'Did you kill the man as he said?'

Isak held up his injured hand for the man to see. 'I did, but he was trying to cut my throat at the time.'

And you're sure no one sent you?'

Isak gave him a wary look. 'Of course. Why do you keep asking me that? Who would have sent me here?'

The man gave up. With an exasperated click of the tongue he turned back to the guardroom and motioned for Isak to follow. His comrade stayed for another moment, his expression disconcerting as

stared into Isak's eyes. When Isak straightened up and looked back at the white-eye, a spark of belligerence flared to life in his belly, trangely, it was the guard who shivered and looked away.

he normal guard, the smallest of the two by a good five inches, rnotioned again for Isak to enter the guardroom and this time the boy follwed the flicker of a fire and stepped inside towards the warmth.

He picked his way past two short-handled glaives propped against the wall and placed himself as close as he could to the flames. There was a small table in the middle of the room on which was a pile of rags and an empty plate. Isak fingered through the oily rags, looking for the cleanest, which he wrapped as tightly as he could around his injured hand.

The white-eye guard stepped inside and pulled the outer door closed. It was a thick piece of oak with a massive iron lock, but the door was dwarfed by the slab of granite on a simple iron runner – presumably to be used in times of siege. Once the room was secured, the man turned and examined Isak again. Isak couldn't work out if the expression was hostile or puzzled, but he decided he was too hungry or cold to much care anymore.

The other guard moved to the far end of the room where the outline of another stone slab was visible. He pulled a chain hanging through a hole in the ceiling and gave a short whistle. The sound was repeated somewhere above, and it heralded a widening of the dark crack down one side. Isak could feel the grinding of stone through his bare toes.

The guard plucked a burning torch from a holder on the wall and ducked through the growing gap. 'This way,' he said tersely.

Thirty yards of narrow passage took them to an iron-bound wooden door set at an awkward angle to the wall. Pushing this open, the guard stepped back to allow Isak to squeeze past. Ducking through the doorway, Isak peered into a large noisy hall, then descended the handful of worn steps. A huge blazing fire was opposite him, above which hung spitting haunches of meat attended by two young girls. The room contained a score of long tables, and some of the men – Isak guessed they were guardsmen from their austere uniforms – turned to look at the new arrivals but quickly resumed their meal. The high beams of the chamber were hung with regimental flags and drapes covered the walls, interspersed with shields, swords and broken standards, no doubt trophies from past battles. The scents of pipe-smoke, burnt fat, fresh bread and thick stew hung tantalising in the air.

Isak craned around, peering at the hall's ornaments, recognising a handful of the emblems from his travels. They'd probably been won in the battles recorded on the wall tapestries. Though the hangings were faded and soot-stained, he was still able to make out the lines of troops and enemy formations. He turned back to the guard, who pointed at one of the servants, then stepped back inside the passage

and closed the door. Isak stared after him; clearly they didn't care that he’d killed a man. It didn't make a whole lot of sense – but nothing 1 d this evening, and Isak wasn't about to cry over spilt blood.

The servant wore the traditional Parian costume of wide loose trousers bound down at the feet and a thick paral shirt, neatly arranged nd tied at the waist with a belt the thickness of a man's hand. It looked as if he were about to leave for the temple to take up some candle-lit vigil, except the man's belt was decorated with Lord Bahl's eagle rather than any divine symbol.

The servant glowered at Isak; he too said nothing, but pointed at an empty table and left, returning shortly with a bowl of steaming venison stew, a flatbread draped over the top. Isak fell upon it ravenously, eating as fast as he could in case there'd been a mistake and it was removed before he'd finished. He'd barely started to mop up the last of the gravy when the empty bowl was replaced by a second, and accompanied this time by a flagon of beer. He ate this helping more slowly, but he was a growing boy already well 'over six feet tall and it took a third large bowlful to satisfy him.

Finally he settled back, wiped a smear of juice from his lips and looked around at his surroundings. It was the first chance he'd had to properly inspect the room. The tapestries, he could now confirm, were indeed scenes from famous battles, with the names of the actions woven into each picture in a variety of ways: in one it was spelled out in the shading of the trees in the background; a second was embroidered on a general's banner. Isak remembered Carel's tales of these very engagements: most featured Lord Bahl at the forefront of the action, riding a dragon or a rearing stallion, always leaving great swathes of dead in his wake.

The tapestries were displayed around the room in chronological order, as far as Isak could see. The oldest, which happened more than two hundred summers ago, was positioned behind the top table at the right-hand end of the hall; the most recent engagement was sited by the grand main door – Isak knew Carel had taken part in that °ne shortly after joining the Ghosts. He spent an idle few minutes looking for a figure that could have been the white-haired old man in his youth, but most of the soldiers were just blank shapes rather than People. It gave him some comfort to think that some of those soldiers had been white-eyes: at this distance they all looked the same, and they had fought together, as a team.

He smiled, thinking of Carel as a young man like himself; unsure quite what he should be doing, keeping close to the veterans, trying to absorb everything he could see while also keeping himself alive. Now he had the luxury of time to think, Isak wondered again why Carel had walked away at the palace gates – how could he just assume that Isak would be accepted here? Even Isak knew this was not how men were recruited to the guard. What in the name of Death was going on? For that matter, what had sent his father into such a rage? Isak knew his father was quick to anger, but he'd never seen him like that, or his friends. They had been like feral dogs, worked up into a frenzy; something must have happened to make them like that. Isak felt a shiver run down his spine. Somehow he knew it was to do with that strange mercenary, Aracnan.

Now he looked around at the other men in the hall, searching for a friendly face. They were a motley collection; the handful of Ghosts were clean and neat in their uniforms, but most of the diners were forest rangers, dressed raggedly in dark woodland colours. Though their hands were clean for eating, mud still stained their clothing, and he could see a couple of dressings that looked hastily wrapped. One ranger had blood dried into his mess of hair and stained down his tunic. The rangers were all lean, tanned by sun and wind; they lacked the obvious bulk of the palace guards because their battles were not fought with armour and pikes, but with stealth and camouflage and swift arrows flashing out from the trees.

Those who bothered to look back at Isak spared the boy only a moment's disinterested gaze. Perhaps they knew why he was here, perhaps not: the only thing Isak knew was that he had much to prove before he would be accepted. No one appeared to care about the colour of his eyes – that made a change, for it made most people keep their distance. He wasn't totally ignored, though, for now the dogs roaming the hall came to greet him, licking at the mud and blood on his bare toes and sniffing up to the empty plate, but once satisfied there was no food left for them, they returned to loiter by the great open fire where they panted and stared longingly at the spitted joints of meat that perfumed the hall.