Karan looked around desperately. The ring-fortress had been breached in at least eight places and the Merdrun were swarming through the gaps, then up onto the flat top of the mountain. Behind her the surviving defenders had formed a hundred-yard-wide ring around the Crimson Gate, preparing to defend it to the death. And she still did not know why.

Karan had no hope that they could succeed; the Merdrun were too many and too tough. She ached all over from the magiz’s brutal summoning and from Malien’s spells before that. She staggered away towards the ring of defenders, the icy air burning her nose and throat with every breath, trying to work out a plan. The magiz, clearly, had recovered from Sulien’s attack, but did not follow.

Karan was here in physical form this time and even in her down-filled garments and fur-lined boots it was unbearably cold, far worse than it had been down below. How could the defenders live up here? How could they fight?

The earnest, black-haired boy she had met last time stood with his father. The lad looked terrified yet determined. All the defenders were resolute, prepared to fight and die as they had sworn to do all those centuries ago.

“Is the gate a sacred place to you?” Karan asked the woman with the ink-stained fingers. There was blood all down her front, her skin was saggy and her eyes showed bleak despair. The defenders knew they were going to die.

Her face twisted. “It’s profane! Evil!”

Karan looked up at the great gate. Even with her unblocked gift for mancery she knew there was nothing she could do to harm it.

“Then why defend it at such cost?”

“To prevent it ever being used.”

The Merdrun were a quarter of a mile away, forming their lines. It would not be long now, and when they charged they would cross the distance in little over a minute. Minutes after that it would be over for everyone, including the wide-eyed boy who was surely no older than Sulien. The thought was unbearable.

Karan was picking frozen tears out of her eyes when something a defender had mentioned previously struck her. “What’s the story of the Fallen Gate?”

“It’s said there was another gate,” said the boy’s father. “The same as this one, only blue, standing beside it. But the blue gate was toppled by the people who gave us this world nine thousand years ago – toppled and buried.”

“What did they call themselves?”

“It’s not recorded, though they were a big dark people.”

“Not the Merdrun?”

“They didn’t have the tattoo, but their eyes were similar.”

“Charon!” said Karan.

The man shrugged. “They were good people, faithful in their dealings with us and true to their word.”

“Then why bury the Azure Gate?” Karan said to herself. “There’s something wrong here… Why are you here anyway? This isn’t your fight.”

“We swore to defend the gate,” he said coldly, “and defend it we will.” His voice cracked; he gathered his son to him, hugged him desperately and turned away to face the enemy.

“Is this the end, Daddy?” the boy said.

“I fear it is, Heydy. But we’ll face it together as bravely as we can.”

Was it better for father and son to die together? If it were her and Sulien… No, it was unimaginable. Karan made her way through the lines of the defenders towards the red trilithon. No one hindered her. It was as if they were already beyond the material world. Or they thought she was still a spirit.

If the people who had toppled and buried the Azure Gate nine thousand years ago had been Charon, what had they been doing? Why topple the good gate?

She reached the great gate. All was still; the defenders were silent and so were the more numerous Merdrun. There was no sound save for the wind whistling through the fringe of icicles hanging from the capstone of the Crimson Gate. Again Karan caught that faint smell of onion soup, the defenders’ last meal.

High above, the three moons – little yellow and black Cromo, red Wolfrim and huge green Stibnid – formed a line pointing directly at the gate. Syzygy. The time was now.

She touched the nearest upright but felt nothing. Where was the Azure Gate? Since they had stood side by side, and it had been buried where it fell, it must be close.

Karan scanned the ice-covered ground. It was uneven, though she saw no outlines that would indicate a buried object. But if the Azure Gate, a structure of vast and ancient power, was here she should be able to detect it with her sensitive’s gift. She walked around the gate, swinging her right arm back and forth, and sensed something below her. She was standing on the toppled gate; it was just inches below the ground.

Could she do anything with it? No – mancery was an art long in the learning and difficult to master. Though Malien had unblocked her gift, Karan still had to painstakingly learn all but the simplest of spells, ones a gifted child might use instinctively. Could she wake the gate and hope that Stermin’s Gates of Good and Evil might interfere with each other?

A skilled mancer might have done so but Karan had no idea how. She pointed her right hand at the place where she sensed the capstone of the gate to be and said, “Wake!”

The ice above the buried gate took on a faint glow, but it faded almost to nothing.

There came a colossal roar from behind her, then the ground quivered as the Merdrun army charged. From the defenders there was silence apart from a single boyish cry soaring above the thunder and the rumbling. It was quickly stifled.

Karan turned, her heart thumping slowly as she counted the seconds down. On sixty-three the attackers struck the defenders in an irresistible mass, armour clanging off armour, sword ringing on sword, roars and shouts, screams and sickening crunching sounds. The wind carried the smell of cold blood to where she stood, revolted by the brutality, the savagery and the waste of a good and decent people who had not asked for any of this.

She would be next.

A squad of Merdrun burst through, led by Gergrig and the big man, one of their generals, with the flattened nose and the metal plate in his head. Gergrig had a long sword in his right hand and a war hammer in the left. Behind them loped the round-faced young woman whose yellow hair was plaited into a loop above her head. What was her name? Uzzey. Her face was radiant as she approached the Crimson Gate.

“At last!” she cried, then stumbled and fell, a spear embedded in her neck. None of the attackers looked at her; to the Merdrun death was failure.

Karan looked away from Uzzey’s death throes. She’d had a conscience; she’d been one of the better ones. What had her life been for?

