Metal pressed my throat. Faces with eyes of green poison were on me, all around me. Hair, long and ragged, was swaying.

‘We are earthkin!’ hissed a face full of hatred. ‘What need we from the likes of an Exelcian monk!’

I felt my lips moving and this time heard my words: ‘I would fulfil a promise made’—my voice was a grown man’s—‘Hear me, you earthkin. I will make of you kings among all druids of your reach. Above the princes of the earth. Above the Raven you fear. Above death. Have you forgotten?’

The green eyes gleamed. ‘That promise was made by another. Who are you to fulfil it?’

‘No one and nothing,’ I answered them, ‘if you will not give me your hand. The Raven cannot give his, so taken is he by the passions of kingdoms. Those all I shall crumble. With your old tongues, deep magics, do this thing. Bind this lost people to my bidding. Grant me a force not yet seen in this world.’

At my words, the metal drew back from my throat.

The faces vanished.

I didn’t feel it: I knew. That white hand on my shoulder. ‘Come,’ the voice said at my ear.

So I turned away, into the night.

This time I was walking, not far behind him. His white back seemed to shift as if the air pulled at it. Dunes rose and fell under our feet, the erg’s waves like a rumpled sheet of moonlit silk. Far away there were mountains, or maybe hills, of black rock. And then they too were gone; so were the dunes and the ghost.

From the pit of a dark chasm I looked up to the night sky. Hadn’t I dreamed about this chasm, or something like it, once? Black rock was all around me, moving, crawling with pale hands as Rath scaled towards the moon.

Sand stirred under my feet and then drained down, out of the chasm.

As if caught in an hourglass, I was poured through its black funnel.

Black rock . . . then greenstone . . .

. . . the tunnel I knew . . .

Bolting awake, I didn’t wait—not for a second. I flipped my sling-bag round my body and scrambled out over the legs inside the tent, pushing a grunt out of Kadesh.

The night was freezing, even colder for the wind off the sea. Radhi’s harbour was nothing more than a shell-shaped shadow on its shimmer, and now I wondered just how different it would have looked those decades ago, with all the watch-lights ablaze.

It was late. Half-shapes of soldiers on the night-watch moved beyond the line of torches while the horses whinnied softly. I hurried through the campsite, catching the eye of the Marszal who sat aboard one of the carts, picking at khapent.

The two soldiers who stood outside the command tent were talking, and before they saw me I smacked my way in through its flaps. ‘I need to talk to you,’ I blurted, straight down the blade of the knife he’d drawn.

‘You’ll find that announcing oneself is good for more than courtesy,’ Plamen chided.

‘Sorry sir.’

A woman hurried in after me but, sheathing his knife, Plamen dismissed her. ‘What is it?’

His white mantle hung up, he wore only a sleeveless tunic and leather leggings, all plain. Plamen’s arms were lean but muscular, and for the first time I could see his martial brandmarks. On his right upper arm, a post-and-lintel symbol. So he’d been part of the Methan Regiment before assuming High Command. On his left was the three-towered symbol of the Antissan Regiment under another, older mess of thickly cauterised skin.

I took a big breath and spoke: ‘We have to go into the erg.’

‘You have seen something?’

‘Yes. Sand.’

‘That is indeed what you’ll find there.’

‘And a tunnel,’ I added promptly. ‘Just like the tunnels under the fortress and the shen in Verunia. And that ruin. Going straight down. The sand I saw was erg sand. There were dunes.’

‘I see,’ he said, going to his table, looking back. ‘The erg’s bone-dry, you realise. Did you see any water?’

It annoyed me, that question, but I had to shake my head. ‘Only the greenstone tunnel and the rocks and the sand. But you have to trust me, I—’

‘Do I.’

I let those two words cut me short.

Nobody knew about the ghost who called to me in my dreams and Plamen wouldn’t be the first. It had been roaming through my mind since the Disc had first revealed its power. Whoever it really was, whatever it was, it was trying to guide me. I knew that well enough, but Plamen didn’t need to. I was here to guide the mission.

