That was all it took. A demon with his talent could sense the presence of magic with much less to work with than that, and he sensed it now. Real magic, the kind he was looking for. The girl—or whoever was in there with her—had use of it. After all his searching, after all the roads he had traveled and disappointments he had endured, all the false leads and dead ends, he had found the real thing. He clapped his hands like an excited boy and smiled.

He kicked Grosha’s body aside and started for the nearest door. He would have to be careful here. He didn’t want to lose her. He had to make certain she didn’t elude him. He glanced around. The Skaith Hounds had fled, disappeared into the rocks. But the Trolls were still there, cringing away from him as he went past. The demon’s lean form was hunched within his ragged disguise, his eyes as bright and hungry as a predator’s as he beckoned for the Trolls to follow him.

“You’ll search this place with me, once we’re inside,” he said, his voice hard-edged and laced with venom. “All of you. No one comes out until I do. We stay there until we find this girl. But she is not to be harmed if you find her. She is to be brought to me.”

The reluctant Drouj fell into line behind him, being careful not to get too close. In a knot they converged on the main doors to the complex.

The ragpicker’s bundled cloth scraps lay where he had dumped them, as rumpled and forgotten as the shattered form of Grosha Siq.

ATOP THE RUINS, high up on the overlook where she had witnessed most of what had taken place between Grosha and the ragpicker, Prue Liss hunched down behind the concealing wall so that the old man couldn’t see her. What sort of creature was he, she wondered, that he could subdue Grosha and cause Skaith Hounds to slink away like beaten puppies? What kind of power did he possess? Now Grosha lay sprawled on the ground below, and from all appearances he was dead. And that ragged old man, together with the Drouj who were now at his beck and call, were coming for her.

Stupid, she chided herself, to have believed he couldn’t smell her out. It had happened so fast. One moment he had been questioning Grosha, all of his attention on the Drouj, and the next he was looking right at her hiding place. He couldn’t have seen her—probably couldn’t even know who she was—but her fate was determined nevertheless. He was at the doors to the keep, and she had a feeling that what had kept the Trolls out would not be enough to stop that old man.

What should she do?