“What’s that funny smell?” said Sulien late the following afternoon. They were winding down the last pass towards the foothills and would reach Chanthed tomorrow.

Karan sniffed, and her healed bones gave an anticipatory throb. Whelm! She had been hoping to meet them, knowing Idlis would come this way on his annual trip to bring her hrux. And they were close.

“The Whelm feed those strange horses of theirs some stinking herb. I never learned why.”

She looked over the brink, down to the road far below. There, moving in a steady line, were half a dozen cadaverous Whelm horses and their equally gaunt riders. They were all bony, with grey skin and big ugly feet and hands. It was Idlis and Yetchah – she recognised them – plus another four Whelm escorts. Or spies. An insecure people who lived in a cold and inhospitable southern land, they saw threats everywhere.

The Whelm lived to serve a master. First Rulke; then, after he was imprisoned in the Nightland, they had served Yggur instead, though they had never respected him. They had spent a thousand years aching for the time when Rulke would finally free himself. Oh, perfect master! they had called him when the great day came. His death not long afterwards had left them masterless and bereft, and masterless and bereft they remained to this day.

“They frighten me,” said Sulien.

“Me too, yet Idlis and Yetchah have been good to me,” said Karan.

“I know,” Sulien muttered. She had heard it too many times. “Idlis hunted you halfway across Meldorin once. But you spared his life, three times, and that means he owes you for ever.”

Karan started. Could they be the answer to her prayers? Maigraith certainly feared the Whelm, who had tortured her many years ago. If anyone could protect Sulien from Maigraith, they could. And perhaps they could hide her from the magiz too.

No! She could not even think about doing that to Sulien.

As they went down, the reek grew stronger until it tore at the passages of her nose and stung her eyes. Sulien’s eyes were watering so badly she could barely see. They turned the last hairpin bend and found the six Whelm arrayed across the track in front of them, enveloped in robes and hoods to protect their sensitive grey skin from the autumn sun, weak though it was. Their black eyes blinked behind slitted-bone eye covers.

“Karan,” said the bone-and-skin man second from the left, Idlis. “To have come all this way, you must be desperate for hrux.”

His face was terribly scarred, the skin like thick paper torn to pieces then crudely glued together in overlapping layers. His voice was as gloopy as boiling porridge. He attempted a smile but it failed and died – any form of levity was anathema to the Whelm. Nonetheless, Karan could tell he was pleased to see her. A bond had grown between them over the years, the strangest imaginable.

“I am,” said Karan. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“You’re hunted,” said the woman to his left, whose name was Yetchah.

She had approached prettiness when she was young, in a gaunt black-eyed way, though she had lost weight and looks since Karan had seen her a year ago. All the Whelm seemed more meagre than she remembered them. How they must be suffering in their masterless exile.

“How do you know?”

“Echoes from a sending,” said Yetchah, which meant nothing to Karan. She looked down at Sulien with a strange, almost yearning expression. “The little one has grown.”

“Sulien,” she said. “My name is Sulien!”

“We will camp,” said Idlis.

They rode into the trees and down a gentle slope until they were out of sight of the track, and dismounted. Two Whelm began to clear the ground in two places – one circle for themselves and another, forty yards away, for Karan and Sulien. Another two gathered firewood. Idlis and Yetchah stood by while Karan removed Jergoe’s saddle, rubbed him down and carried her gear across to the smaller campsite. Yetchah headed down to a rivulet for water, stopped, then turned and cast a longing look at Sulien.

“Sulien, could you help Yetchah fetch the water?” said Karan.

Sulien’s eyes widened. She began to say no.

“No one would take better care of you,” said Karan. “Except me.”

“And Daddy!” Sulien snapped.

Yetchah had been there for Karan’s dreadful labour, which had nearly been fatal to mother and baby. In the end, under Idlis’s direction, Yetchah had drawn Sulien safely out.

Sulien raised her chin, untied the water pot and went with Yetchah, though she maintained a good distance between them. Karan watched her out of sight then turned to Idlis.

“Our business first,” he said, throwing back his hood and taking off the eye covers. Neither were needed in the cool shade under the trees in the hour before sunset.

Karan took the little box out of her pocket. He opened it and pressed in a lump of hrux with thick-knuckled spatulate fingers. It only half filled the box.

“The harvest was bad this year,” he said. “I fear you must endure more pain than usual.”

“Whatever you bring, I accept with gratitude.”

He bowed. “It is poor recompense for a life thrice owed.” The black eyes searched hers. “You are in trouble.”

“So much trouble that I can scarcely bear to talk about it.”

“Yet a trouble shared is a trouble cut in half.”

In some respects she found it easier to unburden herself to Idlis than she had to Rachis or even Tallia. Karan had no idea what Idlis was thinking, though, since he felt contempt for everyone she knew save her and Sulien, he was bound to be on her side. But where to start?

“Llian is on the run,” she said, “accused of murdering Wistan, the Master of the College of the Histories.”

“Llian is a fool,” said Idlis. “No one could understand what you see in him.”

She wasn’t going to try and explain. “It’s love.”

“Ah!” Idlis seemed to be trying to comprehend the notion. Yetchah had once appeared to love him, though Karan was not sure to what degree Idlis had been capable of returning her affection. “Llian would kill, if forced to it.” He worked his grey eyelids up and down with his fingers. “But he is not a murderer,” he added.

“Will you stand up in court and testify to that effect?”

Idlis’s grey lips stretched halfway across his flat face and he made a peculiar squawking noise that she could only assume, never having heard it before, was laughter. She laughed too. The notion of a Whelm testifying on behalf of a Zain was absurd enough, but the idea that any old human court would admit a character reference given by a Whelm was beyond preposterous.