Above that stiff sea wind outside, a beat of hooves was getting louder and as they slowed I heard brief greetings. Plamen didn’t react.

‘Travel will be hard, which will bring more dangers,’ he said. ‘Our drinking water will not last as many miles. And if we’re forced to take flight at any time, we’ll have no choice but to abandon the supply-carts. Still, I see no way the Rath could survive on those dunes.’

‘They’re there, I saw them. We have to look there,’ I insisted. ‘We’ve almost circled Antissa and nothing’s south of the city.’

The grey circles stared. Even though the mission had been his idea from the start, I didn’t have Plamen’s trust. And it was true: I’d seen no river.

The tent-flaps parted behind me. ‘Keda’s here, ekharan,’ said his guard.

‘Show her in.’

We waited, saying nothing. Through the wind I could hear the biggest waves crashing on rocks. When the flaps opened again it was to admit a new soldier; one heavily cloaked against the cold of the night. She walked with one wrist raised, the mottled falcon perched there on a gauntlet. Savhar came in behind her, still moving bits of khapent around her mouth. As I went to stand near the muslin of the Commander’s pallet, I recognised the sharp angles of the falcon-carrier’s face in her headdress. ‘High Commander,’ she greeted.

‘A well-timed arrival, artabekh,’ Plamen replied. ‘I trust your journey fared well.’

‘It did, ekharan. Departed from the fortress an hour after sundown. Rode hard. Were it not for the winds across the southern plains tonight, I should have reached you earlier.’ Her voice sounded a little thick, her face quite blank; I guessed she’d just learned of our losses.

‘You come, of course, to assemble the Laudassan cavalcade.’

‘That is correct, sir. As promised to Caliph Omran.’

‘And the Caliph will have it,’ Plamen said almost brightly. ‘Our mission, it would seem, has found its true direction.’

All eyes rounded on me. Even the falcon cocked its head. ‘The river?’ said Savhar, eagerness and disbelief both in her face. Part of the question was for me. Not wanting to disappoint, I chose instead to look at her boots and answer direct questions only. Too many officers in here.

‘More the chance of one,’ said Plamen. ‘Yet, having witnessed the power of this tool of the boy’s, we should be fools not to trust him.’ I kept my eyes on the Marszal’s boots. ‘Tomorrow we ride for the Northern Erg.’

Savhar gave a strangled laugh. ‘A river in the erg, sir, is that likely?’

‘It is our course,’ was the reply. ‘I will take ten riders with me, two servants and a supply-cart. Artabh Keda will take charge of the rest of the unit, that’s thirty Mounted Scimitars. With the remaining supplies and the surplus of horses, she will ride to Chidh Eshipas and there fulfil our agreement. Marszal.’

‘Sir.’

‘Make your return to the fortress. Enter with due caution. Tell the good Caliph Omran that his temples are garrisoned. Then seek the Viceroy. Inform him that he will have his needed leverage in two days.’

I never liked it when he smiled.

----------------------------------------

And now I only hoped I hadn’t made a mistake. Two hours after sunrise, I sat my horse in the middle of a vastly reduced company of cavalry and watched the others ride away from us. Artabh Keda and her thirty riders inched southeast with their supply-carts, Aznath, Rakhel and Kadesh; while to the east, Marszal Savhar cantered back towards Antissa alone, ripping a cloud in her wake. Losing those numbers had been planned right from the start and yet I couldn’t shrug the worry that the Rath were watching us. The blame for failure wouldn’t be mine, but what did it matter if the rest of us were slaughtered out here? So as we quenched our morning thirst and watched them go, I hung onto the one certainty I had: that the man who led us clearly had no intention of failing.

Our cart was that least weakened by travel. It contained just two tents and their blankets, a cask of water, three days’ rations and rope. I’d insisted on the rope.

We headed north, the first few miles slow across the empty terrain and the heat becoming fully unbearable before it seemed we’d made any distance. The erg sands rose in shallow waves around us, which meant we could stay mounted as we turned to the northeast.