“Take Karan!” roared Gergrig. “Unharmed.”

Two soldiers split from the pack and, before she could move, grabbed her and bound her arms behind her back.

“Where’s the magiz?” Gergrig bellowed. “Hurry!” He pointed to the line of moons.

The defenders were still fighting furiously, though they were failing; the gap in their lines was getting wider by the second. Four soldiers hurried up escorting the magiz, who was limping on her artificial leg and surrounded by a dozen acolytes in grey fur cloaks. She was lit from within, so charged with power from all the lives she had drunk that an oily green light was radiating out of her.

She cast a shiny-eyed glance at Karan but continued to the Crimson Gate and gave low-voiced orders. The acolytes began to set out small devices on the ground, in three concentric circles centred on the gate. Karan could not tell what they were – charged crystals perhaps.

Again Gergrig pointed to the three moons. Karan hoped to see some change in them, a sign that syzygy would soon be over, but they remained in a straight line.

The magiz was chanting, and so were her acolytes, who, Karan saw, were all female. Their voices soared, high and beautiful. The magiz swung her arm down, the chant cut off, and from every one of the devices on the ground a raw beam of red light sizzled out and lit up the Crimson Gate. The ground shivered and the gate began to glow a deep and penetrating red.

In her inner ear Karan heard a scream that seemed to come from the other side of the gate, then the space between the uprights turned misty. The gate was opening. What was happening in Carcharon? Had it just fed on Wilm or Aviel?

The magiz fell, gasping, and she was not glowing now. Opening the gate had drained her to the dregs. Her acolytes were scattered like grey leaves across the ice-sheathed ground.

Gergrig sank to his knees, his cruel face alight with joy, and all the other soldiers emulated him. But he sprang up again. “Soon, my people, we will have our own beautiful world – all to ourselves!”

My world, thought Karan. Santhenar, reduced to an empty shell for the most brutal human species ever to have existed.

“To the gate!” Gergrig raised his sword and ran between the uprights into the mist, along with twenty of his fellows.

Instantly they began to scream; they were rolling their eyes, clutching their heads with their hands and foaming at the mouth. Then they turned on one another, soldiers who had fought side by side all across the void for years, and hacked at each other in an orgy of bloody ruin.

“Hold!” roared Gergrig, who alone was unaffected. “Put down your blades! What’s the matter with you?”

The soldiers inside the gate could not stop; utter madness was on them. Someone struck the general in the head, sending his skull plate flying to clang off one side of the gate. Gergrig, slipping on blood, dived back out onto the ice, gasping. Behind him his soldiers cut each other down until the gate was piled with bodies and all were dead.

He pounded across to the magiz, caught her by her scrawny throat and jerked her to her feet. “What have you done?”

She staggered but did not fall, then raised her right hand. Gergrig released her. Her lips moved; Karan thought that she was interrogating the gate.

“I don’t understand,” said the magiz.

Gergrig stumbled back to the gate and swung his war hammer at the closest upright, knocking off a shovel-sized piece of rock. He inspected the exposed stone of the upright, which was as red as the outside.

He turned, staring at the ground where the rock had fallen. “What the…?”

He picked up the broken piece of rock. The freshly exposed surface was azure blue.

Karan’s heart soared. The gate was a trap, one the Charon must have set up nine thousand years ago when they gave Cinnabar to the defenders. They had toppled the Crimson Gate and buried it, then disguised the Azure Gate with a permanent illusion, making it appear crimson. But the Azure Gate had been the ennobling gate, changing the people who chose it, just as the Crimson Gate had corrupted those who passed through it.

That was why the troops in the gate had turned on one another. The conflict between the ennobling gate and their own corruption had been too great; it had driven them insane. And since their entire lives had been devoted to killing, in their madness all they could do was kill.

What would the Merdrun do now? First of all, with their hopes shattered, they would torture her to death. Could she get away? No, she had to finish the magiz or die trying.

Gergrig dropped his war hammer and his sword, raised his scarred right fist and shook it at the false Crimson Gate. He strained, then said in a commanding voice, “Asunder!”

The uprights shook back and forth, the capstone grinding on their tops, then it faded to azure and the entire structure toppled backwards, hitting the ice with three ground-shaking thuds.

“Mancers, to me!” said Gergrig. “We… will… succeed!”

Dozens of Merdrun mancers ran forward and stood to either side of Gergrig. He pointed to the ground, where the faint shimmer of the true Crimson Gate could be seen.

“Raise the true gate!” said Gergrig.

It took all the power they had, but the two uprights rose slowly to the vertical, shedding chunks of frozen ground, and inch by inch the capstone lifted, hovered and settled on top. The true gate was not a thing of beauty as the false gate had been; it was battered and cracked, and covered in red iron stains and clots of frozen earth and mud. But it stood.

Gergrig cast an anxious glance at the three moons. They were still in line, though it was not as straight as it had been; the littlest moon was creeping to the left and the huge green moon to the right. Syzygy would soon be over and so would their hope of opening the true Crimson Gate.

“Get up!” he said to the magiz, who was lying on the frozen ground again. “Empower the gate!”

The magiz’s acolytes lifted her to her feet and held her upright. “Can’t… do it… twice.”

“You must!”

The magiz looked around. The surviving defenders had fled. “Their lives wasted!” she said bitterly. “Got… no source… power.”

“You’ve got her,” said Gergrig, gesturing to Karan. “She reeks of power, and so does her daughter. Drink Karan’s life and then the brat’s, and open the damned gate!”