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stepped forward, putting himself in front of Nin. She peered round him, still staring at the whatevers.
    ‘Dandy Boneman,’ the stranger said. ‘No need to worry. Just travelling, like you.’ He smiled, showingteeth that were broken and black on one side.
    ‘Sure,’ said Jonas, his voice guarded. ‘We were just having breakfast.’ He didn’t offer their names.
    ‘I saw,’ Boneman turned, beckoning to one of the objects at his heels. ‘I have some cakes, but no honey. You appear to have honey, but no cakes. How about we combine resources?’
    Nin gaped. Trotting forward with a huge pack balanced on its head was … well, she wasn’t sure what it was exactly. It stood about thigh high, was roughly man-shaped, but grey in colour and crumbly in texture, and had two glowing red eyes.
    ‘Mudman,’ said Jonas shortly. ‘Sort of like the Quick legend of golems, only not.’
    The mudman came to a halt in front of Boneman and stood there while its owner rummaged in the pack, finally pulling out a package of greasy paper wrapped around a handful of small cakes. He held them out. His hands were slim and very white and Nin noticed an ancient-looking ring on his middle finger. It had a large red stone and a lot of symbols that made her skin prickle to look at them.
    ‘A half-dozen, plenty to go round.’
    ‘Thanks!’ said Nin brightly. She hadn’t realised it before, but she was hungry. It didn’t seem right to want food when your life had just been turned upside down, but the small, golden cakes looked good and the stranger was smiling at her, his blue eyes bright and innocent of harm. She thought she heard Jonas sigh.
    Boneman walked around to the other side of the fire and Nin got another look at his mudmen servants. There were five of them, all burdened with pots, pans, blankets and packs. Boneman sat down with the mudmen ranged in a row at his back. Jonas stirred more honey into the boiling water.
    ‘Um … don’t they want to put those things down?’
    ‘They don’t get tired,’ laughed Boneman. ‘They are just lumps of earth, you know.’ He gave her a look that she didn’t understand. Like he was working something out in his head. Calculating.
    Nin looked at the creatures, which stood there, unmoving. Their red eyes had dimmed a little, but that was all. One of them was crumbling on the left side, a chunk of its mud had fallen away leaving a hollow. There was no expression, no self-awareness, not even in the ember eyes. She shuddered.
    ‘Are you newly stolen?’ asked Boneman. ‘You’ll get used to it. What do you think of my staff ?’ He nodded at the bone rod, which was now lying close to his side, then began to divide the cakes.
    ‘Is it, like, magic?’
    ‘Sure. It’s a sorcerer’s staff.’ He gave her two cakes, then turned around and pulled a tin mug from the jumble piled on mudman number three, handing it to Jonas.
    ‘Are you a sorcerer, then?’
    Boneman laughed gently. ‘I wield a sorcerer’s power.’
    ‘All the sorcerers are gone,’ explained Jonas, handingback mugs full of steaming liquid. ‘Except possibly one and that’s only a story. A staff like that has the last of its maker’s power stored up in it, like a battery, see.’ He pointed to a symbol like a fancy T running along the back of the staff ’s carved head. ‘That’s the mark of the sorcerer who made it. All sorcerers had their symbols, their trademark, that would be branded, carved or burnished on to anything they made.’
    ‘But an ordinary person can still use it?’
    ‘Sort of. The sorcerer who owned this could have cast fantastic spells with it, but all a Quick can do is force the remaining energy outwards in a blast of power. And that’s hard enough. Eventually the stored-up magic will run out and then the staff will return to what it was before the sorcerer shaped it, just an old bone.’
    Nin, halfway through a sip of her honey tea, glanced up and saw the look Boneman sent Jonas as he talked. She