‘Enough of the whatever-stuff. He’s already killed your guards, those that didn’t have the sense to run away, the two servant women you had are missing, your steward bloke, and I don’t think he’s going to be that worried about adding us to his score. Can we change him back?’

‘No,’ said Bell.

Mary heard Dalip shift behind her.

‘Can we, I don’t know, tame him in some way?’

‘No. Any more than you or I can be tamed.’

‘Can we … lock him in a room somewhere so that he’ll never be able to get out?’

Bell snorted. ‘If you want to stop him, you’ll have to kill him.’

‘Can we kill him?’

She shrugged. ‘If he’s that different from us, he might be impossible to damage him enough to finish him: where’s his heart, his brain, how does he bleed? When we change, we have a fixed form. We’re beasts, but we’re mortal, for the want of a better word.’

‘I proved that with you.’ Mary sat back and wondered if Bell was telling her the truth. She’d admitted that this was outside her own experience, and perhaps this had never happened before. Perhaps it had, and there’d been no survivors left to tell the tale. It could be that dotted all over Down were dark places, filled with visceral, primal hate, and a monster feeding from it.

‘Fire,’ said Dalip. ‘We’re going to have to use fire. If words don’t work, of course.’

That made a sort of sense. It was quite clear that if any of them got too close to Stanislav in his changed form, he could deal with them however he wanted, singly or all at once.

‘And how the fuck are we supposed to do that?’ Mary thought of all the things they didn’t have: petrol, empty bottles, lighter fluid, fireworks, tyres, old mattresses and settees, meths, even flaming sambucas.

‘There’s some bottles of spirit in the store room, and that might burn. Magic? Can you magic up fire?’ Dalip turned on the geomancer. ‘You can, can’t you? In the pit, you light all the candles.’

‘That’s as much as I can do.’

‘And I’m not happy with a plan that involves her in any way. Not happy at all.’ Mary got to her feet and looked around her, hands on hips. ‘What else?’

‘Everything will burn if you try hard enough,’ offered Bell. ‘Even stone.’

‘You can just shut up now. Dalip, how big a fire do we need?’

He frowned as he thought, then looked puzzled. ‘How am I supposed to work that out? It’s not like there are books I can find the answer in.’

‘Guess, then.’

‘Huge. The bigger the better. If we think we’ve got enough, we haven’t.’

The storm rattled the doors, shaking them free, and Luiza and Elena went to shore them up.