The way out of those first dunes, before midday, was more trouble. Again the slopes had looked so gentle, but their sand was loose, and shifted. Many horses lost their footing and would slip, throwing their riders as they tumbled and went down.

Some time after midday, the supply-cart took a badly gauged descent over a crest. It landed with a bump that broke a wheel clean off its axle and sent the whole thing crunching on one side. Issachar’s control of the horse saved the cart as it listed, almost toppling over an embankment, but not before the water-cask rolled and cracked against the boundary.

Kobi lurched to save it, slapping his hands against the wood and pulling back, while the broken wheel ran away and dropped flat out in the open. Water spurted through the staves, dappling the sand. As soon as the cask was secure, Kobi leapt clear of the cart like a rock-hopping locust and held his waterskin right under the leaking current.

Soldiers gathered fast behind him, readying their own. The cask was split near the base, its contents now all but gushing from the fracture. Only when all of their skins had been filled did the Commander dismount. He filled his own skin at the leak but when two soldiers started straightening the cast, he raised a hand. ‘Leave it,’ he said as precious water kept on spilling.

Faces locked on the splatter and Plamen watched it in turn, as if daring a challenge.

I urged, ‘Commander!’

‘Leave it,’ he repeated, tone unchanged.

But Kobi darted forward. The boy ripped open his shirt, exposing the dark brown of his chest, hurriedly pulled it off his shoulders and began to ball it in his hands to stop the leak.

‘My words were leave it!’ Plamen roared.

The youth spun away from the cart, dropping the shirt and stumbling back into the soldier behind him. The fierce rebuke knocked every pair of watching eyes straight to the ground and I was sure that every soldier saw himself in the boy then. The eyes all settled on the water as it slowly eased into a drip. Loud in the silence.

Plamen looked at me. Then the drip. At the cowed servant, collecting his shirt. Creasing his eyes up at the sandscape, he walked out. He walked some twenty feet away into the open before stopping, and with a hand on his sword, stared at the dunes ahead of us. Hot air shimmered before him.

We waited; soldier and servant alike all chided children.

After some minutes Plamen walked back, sunlight flashing in the ruby of his headdress. ‘Boy.’

‘Sir,’ I answered.

‘Not you.’ He looked at Kobi. ‘You. Can you ride?’

Kobi looked down at his hands as they kneaded his ripped shirt. I tensed my grip on my reins. Answer him.

He nodded.

So did Plamen. ‘New orders,’ he said, addressing the full company again. ‘Equip my horse and one other – the fastest here, a gelding. Servants’ tent, rations and three skins of water. From here I take only the Elmine and Ospégan boy with me.’ My heartbeat quickened. ‘The rest to ride cross-country and join the garrison at Chidh Eshipas.’

As if in answer to the loss of so much water all at once, my mouth went dry. Tongue turned to dust. What was he doing? That was mad! We’d stand no chance out here alone!

A shuffle passed among the soldiers but no one raised any objections. They were soldiers, after all, and the only other officer still here was Telmadh Shafra: his rank too low to dare any confrontation with High Command.

Orders were obeyed. The bay was taken from me and, soon enough, I sat in front of Kobi in the saddle of a gelding, lean and brown. The Commander’s large stallion bore the weight of the tent while our own saddlebags carried everything else: rations and water, horse-feed, lantern and rope. That was all.

This was a more spirited animal than the bay I’d been riding, but Kobi could handle a horse better anyway. He rode us up from the broken cart and reined in, cautiously, beside the stallion.

The last ten of our cavalry unit was riding away south, but Plamen didn’t even look up from his compass to watch them. I watched him, bitterly now, knowing his decision for a risk, and maybe one risk too far. ‘What happens now if we’re—’

‘Attacked?’ He closed the compass. ‘If we’re attacked then we ride hard. And if you have a god, Naemian, you pray the dunes part before us.’

The broken cart shrank at our backs as we set out across the sandscape between two erg-belts. Our measured pace didn’t last long. After only a mile, Plamen’s horse sped to a trot. Gold slopes reared on either side, and then ahead.

