A Gurkish woman stood smiling beside him, arms folded. Her skin was smooth as a child’s, flawless as dark glass, eyes midnight black.

“Wait!” barked Murcatto, one hand up. “Wait. She’s a friend.”

“She’s no friend of mine!” Morveer was still desperately trying to understand how she could have appeared from nothing in such a manner. There was no door near her, the window was tightly shuttered and barred, the floor and ceiling intact.

“You have no friends, poisoner,” she purred at him. Her long, brown coat hung open. Underneath, her body seemed to be swaddled entirely in white bandages.

“Who are you?” demanded Day. “And where the hell did you come from?”

“They used to call me the East Wind.” The woman displayed two rows of utterly perfect white teeth as she turned one finger gracefully round and round. “But now they call me Ishri. I come from the sun-bleached South.”

“She meant—” began Morveer.

“Magic,” murmured Shivers, the only member of the party who had remained in his seat. He calmly raised his spoon and slurped up another mouthful. “Pass the bread, eh?”

“Damn your bread!” he snarled back. “And your magic too! How did you get in here?”

“One of them.” Vitari had a table-knife in her fist, eyes narrowed to deadly slits as the remains of the soup dripped from the table and tapped steadily on the floor. “An Eater.”

The Gurkish woman pushed one fingertip through the spilled soup and curled her tongue around it. “We must all eat something, no?”

“I don’t care to be on the menu.”

“You need not worry. I am very picky about my food.”

“I tangled with your kind before, in Dagoska.” Morveer did not fully understand what was being said, a sensation which was among his least favourite, but Vitari seemed worried, and that made him worried. She was by no means a woman prone to high-blown fancies. “What deals have you been making, Murcatto?”

“The ones that needed making. She works for Rogont.”

Ishri let her head fall to one side, so far that it was almost horizontal. “Or perhaps he works for me.”

“I don’t care who’s the rider and who’s the donkey,” snapped Murcatto, “as long as one or the other of you is sending men.”

“He is sending them. Two score of his best.”

“In time?”

“Unless the Thousand Swords come early, and they will not. Their main body are camped six miles distant still. They were held up picking a village clean. Then they just had to burn the place. A destructive little crowd.” Her gaze fell on Morveer. Those black eyes made him unnecessarily nervous. He did not like the fact that she was wrapped up in bandages. He found himself curious as to why—

“They keep me cool,” she said. He blinked, wondering whether he might have spoken the question out loud. “You did not.” He felt himself turn cold to the roots of his hair. Just as he had when the nurses uncovered his secret materials at the orphanage, and guessed their purpose. He could not escape the irrational conclusion that this Gurkish devil somehow knew his private thoughts. Knew the things he had done, that he had thought no one would ever know…