“I don’t want you to go back to Cinnabar,” said Llian.

“I don’t want to go either, but time is running out,” said Karan.

Only a couple of weeks left. He felt a panicky nausea at the thought.

They were on the roof of a ragged spike of carved greenstone that Karan called The Spine, the highest point of Alcifer. The sun was shining, but with a keen southerly whistling across the rough stone it was chilly even in the middle of the day, and she was wearing the down-filled clothing and fur-lined boots Shand had given her. The top of The Spine swayed in the wind and sometimes shook alarmingly.

“There’s got to be another way to stop the Merdrun.”

“I can only think of three ways,” said Karan. “Destroy the summon stone, though we don’t know how and we’re too far away; prevent the Crimson Gate from being opened from Cinnabar; or kill the magiz, who’s gathering power from her victims to open the gate.”

“How do you know the gate —”

She rubbed her watering eyes. “Gergrig said, ‘Without the alignment of the triple moons we won’t be able to open the Crimson Gate, and the next opportunity is years away.’ But the gate was made by Stermin, a mighty mancer, so how can I stop it opening? That only leaves the magiz.”

“Another mighty mancer,” said Llian, shivering. “But Karan, the Merdrun kill everyone in their path for a reason. How can you take her on?”

“If I don’t, she’ll kill Sulien. Then you and me.”

“All right! What’s your plan?”

“Return to Cinnabar and use the dematerialisation spell to spy on the Merdrun from on high, then attack.”

“The same as last time then,” he said despairingly.

The pain in his chest, that had developed when she’d said she was going back, was like pincers wrenching his flesh until it tore. The magiz would kill her and laugh about it.

After a long pause Karan said, “It’s all I can come up with.”

“At least talk to the defenders in the ice fortress first.”

“What for?”

“They had three massive old fortresses, all guarding the path up to the Crimson Gate, but why? What can they tell us about the gate? And about their enemy?”

“All right, but I’ll have to be quick. Malien’s spell is exhausting; I’ll be lucky to last an hour.”

He slumped against the roof wall. “Poor choice of words.”

Karan looked into his eyes and he saw his own fear reflected there – that it was unlikely she would return.

“Can you sense what the magiz is doing now?” said Llian.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “She’s drunk so many lives she’s high as a kite and much stronger than before. She’s… looking for Sulien.”

Then it happened – a wail of desperation so loud that it rang in his ears. Mummy, Daddy, the Whelm have initiated me. They say I’m theirs now. All theirs!

Llian reeled.

“You heard?” said Karan, clutching him with both hands.

A sudden gust hammered the spine, swinging it in a sickening oval. His stomach heaved; the pincers tore his flesh again.

Mummy, I know you can hear me. Why won’t you answer? Don’t you… want me?

Ahhh! It was a glutton’s sigh. I’m going to drink her pretty little life, very soon. The bliss!

“This… stops… now!” Karan said savagely. “Trigger!” Her eyes rolled up, her knees buckled and she crumbled to the floor.

Llian fell to his knees beside her. Her eyes were empty and her pulse very slow. Her body was an empty shell – her spirit had gone to Cinnabar and she did not expect to come back.

He sat beside her, holding her hand. Never had he felt more useless. There was nothing he could do for her or for Sulien. He waited… and waited, his throat so tight that he could scarcely breathe, his heart thumping leadenly. He felt so very cold, yet Karan’s hand was colder.

An hour later she vanished. She had used the materialisation spell on Cinnabar. Or else the magiz had used the spell on her and was drinking her life right now.

The tearing pain in his chest grew worse. What was he supposed to do? He lurched around the oval top of the spine, only to realise that if Karan did return, it could be anywhere in Alcifer.

Llian ran all the way down, more than a thousand steps, reaching the ground so exhausted that his throat was burning and his knees would not hold him up. But it did not take away the fear or the pain. He checked the pavilion, the pool, the watch post high above the north gate and the other places Karan went to frequently. There was no sign of her. She was not coming back.

Sulien’s fate rested on him now, yet he had never felt more out of his depth. What could he do to help her, or Karan, or anyone?

