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nightfall, but the temperature remained hot and oppressive, making his costume – he was armed and armoured in the style of a Keshi mercenary – even more uncomfortable. The sun had darkened his visage, and with his new beard and ragged hair he looked the part. But beneath his armour, his skin was pearly-white, unlike the Dokken, who were all darker-skinned, of Vereloni, Sydian or Ahmedhassan descent. Inferior blood – as the fighting at the mughal’s palace proved. They might have strong gnosis, but they’ve got no idea what to do with it. Even Alaron Mercer was too much for them.
    But I’ve got the Scytale now, Mercer, and what have you got?
    It was a pity he’d left Mercer still alive, but he doubted that situation would have lasted: even as he and Huriya were escaping, the mughal’s soldiers had been pouring into the Dome, and with gnosis-use suppressed in there, surely Mercer had been captured. I’ll bet he’s screaming on a rack even now , he thought, grinning at the image .
    He looked calmly about the ring of dirty, dark faces. Hessaz was fingering her bow, and it didn’t need a visionary to see she was longing to use it on him – she hated him, as they all did, although he wasn’t to blame for their predicament; after all, it was Huriya who’d drawn them from their pathetic lives in the wild into the chaos of the hunt for the Scytale. Admittedly, most of the pack had died at the hands of an Inquisition Fist, and Malevorn himself had been responsible for a good number of those deaths. They’d punished him by forcibly turning him into one of them; they still saw him as an enemy.
    I wonder how many of these fools I’ll have to kill before the end?
    ‘Malevorn?’ He looked round as Huriya gave the infant to Hessaz and walked over to him. She put out a hand for the leather case, tense, as if she thought he’d refuse.
    ‘Of course, “Heart of my Heart”,’ he said mockingly.
    Scowling at his reference to the heart-bind spell that linked their lives – if he died, she did too, and vice versa – Huriya pulled the tooled leather case from the satchel, took off the cap and drew out the legendary artefact. It was a cylinder of metal and ivory, inscribed with runes and studded with domes. The top end had four leather straps attached, with eight domes on each, clearly made to attach to the cylinder in certain configurations.
    She turned the Scytale over and over in her hands, her eyes narrowed, her lips moving, and he watched with interest. He wondered belatedly what Sabele – whose memories Huriya now owned – knew of the Scytale, but it couldn’t be much, not judging from the way she was frowning. Reluctantly, she passed it back to him and he peered at the runes himself. He recognised a few, but not many. The tutors at the Arcanum had never talked much of the Scytale, but they’d all agreed that it required specialised knowledge to decipher. He twisted the cylinder’s head thoughtfully, saw the runes change as it swivelled, and began to realise just how little he actually knew.
    ‘What’s happening?’ one of the Dokken males asked. ‘When will you cure us?’
    There it was: the promise that had led them into danger and destruction. Sabele had told the tribe that the Scytale of Corineus could ‘cure’ a Souldrinker, turn them into a normal mage, one who did not have to ingest souls to renew their powers. That was the dream that had led hundreds of them across half the continent and into battle against magi and Inquisitors.
    ‘How does it work, Inquisitor?’ Huriya asked, interrupting his reverie.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Malevorn confessed.
    ‘What? You told me—’
    ‘I told you that it required special learning. I don’t have that learning.’
    One of the males, a bulky Sydian named Tkwir who favoured a boar’s head when in battle, sprang to his feet. ‘You lying glob of pus! I’ll—!’
    Tkwir stopped and stared at the curved scimitar that had flashed into Malevorn’s hand, the point