With the coming of darkness, the winds had returned to Balmacara: the rowans shook continuously, hissing and rustling; Cromis’s shoulder-length black hair was blown about his face. He looked back at the tower, bulking dark against the cobalt sky. The surf growled behind it. Out of some strange sentiment, he had left the light burning in the upper room.

But the baan that had killed his sister he had in an insulated sheath next to his skin, because he knew he would not come again, riding to the light out of battle, to Balmacara in the morning.

Refugees packed the Viriconium road like a torchlit procession in some lower gallery of Hell. Cromis steered his nervous beast at speed past caravans of old men pushing carts laden with clanking domestic implements and files of women carrying or leading young children. House animals scuttled between the wheels of the carts.

The faces he passed were blank and frightened, overlit and gleaming in the flaring unsteady light of the torches. Some of them turned from him, surreptitiously making religious signs (a brief writhe of the fingers for Borring, whom some regarded as a god, a complicated motion of the head for the Colpy). He was at a loss to account for this. He thought that they were the timid and uncommitted of the city, driven away by fear of the clashing factions, holding no brief for either side.

He entered the city by its twelfth gate, the Gate of Nigg, and there was no gatekeeper to issue even the customary token challenge.

His habitually morose mood shifted to the sombre as he took the great radial road Proton Circuit, paved with an ancient resilient material that absorbed the sound of his horse’s hooves.