The sounds of struggle became more urgent.

‘Narab better get on with this or we’re going to have more than a little bloodshed,’ Arkan added.

Morgeth said, ‘And then we use that street?’

‘Yes,’ the chieftain said. ‘I wouldn’t mind breaking a few heads, but I don’t see any point in starting new feuds when I haven’t put paid to the old ones.’ He looked around. ‘If fighting starts, we leave.’

‘Yes.’ Morgeth gathered his woollen cape around him to ward off the biting wind. ‘I thought it was supposed to be warmer down here on the flats.’

Arkan laughed. ‘It is warmer. That doesn’t make it temperate.’

‘I should have brought my bearskin.’

Glancing at the sea of dark cloaks around them, Arkan said, ‘If things turn ugly, you’ll be glad not to be clad in white fur.’

A shout went up, but this time it wasn’t a brawl, but directed instead at a group of figures standing at the top of the stairs at the crowd’s edge.

Morgeth said, ‘Who are those two on the right?’

‘I’ve never seen them before,’ said his chieftain. ‘But from the look of them, I judge them to be our lost cousins, the taredhel.’

‘Tall bastards, aren’t they?’

Arkan nodded. ‘That they are.’

The two elves they referred to were indeed a full head taller than those who had led them to the top of the staircase. Behind the group rose the maw of the palace, the large entrance to the empty throne room that no chieftain had dared to occupy since the death of the true Murmandamus, the only moredhel in memory to unite all the clans under one banner.