“Okay. Yeah,” Astrid says, filing away that warning. She has a strong stomach for so much — hot animal entrails, fresh kills, even sky burials, even shoving a knife into someone if she has to — but there’s a difference between the freshly-dead and the rotting. A perversion of the natural order; something hanging on long after it should’ve moved on, should’ve fed the grass and beasts by now.

“Were you here when it happened?” she asks, still stalling.

It’s a reasonable assumption, maybe. The other woman’s an experienced Riftwatcher and speaks with firm familiarity; and Astrid knows, vaguely, that this organisation was Involved Somehow when Nevarra first fell.