Again we slowed as we approached them. Too easily, Plamen warned, might a horse snare a hoof in deep sand and lose its balance. These sands were already a greater hazard than he’d expected, a result of recent winds, and we couldn’t risk injuring a horse. So we dismounted for their safety. And after slaking our thirst, we continued on foot. Northwest.

I’d started to think that, just maybe, I’d grown hardened to the sun. But I was wrong. The heat seemed to double, boiling my flesh as I walked. My headcloth was useless, the grubby thing stuck to my forehead with sweat, and I didn’t dare pull it free in case my forehead came off with it. My swathe-hood didn’t help me much more, the sun always finding a way to my scalp. If I lowered my face, it would just cook right through the hessian. Sweat ran in streams from my hair, but Plamen was stern when he saw me always swatting it away. He said the effort wasted strength, as would the frenzy that would follow if I gave in to scratching or shifting swathes. I yearned to be free of my sandals as well, if only to flex my toes a bit or rub my soles around the blisters. He forbade that too. When I got cross he was strangely patient, advising that I focused my mind. ‘Your task,’ he said.

But I’d been doing that already. It was only because of the Sight that I knew our direction. As the heat layered on, however, wave after merciless wave, focus became too sore a strain. My awareness was a speck in the rolling vastness, and forcing myself through that vastness until I stumbled in the sand didn’t help me, or us. Had it not been for Kobi who led the gelding by my side, I’d have fallen and rolled from the crests of at least half a dozen dunes. So I stopped trying.

After another three or four miles of the same rolling rise and fall, a small brown smudge came into view off to our right, far away. It was like a tiny fishing bauble on a wide brown-yellow sea, bobbing through the liquid of the burning air. ‘Yes,’ said the voice up ahead. ‘It’s the fortress.’

I thought about Rusper. I thought about my people. Hoped they hadn’t been forgotten.

Then, again, we turned north. The dunes grew huge now, even harder on my legs. Plamen never flagged, always well in the lead, and I suspected that my own pace held him back. Kobi, as always, managed better. Child of the desert, after all: the greater ergs lying to the south in Ospégath where he came from. But he was tiring. A further five miles took us twice as long. I started doubting. Doubting myself, doubting the dreams. How could any water flow beneath all this sand?

Stolen story; please report.

Slowly, some time and yellow distance later, the heat began to ease. But at the cost of rising winds. As we crossed a dune’s plateau that was almost sheer on either side, the sky went orange. Though I tried to watch the horizon for some monster to match that wall of dust at Calvallagh, it was soon impossible to see more than ten yards ahead of Plamen. A spectral haze filled up the air and we could only move forward with our faces cast down. Often the gelding bucked, pulling on reins, and at Kobi’s struggle to control it, Plamen grew angry with him. That was unfair. All the servant had said was that he could ride—it wasn’t even his horse. But there was nothing I could say, and even if there were, not much strength to say it. One foot in front of another was just about all I could manage between my peeks through the Sight. And even there, I saw less and less with every hour; just the echo of a dream full of black rock, eddies and swirls.

What was I doing? Why was I even here?

Why. The word became a mantra for every foot I dragged forward, steering from stumbles, shielding from gusts.

In the lee of a slope we rested for a short while, more for the sake of the horses. Plamen allowed us both some water, then beckoned on. ‘We cannot stop here. When the dunes sink, we’ll be covered.’

Northward again, the wind drove stronger than before and now directly at our faces. Even where the sand was flat, we had to push to move against it, pitching forward. Sprays stung the skin of my cheeks and my shins and my ankles, and I felt bad for Kobi in his torn and flapping shirt.

Even Plamen struggled now. Every few yards, he’d slice his sword into the sand to test how tightly packed it was, yet it was another three miles on foot before he left it poised and turned back, calling to us. The plateau that had led us across the last few miles of erg finally widened here to put good distance between its sides.

