‘No, Mrs Lehner!’ he said.

Death looked back at him. A face with the thinnest covering of pale skin. A face Christophor recognised, but the voice was not the same as it said, ‘They come alive on All Hallows’ Eve.’ It was Victor Eder’s voice, the same he’d heard on that very bridge so long ago. Another of the innocents lost to him.

Death threw the seal.

Christophor reached out uselessly. He could only watch the stone creature arc out over the side of the bridge, eclipsing stars, until it hit the water much as it had hit the road. There was no splash. No spouting of river murk, no change in its flow at all. The seal skated, as if on ice, as bewildered as any onlooker.

Mrs Lehner was also leaning over the side to see it.

‘Stone moves on water,’ Christophor said. ‘The last conditional before the ritual can begin. Helping has only made it worse.’

This, he realised, was why the Dreken river had been diverted. This moment. It was why the animal bridge had been built and why the river was getting faster. I had seen it in Marcus’ paintings, but was too slow to realise the significance. All that work and planning, so stone could move on water, so Berith could be satisfied.

Mrs Lehner looked up at him. She was confused, and it was clear she might break at any moment. He saw the same in many faces on the bridge.

‘I saved you,’ Mrs Lehner said, her voice her own. ‘Inspector, I—’

He pushed his way through the crowd. The other stone statues had stopped their rampage, become inert stone once again, frozen now in various new poses. A man had to be helped from the clutches of the bear. A child retrieved its hat from the beak of an eagle.

Stone had moved on water. And Christophor had played his part in that. Perhaps we all had.

He made for the Eder house. Clouds spiralled there, still the only clouds to mar the night – as clear as any beacon. As he left the bridge, the white horseman appeared before him, an apparition. The handsome foreigner clad in perfect, unstained white. The conqueror. It pained Christophor to look at him.

‘We share much, you and I,’ the horseman said. ‘We have taken much, you and I.’

‘I thought I’d put an end to it.’

‘End?’

‘I thought I had.’

‘They wait for you,’ the horseman said. He smiled, but there was no warmth there.

And then he was just a man: sallow-cheeked and missing teeth, a bulbous nose between eyes that swam in liquor. A man on a wooden horse that was draped with a once-white sheet. My night-brother made to say something, and the man belched.

They wait. And Christophor would attend.

*

It both was, and wasn’t, the house. Each window still held a single candle, but there was nothing behind those small flames. It wasn’t simply that Christophor couldn’t see the rooms – there was a void, an absence, a chasm where once there had been furniture and carpets and a family.