All the way there Galen said nothing else, but Raffi could feel the pain in him, the desperate rising hope. Some of the way they ran as time was running out; even Carys felt eyes on her, scurrying of shapes in the shadows, constantly glanced behind her at the darkest corners. Once she laughed at herself – she was the Watch, after all – but in this place everything seemed full of doubt. She knew she was beginning to look like an outlaw, to think like one. She had almost forgotten herself, and the knowledge shook her.

Overhead the draxi flapped, looming out of fog; Raffi glanced up at them with a shudder.

Crouched under walls, against buildings, they ran deeper and deeper into Tasceron’s heart. Finally the Sekoi stopped by a smooth sloping wall. ‘Well, keeper,’ it said, breathless. ‘Your Pyramid.’

The top was lost in gloom. They walked round it. Four walls, with no opening. It was blank and smooth.

‘Now what?’ Carys muttered.

Galen put both hands on the brickwork. He began to speak, words that not even Raffi knew – fierce, secret sounds – so that Carys stared and the Sekoi put its long hands together and chewed its nails nervously.

The spell ended. But nothing moved.

In a rage of fury, Galen slammed his hands against the wall, kicked it, beat at it. He moaned and cursed, his voice an agony in the silence. It chilled them all. For a moment Raffi wondered if his mind had gone. Then Galen turned. He looked over Raffi’s shoulder into the dark and there was a look on his haggard face that terrified them.

But all he said was, ‘We’re going to have to improve your sense-lines, boy.’

Carys spun round.

The Sekoi snarled.

Behind them, a row of armed men was waiting in the gloom.

20

There will be one who will return from the black pit.

And yet he will not be the one who went.

Apocalypse of Tamar

‘MY NAME IS not for you yet,’ the old man said. He nodded to the nearest swordsman. ‘Search the pack.’

They were inside the Pyramid, though Raffi still wasn’t sure how it had opened. The scuffle in the street had been brief; the men had dragged them in and flung them down there in a heap. The Sekoi had a torn ear, and Carys’s crossbow was in a swordsman’s hand.

Now Raffi watched in fury as the pack was tugged open; one by one their clothes were tossed out, the water-flask, the tinder-box. Finally the relic-bag. The swordsman tossed it to the old man, who held it a moment.

‘What might be in here?’

Galen was silent. Raffi’s heart thumped.