Dusk was an orange phantom filtered weirdly through the storm. We fought to raise our small shelter, and I could barely hear my own cursing through the gale. The pegs were long – borrowed from the command bivouac – but if they weren’t buried deep enough, the shifting sand would uproot them. Twice as we battled the flailing canvas in the wind, the gelding started to scream, and twice Kobi managed to calm it. But even when the tent was weighted down with heavy covers, it rocked and waved as if ready to take off and fly. It would hold, Plamen said, as long as the winds grew not much stronger, and those pegs were checked all through the night. As it was, he could expect to take no sleep for himself. The horses couldn’t be tethered. And although Kobi was a good and obedient hand, he could no more defend against attackers than me.

I helped him relieve the horses of supplies and put them in the tent. Withdrawing his sword from the sand, Plamen strode out into the haze just about as far as he could without completely disappearing. I watched as, arm across his mouth, he gazed out into the orange murk, his white cape whipping at his body. I wondered what he could see, or hope to see, through all that sand.

Kobi was afraid, I could tell, and paid as little direct attention to the Commander as he could afford, clearly dreading having his. Even when we took shelter to eat, he stood outside with the horses as if what had only just yesterday been a tent for the servants was now the designated area of High Command. ‘Don’t be wooden,’ Plamen shouted. ‘Do you want sand in your bread?’

‘It is the horses, ekharan. Could bolt in the storm.’

‘They’re schooled to stand. Get in and eat.’

He had already bound their stirrups to prevent their getting far if anything spooked them. Kobi obeyed. Around the lantern that glowed fiercely from the day’s heat, we shared the food and the water while the gale battered the canvas. Then Plamen crouched at the flaps to wait it out. Even his tanned face was chapped by sun and the journey hadn’t been kind to his robes. They were browned, frayed here and there, and his headdress was torn. And there were the scorch-marks across his chest from those flames the Disc had moulded.

Carefully I unwound the bandage on my leg and took a look. It was a mess—should’ve got Aznath to fix the stitches before she’d left with Artabh Keda, but it had all happened so fast. Now it was hard to tell how much black gut-string was still in there. The wound was an ugly mix of yellow clotting and brown dust, the edges crusted with sand. Though my small chib would have been better, I used Eflan’s knife to trim the stitch-ends. Then, as I didn’t have another bandage, tried my best to tie it back.

As darkness fell the storm went on but, after an hour, dropped by enough for us to speak above the wind. ‘Say again what you saw,’ said Plamen, picking at his teeth. When again I just said sand, he nodded long-sufferingly. ‘What else?’

‘Rath were climbing black rocks. It looked like . . . the inside of a well or something. That’s why I thought we’d need rope.’

Kobi was lying on his side, pretending to sleep.

‘Black rock,’ Plamen echoed.

‘Smooth,’ I added. ‘Sort of shiny, with strange shapes. Like statues.’

He watched my face as I said this, before looking aside. ‘That may be more useful,’ he said, ‘trusting you know nothing of this region.’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘We are not far from the Spectres. If conditions improve we will reach them tomorrow before noon.’

‘What are they?’ I ventured, catching a glint off Kobi’s eyes.

‘Ancient formations, half buried by sand. Black jet rock. The winds have shaped them into strange forms over many thousands of years. You will see for yourself. Now sleep. Both of you.’ He nodded to my wrist. ‘And do not forsake your task. You may have no further chance to dream after tonight.’

With those words, he took up his position outside the tent.

It was true. I couldn’t say how many Rath were waiting there among the rocks the Sight had showed me. But I could count our own party on the fingers of one hand. Not a number or a thought that welcomed sleep.

----------------------------------------

Rath swarmed below. A sea of hordes. Wild-looking people, men and women, poison-eyed, stood not far off, hair to their waists. It flew and swirled in the high wind as they chanted.

‘Nemae il veru deh gossa kerak . . .’ Voices like mud. Words I knew.

As I listened, another voice – one I knew better – spoke to me. Then swept me away.

‘Where are you?’ I called.

I drifted through the greenstone tunnels, down through deepening levels. Was this the Deep?

