“How’s it coming along?” Triand asked. They had been underway for five days since the last witch hunter incident. At the moment they were passing through possibly the world’s largest meadow. The forest had become scarce; the landscape had changed to grey and green mountains, ragged and mossy looking in the distance to either side of the flat valley they were crossing. Iwy would have appreciated the sight of the wide-open space had she not been so tired. Triand seemed to love it. She kept stopping in her tracks to pick flowers, which she tried to stick into Iwy’s braid, or yell at the odd mountain goat that just looked at her while chewing on glen herbs.

  They had left the horse, by then nicknamed Radish by Triand, in a village; that was, Iwy had sold it for a tremendously low price that also bought a no questions guarantee. It was enough, at any rate, to buy herself a pair of hardly worn wool trousers and a shirt from an old lady at the edge of the village. If she had learned anything, it was that riding in a scrunched-up dress for a length of time was not a thing you wanted to do more than once. Though she didn’t dare wear them in this heat; she had no idea how Triand could stand it.

  The sun was merciless in the unshaded space. Triand had fashioned her chequered blanket into a wonky but serviceable parasol that drifted above her in an attempt to keep her very pale self from turning a beet shade. Iwy had considered asking her master to teach her that spell, but then again, she’d never had a sunburn in her life and she needed to concentrate on something else anyway. She wiped sweat from her brow before it dripped on her partially invisible lantern. “Not great. It’s too hot to think. Don’t you get hot in your robes?”

  “Nope. I put a temperate spell on them.”

  “That’s possible?” Every time Triand mentioned a spell, it was an utter novelty. They weren’t in any of the books she made her apprentice read.

  “Sure. Little trick I learned at the University of Seyaneyout.”

  Iwy tried to recall her admittedly small score of geography. “Where’s that?”

  “Over in Kemeta.”

  “You’ve been all the way across the south sea?”

  “Yeah, couple years ago. It’s so hot there, everyone enchants their clothes.”

  “Someone once told me people from Kemeta have two heads.” And two other things, but her father had covered her ears again as the traveller at the pub had told the rest to the guffawing crowd.

  “What? I mean, they’re twice as smart but they don’t need an extra head for that. Great mages down there. They see magic as a form of science they can’t explain yet, but they’re working on it. They didn’t mind me asking a lot of questions like the wizards on this continent.”

  “Can you teach me that spell?”

  “Oh, sure.” She handed over her Notebook of Useful Spells. “Page 94.”

  “‘Don’t get too hot, don’t get too cold, keep me comfortable or I’ll turn you into socks’?”

  “It loses a bit in the translation, but it still works.”

  “‘Turn you into socks’?”

  “That’s my addition. I think that’s a garment’s worst nightmare, don’t you?”

  The city of Prey couldn’t be that far now. If Iwy had read the wonky map correctly, it should be at the end of the plain. This looked like a decent place to live. If her family ever had to move, here wouldn’t be too shabby. Not much for wheat, but you could herd cattle and there were streams for fishing, even a small lake, clear as glass. Iwy spotted the ruins of a fortress on a small island on the lake and had half a mind to ask Triand if they could explore it.

  That thought stopped when she looked ahead into the valley and saw smoke.

  It wasn’t a dragon this time, but not much better. The field might have been a copy of the one on the way to Riestra and it was equally impossible to tell how long the ground had been smoking here.

  Triand had told her that there had been hundreds of wizard wars, all over the place. What could possibly be so important to not only fight but leave the battlefield in a state like this?

  If that wasn’t enough, she spotted movement in the corner of her eye. Someone was running towards them. He was running for a very long time what with the size of the meadow.

  “You! Travellers! Are you a wizard?” he panted when he reached them.

  Triand shrugged and the blanket fell on her head. “More or less.”

  “Please help me! Cultists have kidnapped my family! They’re going to sacrifice them. I barely escaped.”

  “Have they? What cultists? Sacrifice them to what?” Triand said.

  Iwy dragged on her sleeve. “Who cares? They need help. Come on!”

  “Alright, alright, lead the way. Just saying I don’t know of any cult in this area ...”

  The man jogged ahead of them towards an ancient wooden walkway that connected the mainland and the small fortress on the lake.

  Triand’s eyes narrowed for a moment. “Over there, huh?” she said cheerfully. “In that completely not ominous building?”

  “Yes! Please hurry up!” The man legged it across the planks, Iwy following close behind. She looked over her shoulder to see if Triand was keeping up. A few days ago, she’d raced into a dragon?ransacked town, why was she acting so strange about this now?

  “What sort of cultists are they?” Triand whispered.

