They were five strides from the wall before the first flash came from behind. Immediately the courtyard seemed lighter, new shadows growing from their pounding feet as a delicate glow rose behind them. Chel could see the lip of the wall ahead, a shrinking line of shadow, seeming ever darker as the orange light lit the walls. Ahead of him, Tarfel stumbled, dropping to his hands two strides short of the wall as Kosh scuttled back from the door and behind it.

Chel seized Tarf by the collar and dragged him up and on, hauling him over the lip of the wall, when around them the courtyard went white. Something popped in the air, then the wave hit as they threw themselves down past the stone, a wall of sound like the smashing of a thousand pots, the beating of a thousand gongs. The heat followed, a flame-tongued shock that blasted over their heads like the wash of a furnace as big as a city.

Chel felt the air leave his lungs, incredible heat, and then he was chewing dust, the loose stone of the courtyard floor pressed to his singed face. Rain was falling, cold and distant against his battered back, trickling down his neck.

He sat up, feeling the groans and cracks of his body, the raw patches of skin and smouldering hair. His eyes were still gummy with tears. The courtyard was transformed. The wagons were gone, the canopy gone, the wall behind a blackened smear, its remaining stones marked by a scatter of lingering flames. The other wagons had been blasted off their axles, thrown into a shattered mass on the courtyard’s far side. Thick black smoke boiled up into the night. And behind them, the grand embossed door of the archway had buckled inwards, the fine lacquer visibly scorched.

There was no sign of Nadej, or Jaul, or any of the Gold Peak mercenaries, in any form Chel could recognize in the smoking crater where the wagon had stood. There was no sign of Whisper.

Kosh was hunched beside him, huddled in her cloak, still but breathing. Tarfel was crying, snivelling in the rain, whimpering over and over that he was sorry, that the pot had slipped from his hands, that he should never have sneaked off in the first place. His voice sounded distant to Chel’s numbed and ringing ears, irrelevant, useless.

Behind them, the archway door clanked and lurched, its bolts dangling loose, its mechanism wrecked. Then it fell open. An orange-girdled head emerged from within, grazed and battered but otherwise whole. ‘Aye, right, finally! That’s got it, just needed a big old bang. Ah, there you are, you wee pricks.’

She took a moment to absorb the scene, her eyes distant, still fuddled with booze. ‘What in the name of galloping fuck happened out here?’

Another pause. ‘Where’s Whispie?’

Chel couldn’t speak, but the desolation of his gaze must have told its own story. Her face fell.