Around me the tunnels opened, but the darkness hugged me close, showing me barely a fraction of the big space I could feel. An enormity was out there, but the veil wouldn’t lift.

When I stopped drifting, I was standing on a landing of stone. But that was all I could see, prisoner as I was inside a tiny spotlight circle of the Sight.

The ghost stepped into it.

Right in front of me he stood and looked into my eyes. Or simply at them. I met his too: pale as his paper-like skin, whites and irises and pupils. Two pale circles thinly painted on a porcelain mask.

‘Who are you?’ I said.

‘One who serves, little spark.’

‘Serves who?’

‘You.’

The eyes weren’t eyes, they never blinked. They never moved. If he was a ghost, then I found it hard to imagine the living person he had been. He didn’t look or sound or feel like a person. Even the ghost of one. If he had ever been alive, he looked like a man that a pencil could have killed.

‘I serve as we all served. The other servants are gone. Destroyed by the Raven. I still remain. I serve you as we all served.’

I knew I was dreaming, and knew also that I was dreaming in the Sight. So I tried to look beyond him at the darkness of the veil. Willed it to part. As much to see as to escape. But it didn’t work now for some reason; didn’t answer to my will.

Again I met the soulless eyes.

‘What others?’ I said. ‘What raven?’ Even as I questioned, I felt the unrealness. How I wasn’t really talking to someone, and how someone wasn’t really answering me. ‘Serve me with what?’

‘I have swept you from your peril. Saved you from your death. Moulded flames from your own hand. Healed the sight of your servant.’

‘My . . . you healed Rusper’s sight,’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘I returned it.’

‘But he’s not my servant, I’m his.’

Again that unrealness. It wasn’t that he didn’t hear me, but that the words seemed to find no meaning. ‘I have guided your path, as even now I guide it. This is the place that you have sought.’

The dark veil quivered around us. It drew back a short distance to reveal more of the space: the lower section of an enormous metal circle . . .

I pulled another thought, and question, from the ether of my dream. ‘Are you one of the Builders?’

The ghost was utterly still. Seemingly without lips to frame the borders of his mouth, nothing moved in his face even he when he spoke. ‘I serve,’ he said. ‘I do not build. This form you see is one I wear that you may know me. Little spark.’

‘I don’t know you,’ I said. ‘Just tell me who you really are. Why can I see you? Why do I keep seeing all these places and people I don’t know inside my head?’

Then a new line appeared in the face, a sudden crease along its oval. ‘You would forget what has been?’

‘I don’t know what that means. Can’t you just tell me what you want from me. Tell me your name!’

‘I have no name. Only you have, little spark.’

‘Stop calling me that!’

The crease deepened. Then it carved the whole face, which seemed to cave in on itself. ‘You are changed,’ he said then, and wasn’t there.

Darkness blew back from my Sight-circle and reached out to far walls, showing me the full height of the circular stone door ahead. A massive chamber bloomed around me and, below the landing where I stood, a fast-flowing river hemmed by levees of greenstone.

----------------------------------------

Calm woke me. No more wind. I crawled out into the light, relieved to feel the coolness the storm had left on the morning. It had eaten most of the dune during the night, both sides now dipping away less than a yard from the tent. Both the horses were still there, Kobi returning our supplies to their saddles. Plamen crouched a short way off, sipping from his waterskin. Behind him, the eastern sky was painted purple and pink. Yellow tinted the tips of the dunes. When he saw me, he held out the skin. ‘Drink.’

I took three swigs. Finished with the bags, Kobi knelt to pull up the tent-pegs. Plamen stopped him. ‘We can afford no more weight than we need from this point on. Leave the tent, take just the cover.’

That was fair at least. If we were chased by the Rath now, then every ounce that we carried would slow us down. It also left us without shelter at the mercy of the erg, adding to my suspicion that he was testing me somehow.

‘That place,’ I said, ‘the Spectres. The river’s there, I know it.’

‘Such was my understanding yesterday.’

‘Now I’m sure.’