All three moons were in the sky now, and they weren’t far off alignment. Syzygy should have been a week and a half away but Karan could tell it was only a few days off. Had the magiz lied when she had said eight weeks, to make herself look good now? She must have.

It was too soon! Even if the allies, by some miracle, killed Snoat today, they couldn’t possibly be ready to fight the Merdrun in a few days.

Floating high in the bitterly cold air, in spirit form, Karan saw that the ice fortress, which she had thought to be a stronghold guarding the steep track up the mountain, was actually a gigantic ring-fortress a couple of miles in circumference, surrounding the entire flat-topped peak and the Crimson Gate at its centre. There must be many thousands of defenders; surely they could beat the enemy, who had to be exhausted from months besieging the domed city and the two lower fortresses.

The Merdrun army was dug into the crevassed ice below the ring-fortress. Karan could not tell their numbers, though they seemed greater than she had previously thought. And with every life the magiz drank, her power grew.

Her big red tent with the green rope along its top was surrounded by three rings of guards and another ring of cloaked figures that Karan assumed to be her acolytes or assistants. There was no way she could get through them all.

She swooped down towards one of the watchtowers of the ring-fortress, straight through the ice wall and into a long, narrow room, rectangular on three sides and curving gently on the fourth. It was constructed of sawn blocks of bluish ice with little streaks and flecks of red through them. There were woven rush mats on the floor and hundreds of weapons hanging on the curving wall. More were stored in little round compartments cut into the ice. A long workbench, also made from ice, ran along the centre of the room.

“Who are you?” cried a stocky black-haired boy, nine or ten years old, who was polishing a double-edged sword at the bench. He reached for the hilt.

“A friend,” Karan said quickly. “You can see me?”

“We’re protected against magic here.”

Karan threw back her hood and shook out her red hair, which fell halfway down her back. The boy stared at her, then at her hair, as if he had never seen such a colour. “You’re not… one of them.”

“The Merdrun are our enemies too. My name is Karan.”

He put down the sword but did not give his name. He was a very serious little boy. “You must see my father.”

She followed him along halls of rough-sawn ice. Old tapestries, so faded that they were just blurs of green and blue and grey, covered most of each wall; the floor was strewn with brown rush mats. The air smelled of onion soup and oiled armour.

They entered a low, dome-shaped room where half a dozen men and women, all compact, stocky and short-haired like the boy, stood around a low table spread with battered old maps drawn on fawn leather.

“Father,” the boy said to a weary man wearing green leather armour. His grey eyes were bloodshot. “A friend has come. Her name is Karan.”

The people around the table stared at her.

“You’re here,” said the boy’s father, reaching out to touch Karan’s arm but not meeting any resistance. “Yet not!” He took a step back, watching her warily.

Karan explained where she came from, how she had reached Cinnabar via Malien’s spell, and that she was trying to protect her daughter from the magiz.

“The Merdrun invaded Cinnabar eighty-eight weeks ago,” said a plump black-eyed woman with ink-stained fingers. She laid down her pen on a blue plate, careful of the map. “They immediately attacked our cities in the lowlands, one after another. They’ve been fighting their way to us ever since. We don’t know why.”

“Thousands of years we’ve lived here, in peace,” said the boy’s father. “We —”

“Then why the massive fortresses?” said Karan.

“When we were given Cinnabar in ancient times, we promised the givers that we would guard the Crimson Gate against all comers. And so we guard!”

“I know why they’re here,” said Karan. “At the time of syzygy the Crimson Gate can be made into a portal to another world. Our world. It’s called Santhenar.”

“We haven’t heard of it,” said the woman with the ink-stained fingers. She had the air of a leader.

“Santhenar is what the Merdrun really want, and if they get through, we can no more resist them…”

Karan broke off.

“Than you can, you were going to say,” said the woman coolly. “You need have no fear. I swear by the Fallen Gate that we will resist them. We’ll crush the Merdrun and hurl them into the bottomless crevasses to feed the flesh-sucking ice worms.”

But Karan saw from the faces of the other adults, and even the boy, that they did not believe it. They would fight to the death, and they would be defeated. The Merdrun had never been beaten.

