On the nights where they had no choice but to sleep above ground they made no fire – it attracted moths the size of Yalric’s shield, and a host of far more unpleasant creatures that watched them from the edge of the firelight’s reach, their presence betrayed only by the reflection of eyes.

On the eighth day out they were riding through an area dominated by wide-spaced golden-wood; it was like an ocean of orange bark and red leaves. The trees were as straight as spears, with few low branches amongst them, and the ground was spongy with leaves, making the riding easier than it had been for days.

Coralen winced as a strange smell drifted through the forest, pungent and acidic. She looked at the others and they were all pulling similar faces.

‘Do you recognize that?’ Coralen asked Yalric – hailing from Gramm’s hold he was the only one of them that had any experience of Forn.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But I have never travelled deep into Forn. Strange things live beyond its fringes.’

As you’ve told me before. Yalric was deeply superstitious and always making the ward against evil, but Coralen had come to find him an intuitive tracker and as brave as Storm when he could see that he was fighting flesh and blood and not a demon from the Otherworld.

Wait until he meets the Kadoshim.

The smell became progressively worse. Coralen’s horse started shying, the mare’s ears flattening to her head.

‘Perhaps we should stop, go back,’ Yalric muttered, wrestling with his reins and snapping a command at his horse. ‘Whatever is making that smell, it’s nothing good.’

Coralen frowned at him. We need to know what’s causing them to behave like this.

In the end Coralen slid from her saddle, the others doing the same. Teca stayed with the horses and Coralen led Enkara and Yalric on. The smell was so intense now that she was fighting the urge to gag.

About fifty paces ahead something appeared on the ground – a series of mounds, more of them coming into focus, Coralen counting thirty or forty as they drew closer. She paused before the first one, a mound about chest high. It was steaming – a few of them were, others were hard-crusted and frozen with the cold. The stench was overwhelming, crawling up her nostrils, coating the back of her throat. Coralen prodded the mound in front of her. Beetles seethed out from it, covered in viscous slime.

It’s dung.

Something was poking out of it. Not seeming able to stop herself, Coralen grabbed it and pulled; a knobbly bone emerged from the pile of steaming dung.

This is not good.