‘I’m tracking you on Vilgefortz’s orders!’ Rience roared. ‘It concerns the girl! By tracking your troop I hoped to get ahead of you, reach that bounty hunter before you did! I was going to try to negotiate the wench away from him! From him, not from you! Because you want to kill her, and Vilgefortz needs her alive! What else do you want to know? I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you everything!’

‘Whoa, there!’ Tawny Owl called. ‘Not so fast! Why, a fellow’s head could ache from such a racket and mass of information. Can you imagine, gentlemen, what will happen when we burn him? He’ll scream us to death!’

Kriel and Silifant cackled raucously. Kenna and Neratin Ceka didn’t join in the merriment. Neither did Bert Brigden, who had just then removed the iron from the coals and was examining it critically. The iron was so hot it seemed to be transparent, as though it wasn’t iron, but a glass tube full of molten fire.

Rience saw it and shrieked.

‘I know how to find the bounty hunter and the girl!’ he yelled. ‘I know! I’ll tell you!’

‘I’m certain of that.’

Kenna, still trying to read his thoughts, grimaced, picking up a wave of desperate, impotent fury. Something snapped in Rience’s brain, yet another partition. He’ll say something out of fear, thought Kenna, something he meant to keep until the end, as a trump card, an ace, which would have beaten all the other aces in a last, deciding hand for the highest stakes. Now he’ll discard that ace, out of a banal, revolting fear of pain.

Suddenly something popped in her head, she felt heat in her temples and then sudden cold.

And she knew. She knew Rience’s hidden thought.

By the Gods, she thought. What a pickle I’m in…

‘I’ll talk!’ howled the sorcerer, reddening and staring goggled-eyed in the coroner’s face. ‘I’ll tell you something genuinely important, Skellen! Vattier de Rideaux…’

Kenna suddenly heard another thought, belonging to someone else. She saw Neratin Ceka with a hand on his dagger moving towards the door.

Boots pounded and Boreas Mun rushed into the headman’s hall.

‘My lord coroner! Quickly, sir! You’ll never believe who’s here!’

Skellen gestured to Brigden, who was bending over towards the spy’s heels with the iron, to stop.

‘You ought to play the lottery, Rience,’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘I’ve never met anyone in my life with such luck.’

Through the window they could see a crowd and two people on horseback in the midst of it. Kenna knew at once who it was. She knew who the bony giant was, with the pale fishlike eyes, riding a powerful bay.