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pirates, suspected spies and traitors, even Guardians who had fallen from favour. Each one had been locked up, pending a trial which would take years to come – and almost certainly end up with an execution. In the meantime, they had to remain in their cells – if cell was the right word for the precarious ledges which jutted out into the vast atrium at the centre of the tower.
    Xanth stopped on a half-landing, where one of the descending flights of stairs became two, and turned to the door facing him. He slid the round spy-hole cover to one side and peered through. The prisoner was still sitting in exactly the same position as when Xanth had left him, nearly two hours earlier.
    ‘It’s me,’ he hissed. ‘I’m back.’
    The hunched figure did not move.
    ‘You were right,’ said Xanth, louder now. ‘It worked.’ Still the prisoner did not stir. Xanth frowned. ‘I thought you might be interested in my good news,’ he said peevishly.
    The figure turned and stared back at the spy-hole. He was old. His eyes were sunken; his cheeks hollow. His thick, grey beard and thinning hair were dark with years of filth. He raised one shaggy eyebrow. ‘Interested?’ he said. ‘Aye, Xanth, I suppose I am.’ He looked round his cell and shook his head wearily. The small ledge, sticking out into the cavernous, echoing atrium, had no walls, yet escape was impossible. Apart from the door, which was kept securely bolted from the outside, the only way out was down – down to certain death on the ground, far below. He turned back tothe spy-hole. ‘But I am also envious beyond words.’
    Xanth swallowed with embarrassment. Here, deep down in the stinking bowels of the atrium, the cell was about as bad as it could be. There was a table where, being an academic, the prisoner was forced to do work for the Guardians, and a filthy straw mattress. And that was it. For as long as Xanth had been alive, and many, many long years before that, the cell had been the prisoner’s entire world. ‘I … I’m so sorry,’ said Xanth. ‘I didn’t think.’ ‘You didn’t think,’ he murmured. ‘How ironic that is, Xanth, for I do little else but think. I think of everything that has happened – of what I have lost, of what has been taken from me …’ He paused, and when he looked up again he was smiling. ‘You will enjoy the Deepwoods, Xanth. I know you will. It is dangerous there, of course, with more perils than you could imagine. Yet it is a wondrous place – exciting, beautiful …’
    Xanth nodded enthusiastically. It was, after all, their long conversations about the endless forest which had triggered his interest in the Deepwoods in the first place. They’d talked about woodtroll paths and reed-eel beds, about waif country and (Xanth’s favourite) about sacred Riverrise, high up in the distant mountains. Yet it was a place the prisoner would only ever visit again in his memory, for Xanth knew that the Most High Guardian of Night considered him too important ever to be released – and no-one had ever escaped from the dungeons of the Tower of Night. Just then a pair of soiled ratbirds landed on the cornerof the prisoner’s sleeping ledge.
    He flapped his thin, grimy hands at them, sending them screeching back into the air. ‘And stay gone!’ he shouted after them.
    ‘I’m not dead yet.’ He snorted. ‘There’ll be time enough to pick my bones clean when I am. Eh, Xanth?’

    The young apprentice Guardian winced uneasily. ‘Please don’t talk like that,’ he said. ‘Something’ll turn up. I know it will …’
    ‘Hush now, Xanth,’ the prisoner cautioned. ‘Such words are treason. If you do not wish to end up on your own dungeon ledge, you’d better be careful.’ He returned his attention to the barkscroll. ‘I will be thinking of you,’ he said.
    The following morning Rook Barkwater stood in the cold, damp dormitory, stuffing all his belongings – which were few – into a backpack. He untied and reknotted the