Lug watched the transformation with his hands clapped over his mouth. He had seen magic before but nothing quite as dramatic as Liska’s change. Her cloak seemed to coil itself around her body as if it were alive, and then she folded inwards, shrinking, bending. The hollow, floppy limbs of the griffyx fur started to pop and jut with bones and muscle. The dead, feathered wings on its back began to flap and flutter. The empty sockets on the fox-fur head were suddenly filled with Liska’s eyes. Bright green, fierce and now wide with fright.

Finally, the ears pricked, the jaws snapped and a puppy-pink tongue flashed. Where the fierce girl had stood a moment before, a winged, scaled fox now crouched, tail swishing, nose twitching.

‘What are you standing around for?’ the griffyx said with Liska’s voice. ‘Get running!’

Then it hunkered down, beat its wings and shot off upwards, heading for the mountaintop.

Chapter 4

The fortress known as the Breach was as old as the city itself. Built from man-sized chunks of carved granite, at some point in its history it had been damaged in a wyvern attack. Split in half down the middle, one side of the stocky tower had slid sideways, crashing through walls and smaller buildings, threatening to topple down into the valley below but not quite managing it.

That had been hundreds of years ago, and it still hadn’t fallen. Shored up, reinforced and built all over with layer after layer of new stone, the lopsided fort now bristled with landing platforms, flags, banners, catapults, ballistae and lookout points. Not to mention extra turrets and observatories where stormsingers brewed their protective mists and master mages peered out at the Rotlands, trying to estimate how fast the black plague of Bitterblight was spreading.

Its battlements and walkways were patrolled by the prowling forms of shapewalkers dressed in leather armour criss-crossed with straps and buckles. They carried no weapons but wore cloaks of fur and hide that trailed behind them. Claws and fangs glinted in the scraps of sunlight that broke through the fog and cloud. Those were their weapons, hungrier and deadlier than any spear or blade.

Liska made for them now, pounding her wings against the air, fighting to climb as fast as she could. There was no time to glide in circles, rising on thermal currents, as she had been taught. Every second she spent flying, another one of those things could be oozing its way through Noxis’s tunnel.

Panting for breath, she reached the lowest walkway of the fort and crash-landed, spilling into a tumble of legs and wings and cracking her snout on the flagstones. Scrambling up, she tucked her wings away and began scampering on paws up stairway after stairway, following trails of scents, desperate to find somebody, anybody who could raise the alarm.