Another prisoner passed in front of his cell door. He listened carefully to see if he could tell who it was, but she was silent. She and her guard scuffed down the corridor outside. As they moved further away, there was banging and shouting – Romanian and English – but it was all in vain. A distant door opened, closed, and something heavy banged into place.

That made five. Because Mary had escaped – or at least, because Mary was still on the run, and there was a huge difference between the two – that was it. They’d be left to stew.

There was no bucket in with him, not even a hole in the floor that he could find. Given that he’d been casually beaten up, arbitrarily bound and blindfolded, force marched and imprisoned, he supposed that this was just the start. There was no reason why, above the simple expediency of keeping him alive long enough to answer questions, he wasn’t going to end up living night and day with his own excrement, slowly starving to death and driven mad by his incarceration.

He wondered what would have happened, what would be happening now, if he’d literally and metaphorically thrown Mary to the wolves, and swum the river himself. He decided that he’d have found that choice impossible to live with, and that he was, if not exactly glad, content with the way things had gone. He was supposed to protect others, even at a cost to himself. That he’d never had to do it before might have made it easier: he had none of the messy practical experience to dilute his pure motive.

But being locked up to rot wasn’t what he wanted, either. As the guard’s footsteps tracked back down the corridor, he knocked crisply on the door and said: ‘I want to see the geomancer.’

It wasn’t quite a demand, and was far from grovelling for mercy. That might come later, of course, but he didn’t know what that might look like and he really didn’t want to.

The footsteps had stopped. Under the door, he could see the slowly shifting shadows cast by a lit candle.

‘You saw her already.’

‘I want to see her again.’

‘Why’s that?’

Dalip judged his words carefully. ‘Because she wants to ask me some questions.’

Nothing about giving her the answers she might want, but yes, she did want to ask him questions. He’d misplayed the situation before. Perhaps he was doing so again, but it was perfectly clear that regular beatings eventually followed by death would be the result of his opening gambit.

‘Wait there,’ said the guard, then laughed at his own joke. He went away, his hiccoughing chuckles receding with the light he carried.