The Sulien Asylum had been built outside the city on the edge of the River Avenne, a rambling, ramshackle bastion, its neglected gardens rank with strangling creepers.

Jerame Magelonne stood before the massive doors, hand upraised to tug the rusted bell-pull. A thin wind blew off the river marsh, a mean wind, piercing and damp. He had avoided coming this way for the past thirteen years. He would not have come at all had it not been for last night’s scene with Orial.

He gave the bell-pull a sharp tug. Deep within he heard the bell clang, a harsh, cracked sonority. Bolts were tugged back, clinking chains disconnected, the heavy door dragged open, grating over the uneven flagstones.

A prison, Jerame thought as he crossed the inner courtyard.

‘Jerame!’ Ophil Tartarus, the Asylum Director, came out to greet him. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘Expecting me?’ Jerame glanced at him warily, wondering if in the intervening years since they studied at Medical School together, Tartarus had become as mad as his patients. How could he have known Jerame was coming today?

‘Let’s talk in my office.’

Brownish light filtered into the dark-walled room; Jerame placed his gloves and hat on the desk.

‘Drink?’ Tartarus held up a glass decanter containing a brackish liquid, looking suspiciously, Jerame thought, like old embalming fluid. He shook his head. Tartarus poured himself a glass and drank it down.

‘Ahh. Keeps out the damp.’ He grimaced, showing teeth stained as yellow as the liquid he had just swallowed.

Jerame began to wonder if he had been wise in coming. But Tartarus was the only expert on disorders of the brain in Sulien – and at Medical School his quirkily enquiring mind had distinguished him as the genius of the year, the star pupil.

‘Long years ago I asked you a question. A question you could not then answer.’

‘Why? That was the question you asked, I seem to recall. A hundred questions in that one word. Why the Accidie? Why is it irreversible? Why Iridial –’

‘Yes, yes. And you said to me you would investigate the Accidie from the viewpoint of modern medical thought. Away with the superstitions, the legends. Observed facts and scientific conclusions – that was the only way forward.’

‘But you wouldn’t let me draw my own conclusions,’ Tartarus said; a gleam of resentment lit his eyes, dull as old varnish in the brown light.

‘I wouldn’t let you dissect her!’ Jerame cried.

Tartarus shrugged and reached for the decanter.

‘So much for modern scientific investigation. But Iridial is long dead. Why are you here today?’

‘It’s my daughter Orial. She –’ Jerame faltered, hands toying with the fingers of his gloves. ‘She is showing all the same signs.’

‘Your daughter too. So I was right?’ The gleam had become acquisitive. ‘Intriguing. It so often skips a generation. It would be most instructive to examine her –’