They reached the pool. But for the low blanket of mist in the surrounding area, it was much as Drusher remembered it from the previous day. Nayl, Voriet and the deputies went ahead to scout, leaving Macks and Audla Jaff with Eisenhorn and Drusher.

Eisenhorn limped to the old, mossy stones and began to examine them. He took off his gloves to run his bare hands across their surfaces.

Drusher watched the birds in the nearby trees for a while and counted off eight species. Then he wandered over to join Eisenhorn.

‘Do they know you’re hunting for them?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘The Cognitae? This Chase woman?’

‘Yes, magos.’

‘And it would seem, from the fate of your poor associate Thea, they knew you had come close here.’

‘It would.’

‘Are you familiar with the white tile spider?’ asked Drusher.

‘Pretend I’m not,’ replied Eisenhorn.

‘It’s small, but venomous. An arachnid. Black, but with a small white square on its abdomen, hence the name. Elusive. It is preyed upon by a number of small lizard species. It has a habit of killing greenback beetles, which the lizards consider to be a delicacy. It does not eat the beetles. It leaves them dead, near its lair. This attracts the lizards, who feed on the beetles and slowly become paralysed by the venom the white tile has injected into their bodies. Once the lizards are helplessly inert, the white tile emerges and kills them. It kills and feeds upon its own mortal enemy, creatures many times larger and more powerful than itself.’

‘That was an analogy, wasn’t it?’ said Eisenhorn.

‘The bodies you’ve found here in the Karanines,’ said Drusher. ‘That appears to me to be the oddest fact of all. Whatever’s afoot here, whatever secret endeavour, why leave them where they can be found? Why draw attention where no attention was being paid?’

‘You think this is a trap, magos?’

‘I think if you were hunting me, I’d want to find a way to stop that. You say the Cognitae are clever and devious. That thing that attacked us in Helter. Animated by a word of power, I have no doubt…’

‘It was.’

‘It seems to me that it was animated once we were all here together. You had been absent for days, and several of your staff were away recruiting me. Only when we all returned did it strike. Because we were there to be killed. Brought there by the mystery of the bodies.’

‘Drusher,’ said Eisenhorn, ‘I am not worried that this is a trap. I am absolutely certain it is one. An effort I cannot ignore, too delicious to resist, intended to bring me to this place and end me forever.’

Voriet clambered back up the slope to join them at the edge of the pool.

‘Sir, we’ve found the house,’ he said. ‘What’s left of it.’

Fourteen

FOURTEEN

Shade Hall