Rouge coloured his cheeks, but the powdered make-up did little to dampen the sharpness of his features. His out-thrust chin and dagger-like nose were too severe to be considered handsome. He wore his long grey hair in a tight plait pulled back from his face and he glared at them with sharp violet eyes. Ida found him strangely mesmerizing. He seemed somehow more solid than the world around him, a fixed point in a spinning world. She felt her nausea diminish.

The Unmer child had her arms wrapped around the bowman’s leg.

And behind them both stood a berserker dragon.

The beast was small for its species, perhaps sixty feet from its snout to the tip of its tail. It wore a suit of glazed white armour chased with silver, each plate exquisitely shaped to hug its serpentine body and its short, powerful limbs. Shards of crystal glinted on its gauntlets and again on its long, tapered helmet, wherein burned blood-red eyes. It nuzzled the Unmer child until she giggled.

Like all dragons, it had been human once – a warrior remade by Unmer sorcery into this new and bestial form. It unfolded great nacreous wings that glittered like rainbows, and then it lowered its equine head and began to lap at the poisonous brine. In creating this species for war, the Unmer had given it unholy addictions. The seawater would be acting like a drug, fuelling its rage in preparation for battle. When it raised its head again, brine dripped from ranks of bared white teeth.

The bowman smiled. ‘Do you enjoy tormenting children?’

Creedy said, ‘Fuck.’

Now the colonel hefted his own hand-cannon. ‘The child was in no danger from us,’ he said. ‘Take her back to the ghetto, and we’ll allow you to leave here unharmed.’

‘Allow me to leave?’ the archer said incredulously. ‘In what way do you suppose you can harm me? Your weapons are like those of ghosts.’ Behind him, the dragon growled words in a strange, guttural language.