Shoal inhaled the reek of things dead and rotting. She tried not to gag, but dry-heaved anyway, spitting up bile from her empty stomach onto the blue-white snow.

Around them, the air was black and turbulent; as if they were in the eye of a typhoon of filth that surged into existence where Whistbone walked on his blanched legs – broken and backwards like a bird’s, or like twisted branches of a dead tree. The clotted, reeking air shut out all light except a small circle high above – a distant view of clean sky that Whistbone tolerated as if to tease his prey (and even his own servants were prey). Within the column exuded by Whistbone’s corrupted soul it was always night.

Whistbone took a step forward, leaving no print in the snow. His fused club of a foot – more hoof than anything – drove the fallen driver’s head into the snow and crushed it, black blood steaming in the snow. Whistbone, naked and pale, corpulent and cadaverous, paused and leered at Shoal, exposing hundreds of yellowish fishhook teeth.