Erlan awoke with a shiver. He had been dreaming again. Absurd dreams of freedom and hope. The beach again. The beach where it had all begun. But instead of Inga’s laughter carried on the wind gusts, it was Lilla walking there, the hem of her cloak trailing in the surf, her long blonde hair blowing sideways like a war-banner, and as she drew closer he saw she was wearing a shirt of ring-mail. She looked taller. Stronger, somehow. A world away from the wretched maiden stripped naked whom he’d plucked from the darkness beneath the Earth. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called out, but the words were lost on the wind. She called again. The wind rose against her, the waves grew taller, folding onto the strand with a violent crash. . .

The second bucket of water brought him fully to his senses. His hair was plastered to his head.

‘You alive down there, slave?’

‘I’m here, you bastards,’ he muttered.

There was a chuckle far above. ‘It’s your lucky day, Northman.’ And a couple of heartbeats later, a rope fell into his lap.

The sky was already reddening in the west by the time he was being marched across the Augustaion towards a constellation of gleaming columns and archways and tiled roofs that made Arbasdos’s mansion on the north side of the promontory seem little better than a goat stall. The Great Palace, seat of the emperor, house of the king of kings. . . Only kings? By the stars, it looked a home more fitting for the gods.

Erlan gazed at it all in a trance. He hadn’t eaten a morsel in two days. They had at least let him drink, and washed and clothed him. He looked as clean as he had in a long time. Perhaps more so since he’d never been garbed in white before. The wounds across his back still hurt. Thick scabs had begun forming over the divots of flesh torn from his hide. They itched worse than a rash of ringworm.

Silanos had been there, overseeing it all, but giving little away. ‘Someone wants to see you,’ was all he had said, with an enigmatic smile.

It seemed too absurd to hope that his case had somehow come to the notice of the emperor. But who else could it be, dwelling in this mountain of marble and brick?