The old man took an amulet from around his own scrawny neck and put it gently over Pietro’s head, adjusting the leather thong until the knot was to one side, just above Pietro’s breastbone. The bundle of feathers reached to the boy’s waist but that didn’t matter. People would still look at him and know he was protected, that he’d walked with death through the valley.

‘Go,’ said the old man, then jerked his chin towards the lifeless Colt still held in Pietro’s fingers. ‘And leave that t’ing behind. Sábado want to talk to it.’

A wolf howled somewhere on the edge of the mountain, up where Mai was headed, where the air was thinner and even more cold than where she was now if that were possible. Mai thought it was a wolf, the animal certainly howled the way she thought wolves should howl: sounding desolate and sad, and very dangerous.

There was something wrong with the sky, but Mai couldn’t work out just what it was. The colour looked right, pale blue with low grey clouds that clung to the lower slopes. And birds swung high in the air currents. Not just the small familiar swifts she knew from the brothel, but larger, more exotic species she’d only seen before on newsfeeds. Even a pale osprey that skimmed low over a small silver lake behind her, its talons extended though it swept upwards again without ever catching a fish.

The priest didn’t look at the mountains or birds. He was talking to a ragged Tibetan boy with a hoe who’d stood watching them as they rode up the track towards him.

‘How far…’

Almond-eyes regarded Father Sylvester passively. Dark eyes set in a wide face under a crudely-cut thatch of black hair. The boy was a lo-pa, high valley Tibetan and the man wasn’t. As far as the boy was concerned that was all he needed to know. He’d been busy clearing rocks from a field until the strangers interrupted him and he wanted to get back to his job.

The man on the black stallion snorted in exasperation. He was cold, wet and tired. And, worse than that, he was four days closer to death than when he selected Mai at the brothel. Pulling a small gold box from his coat pocket, Father Sylvester flipped open its enamel lid and tapped a pinch of white powder onto the back of his shaking hand. One sniff and raw cocaine blasted the back of his throat, melting like snow. He didn’t offer any to the boy and he certainly didn’t offer any to Mai, sitting silently behind him. The priest didn’t approve of children taking drugs.

‘How far to Cocheforet?’ Father Sylvester didn’t quite add you moron, but the unspoken insult was understood. The priest wasn’t looking for an exact distance, what he wanted to know was how much longer this journey was going to take him. The Jesuit master had never been a patient man and dying was making him more impatient still.

He didn’t have time to waste.

‘Well?’ Father Sylvester said as he kicked his horse forward, almost trampling the boy. ‘How far?’

For a moment it looked like the boy planned to swing his hoe at the priest’s head, but he just shrugged instead and spat into the road before turning away, swinging his hoe from side to side.

He didn’t know the man was a priest, of course. Just as he didn’t know the girl with her feet in the second set of stirrups was the man’s prisoner, her wrists bound behind her back so tightly it cut off the blood supply to her fingers. All the boy noticed about the girl was that her face was tear-stained and she wore a ragged bead-and-feather talisman round her neck.

Father Sylvester almost hissed in irritation. He didn’t need the boy noticing the talisman or the girl and he didn’t need her to start crying again.

She’d never been on a horse before and they’d been riding for two days, almost without stop. The inside of Mai’s thighs were raw, her buttocks ached and every stumble from the horse went straight up her spine to explode inside her head. Worst of all, the man wouldn’t stop and when she’d pissed herself a mile back, urine running in a stinging river between her leg and the saddle, all the priest had done was flip up his arm and backhand her across the face, without comment, without even looking round.

‘Hey, boy,’ Father Sylvester pulled a handful of coins from his pocket and rattled them before returning them there.

Without word, the boy turned back, his face still sullen. He was gripping the hoe with both hands but it was unmoving now.

‘Cocheforet?’

Mai wanted to cry out, to warn the Tibetan boy, but she couldn’t. Her lips were sewn shut with surgical thread. Surgical so the tiny puncture wounds wouldn’t get infected. She’d already tried ripping her mouth open but the agony was too great. And the only time they’d stopped in the last twenty-four hours was when they’d passed through a village and she’d fainted with the pain of trying to shout for help.

He’d rabbit-punched her in the ribs then, once when no one was looking: adding to the bruises already inflicted by the animal’s hoofs and her fall. She believed without hesitation that he would do exactly what he’d threatened to do if she tried it again, so she hadn’t. All the same, a part of her wanted to warn the boy? The tiny bit not already kicked into submission. That ember which no one had ever quite kicked into submission, despite all that had happened to her in the short ugly space of her life.

‘Cocheforet?’ repeated the priest.

The boy looked doubtfully at the man’s black stallion. The metal bit in its mouth was flecked with foam and the animal’s flanks radiated steam like a wet blanket drying too close to a fire. He held up four fingers, then changed it to five and shrugged.

Three, Father Sylvester decided. That was how many days they would take. Stamina and willingness weren’t what kept his horse going, the secret was 0.25 mg/kg of ketamine every two hours, mixed with crystalMeth and blasted through the animal’s thick hide into its neck using an industrial-strength BayerRochelle subdermal gun. The priest had doped up the animal so often that now his mount took the injections without even breaking its stride.

‘Thank you,’ said Father Sylvester as he pushed one shaking hand deep into his pocket and closed his fingers clumsily around a blade, ‘you’ve been very helpful.’ The stubby glass knife caught the boy in the throat, severing his vocal chords. For a second—as the boy stood there swaying, eyes glazed and mouth slack with shock—it looked as if the priest might have to climb down from his horse to finish the job, but then the boy pitched forward and Father Sylvester caught him by his long damp hair.

A blade so sharp the makers claimed it was honed to a single molecule sliced once across the boy’s neck and oxygen-rich blood spurted from a severed artery. With a hiss of regret, the priest dropped the boy into a heap and watched his blood stain the thin grass.