‘You’re staying here. The others don’t trust you for the moment.’ He got to his feet too, and they were both as uncertain of vertical as each other. ‘Give it time, and we’ll work something out.’

He left him there, and closed the door. Stanislav wasn’t a prisoner, and there was nothing but words keeping him in the store room. Dalip hoped all the same that he’d stay there.

Truth be told, the man had a point. They’d been tricked and trapped and enslaved, and they had a moral duty to make sure that it didn’t happen to anyone else. There was no justice in Down, no higher authority to appeal to. It was the strong against the weak, or the strong for the weak: what other way was there?

Dalip climbed up the steps to the top floor. Mama was seeing to the geomancer’s wounds, while Luiza and Elena were carefully checking the contents of each box, each drawer. Mary had moved on to the bed, and lay there against the headboard, still wrapped up in the tapestry.

‘What are they looking for?’ he asked her.

‘Maps,’ she said. ‘She should have lots of maps, but there don’t seem to be many at all.’

‘And why maps?’

‘Because,’ she said, ‘maps are power and wealth. It’s what geomancers need to … Look, this is fucking complicated and I can barely get my head round it myself, let alone explain it. She should have a fuck-ton of maps somewhere in this tower, and they’re like gold, so I’m guessing that they’re somewhere here, in this room.’

‘Have you asked her where they are?’

‘She’s not exactly in an answering mood: between me and your mate, we’ve terrified her into silence.’ She shifted uncomfortably on the bed, and sat up, revealing her scars as she slid her hands down to her shins.

‘Who, what happened?’ The wounds were new, barely healing, wide and glistening.

‘She did. She happened. A few days ago now. She would have killed me if she could.’

Dalip sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her. He watched while the two Romanian women systematically went through everything, lifting things up, moving them around, checking behind them.

‘What are we going to do with her?’

‘I don’t know. I thought I was coming here to kill her. It turned out I didn’t need to.’

‘I thought we were going to have to kill her too. But I didn’t have the stomach for it. I wanted to see if I could reason with her instead.’ He looked at her over his shoulder, her coiled-spring hair, her skin opened up in broad red trenches. ‘Was that a mistake? Stanislav seems to think so. He says if we leave her alive, then either us or someone else will become her victims. We have to remember what sort of person she is.’