Dust came toward him and reconfigured as if moulded by the growing heat, and became a man on a horse. Drogon was riding back. Cutter shouted.

"You can’t go in," he said. "It’s a trap. It’s a golem trap."

Drogon rode around them as if they were steers, and when they buckled he would whisper to them, to their underbrains, and they could only obey. "Run," he whispered, and they were helpless not to.

By the raised plain were slippy scree paths, so they held onto boscage while they climbed toward the dark. Drogon took his horse at speed along a route that looked impossible. The dogs, tied by the crack’s entrance, pulled, imbecilic with their porcine eyes and bared teeth. They were in agony to enter, to reach what they could smell.

"He knows," Cutter said. He leaned against his knees to cough up the stuff of the path. "He knows they’re coming for him."

"Handlinger," said Drogon. A fleck at the edge of the plain. "We have to go."

Cutter said: "He knows they’re coming and he’s not tried to hide his scent. He thinks it’s the militia after him, and he’s funnelled them here. It’s a trap. We can’t go in there. We have to go over. He’ll be on the other side, waiting."

They did not debate long, with the handlinger curdling the air as it approached. The dogs bayed and Drogon shot them dead inside the tunnel. The others followed him up a steep root-ladder to the rocktop plateau. Drogon whispered to them "Climb," even suspended as he was himself, and they found their footing and their grip.

Drogon led them by the edge of the crack. They saw his horse and the carnage of dog-flesh below them. He whispered to the horse, and it snorted and turned as if to go through the conduit.

"What you doing?" said Cutter. "If you don’t keep it still I’ll shoot it, I swear. We can’t risk it triggering anything." There was an instant when it seemed the whispersmith might fight, but he turned and ran again, and the horse was still.

Cutter looked back and cried out. What followed them, dangling, had the shape of a man. It carried a burden. It was scant miles off, arrowing with grim unnatural motion toward the wall and the shaft.

On the other side they looked down across sierras, a slowly rising landscape. In the full sun of dawn Cutter saw runt trees.

"We have to wait until that bastard thing’s gone," said Pomeroy.

"We can’t," Drogon said to Cutter and Pomeroy in turn. "It’s not tracking your friend, it’s tracking us. By our mind-spoor. We have to get beyond. Turn and fight it."

"Fight it?" Pomeroy said. "It’s a handlinger. "

"It’ll be all right," Cutter said. He felt a great and sudden conviction. "It’ll be taken care of."

It was he, not Drogon, who found a way down. One by one they descended, the whispersmith last. " Damn handlinger’s so close," he said to Cutter. "He’s by the entrance, he’s seen the dogs, he’s going in."