“I hope you do,” said Karan, bowing to them in turn.

She pulled her hood up and floated up through the ice roof. It was sickening to think that the depraved magiz and her assistants would drink the lives of these noble defenders like drunkards; that they would get high on their lives like the miserable nigah addicts of Thurkad.

She drifted towards the Crimson Gate, which consisted of two oval lens-shaped uprights with a similarly curved capstone on top. It was even bigger than she had thought – a good thirty feet tall. She settled between the uprights, looking up.

The Gates of Good and Evil, she thought with a shudder. And this was the evil gate, so what had happened to the good one, the Azure Gate? Had the Merdrun destroyed it after finding out what Stermin had done to them?

Karan reached out to touch it, expecting to get a shock or sense a surge of power, but felt only a cold more bitter than anything in her experience.

She must not give up hope. Even with the summon stone woken, Gergrig had said it would take an enormous amount of power to open the gate, and first the Merdrun had to break through the massive defences of the ring-fortress. She eyed the three moons. It was not long at all until syzygy. How could the enemy do it in the time left?

The ground shook violently, grinding the capstone back and forth on the uprights. She hurled herself backwards, but it stilled. Away to her left, in the direction of the green moon, clouds of snow boiled up. She floated up, trying to see what had happened.

There was a breach in the ring-fortress. The Merdrun had undermined part of the lower wall, collapsing a thirty-yard-wide section of the fortress, and they were swarming up the ice to the attack. The defenders tumbled ice rubble down at them, driving them back, but they attacked again and again. They were relentless.

Karan took advantage of the chaos to slip lower, scanning the attackers for any sign of the magiz. Many of the defenders lay dead and dying below the broken section; she was bound to be there, drinking their lives.

Karan found her several hundred yards below, where a section of the ring-fortress had slid down in one piece before breaking apart and strewing nine crushed and bloody defenders across the ice. The magiz, accompanied by three acolytes in grey fur-lined cloaks, was hobbling from one body to the next, doing the gruesome business. Karan glided down, keeping low.

“We’ve lost thousands attacking this fortress,” said one of the acolytes. It was a woman’s voice, though Karan, being behind, could not see her face. She was as round as a dumpling in her heavy clothing. “We’re really hurting, magiz.”

“Not as much as they are,” said the magiz.

She bent over another body, a young soldier whose chest had been crushed, though he was still kicking. Karan heard a revolting slurping sound and the magiz said, “Aaahh! that was a good one.” The young man went still.

Karan clenched her fists helplessly. The evil old slukk had to die.

“Won’t be long now,” said the magiz, panting.

“How can you tell?” said the acolyte.

“A while ago I jerked Snoat’s string again. I warned him of an assassination attempt by his enemies. He’ll strike back very soon, and it will be the end of all resistance in western Santhenar.”

“How did you know about the assassination plan?”

“I embedded a link in one of the enemy leaders a month ago. What he sees, I see, the fool!”

Karan, who had forgotten about the spy in their midst, froze. He and one of their leaders could mean Nadiril, Shand, Yggur or even Hingis at a pinch, but who? Yggur was the most likely traitor, given his previous mental breakdown and fragile emotional state.

She remembered the odd look he had given her in Chanthed, when she’d revealed that she had sent Sulien away with the Whelm. Could the magiz manipulate Yggur into hunting her down? Well, no one alive knew the Whelm better than he did. But would he hurt or kill an innocent child – even under the magiz’s compulsion?

Yggur had been a ruthless warlord once, but there was also a soft side to him, a kindness in him. And he was tough – he had survived ordeals, mental and physical, that would have broken most other men. Karan did not want to think him capable of killing a child… yet she had not thought Benie capable of killing either.

The magiz hobbled to another dying defender, twenty yards away, while the three acolytes remained where they were, staring at the corpse of the young man whose life she had just drunk with such sickening ecstasy. Was this Karan’s chance? There were no other Merdrun within a hundred yards; they were much further up the slope, occupied with the attack.

