Katya hadn’t even realised that Zac had left them until he tottered back into the room, holding Hannah’s hand.

“Where have you been, wee man?” she said. “Playing with Hannah? Thank you for keeping him entertained, by the way. Are you hungry, Zac?”

“The stars are falling,” he said.

“What’s that, sweetie?”

“Come, see.”

As Katya and Silus got to their feet, Silus thought that he heard a low, deep thud as though something heavy had fallen to the floor in another room.

In the guest room they found Zac and Hannah kneeling on one of the beds, looking out of the window, their faces intermittently illuminated by brilliant flashes of light.

“Dunsany, Kelos… everyone! ” Katya said. “You may want to come and see this.”

Zac had been right; far out in the desert, stars were falling to earth. Most fell beyond the horizon, but a few landed closer to the settlement, throwing up huge plumes of glowing sand.

“My gods!” Dunsany said. “I’ve seen shooting stars before, but nothing like this.”

“Shouldn’t we be heading for the ship?” Kelos said. “I mean, if one of those things hit us…”

“We are quite safe,” Shalim said. “The ship will protect us and the bombardment will soon be over.”

And indeed it was. Silus blinked away the purple blotches swimming across his vision. Where the stars had come down, the sand glowed rose-red.

“It’s beautiful,” Kelos said.

To the mage, it may have been a wondrous sight, but as Silus watched the glowing sand darken, he’d never felt further from home.

CHAPTER SIX

Emuel felt himself being pulled in all directions at once. At one point his head was somewhere down around his knees, while his eyeballs orbited his right wrist. It felt like he had been disassembled and put back together again a million times. For a moment he found peace, letting go as his constituent parts tumbled away from each other into the void; Emuel wished his left ear well as it slowly somersaulted past him.