  “I don’t know! They were just here one day.”

  “Huh.”

  The man slowed down as they reached the entrance. “Their camp is in the courtyard,” he whispered. They glimpsed through what was left of the gate. A bonfire became visible.

  Triand readied her staff. “Right. Iwy, stay behind me.”

  The camp was a quiet gathering of small tents and wooden cages large enough to fit a human. Triand crept around them. No one in any of them. Nor their unfortunate remains.

  They looked around the yard. In the middle, someone had carpentered a makeshift altar. The flat top seemed to have started life as a barn door. Couldn’t be that important a deity if the disciples didn’t even take the time to recycle the walls of the building.

  Before the altar were several poles with ropes to bind victims to, but they too were noticeably empty.

  No sign of the man’s family anywhere.

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  Just as Triand began to wonder if the cultists had gone on a long tea break, a veritable conjuring of hooded figures emerged from the battlements.

  “And it’s a trap. Of course it’s a trap.”

  The man who had led them here marched into the courtyard. Someone handed him a hooded robe which he threw over his respectable clothes.

  Iwy glared at him. “People like you are the reason everyone’s so distrustful these days.”

  Triand was unbothered. Being bound to a wooden pole was not exactly comfortable on her wrists, but it was a good back stretch. She turned to the nearest cultist. “So. Now that we’ve been acquainted, would you mind telling us whose sacrifice we’re gonna be?”

  The face wasn’t visible under the hood, but the fabric somehow managed to look uncomfortable in the presence of the good-natured tooth gap. The wearer tried to summon some dignity. “Our master Xurus, destroyer of worlds, lord of the eternal night.”

  “Really? Never met him. I met Hell once. Decent chap. Owes me money, come to think of it.”

  The mention of the god of Things That Suddenly and Inexplicably Go Wrong did not elicit much of a response from the hooded audience.

  “Anyway. I’m sure he’s nice. Can’t wait.”

  “Um. They’re gonna kill us,” Iwy whispered tersely from the other pole. Her wrists were red from trying to tear the ropes off. Burning them off hadn’t worked. “You know that, right?”

  Iwy tried to conjure every state of mind she could think of. She thought of flames, of the feeling as they leapt out of her hands. The warmth, the feeling of rightness, no reason she should be able to injure someone in a barn and not in a fortress ...

  Her skin stayed cold.

  A gong sounded. Someone began to beat on a drum, not a bad rhythm, you could dance to it if you were reasonably unrestrained.

  The cultists loosened the ropes from the poles and dragged them to the altar.

  The chanting began in earnest. It contained the required amount of words in a dead language, and the cultists seemed to have been practicing.

  The apparent priest, easily identified by the additional symbols on his robe, raised his arms. “We call on you, great Xurus! Bless our congregation with your presence so that we may rejoice!”

  “You know, there’s easier ways to rejoice, like a knees-up ...” Triand suggested.

  “Silence! Now I have to start over. Ahem. We call on you, great Xurus! Bless our congregation with your presence so that we may ...”

  “Come to think of it, that name does ring a bell. Is he the one with the funny hat on?”

  “Can’t someone just gag her or something?”

  “Don’t look at me,” the robed figure to the priest’s left said. “I haven’t brought a gag. It was Jeff’s turn to bring a gag.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” robed Jeff said.

  “Ye-hes it was, I brought one last week.”

  Light flashed. The ground shook. The sun dilated into nothingness, daylight snuffed out.

  Behind the altar, a darkness moved in darkness, filling the sky.

  As one man, the cultists dropped to their knees. The priest, not to be outdone, flung himself flat on the stomach. “Oh, great Xurus, we have brought these two sacrifices as tribute to your greatness!”

  The fiery eyes looked down on him. They didn’t seem impressed.

  The priest got up on shaking knees and reached for the ceremonial dagger. “Any last words?”

  Triand grinned a toothy grin. “Yup. Hey, uh, big guy. Yeah, you. Down here. Me and my friend here have brought you these ... one, two ... thirteen sacrifices as tribute to your greatness. Matching robes and all, ain’t they pretty?”

  The god looked about the group of lowly mortals, seemed to perform a quick calculation in his head, then looked back at Triand. “Duck.”

  Triand ducked. After a few seconds, she grabbed hold of Iwy’s sleeve and pulled her down as well.

  It would have been nice to say that a flaming inferno passed over their heads and the screams of the dying rend the air, but she heard merely a series of gurgling noises and when Triand next looked up, deity and cultists were gone. The sun returned.

  Iwy dared to peak through her hands at the empty fortress. “I thought we were dead!”

