Ola Harsheim and Dacre Silifant picked up the milk pail and simultaneously flung the cream in the direction Kenna was indicating. Til Echrade vigorously emptied a flour barrel which had been hidden under the table. A creamy, floury shape–amorphous at first–appeared on the floor of the chamber. But Bert Brigden was alert. Correctly judging where the pancake’s head might be, he whacked it as hard as he could with a cast-iron frying pan.

Then everybody threw themselves at the spy who was plastered all over with cream and flour, tore the hat of invisibility from his head and seized his arms and legs. After upturning the table, they tied the captive’s limbs to the legs. They pulled off his boots and footwraps and stuffed one of them into his mouth which was open and ready to shout.

In order to crown their work, Dufficey Kriel kicked the captive hard in the ribs, and the others took pleasure in watching the spy’s eyes bulge out of their sockets.

‘Magnificent work,’ commented Tawny Owl, who hadn’t moved during the entire, brief, incident but had stood with his arms crossed on his chest.

‘Bravo. Congratulations. Above all to you, Miss Selborne.’

Bloody hell, thought Kenna. If it carries on like this I really am liable to end up an officer.

‘Mr Brigden,’ Stefan Skellen said coldly, standing over the prisoner spread out between the table legs, ‘put the irons in the coals, please. Mr Echrade, please make sure no children are hanging around outside.’

He leaned over and looked into the bound man’s eyes.

‘You haven’t shown your face for ages, Rience,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think some misfortune had befallen you.’

The bell in the guardhouse–the signal for the changing of the guard–struck. The Scarra sisters snored euphoniously. Kohut, hugging the stool, smacked his lips in his sleep.

He played the hero, Kenna recalled, pretending to be brave, that foolhardy Rience. The sorcerer Rience, given the pancake treatment and tied to the legs of a table with his bare feet sticking up. He was playing the hero, but wasn’t fooling anybody; least of all me. Tawny Owl warned us he was a sorcerer, so I scrambled his thoughts to stop him casting spells or sending for magical help. And read his thoughts while I was about it. He was blocking my way in, but when he caught a whiff of the smoke from the coal of the brazier where the irons were heating up, his magical protection and blockades burst along all their seams like old britches, and I was able to read him freely. His thoughts didn’t differ from those of other people I’ve read in like situations. The thoughts of people who are about to be tortured. Chaotic, trembling thoughts; full of fear and despair. Cold, slimy, wet, foul-smelling thoughts. Like a corpse’s entrails.