“I have to get to Chanthed and save him,” said Karan.

“I understand the need. But you have another problem.”

“Maigraith. You know her.”

“A desperate woman.”

Karan told him the whole story.

“This Julken should have been strangled at birth,” said Idlis.

“No!” she cried.

“Some pairings are wrong. Rulke, our perfect master, believed he had found his match and his soulmate in Maigraith. We all believed it at the time, and we were wrong. There is a flaw in her, as is often the case with triunes.”

“Like me.”

“Yetchah and I drew forth the girl-child Sulien from your body, alert for any such flaw.”

“And?” cried Karan.

“In choosing to mate with that buffoon Llian, somehow your womanly instinct led you to select the complement that was right for you. Sulien is not flawed.”

Karan wasn’t sure whether she had been complimented or insulted.

“But Maigraith’s choice was a disastrous one. By mating with Rulke, the flaw was magnified. No child of hers by our perfect master could ever be anything but a monster.”

“Then her quest is doomed,” said Karan.

“Yes, though she will pursue it, with increasing bitterness, until the very stars wink out. But there is a third problem.”

“We’re being hunted,” said Karan. She was about to tell Idlis about the Merdrun and the magiz when an instinct warned her to keep silent. She could not have said why.

“And they’re close,” said Idlis.

“Maigraith!”

“No.”

“How can you tell?”

“We are far from home, and the people of Meldorin do not love us. We search our surroundings for danger using a kind of… sending. It creates echoes, and one is coming down the way you came.”

It had to be someone sent by or under the control of the magiz. “I’ll be careful,” said Karan, “but what am I to do about Maigraith?”

“There’s only way to put an end to it. Kill her.”

“I’m not a murderer!”

“If she tried to kill Sulien, would you not defend her to the death?”

“That’s different.”

“It’s only a matter of degree,” said Idlis. “The sooner it’s done, the less trouble you’ll be put to.”

“Maigraith is Shand’s granddaughter, and he’s my friend.”

“You would put friendship before the life of your own flesh and blood?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is very simple. If you kill Maigraith, you solve the problem and save your daughter, and all it costs you is one friend. Allow Maigraith to live and you will eventually lose your daughter, she will suffer a terrible fate at the hands of a monster, and you’ll blame your friend and lose him too.”

He had a point, though it was like being struck in the midriff with a battering ram.

“Then help me,” she said, reaching out to him, the words tumbling out spontaneously. “I’ve got to get to Llian and I can’t risk having Sulien with me. Take her! Take her with you to the frozen south. Hide her and look after her until…”

Idlis’s ruined face heaved. He liked the idea even less than she did.

“If you ask it,” he said, “I will do it because of the lifelong obligation I owe you. But such an exile does not please your daughter.”

There came a clang and a cry of “Mummy, no!”

Sulien had dropped the pot of water she had carried all the way from the rivulet. Her trousers were wet up to the knees and she was staring at Karan in betrayed desperation. Then she turned and bolted up the slope into the trees.

Karan ran after her, but her bones must have shifted in the week-long ride from Gothryme. Every step sent shivers of pain up to her hips and Sulien was leaving her behind. The forest was scrubby at the top of the hill, then Karan descended into a series of parallel grooves, miniature ridges and valleys no more than thirty feet from crest to trough, with bands of dark shale angling out of their sides.

Sulien passed over the crest of the third ridge and out of sight. Karan stumbled after her, topped the ridge and stopped. Sulien had only been thirty yards ahead but there was no sign of her.

“Sulien?”

No answer.

A band of olive-green bushes meandered along the base of the valley, not tall enough to conceal a standing adult, though enough to hide Sulien. The ground showed no tracks. At the bottom Karan saw a small boot print in the moist earth, then a strand of red hair caught on a twig. Sulien had gone up the little valley, under cover.

She had a rebellious streak that Karan, recognising much of herself in the child, had not tried hard to curb. She followed the intermittent tracks up. If Sulien broke out of the bushes to either side, she was bound to see her.

The tracks led up the base of the little valley to a dripping hump where the bushes were sparse and the finely banded shale outcropped like the pages of a book. Karan lost Sulien there. She climbed the wet hump, stood on top and looked around. Ahead, a dip in the rock had created a shallow pool ten feet long and three wide at its widest point, though only six inches deep. The water was clear, the dead leaves lying on the bottom undisturbed. Sulien had not gone through it and there were no tracks to either side.

Hairs lifted on the back of Karan’s neck. Something was wrong. She looked to either side and back, trying to gauge how far she had come. A quarter of a mile at most, but too far to call Idlis; he would never hear her through the trees.

“Sulien? Come out at once!”

It would soon be dark. A line of pregnant clouds was moving up from the south and the air had a heavy, moist odour she had not smelled at Gothryme in ages. It was going to rain.

She trudged up the valley. The bushes were sparser here, the ground rockier, and a hundred yards ahead it rose steeply to a fist-shaped knob that thrust outwards, providing an outlook over the surrounding woodland.

Karan headed to the left around the knob, the front face being too steep. Low-growing ferns brushed her calves. The rock here was a yellow, gritty sandstone that rasped at her fingertips as she climbed. The top of the outcrop was oval-shaped and almost flat, like a beret. She was scrambling up when a warty hand slapped across her mouth and nose, and she was dragged backwards then shoved to the ground.

She looked up into the face of the ugliest man she had ever seen, a huge lumpy fellow with scarred and mottled skin covered in warts and wens and grotesque pustules.

“Where is it?” he said in a thick grunting voice, as if his insides were as nodular as his exterior.

Idlis had been right. Maigraith wasn’t her closest pursuer.

“Who are you?” said Karan.

“Name is Ragred.”