He was released after six years. He was very ill by then. Scurvy had taken away all his teeth, anaemia his hair, glaucoma his eyesight, and asthma his breath. The fingers of both hands had been broken during the interrogations.

He lived for less than a year after being freed. He died in a temple poorhouse. In misery. Forgotten.

The manuscript of the book Men from the Shadows, the History of the Royal Secret Services vanished without trace.

The sky in the east brightened. A pale glow appeared above the hills, the harbinger of the dawn.

Silence had reigned by the campfire for a long time. The pilgrim, the elf and the tracker looked into the dying fire in silence.

Silence reigned in Elskerdeg. The howling phantom had gone away, bored by its vain howling. The phantom must have finally understood that the three men sitting by the campfire had seen too many atrocities lately to worry about any old spectre.

‘If we are to travel together we must abandon mistrust,’ Boreas Mun said suddenly, looking into the campfire’s ruby glow. ‘Let’s leave behind us what was. The world has changed. There’s a new life in front of us. Something has ended, something is beginning. Ahead of us—’

He broke off and coughed. He was not accustomed to speeches like that, was afraid of looking ridiculous. But his accidental companions weren’t laughing. Why, Boreas positively sensed friendliness emanating from them.

‘The pass of Elskerdeg is ahead of us,’ he ended in a more confident voice, ‘and beyond the pass Zerrikania and Hakland. There’s a long and dangerous road ahead of us. If we are to travel together… Let’s abandon mistrust. I am Boreas Mun.’

The pilgrim in the wide-brimmed hat stood up, straightening his great frame, and shook the hand being held out towards him. The elf also stood up. His horrifyingly disfigured face contorted strangely.

After shaking the tracker’s hand the pilgrim and the elf held out their right hands towards each other.

‘The world has changed,’ said the pilgrim. ‘Something has ended. I am… Sigi Reuven.’

‘Something is beginning.’ The elf twisted his ravaged face into something that according to all evidence was a smile. ‘I am… Wolf Isengrim.’

They shook hands, quickly, firmly, downright violently. For a moment it looked more like the preliminaries to a fight than a gesture of reconciliation. But only for a moment.

The log in the campfire shot out sparks, celebrating the event with a joyful firework.

‘God strike me down—’ Boreas Mun smiled broadly ‘—if this isn’t the start of a beautiful friendship.’

…along with the other Martyr Sisters, St Philipa was also calumniated for betraying the kingdom, for fomenting tumults and sedition, for inciting the people and plotting an insurrection. Wilmerius, a heretic and cultist, and self-appointed high priest, ordered the Saint to be seized, thrown into a dark and foul prison beset with cold and stench, calling on her to confess her sins and declare those that she had committed. And Wilmerius showed St Philipa divers instruments of torture and menaced her greatly, but the Saint merely spat in his countenance and accused him of sodomy.