She would have to be quick, though. Malien had said that materialising oneself was incredibly exhausting. Karan drew her knife. One quick thrust was all it would take, then she would dematerialise and return to Alcifer.

She zoomed down and, just before landing a few yards behind the magiz, triggered the materialisation spell. Her boots struck the ice, but the moment her weight came onto her knees, they buckled. She had no strength at all; she could not even hold the knife! It went click-click as it hit the ice, then skidded past the magiz.

She whirled, colourless eyes shining out of those horrible soot-black sockets, grinning savagely. “I’ve pulled your string too, you little fool.”

The magiz lunged, surprisingly quickly for someone who had an artificial leg, and caught Karan by the left shin. Her hands were as cold as the ice beneath her; so cold that they burned. Karan tried to dematerialise but could not speak the words. She could barely move.

“Make a link to your daughter,” said the magiz.

Karan managed to shake her head.

The magiz laughed. “You can’t save her. When I have direct contact, you can’t stop me.”

The magiz let go then, with the bony forefinger of her other hand, tapped Karan on the top of the head three times, and each tap was like a metal spike being driven deeper. “Link to your daughter!”

Karan managed a grunt of defiance, but it wasn’t enough – the magiz was forcing a link to form. It was already complete in Karan’s mind; it was questing out, searching for the emotional connection to Sulien, and she could not stop it.

No! she thought desperately, as if she could stop the link through will alone. No, no, no!

But the magiz’s will was stronger, and her mancery was overwhelming. “Yes,” she said. “And the moment it’s complete, I’ll drink her little life.”

She forced so hard that the spike seemed to spear right through Karan’s head. She could not make a sound, but every fibre of her mind was screaming.

Mummy, what’s she doing to you?

The magiz had succeeded, and Karan was crushed by a terror so complete that for a moment she could not think. Then it burst out of her: Sulien, break the link!

“Ahhhh,” sighed the magiz, then tensed. She was preparing to send a killing blow across the link, and Karan could do nothing about it; the pain had utterly disabled her.

But she’s hurting you, Mummy, said Sulien. She’s trying to kill you.

Break the link! NOW!

The pain grew; the magiz was about to strike Sulien dead. Karan had to do something. Her tongue unfroze and she screamed.

Leave… my… mother… alone! cried Sulien.

Karan sensed her desperate rage. Don’t, Sulien!

“I’ve found the brat, Gergrig!” yelled the magiz. “I know where she is.”

Sulien’s fury exploded and a searing, blue-white flash burst in front of the magiz’s eyes. She shrieked and tried to shield her eyes but little blisters formed all over her face, then her eyes turned blood-red.

“I can’t see!” she howled. “Gergrig, I can’t see.”

“I’m coming!” he roared.

And then it happened. Across the link, through Sulien’s eyes, Karan saw the Whelm stand up, a dozen of them, and they were staring up at the sky as if in awe.

Gergrig? said a squat bony man. Master?

Every hair on Karan’s head stood up. No, no!

We have no master, Idlis said coldly.

But we could have, said the squat Whelm yearningly.

The pain in Karan’s head was gone and she could move again. Sulien, get out of there now!

There was no reply. Sulien, did you hear me?

The magiz flailed around blindly and caught Karan by the shin again. Karan kicked but could not break free; the magiz’s hand had frozen to her skin. But Gergrig was only yards away. She had to break the link and go.

“Dematerialise!” she gasped. “Spell-stop, spell-stop!”

Rip! She felt an agonising pain in her lower left leg – the skin had torn off in a bloody inches-wide strip all the way around.

“Amplify the drumming, magiz!” bellowed Gergrig. “Corrupt everyone on Santhenar.”

Karan tumbled into blackness, the drumming loud in her ears, then went skidding across the polished stone floor of Alcifer, dribbling blood from the ragged skinless ring around her shin. Everything, including Sulien’s earlier cry, had been part of a lure to bring her back to Cinnabar – and into the trap.

She forced herself to her hands and knees, realising that she had been gone a long time and Llian must be in torment. She had to find him. But before she could stand up, something hard pressed into the middle of her back.

“Welcome back,” said Maigraith.