  “You don’t have a very good instinct for that sort of thing.” Triand shook off the ropes and brushed off her robes. “That was fun. Reminds me of the time I was kidnapped by pirates.”

  Between shaking and trying not to hyperventilate too obviously, Iwy found a few seconds to be confused. “You what? How is that fun?”

  “Weeell, I showed the captain a little shoulder, gave her the ol’ eye, and she didn’t even mind that I still had some of their treasure on me when she sent me over the plank ...”

  “Why do you have such problems with the concept of fun?”

  Triand ignored the question as she snapped the rope from Iwy’s wrists and walked purposefully around the tents in search for lootable things. “Aha!”

  “What’s aha?”

  “Nothin’,” Triand said, but Iwy caught her sneaking a leather-bound book from a tent and into a pocket.

  “What is that? Just how much fits into your robes?” Something crunched under her boot. Iwy picked up a rustled piece of paper.

  Triand glanced over her apprentice’s shoulder “‘Join the witch hunter army today.’ Too late for that.”

  “Thought that was just to sound tough.” Triand tapped her lips. “What d’you make of that general?”

  Iwy shrugged. “They need to have some kind of authority, don’t they? Their mission is probably just to rid the world of witches.” Something was nagging at the back of her head. It had been there since she first learned about them. “I’d still like to know why they only go for witches.”

  As far as Iwy could make out, a witch was nothing more than a wizard without money. That alone couldn’t be offensive. And surely there were poorer wizard orders than the ones in Riestra. Or lone wizards. Nothing about this made sense. The hunters needed to see at least some logic in it, didn’t they?

  Triand shouldered her bundle again. “Anyway, those weirdos cost us a good half-day of travel. Have I mentioned yet that we don’t trust people?”

  “It could have been serious.”

  “Nah. Cultists worth their salt don’t let people escape once they got ‘em. I should know.”

  “... and that’s basically what they told me once I got them out of the tree,” the Master of Runes ended his report.

  The Inner Circle was having a brief meeting in the designated hall before facing their leader. Acarald spent the morning meditating in his study, as always when he returned from one of his trips. He was not to be disturbed. The last person who had tried had become part of the tower’s foundation.

  “Acarald won’t like this,” the Master of Birds said.

  “You guys are all such followers,” the Sorcerist said. He was an excellent wizard; unfortunately, no one ever understood a word he said. Starting with his title.

  The day he had become a member of the Inner Circle, this dialogue had happened: “Do you mean sorcerer?” the Master of Birds had asked.

  “No, there’s a difference,” the young man said while nipping on a hot beverage with a strange foreign name.

  “And that would be?”

  “It’d be too hard to explain it to you.”

  But Acarald seemed to believe in his power (which apparently was ancient, and the other mages couldn’t possibly have heard of it). Which was a good thing, because the Scourge of the South was always two seconds away from sacrificing him to Xurus, the patron demon who had bestowed her power to her.

  “We are followers,” the Master of Runes said patiently. Out of sight of the Sorcerist, the Head Conjurer mouthed the words ‘mad as a spoon’. “That’s the point.” He produced a length of parchment from his robe sleeve. “Anyway. After consulting this map I have reason to believe she is headed for one of three places, either for ...”

  “Is that parchment locally made?” the Sorcerist asked.

  “What?”

  “Prey,” the Scourge said, coming out of a brief trance, which was only recognisable by the scarlet tinge of her eyes, never a good sign with warlocks. “They’re headed for Prey.”

  “You guessed,” the Head Conjurer said accusingly.

  The Scourge shot him a withering glare. “My lord Xurus devoured thirteen of his own followers a day’s travel away from Prey, because they were apparently sacrificed by a red-haired wizard woman and a severely shaking girl.”

  “How did you know?” the Master of Runes asked, folding up the map in quiet disappointment.

  “Demons gossip as much as other people,” the Scourge said nonchalantly, flicking a speck of dust off one of the metal spikes on her shoulder. Spikes were in this season as far as she was concerned. On their first meeting, the near-blind Master of Birds had mistaken her for a confusingly attractive hedgehog. “We have no contacts in Prey. The Order there is the most stubborn.”

  “We-well, Acarald might know ...”

  “Acarald does,” Acarald said behind him. “I had hoped you would have worked it out by now.”

  The Master of Runes had flattened himself against the wall. “Th-thank you, Archmage.”

  “The city of Prey is very thoroughly protected,” Acarald continued. “But a few of our people should manage to get in. Please ask for volunteers. And see that they are properly prepared.”

  The Inner Circle nodded. Acarald turned to leave the hall. “And do something about your nerves, Runes. You’ll be scared of your own shadow next.”