Chel had nothing to offer. He opened and closed his mouth, chewed at his lip, and the prince’s gaze fell back to the plum stone. Chel’s joined it. In the distance came the sound of drums and discordant horns, fighting valiantly against the wind across the plateau.

The earth shook. Chel thought he heard a crack over the rush of the wind, a sound like something huge snapping in half. Another tremor followed, then another, a gentle rumble beneath their feet, the slightest rattle from the platters of fruit on the low table beyond the arch. Chel and Tarfel exchanged anxious looks, the prince’s pain forgotten, each turning to the balcony.

‘Could it be—’

‘Witchfire!’

Kosh was already at the rail, Matil at her side. ‘Smoke!’

The Keeper had not moved, although deep lines furrowed her paper-thin brow. She muttered something to an attendant, who fussed his way to Matil’s side and to the tubular device at the rail. Chel could see the smoke now, black and rising, and a wafting pale cloud that intertwined its base. It came from the pass.

‘What in hells—?’

On the plateau, awareness was spreading like flame. Chel could see the eddies of hurrying figures, little more than dark blurs through the haze, stripped of sound by the flap of the wind. Spurts of activity flared around the camps, small at first, then spreading outwards until a full-fledged stampede was in progress. The gleam of armour drew Chel’s attention to the ring of watchtowers before the gorge; the guards were abandoning their posts, making for the great bridge over the divide.

The Keeper barked again, and the flunky at the tube yelled something back over the growing murmurs on the gallery. Chel could hear bells tolling around the city, increasing in number, and felt a familiar sick panic swelling in his chest. This had happened too many times.

‘What’s happening?’ he called toward Kosh and Matil. Was that screaming from the plateau? ‘What’s he saying?’

The smoke was thick now, a dark column like a wedged shaft of night, around it a blooming yellowish fog, spreading out from the pass, clogging the neck of the plateau. Matil turned toward him, but her gaze was still toward the pass, toward the smog obscuring the fortress.

‘He can’t see the signals from the fort. The smoke and dust are too thick.’

Urgent bells were all around them now, panic had taken the city and its towers. The passage to the bridge was choked with fleeing guards and those escaping the camps, fighting to get across toward the sanctuary of the city.