They walked together between the dark houses, through the mud, the soft pools of water and dung. The stench of the place was appalling. Filthy children watched them from doorways, silent and unsmiling. The buildings were squalid and patched, the wood rotten and green with age. As they squelched through the muck, Galen muttered, ‘Anything?’

‘People watching. Just curious.’ The sense-lines moved about them, invisible, fluid. Raffi held them with some distant part of his mind, easily, from long practice. It had been the first thing Galen had taught him.

The fortress loomed up. Noise and smoke drifted out from it, laughter, the yells of an argument. In the ruined windows, faint lights glimmered; the strange smooth walls were dappled with moonlight.

At the doorway, the entrance Raffi had seen through the glass, three men waited. Their weapons were in their hands – long hooked knives. They watched Galen come with a mixture of fear and something else, something disturbing. Warnings rippled in Raffi’s skull. ‘Galen …’

But Galen had walked right up to them.

‘My name is Galen Harn. I’m looking for Alberic’

Whatever else, they weren’t surprised. One grinned at the others. ‘We’ve been expecting you, keeper. Come with me.’

Inside was dark, a maze of rooms and passages. Voices echoed ahead, or from behind closed doors; smoky torches guttered on brackets. The air was fetid and smelt worse than outside. As they walked down a long corridor men squeezed past them, a few slaves, two girls giggling behind Raffi’s back, sending the sense-lines rippling. Looking up, he saw something on a wall, marks under the dirt, a symbol he knew. Next to it was a grid of buttons and numbers by a door. Galen stopped too and made the humility-sign; Raffi knew he longed to touch it. ‘This is a relic,’ he said to their guide. ‘It shouldn’t be left here.’

The man shrugged easily. ‘That’s up to Alberic’

‘Don’t you fear it?’

‘I stay away from it, keeper. The whole castle is old.’

‘Where does this door lead?’

‘Nowhere. There’s a square shaft behind it, empty. Goes right down.’ He leered. ‘Alberic uses it as a burial pit. Knee-deep in skeletons.’

He wasn’t joking. Raffi glanced at Galen, but the keeper’s face was dark and grim. Putting his hand in his pocket, he let the touch of the blue box comfort him.

They came to some stairs leading up, wide but dingy. Raffi’s eyes smarted from the smoke; he stumbled on greasy bones and other rubbish in the thick straw. Gnats whined round him; fleas too, he didn’t doubt.

The stairs rose up. Ahead in the dark, Galen climbed them steadily, his black stick tapping. Something was cooking somewhere, a rich, meaty smell that tormented Raffi like a pain. He wondered if they’d get any of it. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten meat.