“Let me try again.” We went a few more rounds. I let him win often enough to start feeling cocky but got it right a few times, with suitably feigned deliberation. That kept him keen to prove he could outwit me. Most of the other children returned to their own games.

“How does a hargeard keep you safe from gebaedim? No tale tells how to ward off the Eldritch Kin where I come from.” I picked up the shell to reveal the stone. That was twice in a row.

The lad set his jaw, determined to best me somehow or other. “Gebaedim live beyond the sunset where there’s no light or water,” he told me with lofty superiority. “Where the dead go.”

Which was a fair description of the shades, where the pious would insist those barred from the Otherworld by Saedrin ended up. “What then?”

“The dead have power.” He spoke as if that were self-evident and it certainly fitted with what I knew of Mountain Men’s reverence for their ancestors’ bones. “The hargeard ties their power to the living. As long as we have the lore to use that power, the gebaedim cannot harm us.” He glanced towards Olret’s keep.

“And Olret holds the lore.” I nodded as if he was saying something I already knew. In one sense he was; I’d suspected Olret had some Artifice at his disposal. “But your friend said there are gebaedim in Kehannasekke?”

“So my father says.” The boy looked all too young as he said that, fear shadowing his eyes. “He says Ilkehan uses them in his army, that’s why he’s never been beaten.”

“But Olret holds your hargeard and that keeps you all safe,” I reminded him. I didn’t want nightmares of evildoers arousing parental suspicions about whom the children might have been talking to. I picked up a shell. “There it is. I’ve got the trick of this now”

Three times is always the charm and it worked on the lad. “I’ve played enough. I have work to do.” He stomped off, too cross to fret about Eldritch Kin. As he thrust a sheet out of his path, I saw a small child trying to hide as she was revealed.

“Go away!” Gliffa flapped an angry hand at the little girl. “You’re not to come here.”

The intruder fled, bare feet showing dirty soles. All she wore was a ragged shift, which struck me as odd given the others all wore neat skirts or trews, loving embroidery around the collars of their coarsely woven shirts and chemises, feet snug in tight-sewn leather footwear halfway between boots and stockings.

“Will you tell us another story?” Gliffa asked shyly.

“Maybe later.” I smiled at her. “I’d better go. My friends will be wondering where I am and I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble.” I gave her a conspiratorial smile before walking away just fast enough to see the ragged little girl scamper through the crudely cobbled yard running along the back of storehouses. Adults busy about their tasks ignored her, apart from one man who raised his hand to her in unmistakable threat. She cowered away and vanished through a sally port in the wall around the keep.

The jalquezan refrain from the ballad of Viyenne and the Does should keep me unseen if I could only keep it running through my mind. “Fae dar amenel, sor dar redicorle.” Sure enough, no one so much as glanced my way as I ran silently to catch up with the child. I reached the sally port just soon enough to see the girl scramble in through a window that quick calculation told me must open on to the lesser stair.

Hitched up, her shift showed a painfully thin rump and legs barely more than skin and bone. That starveling little lass wasn’t eating her fill of fishy-tasting birds or meaty seabeasts and sneaking in through a window suggested she was up to no good. Neglected like this, all she’d have to fill her belly was resentment. If I could catch her, I might be able to tempt her to tell me some less pleasant truths about this place.

There was no one in sight but I still kept up the charm as I squeezed myself through the narrow window. I could hear the lass’s breathless running up the stair, bare feet whispering on the stone. She didn’t halt at the floor above the great hall, nor yet at the next, hurrying on up. I kept pace with her, flattening myself against the wall and peering around the corner to see her meet another of those iron gates. Which were all very well, unless you were thin enough to squeeze through the bars. I watched as the child threaded herself carefully through, the fattest thing about her the woolly animal she clutched by one leg. That was easily squashed and pulled after her. She paused to reshape her treasure, kissing the nameless beast with passionate apology before disappearing up the stairs.

A memory struck me with all the force of a blow to the head. I’d seen that woolly beast before now and I could recall exactly where. That little girl had been barely walking but she’d carried it through the halls of the Shernasekke house that we’d seen reduced to ruins. How had she escaped that destruction? If Olret had saved her, he wasn’t taking particularly good care of her now.

What else was he keeping behind lock and key? I crept cautiously down to the corridor where Olret’s mutilated son had his room. That was empty so I ran lightly down the next flight and ducked into my own cubbyhole. The bed bore no trace of our passionate exertions the previous night, coverlets straight and smooth. My bag hung on the footboard and I saw that the hair I’d left in the buckle apparently caught by chance, was now snapped. No matter; I didn’t keep anything of interest or value in there. I sat on the bed and opened my belt pouch. Slipped into the stitching of the inner seam was a fine steel picklock and I patiently teased it free, tucking it into the sheath of the dagger I had strapped on the inner side of my forearm. I also took out the parchment bearing my scant knowledge of Artifice and smoothed it flat. That in hand, innocent face all eagerness to help, I marched boldly up the stairs to the floor above. There was still no one around, so, tucking the parchment back in my pocket, I disappeared up the curve of the stair.

There was no way I could squeeze through the bars so I knelt by the locked gate. I could have opened most locks in these islands with a piece of wet straw but this was different. As I probed its hidden working, I wondered where Olret had got such a thing. There wasn’t enough metal hereabouts to give any Elietimm the chance to hone such craftsmanship. No matter, it wasn’t as complex as the Mountain-crafted locks Sorgrad had trained me on. It yielded with a softly rolling click.

I went cautiously up, low to the ground to look over the topmost stairs since any guard would be keeping watch at head height. There was no one there but a rank smell like a stable drain wrinkled my nose. I stood up and walked softly down the corridor. Doors ajar on either side opened on to unfurnished rooms, bare walls, scrubbed floors and no sign of the little girl, not even cowering behind a door. After checking every room, all I was left with was one shut up and, unsurprisingly, the source of the stench. The door wasn’t locked but bolted high and low.

What was inside, besides the little girl? Whatever it was, it was something Olret kept safely locked away and that meant it had to have some value. I reached up to the top bolt and then stopped. How had the child got in here and then bolted the door after herself? No, she must be cowering in the other stairwell. I lowered my hand and was about to turn away when both bolts began to move of their own accord. They glided smoothly through the hasps and the latch lifted. A frisson ran through me.

The door stayed shut though. Opening it would have to be my choice. Where had that notion come from? I studied the blank timber. Could I walk away and not know what it concealed? Curiosity got Amit hanged, as my mother used to say. Perhaps, but that had never stopped me before. I pushed at the door and it swung open on well-oiled hinges. I managed not to choke on the stink it released.