Alec and Thero rode for Zikara with Captain Brescia and a decuria of riders for support. Everyone had been duly warned about the dangers there, although word had already spread after the last disastrous visit. Ravens still ruled there, croaking and watching them with avid black eyes from the rubble.

“Show me how you entered the town,” said Thero as they sat their horses beside the dry riverbed.

“This way.” Alec led him and the riders around the town to where the back gate of the palisade had been, then dismounted. There were faint traces of a street and he followed it, leading the others carefully as he looked for familiar landmarks among the rubble. He could just make out a marketplace, and imagined houses and tenements standing where their foundations still could be seen.

Following a street that looked familiar, he came to the edge of the bare stretch of ground and could make out some of the paving stones of the courtyard sticking out of the ground at its edge.

“How can this be the same place, but the tower not be here, Thero?”

“You’re sure it is the same place?”

“Yes.”

Thero stood in thought for some time while Alec waited, listening to the ravens muttering among themselves.

“Perhaps I’ve been wrong calling the other place a plane,” Thero said at last. “Maybe it’s more about time—a shard of time split off from the world and caught like a leaf in an eddy.”

“Except for the tower.”

“Yes, except for that.”

“You mean when I go there, I’m somehow going back to the time when this place was inhabited and the tower was here?”

“You’re the one who’s been there. What do you think?”

Alec turned slowly, looking around. “It’s the same place, that’s certain. But it’s so different on the other side. There’s day and night, but no sun or stars there that you can see. The sky is always grey. And like I told you, the people must be ghosts. There was no sign of food, little color. It’s all drab and—it’s like the life has been sucked out of everything.”

“Interesting. According to what Mika told us, the dyrmagnos extracts the life essence of her victims with a kiss. If the people who lived here were sealed away with her, then she must have fed on them until there was no one left to devour.”

“And when everyone was dead? How could she live?”

“I don’t know, but it seems she did.” Thero plucked absently at his beard. “A thousand years. Perhaps she slept, like a caterpillar in a cocoon or a frog in winter mud, and woke when the outer seal was disturbed. That’s when people started going missing. If she’s feeding again, then she’s growing stronger.”

“But all those centuries she couldn’t feed, wouldn’t she have grown weak?”