And so he ran.

He reached the next corner and there was Aska, waiting for him. They ran together, still on the trail, until they came to a large imposing building standing in isolation against the sea walls. This had to be the Boukoleon Palace, he realized, and the stone gateway to the right must lead to the emperor’s private harbour.

Except Aska turned east along its outer wall until they came to a smaller building beside it. Then he disappeared inside. Erlan slowed only long enough to register the terracotta domes of a bathhouse. Inside all was darkness. His footsteps echoed off hard tiles. ‘Aska? Aska!’ he hissed. A shaggy head appeared at the top of a staircase. Erlan flung himself down it, not knowing where it would lead. The sound of running water murmured off the walls. He reached the bottom, blindly following Aska’s skittering footsteps past empty bath cells to the end of the corridor until a grille gate barred their way. Erlan snapped open the bolt and they slipped through. The running water grew louder and there was a different smell on the air, noisome and damp. More steps, slick with mould, to a still lower level where the water became a rush and the stink overpowering.

‘Aska – where the Hel are you?’

He couldn’t see a thing. The dog yowled softly in the dark a few paces ahead but he seemed reluctant to go on. There was a slight lessening of the darkness to the right. Erlan moved towards it and suddenly his foot jarred down with a splash.

He guessed he was standing in the effluent from the bathhouse – or maybe even the whole palace. He felt around for the top edge of the opening. It was low but not too low for a man to pass through. Was this where they had come? It had to be. Aska couldn’t possibly have led him to such an obscure corner of the palace if it wasn’t. Could he? But if they came this way, how long ago? Was he already too late? He inhaled a deep breath, foul with the reek of excrement, then bellowed Lilla’s name.

Lilla and Anna had kicked and bitten and scratched like wildcats, doing all they could to hold up their kidnappers’ flight. But it served them nothing; the eunuch and his men had merely picked them up and carried them like corpses with hands clamped over their mouths.