‘It is…’ he mumbled, staring into the ice hole, into the black water. ‘Mil Trachta. But we says: Hundred Lakes.’

‘And Tarn Mira lake? Do you know of such a place?’

‘Everyone does.’ He glanced at the girl, frightened. ‘We calls it Bottomless Lake, mind. It’s enchanted. Awfully deep… Rusalkas live there, drown folk, they do. And phantoms live in the ancient, enchanted ruins.’

He saw her green eyes light up.

‘There are ruins there? A tower, perhaps?’

‘What tower?’ He couldn’t suppress a snort. ‘Stone upon stone, covered over with stone, overgrown with weeds. A heap of rubble…’

The perch had stopped flopping, and was lying, moving its gills, amidst its colourful, striped brothers. The girl stared at it, lost in thought.

‘Death on the ice,’ she said, ‘has something bewitching about it.’

‘Eh?’

‘How far is it to the lake with the ruins? Which way should I ride?’

He told her. He showed her. He even scratched it on the ice with the sharp end of the chisel. She nodded, trying to remember. The mare at the lakeside struck its hooves on the frozen ground and snorted, belching steam from its nostrils.

He watched her move away along the western edge of the lake, gallop along the edge of the cliff against a background of leafless alders and birches, through a breathtaking, fairy-tale forest, adorned with a white icing of hoarfrost. The black mare ran with unutterable grace, swiftly, but at the same time lightly, the beat of its hooves barely audible on the frozen ground, a faint silver powder of snow dropping from the branches it knocked against. As though it were not an ordinary horse but one from a fairy-tale, as if a spectral horse was running through a mythical forest, the trees bound in hoarfrost like icing.

And perhaps it was an apparition?

A demon on a ghostly horse, a demon that assumed the form of a girl with huge green eyes and a disfigured face?

Who, if not a demon, travels in winter? Or asks the way to enchanted ruins?

After she had ridden away, Gosta quickly packed away his fishing tackle. He walked home through the forest. He was going out of his way, but his good sense and instincts warned him not to take the forest tracks, to stay out of sight. The girl, his good sense told him, had not–contrary to all appearances–been a phantom. She was a human being. The black mare hadn’t been an apparition, it was a horse. And people who gallop through the wilds–in winter, to boot–are very often being hunted.

An hour later a search party galloped along the forest track. Fourteen horses.

Rience shook the silver box once again, swore and smacked his saddle pommel in fury. But the xenogloss was silent. As the grave.

‘Magic shit,’ commented Bonhart coldly. ‘It’s broken, the cheap gewgaw.’

‘Or Vilgefortz is showing what he thinks of us,’ Stefan Skellen added.

Rience raised his head and glared at the two of them.