Now stamina and nerve were all that mattered, and the duel became a slogging match.

A series of detonations rocked the room as pots and jars exploded on the blazing benches. The combatants ducked from flying pottery shards. Then an axe-head penetrated the door.

The concatenation of events threw the bandit off his stroke. Serrah homed in. Leading with the knife, she evaded his careless defence and raked his chest. He wailed, clutched the pumping lesion and, recoiling, crashed into an upended chair. Sprawled on the floor, he tried to hold her off. She dashed the sword from his hand and it bounced away, steel on stone, chiming.

He focused on her through pained eyes, and recognised the pain in hers.

‘Butterfly?’

he whispered.

‘This butterfly has a sting,’ Serrah told him, and drove home her blade.

She straightened slowly, short of breath, blinking from the smoke. Fire had taken hold on all sides and the heat was crushing. The back of her throat was grievously sore.

An axe cleaved the door again, and another joined it. In a cacophony of splitting wood and rending metal, her group broke through. They spilled in with raised weapons and taut bows, then stopped to stare.

Serrah got a hold on herself.

‘Report!’

she demanded huskily.

The foremost group-member tore his eyes from the carnage. ‘Er, nest cleared, ma’am.’ He looked at Phosian. ‘No…other casualties.’

‘Good. Now everybody out.

Fast

.’

He nodded Phosian’s way. ‘What about…?’

‘Bring him.

Hurry!

’

Arms across faces to shield themselves from the inferno, they ran to retrieve their comrade. Then Serrah shepherded them out, bringing up the rear. The passageway funnelled smoke, and they were all coughing and retching by the time they reached air.

Outside, the rest of her men were waiting. They set Phosian down and Serrah felt for a pulse. The band exchanged looks. At length she shook her head, though she had really known all along.

She took in the faces of her crew and knew what they were thinking. ‘I don’t like losing anyone,’ she said, ‘even a wilful dolt. But there are overheads in our work and this was one of them. There’ll be no indiscipline about it. The mission’s not done till we’re home.’

‘Of all the people to lose,’ somebody muttered.

Serrah thought Phosian’s loss was preferable to any of her seasoned crew. But it was going to cause a lot more trouble. She concentrated on priorities. ‘This place will be crawling with citizens soon and they won’t all be glad to see us. Eyes peeled. And if we run into opposition, no quarter.’

No one chose to debate the issue. She assigned a detail to carry Phosian’s body and they started out. Behind them, flames were playing on the roof of the ramp den. Inky smoke and eddying sparks belched from the windows.

They moved through the streets warily, keeping to the shadows. As they went they rid themselves of their outer layers of clothing, balling masks and shirts and pitching them into bushes and ill-lit alleys. They wiped the ash from their faces.

Serrah discarded her mask and shook loose a tumble of barley hair. She spat on her hands and rubbed them together. The reaction was starting to set in; the pain of exertion and of the acid burns made itself felt. Above all, what had happened to Phosian. Taking deep, regular breaths, she willed herself to stop shaking.

They could hear noises behind them, a commotion of faint shouting. Serrah increased the band’s pace, and thought about splitting them up. But they reached the piece of waste ground without incident, seeing nothing save an occasional errant glamour. In the curtain of trees they rejoined their horses. Two men wrapped Phosian in a cloak and draped the body over his saddle.

Reaching the road, they saw a group of horsemen approaching, but not from the direction of the raid. They were too close and too numerous to outrun. Serrah and her crew steadied their horses and fingered their swords.

As the riders came nearer there was just enough light for their distinctive red tunics to be made out.

‘That’s all we need,’ one of Serrah’s band grumbled.

Thirty or forty strong, the advancing company was three to four times bigger than Serrah’s, though how many of them might have been chimeras was anybody’s guess. The paladin clans had access to the finest magic.

They arrived in good order, their military bearing contrasting with her band’s more casual demeanour. The paladin captain halted his column. A goatee-bearded, hard-faced individual, he wasted no time on niceties. ‘Serrah Ardacris?’

She nodded.

‘Escort party for Chand Phosian.’

Serrah said nothing, and nobody else dared speak.

‘We’re here for Chand Phosian,’ the paladin restated deliberately, as though addressing a moronic child. ‘Where is he?’

‘We’re fresh from a mission,’ Serrah told him. ‘There’re likely to be repercussions any minute. Let’s get out of here and -’

‘Where’s the Principal-Elect’s son?’ He read their expressions and added sharply,

‘What’s happened?’

Reluctantly, she motioned for Phosian’s horse to be brought from the rear. At the sight of the burden it carried, the captain’s face darkened. He dismounted and went to the steed as the others watched in silence. Pulling aside the cloak, he bared Phosian’s pallid features.

‘Combat casualty,’ Serrah explained.

The captain looked up at her. ‘You’ve been very careless.’

‘We take losses on missions, you know that.’

‘Some losses are unacceptable.’

‘Oh, come on! It was just -’

He swiped the air with his hand, cutting her off. ‘Save it, Ardacris! You’re coming with us.’

Before the empires, before history, there was the Dreamtime.

The earth’s energies were known then, and mastered, and the Founders chose to mark out their channels of power. Scholars speculated that the whole world had been embellished in that golden age. They pictured an all-pervasive, varicoloured grid covering plains and valleys, forests and pastures, mapping the spirit of the land and its alliance with the heavens.

Since the Founders left the stage, epochs ago, the mesh had fallen into neglect, though it still animated the magic. But in some places, through respect or fear, the old ways were honoured, if not entirely understood.

One such was a remote hamlet not far from Bhealfa’s inhospitable eastern coast. An indigo dye line, the width of a man’s fist, ran arrow straight along its central street, marking the power’s flow. Most people tried not to step on it. The stranger arriving on foot as the sun rose didn’t seem to care about that.

His appearance, too, turned the heads of the few citizens up and about at that hour. Taller than average, and muscular, he walked with easy confidence. His weaponry included two swords, one conventionally sheathed, the other strapped across his back. Clean shaven when the norm was more often hirsute, his eyes matched the hue of his lengthy, jet-black ponytail. He had handsome features, in a chiselled, weather-beaten fashion, though the set of his face was melancholic. His clothing inclined to sombre black.

He moved through the village unfazed by the stares, appearing sure of his bearings.

The sun was climbing when he emerged from the settlement’s northern end and the street became a curving track. He took a left-hand trail, rougher and weedy. The indigo line lanced off into the countryside and faded back to dereliction.

At last he came to a house, practically hidden by untended trees. It was rambling and dilapidated. He went to the door and rapped on it. A second, louder round of knocking was necessary before he got a response.

The door was half opened by a bleary youth yet to come to terms with either the new day or manhood. He blinked at the stranger, eyes red-rimmed. ‘Yes?’