‘Good.’ He corked the skin. ‘The Viceroy will be pleased.’

The day took us east. Another mark of our journey left behind us on the sand, the tent—our last—melded with the dune even before the next eclipsed it. Soon to be swallowed, I guessed.

But if yesterday we’d crawled, now we seemed to fly across the miles. Both the horses seemed brighter and the ache in my own thighs and calves had got easier to bear, giving them just enough stiffness to handle the steep climbs and descents.

Something else had changed, though. As I pulled the torque’s lever and opened my awareness to the Disc, the Sight didn’t answer. Not at first anyway. And when it did, it held back. Instead of boundless space unleashed, the sphere of seeing was strained, somehow tighter and thinner. Every attempt gave me less still, views that were closer, weaker, shrinking like a gnawed elastic rim around my head. The tingle on my wrist I’d grown so used to came much less.

Maybe I’d simply come to expect what it was going to show me: dunes and dunes and more dunes . . .

When we reached our destination, it wasn’t what I’d expected. The sheer size of the Spectres gave me that giddy rush I’d first felt among the Hub’s pipes. Ahead, the sun baked down on weird shapes of black jet; some fat and monstrous, others serpentine and sleek; distended horns and antlers and spines. Wind-torn prongs arced for the sky as if suspended in the air while lower reefs curved in the sand like sunken crocodiles’ backs. Dragons, frozen. Beached sea creatures. Fingers of long-drowned giants buried even deeper in the erg. The formation clusters spanned more than a mile all around, the shallow dunes lapping at the spaces in between.

‘So quiet,’ I murmured. Though they were stone, just lifeless stone, the shapes seemed too large, somehow, to stand so still.

‘And so it should remain,’ Plamen said. ‘If your Disc is to be believed, the Rath are here. So be wary of your noise. Keep close, move swiftly. You know your own part, ekhin Flint.’

I tugged my sleeve. ‘Yes, only . . .’

‘A problem, perhaps?’

‘No sir.’

There wasn’t, was there? This was where the ghost – the Disc – had brought me.

We came down from the taller dunes, returning to our saddles as sand flattened, and moved between the massive rocks. Cowed by the thought that they stared back, I scanned the bodies of black jet, crags smooth and gnarled, wondering how best to begin what I had to do. There was nowhere to hide here except for the one place we were looking for, and when we found it the Rath would be there, waiting for us.

I opened the Sight again. It slammed me so hard that I listed in the saddle. Kobi caught me by the shoulders. But the Sight-wave didn’t last, shrinking back after a second to the same weakness of before. Uselessly it batted at the jet, then before long condensed into little more than a bubble around our horse.

We moved on through the eerie silence, tracing the feet of the crags, and after an hour of slow trotting I knew I’d seen even less than if there’d been no Sight at all.

It expanded again.

Now I started to panic. Why were we out in the open like this, not near the walls?

‘Don’t you think we should keep closer to the crags,’ I said, pushing for calm.

Ahead of us the white horse turned and I saw Plamen’s bewildered expression. ‘We’re right under them, boy.’

I jammed the torque’s lever home.

Out of nothing at all, black rock towered on my left. As my heart pounded, my eyes scampered up the blackness. Only a moment ago we’d been far out in open space, at least fifty yards from any crags.

‘Something’s wrong,’ I came clean then, breath short, and picked open the torque’s lid. Trying to ignore the confusion of its perfect reflection and how it transported my mind, I fumbled the Disc out on my palm. ‘It’s not working properly, this place is all muddled, shifting around, showing things backwards!’

I dropped it on my other palm—Spectres rearranging in their scores. Sickened by the hugeness of their movement, I shut it back into its chamber and pressed the lever further in. The craggy wall blinked back into position on my left.

Plamen set his teeth. ‘Every moment we waste here is a risk to our lives. Tell me plainly if you can still locate the river.’

But before I could answer, a crisp clap of sound drew his face to the south. We followed his eyes, Kobi’s body tensing against mine. But nothing moved among those shapes.

