Her hand found the flattened scroll at her chest. This was for him. Had he reached the Hold yet? He must have – but who could be sure on a night like this? And the gatekeeper – Lubben – he would let her know if he had. He might even let her in. If she played it right.

Kiska opened the door. The dog whimpered afresh. Looking back, she saw it still curled on the privy floor, unwilling to even push its nose past the threshold. She bid goodbye and headed for a shortcut she knew to Rampart Way.

The night had turned unearthly still. Even her slippers and the whisper of her breath sounded deafening. Then suddenly, randomly, a hound’s baying shattered the calm, causing her to shrink. But other than these terrifying moments – each of which she was certain would be her last – it was as if the night stood frozen. Only the moon appeared to move, watching her with its silver eye as she made for the waterfront where the shore lapped the cliffs and the oldest wharves ceased at a thatch of rotten piers.

She climbed the slick stones jumbled at the cliff’s base. Salt spray beaded on her shirt and the waves beneath her murmured, unnaturally subdued. Her cord-soled slippers gripped the broken rock, but her hands slid, cut open on its knife-like edges.

Soon she reached the barest lip in the uneven stones – an animal path dating back generations to when wild goats still clambered over the island. The track was long forgotten and invisible to those beneath and above. She fancied it was the mystery behind the phantom departures and arrivals of the island’s pirates.

She carefully edged her way up the slick rock ledges, most no wider than her foot. Thorned brush choked the route, forcing her to ascend behind or over. But she knew the way blindfolded, as she’d often climbed it at night. It led to her favourite spot on the island – after Agayla’s rooms, that is.

The mist closed in like a shroud. The bay, some hundred yards down, lay smothered in low-lying fog. In the southern sky, lights flickered green and pink, reminding Kiska of the legends of the Riders who rose in winter to tow sailors to their doom. She also remembered the tales of ghosts and revenants said to haunt the Hold above. Even these cliffs boasted an entire host of spirits – drowned sailors deceived into drawing too close to the shoals, tricked by her ancestors, wreckers and pirates all. It was said you could still hear their moaning at night, seeking vengeance on their murderers. She’d grown up on such yarns and believed not a one. Including those of a certain demon-haunted Shadow Moon…

When her outthrust hand told Kiska she’d reached a depression in the veined granite, she threw herself into the opening she knew awaited ahead. She gasped for air, and not just from the strain of the climb. Her clothes clung to her, heavy and damp. The air retained the rich fetor of rotting humus and bird droppings. Kiska leant against one inward-canted wall to steady her breath. The crevice she stood in couldn’t really be called a cavern: it was more like a ragged cleft in the living rock of the island, a jagged fissure that shot straight into the cliff. Her heel dislodged chips of stone that shifted and crunched. She’d found places within where there was no floor to speak of at all, just a thinning skim of darkness descending straight down to a finger’s breadth.

She had played here as a child. It was her secret hideaway, though she had the feeling Agayla was aware of its existence. She’d explored every inch of the radiating cracks and the galleries of narrow, vertical faults. And though island legends told of secret caves and hidden troves of gems and gold, she’d found no trace of them. Broken decayed slats and bits of salt-dissolved iron scattered here and there were all she’d kicked up as reward for her efforts.

Overhead passed a portion of Rampart Way; it would be a difficult final climb. She rubbed warmth back into her hands and felt the burn of cuts as circulation flowed into salt-encrusted wounds. Perhaps she should wrap them in lengths of cloth. But what if it should slip or come loose?

Noise clattered from without. Kiska pressed herself against the cliff wall and listened: fabric brushing over stone, falling pebbles. Someone climbing outside. She edged farther into the cavern. As she did so, a shape from within loomed in the narrow stone confines like one of the revenants she’d heard tell of.

An instant of soul-clutching dread slowed her enough for the figure – a flesh and blood man – to grasp her hand. She almost smiled at such a mistaken move and used his resistance to snap a kick to the opposite side of his head.

The man grunted but held on. Kiska lost her grin.

A foot lashed out and cracked against her wounded knee. She bit down a shriek of stabbing pain as the leg gave way. He released her hand as she fell.

‘Don’t struggle,’ he told her.

She stared up at him; here in the dark he was mostly shadow, but there was something familiar about him.

He shook out a slim length of cord and stepped over her. Her every instinct wailed against being bound again, and she lashed out with her good leg, catching him high in the inner thigh.

A loud hiss escaped his lips, yet he bent over her again.

Kiska covered her face, cried, ‘No, please!’ She slipped the knife from the back of her collar. Before she could use it his booted foot came down on her wrist and something hard like a knout of iron smashed against her temple. The cavern’s darkness exploded into a dazzle of red and yellow pinpoints that shimmered and faded slowly.

‘You’ve a few moves,’ he allowed, grudging, ‘but you’re out of your depth here, child. Don’t make me kill you.’

Kiska blinked against the lights befuddling her vision. ‘Who in the Lady’s Pull are you?’

The man ignored her. ‘Turn your back,’ he told her.

She obeyed and he tied her wrists together. Another figure climbed up into the opening and the man moved to his side. They spoke and against the light of the moon Kiska recognized him. The flat, scarred face, cat’s whiskers moustache: the bodyguard of the very man she sought.

She laughed. The men ignored her, continued speaking in low tones she couldn’t catch. The newcomer was sent out again. The Seti tribesman returned to her. He pulled a black cloth from within his cloak. Kiska recognized the cloth and where it would be thrown.

‘I have a message for your master,’ she said as he readied the cloth for her head. The hands hesitated a fraction of a heart beat, continued down.

Darkness enveloped Kiska. ‘The man he met in the garden is dead,’ she said, too quickly and loud for her liking. Her heart hammered.

Silence. The sullen lurch and suck of the surf beneath. Kiska listened: not even the clatter or shift of stone chips underfoot. Nothing. Was he still there? Was anyone? Would they leave her here? Perhaps it was a sort of twisted kindness. After all, she’d be safer tied up here than roaming the streets tonight.

A hand took hold of the hood at its uppermost fold. It gently lifted up and away from her head. Her hair caught at its coarse weave.

A man crouched before her: a long, narrow mahogany-tanned face that appeared oddly seamless, bland even. Sunken, dark, black-ringed eyes. Brown pate shaven but for a long braided queue at his shoulder. A straight slash of mouth. Lips Kiska imagined shattering should they be forced to smile. Her quarry.

‘I’m told you have a message for me.’

He spoke aristocratic Talian with a hint of an accent she couldn’t place. As out of place on this island as gold in a fish’s mouth.

He waited, expressionless. Kiska found her voice. ‘In my shirt.’ She tried to raise her arm but only wrenched her wrist.

He raised one hand. ‘May I?’

‘Yeah – yes.’

He wore black leather gloves, his fingers long and thin.