‘If you like. Oh, you mean names? A description will do,’ he said. The wolves were dragging him away, and he was letting them. ‘Names have power, little darkie. Best you remember that.’

He was running, chains in his fists, a wolf either side of him, away from the fire and between the trees, leaving only his words and his scent.

‘Darkie,’ said Dalip. ‘He called me darkie.’

Stanislav finally dropped his club at his feet. ‘I do not trust him.’

‘Not after he called me darkie, no.’

‘That is not why. I have met men like that before. Count yourself lucky you have not.’

‘Dalip, what’s a geo-thingy?’ Mary stepped between them.

‘Geomancer. A sort of priest. They tell the future using stones. You heard him call me darkie, right?’

‘Better than Paki, I suppose.’

‘I—’

‘Enough,’ said Stanislav. ‘It does not matter to him what colour your skin is, only that you bleed red. He was trying to provoke you, and look, he succeeded.’

Dalip’s fingers curled and uncurled around his kirpan. ‘At least we learned something.’

‘Did we? Perhaps we did. Perhaps we only know what he wanted to tell us.’ Stanislav’s gaze followed the path the man had taken back into the forest. ‘This geomancer, if she exists: what is she going to want from us, other than our answers?’

7

7

For a brief moment between waking and sleeping, the dreams of being burnt alive faded – Nicholls’ clip-board bursting into flame and the sheets of paper curling as they were consumed – and she thought she was back in her hostel.

Music, loud and fast, coming through the wall at her, sounds of an argument through her well-locked door, the grinding of changing gears from the road outside … That was only a dream, too. Her reality was a vast open vista and the people she’d arrived with. That was it. That was all she had now. Literally, the clothes she stood up in, and nothing else.

There was nothing to eat. There was only river water to drink: it tasted odd, and no matter how often she cupped her hands, she always ended up with silt or something floating in it. Water came out of a tap and into a cup, not flowing past her face in a hundred different streams separated by sand banks. She had no real choice, and in the end she just shut her eyes and drank anyway.

She wasn’t used to this. She was used to a bed, and coffee first thing, and if not a bed, someone’s sofa. She was tired, with gritty eyes and a mouth that still tasted of last night’s fish. Her neck ached, so that when she tried to stretch, things went crack.

The early morning light slanted over the far-distant mountains, bright and sharp, and the huge moon had thankfully disappeared over the opposite horizon. The sky was brilliant blue, with cotton-wool clouds piled up to the heavens.