat had been caught in the icy blast, and stiff corpses and berries lay mixed on the ice in front. Venn wove through the wreckage and revelled in the bloody puddle about a sailor pierced by his own mast. The first blood had been spilled, the first life taken in vengeance. There would be many more.

They were almost at the city now. The blank wooden facade of the outermost keep loomed off to their right. Ahead and left, there were the spires they had seen from shore, but now they could see the channels that lay between, streets lined with smaller shelters and stalls of wooden casks. It stretched back as far as the eye could see. Everything tumbled with levin. Venn could make out the rocky shore of the island, the last tiny strip not claimed by their prey, and the mice that bordered it. They were flailing strips of something flexible in the air, and even as the reptiles scrabbled on the ice, stones the size of mere scales dropped onto them from the guards. They did not pierce, did no harm, and now the skern could see the guards waving back the onlookers as they loaded another round. They were running, hundreds of them, and the sight made the hunters ravenous. Their back legs slipped on their saliva as they flung themselves forward. More stones fell pointlessly against scale and bark, and then the levin were taking up spears and lining the beach with bristles.

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Guff was almost upon them when he heard Venn’s cry. “To the tunnel! They cannot surround us!” And he saw and knew his friend’s course, a hollow and a stream at the base of the platform before them taller than the highest tree, barred against entry with wooden planks. He skidded round to the right and did not slow as he met the grille. Venn met it panting at the same time, and the wood disintegrated into nothing before their momentum. Spines bent and snapped but they felt no pain.

They were inside the keep, and the raised room about the stream was filled with levin, scrambling for the narrow hallways about its edge.

There were no manoeuvres, no tactics for this tight space. It was time for the brute force of the first hunt all over again.

“Charge!” screamed Guff.

They heaved their bulks from the water, raised up their claws, and launched themselves into the sea of levin. At long last, the sweet resistance of flesh upon talon filled the air. So did the squeaks and squeals. They crashed their tails and raked their legs across the roiling mass, and blood sprayed and blood dripped and Venn felt the power of centuries fill him once more. They should never have doubted. Guff barrelled into some tall wooden thing in the centre of the hall and splintered it to matchwood. The top stayed intact and fell heavily into one of the exits. He hissed joy as he took up the panicked victims he had trapped and snapped them one by one in his aching teeth.

They were thrashing about for several seconds before they realised all were dead before them.

“This is what we live for!” laughed Venn. Guff was ripping open the stomach of a crying guard hungrily, and Venn joined in. The taste of its flesh was life itself.

When they had finished, they felt the pain. Spears and axes lay here and there among the bodies. They had been fighting back, but neither Venn and Guff had felt it and now it still did not matter. The spirit of the hunt would carry them through whatever came against them.

“Where next?” cried Guff.

“Anywhere!” roared Venn. “Don’t let them think. Don’t let them regroup. Charge and kill!”

They left the fallen and, led by Guff, plunged clumsily down a random corridor. The levin were small, but these passages were plenty big enough for skern too. At least they were not so wide as a dragon.

They were so hungry, so fast, that they did not see the sharp turn until it was too late.

The wall was as flimsy as the grille. They plunged headlong out into fresh air. It was the street behind the keep, lined with spearmice and slingers. Instinctively, Guff went left, Venn right. It was all a blur of rage and triumph. The bodies fell and some were groaning and crawling, but they deserved to die slowly amid the insolence of this foul place.

Even more deserving were the cowards. Guff sniffed out fright within a storeroom halfway along the road and prised off its door. They spent ten minutes within.

When they came out, their snouts were red and steaming. Venn could hardly gurgle his words out from beneath the clots.

“What?” Guff gasped.

“We better return to the castle and empty it before we go on. We can’t risk brave ones coming up behind.”

He turned to go, but Guff held him back. They stood drawing in grateful gulps of air in the warm carnage of the street. “We really can do this, can’t we Venn?” It wasn’t a question. “The greatest raid since the wave hunts. You were right, brother. We will have our own clan.”

Venn considered. “We have the upper hand, but we mustn’t lose the pace.” But he allowed himself a nod of happiness all the same. “That hall, the running, the fallen ones... we’ll never forget this, brother.”

They never forgot.