Galen frowned. ‘This bit’s very broken. I can just get words, hollow, sacred, the messenger. Then, Find him. Find him. Prayers and blessings, brothers. Strength of the rock, cunning of the weasel be yours.’

He looked up. ‘That’s all.’

Carefully, he sifted the tiny scraps that had fallen, trying to find more.

‘The Crow!’ Raffi breathed the words in awe. ‘Still alive!’

‘Tesk died twenty years ago. That dates it.’

But Raffi could see the news had shaken Galen, stirred him deep. He wanted to ask more, about what it meant, but instead he picked up the ball, carefully. It was cold, heavy, quite transparent. He turned it in his fingers. Nothing came from it now. It was silent.

Galen took it from him. ‘A relic. But of what?’ He muttered a prayer over it, a brief blessing. ‘Once I saw an image of the Crow carrying such a glass ball in its mouth. A most secret sign. But what it means, I never learned.’

‘Did you know him?’ Raffi asked.

‘Kelnar? No. Not even the name. But the Order was great when I was a scholar. There were hundreds of keepers.’

‘I wonder what happened to him.’

Galen scowled. He wrapped the ball back in the waxed cloth and, picking the letter up, read it again. Then he crushed it in his strong grip. Fragments of desiccated parchment gusted in the river breeze.

‘Dead,’ he said softly. ‘Like all of them.’

They decided to sleep on the island. With the spell on the bridge, and on the second bridge that led through a great bank of nettles to the far shore, there was nowhere safer. Raffi was too tired to think about what they had found. He drank hot tea made of nettle leaves and curled up hastily in a blanket in the shelter of the ruined wall.

His dreams were strange. He found himself walking endlessly over a grassy plain; a great city lay before him, its spires and towers rising over the horizon, but he could never reach it, never get any closer. And behind him his shadow stretched, long and black, and it danced and capered with glee, he knew it did, but every time he turned and looked at it, it kept still. Walking on, he felt the evil dance break out again behind him. There was nothing he could do about it.

When he woke, he lay with his eyes closed, sleepily, trying to remember. Dreams were important. Perhaps someone was following them. The Watch, he thought, in sudden terror. Or Alberic. But whoever it was, the bridge would stop them. Relieved, he knew that was true. No one else could cross that.

When he sat up, the sky was dim – the sun had set into red streaks towards the west. Cloud was building there, a sullen bank of weather; gnats and humflies gathered in twisting columns among the sedges.