Black waters, white shroud. Bound from head to foot, she could not kick free. Spiralling on down into the muddy depths.

Her jaw was bound, she could not move, she could not cry out. The lead weights dragged her down to the bottom. Weights, cerements –

They had given her to the waters, thinking she was dead.

But I’m alive!

She heard the snap and grind of razor-teeth close to her ear. The water swirled.

The water-snakes. They would devour her, alive or dead, they would strip the living flesh from her bones–

‘Noooo!’

She was sitting up in her own bed, staring wildly into the darkness, her arms crossed against her breast, hands clutching her bare shoulders.

The Antiquarian, Dame Jolaine Tradescar, rubbed her eyes. Old age was an extreme irritation. Nothing worked properly anymore: hearing failed, sight dimmed – and just when she needed her senses to be at their most acute.

The desk was stacked with notebooks filled with page after tightly packed page of her small, neat script, her meticulous drawings of the hieroglyphs, a lifetime’s scholarly obsession. A lifetime spent searching for hidden clues, following false trails.

Many times in the past, she had been certain she had been about to crack the code. She should know better by now! And yet she could not suppress a shiver of anticipation as she took out her eyeglasses to study the new find more closely.

A soaking in a bowl of clean water had removed the encrusted mud. She could see what it was now. A rolled sheet of fine pewter.

A curse.

With trembling fingers she took up tweezers and, with extreme delicacy, began to smooth the ancient pewter sheet flat.

The custom of inscribing a petition to the Goddess Elesstar and dropping it into the sacred spring was still popular amongst the people of Sulien. A generous donation towards the upkeep of the Temple was the customary fee. Most petitions were pleas for a cure for various ailments – but a few were vengeful curses, imploring the Goddess’s aid. No one was certain when the custom had begun but the Priests and Priestesses did not discourage it, especially as the petitioners usually brought generous gifts of food and wine with them. And no one knew anymore why it was essential to scratch the petition backwards – it was merely the tradition.

But this petition was older and more fragile than any other Dame Jolaine had examined before. It might so easily have been lost for good if she had not spotted it in the silt the workmen had raked from a blocked drainage channel.

She peered at the faint scratches inscribed on the lead sheet. Backwards. Remember: transcribe the letters first, then reverse…

And then she peered more closely.

There were two inscriptions. The first was in what seemed to her eyes to be an archaic form of the Allegondan script. And the second below was in –

In the Lifhendil hieroglyphs!