'Move.' Sword drawn and ready, Ryshad made to lead the way off the sandbank as troops were advancing from either side. I hoped forlornly that they would be more interested in killing each other than us. Perhaps moving was a mistake; we were certainly noticed.

I screamed in sudden shock as irresistible, invisible hands began to pull me upwards. Ryshad seized my thigh as my feet left the ground and I grabbed wildly for his shoulders and curly head. Blue-white sparks crackled in my hair until an icy blast of wind knocked me back to the ground. Strange angular beams of light darted from side to side but were foiled on each pass by the brilliant blue fire shooting from Shiv's hands. Green gleams around us shoved at the advancing soldiers; wherever they stepped, the sand turned liquid and treacherous under their boots.

'Try your old book-magic then,' I heard Shiv mutter savagely. 'I'm in my element.'

Unaccountably dizzy, I clung to Ryshad. We huddled together as Shiv wove a shimmering net of power around us and Aiten drew his sword with an awkward gesture of defiance. Men in brown and black were advancing from both directions now and Shiv began to throw spears of lightning at them, sending them reeling back blackened and hissing as their charred flesh landed in the water pooling on the sands. Now I heard a sob of frustration in his voice as he cursed them; for every one he blasted to Saedrin, the aetheric enchanters were simply lifting two more over the channel, abandoning attacks on each other in favour of the real prize. As I realised this, I wondered if this was the time for abject terror but somehow, it didn't seem worth it.

We stepped back, shoulder to shoulder, facing oncoming death, swords drawn and hands steady. My bowels were turning to water inside me and a scream was trying to rip its way out of my chest without bothering with my throat, but I felt a mad surge of pride.

Shiv let his assault falter for an instant and, in that breath, an invisible hand knocked him backwards, clean off his feet. As a massive purpling bruise erupted across his forehead, he landed, boneless as a rag-doll, on a scatter of rocks hidden in the shallows. Blood stained the water behind his head and I took a futile step towards him.

My feet slipped and stuck under me. I twisted wildly and was held in an impossible position, hanging in the empty air, pinned like a fish gutted and racked for smoking. I waved my arms helplessly but felt like I was struggling in thick honey; I soon lost any ability to move at all. With the last of my strength, I twisted my head to an agonising angle and was just able to catch sight of Ryshad and Aiten. They were caught like me, held motionless halfway through a step and a fall. In Aiten's case, his head was only a hand's breadth above the water; I could see the ripples of his breath on the surface.

Battle cries screamed around us as the real fight was joined, now we were immobilised. The sands blushed red and the charnel smell of slaughter mingled with the salt scent of the sea and the sweaty reek of fighting men. High above I could hear the seabirds crying, attracted to this sudden unexpected bounty. Whatever magic had numbed my feet was creeping up my body; I was feeling increasingly remote from the mayhem all around me. My mother had once dosed me with an Aldabreshi pain-syrup after the surgeon had cut an abscess from my back. I had woken fleetingly in the depths of the night to see her by my bed, face drawn tight as she watched every breath I took, but I had been as far away from her anguish then as I was now from the men dying all around me.

I vaguely realised that the screams were changing, losing any sense of words or coherence. I saw one man in brown turn on his neighbour, and abandoning his sword, attack like an animal with teeth and nails, oblivious as they drowned together in the foam of the returning tide. The wavelets rolled a corpse past me, hands clasped tight on the dagger the man had used to tear open his own throat. Two men staggered across my bleary gaze, each bleeding from a handful of mortal wounds as the madness in their eyes drove them to fight on.

Rough hands grabbed me and I was slung across some leather-clad shoulder, my head bouncing helplessly, studs scoring my cheek. In a brief moment, as I was passed to someone else, I saw the path we had come down such a little time before. Brown-liveried corpses were strewn across the shingle and Senior Gorget was moving among the wounded. Some were being helped up but, as I watched, he came to his junior and with a brief shake of his head and a dagger through the eye despatched him to whatever Otherworld awaited these people. Bloody-handed, he screamed a curse that chilled even my numbed and uncomprehending mind but the pace of the black-clad men carrying us did not so much as falter as they turned their backs on their defeated foes, kicking the enemy dead aside with evident contempt.

I realised dimly that this should frighten me but as I was trying to work out why, the creeping insensibility finally reached the last of my mind and everything dissolved into nothingness.

It was quite some time before it occurred to me that I was conscious again. I could not move, not even my eyes, and it took a while for me to realise the featureless white expanse that I could see was actually a plastered ceiling. That thought hung in my numbed mind for a while and then, as my wits slowly awoke, I began to notice tiny cracks, missing flakes, a spider's web clinging optimistically to an inaccessible corner. I was just getting interested in the textures of the ceiling when I realised my hearing was coming back, not that I'd realised I'd been missing it until then. Footsteps marched briskly along wooden boards some way off to the side and an unidentifiable clatter rose from somewhere below. As I tried to establish what these sounds might be and what they might mean, all with my wits as useless as a three-day drunk's, a tearing scream ripped through the silence, ending with shocking abruptness.

It woke me up more thoroughly than a bucket of stable water. That had been a man's scream, not a yell or shout of outrage, but a scream of pure terror. An instant of fear for my companions filled me but vanished in fear for myself; mentally, the shock of that scream might have made me jump twice my height in the air but in reality, I hadn't moved a muscle. I was as helpless as a stunned hog waiting for the butcher's knife.

In the same instant, almost as if my thought had been a signal, the door opened and I heard the soft scrape of boots on the floorboards. I strained uselessly to turn my head but need not have bothered; the newcomer came over to where I lay and leaned over me so I could see his face.

It was the white-haired man from the beach, the mace-wielder. He was handsome in an angular sort of way. The long bones of his face carried no spare flesh and the skin was drawn smoothly over them, patterned with tiny wrinkles and a few small scars. His eyes were deep brown, almost black, pitiless and as alien to me as an eagle's, dispassionately regarding its prey.

He spoke but his words meant nothing. They carried something of the cadence of Mountain speech and a few similar sounds but, at that speed, I was going to make no sense of anything. I tried uselessly to shrug, to widen my eyes, to turn down my mouth to convey my incomprehension. Unpleasant amusement flickered in my captor's eyes and he spoke a slower mouthful of gibberish with a subtly familiar metre.

Sensation returned to my arms and legs. I felt restraining bands around ankles and wrists anchoring me to a hard table. Twisted muscles all began to protest at once and I found I could now grimace with the pain. The confusion inside my skull began to subside, leaving me with a feeling like the worst morning-after head I've ever suffered and I had to concentrate on not throwing up, a bad idea when you're flat on your back. White-hair was still leaning over me, supercilious amusement in his eyes, and I decided that if I were to vomit, I'd do my best to give him a faceful.