Plamen peeled his eyes away and smartly flicked at his reins. ‘We keep moving,’ he said. ‘You keep trying.’

A corridor opened in the formation and we dismounted to walk between the walls of two Spectres.

Feverish thoughts frisked and flitted. The Disc was failing, somehow failing, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Even my panic felt strange, fevered and stretched, as if the whole of my own mind had been sieved through the straining Sight. As if whatever was happening to the Disc was also happening to me. Time was hard to trace. I was aware of the corridor’s twisting and turning as we walked, but even these took on the feeling of the progress of a dream. Without the Sight, my waking eyes played tricks on me: enlarging things and shrinking them back in dizzy flashes. The tingle under the torque had come back too and come back strong. A different strength: desperate, angry? But I didn’t dare take it off my arm for fear of what Plamen would say. I clutched my wrist and followed on.

‘Does it hurt you?’ Kobi asked softly, meeting my eyes. When I nodded, he glanced at the torque with distrust. ‘Your skin is pale.’

I sniggered emptily. ‘Elmine, remember?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You look sick.’

‘Quiet,’ said Plamen. Up ahead he had stopped, eyes wide and bright over the rocks, combing the crags over our heads on either side. I heard it as well: quick slaps and crumbling echoes. ‘They know we’re here.’ He unhitched the crossbow from his saddle.

The gelding pulled on Kobi’s grips.

‘Control the horse, servant.’ Plamen was calm, his orders short. ‘Ekhin Flint, move ahead now. Use the Disc and tell me how many we face.’

I heard the fear thick in Kobi’s voice as he cooed and stroked the gelding’s neck, but the horse only tossed its head and bucked harder.

I scampered a few yards ahead and, holding my breath against whatever would come, pulled the lever. Pure white pain flowed through my body and my knees bit into sand.

In the corridor ahead, like a rough sketch, stood the ghost. Jet morphed and smudged around him in the Sight, giving me nothing.

And the pain was just too much.

I pushed the lever back again and turned round on my knees, just in time to see Plamen aim his weapon at the ledges overhead. Something leapt between then. He fired, the thing immediately gone. There came a scream from the gelding as it wildly backed from Kobi.

‘Boy . . .’

I cried, ‘It isn’t working!’

‘Make it work!’

Another long-limbed Ratheine body cleared the breadth of the corridor before a bolt could be released. The slapping echoes up there were getting louder from both sides.

I braced for pain and pulled the lever yet again. Pain came on cue.

So did the blaze, crackling white—

—and crackling back.

Although still down on my knees in the sand as before, the corridor was gone. Around me the Spectres’ jet formed an open crater. Wherever I was, there was no sound. I was alone: no Commander, no Kobi, no horses. No Rath.

No, not alone. Across the crater was my ghost. ‘Little spark.’

‘Where am I?’ I said. This was no dream.

‘Safe.’

That wasn’t good enough: ‘Where—am—I?’

Across the distance between us his eyes were barely there. ‘You are upon the place that you seek.’

‘No,’ I said, standing. ‘No! What about the others? You can’t just leave them, they’ll die!’

‘I protect you, little spark. Only you.’

‘If they die I die,’ I shouted. ‘You said you serve me. So if you serve me then save them!’

Just as it had in last night’s dream, the pale face crumpled. The unreal eyes pocked their way inward as if bored by two spiralling drills. The lipless mouth, unmoving, said, ‘You are changed . . .’ Then it did move, or collapsed, but still said: ‘. . . Myrdrin Edsel.’

I flinched. ‘That’s not my name.’

Without a mouth, ‘It is you.’

‘My name is Florian Flint,’ I said, striding forward.

‘It is false.’

‘It’s who I am!’

‘You are changed.’

Pain threw me back down on the sand. That same white lightning flowed out now with force enough to raise my arm. Through eyes I couldn’t open by more than half, I saw it blaze and crackle right at the middle of the crater, and there collect into a ball. And as it grew I saw the shapes that formed and leapt out of its heart. Two men, two horses.