The pennant billowed towards her and as Ace put out her hand instinctively, she felt a shock of vivid memory – like the time-storm was snatching her again right now, its fire sparking through her bones, making her lightning that struck hard across the void. She cried out, fell backwards to the polished stone.

Halogi-Kari giggled again. ‘Bringer of time. Bringer of distance.’

‘It was you who took me?’ Ace breathed.

‘The personal touch. At Fenric’s command.’

Ace sneered at him across the chamber. ‘Just another of Fenric’s Wolves.’

‘Ah. Alas, once I lived as a wolf, yes. These days, I’ve been starting to think I am sheep only. Yes, only a sheep. But you, Child of Earth, you remind me of the days I was a wolf. I sensed something in you, you know. And I have excellent records. Impeccable records of everyone I’ve taken through the years. See …’

The hanging fabrics began to shift and stir like waking ghosts. Ace saw faces form in the stitch work, some human, some not, but all with one thing in common: they were silently screaming, shaking, terrified. Hundreds, thousands maybe, begging for mercy, their fear taken, like a souvenir, to create this monster’s tally of suffering.

‘Stop it, you sicko,’ Ace hissed, then glared at him and yelled, ‘Stop it!’

The screaming shades faded and the fabric shifts swayed to a stop.

‘You see, Child of Earth, with all these faces, only one did I ever see twice.’ Halogi-Kari leaned forward on his ivory perch. ‘Your face. I took you once from that world. And then you are back?’ He laughed again. ‘To take you again I would’ve thought impossible. Yes, impossible!’

‘Not the first time I’ve been called impossible.’ Ace glowered at him. ‘What are you, sicko – some sort of kidnap-fixer? Someone gives you a target and you time-storm them away and put them down again wherever you’re told?’

The creature considered. ‘In my glory days, yes. That is fair to say. But then, you see, things stopped. You know that this is true, I think.’

‘You don’t know me,’ Ace promised him.

Halogi-Kari just smiled and lowered his voice to a teasing whisper that chilled her blood. ‘I know what you are,’ he said. ‘And I feel that you will be of great value to me.’

‘Go to hell.’ Ace bunched her fists, determined not to show him how rattled she was. ‘I mean it, sicko. Suppose you just drop the shadowy master-criminal rubbish and tell me why I’m here?’

‘Criminal? I? No, no, no.’ Halogi-Kari hopped off his carved ivory throne, and the impact set his thick flaps of skin quivering. ‘I am most careful when it comes to breaking laws. I must be! I cannot risk a further sentence from the Shadow Proclamation.’

‘The who?’