The woman nodded to Chel’s left, and the meathead beside him cracked him across the back with his baton. The pain was sharp and staggering, sending him lunging forward onto the table, both hands planted. A second rap of the baton against his knuckles made him yowl, dragging his hand back and cradling it beneath his arm.

‘As I said,’ the woman continued, ‘your wanderings in darkness have ended. Your path back to the light begins today.’

‘Who are you?’ he hissed, mentally inserting ‘the fuck’.

‘My name is Haranali Laralim.’ She smiled, this time with unexpected warmth. ‘But you may call me Auntie.’

***

Chel walked beside Laralim out into the brisk air of the terraced gardens, paying close attention to his foot placement lest he step on the swishing train of her bright silken dress. Behind them lurked the squat bruiser, named by Laralim as Urbu. The baton remained in his hand.

‘Why have you brought me here?’

She tilted her head, awaiting something.

‘Auntie,’ he added through gritted teeth.

She smiled. In the silvery light of the gardens, he could see the layers of make-up that caked her face, applied with expert hands but cracked and flaking nonetheless. He realized that the shadows were long, the absent sun descending in the north-western sky, soon to be lost behind the wall of smoky peaks that loomed over them. They’d left him bound and hooded for hours. He had places to be, and people to find.

‘We are the Wards,’ she said. ‘The Wardens. We are the keepers of our people. This is our enclave.’

‘Oh. I’ve heard of you.’

She nodded, still smiling, more to herself than to him. ‘As well you might.’ They walked along a covered path around the faceted edge of a building, the occasional drip of meltwater plopping from roof to the puckered earth below. The gardens bloomed beyond them, a regimented array of brilliant colour, reds, pinks, and lilac, stacked in terraces down the hillside toward the grey walls encircling them. Directly before and beneath them sat the gloomy bulk of Merenghi, steaming and huffing in the afternoon light. In the other directions, he saw little; curls of drab, rolling plains, pockets of scrubby trees, another distant run of hills, the barren rise where they’d parted from Whisper and Tarfel, empty now. The gardens were a splash of vivid colour in a sea of dinge.

‘You have a pretty garden,’ he ventured, hoping a little flattery might earn him some answers.

‘We do. It is well-tended and carefully nurtured, like our family.’

He sighed inwardly.

‘My friend, where is he? Why are you keeping him? Keeping us both?’

The path diverged at the wall’s end, and she directed them out along the edge of the terrace, under the pale shade of thin and barren trees, moulded into arches. Urbu stomped behind them, quietly seething.