The smoke came from three wagons.

They sat slewed across the river road at the bend, one tipped right over on its side, barrels rolling off it into the ditch and bleeding a thin dark trail of lamp oil through the grass. An ox bellowed somewhere. Men with iron hammer pendants at their throats were busy dragging crates off the back of the nearest wagon, and two figures in grey crouched on the canvas roofs with bows across their knees, watching the road.

And in the middle of it all, backed up against a wagon wheel, stood a stout red-faced merchant, holding a pig.

He was holding it the way some men hold a sword: in front of him, with both arms, ready to defend it with his life. The pig did not seem to think much of this arrangement.

The companions took this all in from behind a hedge.

“Hammers,” said Derek.

“Again,” said Thorn.

“There’s a pig,” said Dave.

“There’s a strongbox,” said Nibbles, pointing at a heavy iron chest that two of the Hammers were struggling to carry off the back of a wagon. “Look at the size of it.”

“We’re not here for the strongbox, Nibbles.”

“I know. I’m only noticing it.”

Thorn looked at them all, and for once nobody was arguing. They had been travelling together for long enough now that they hardly needed a plan. Thorn nodded at Dave. Dave stood up, very tall, behind the hedge, and stretched out both arms.

The Sleep spell went out across the wagons like a warm wind. Hammers sagged where they stood. One sat down against a wheel. One lay down gently in the road. One, who had been carrying the strongbox, slumped forward on top of it as though it were a pillow. The merchant swayed, blinked, and stayed awake, still holding his pig, which had gone to sleep in his arms and was snoring.

Before the remaining Hammers had even worked out what had happened, Thorn and Nibbles were through the hedge.

The biggest of the Hammers was a broad, scowling man called Brakk, with a maul over his shoulder and the look of someone who was about to give orders. He opened his mouth to give the first one. He never got to finish it. Thorn hit him from the front and Nibbles from the side at the same moment, and Brakk went down into the road with the order still in his mouth, before the fight had properly begun.

The two figures in grey on the wagon roofs moved fast. These were not Hammers. They wore no pendants, they made no noise, and they moved like people who did this for a living. One took a single look at Brakk lying in the road, slid off the far side of the wagon, and was gone into the trees before anyone could stop him.

The other leapt down with a short sword in each hand and ran at Dave.

He did not get there. Thorn crossed the road at a flat sprint, and then found a burst of speed none of them had seen before, as if time itself had paused to let him catch up. He arrived beside the man in grey just as the sword came up, and did the thing that had put the hobgoblin in the river: instead of trying to hit him, he hit the space where the man was standing. The axe came round flat, and Thorn’s shoulder came in behind it, and the man in grey was simply removed from the road. He went backwards through the air, landed in the ditch amongst the oil barrels, and did not get up.

“Whoa,” said Dave, in a voice of deep respect.

Nibbles finished what was left with a Thunderwave that boomed down the road and blew the last two Hammers clean off their feet and into the hedge.

Then it was quiet, apart from the pig, which had woken up and was screaming.

---

The merchant’s name was Hesk Morrow. He dealt in wool and lamp oil, he had been robbed twice already this year, and he was so grateful he could hardly speak.

“Anything,” he kept saying. “Anything you want. You saved my wagons. You saved my stock. You saved…” He looked down at the pig in his arms. “You saved Petunia.”

There was a short silence.

“Her name’s Petunia?” said Dave.

“She’s a prize sow. She won second place at the Sunfall fair. She’s going to Fallcrest to meet a very important boar.”

Nibbles, who had been about to name a sum of money, closed his mouth. Something new had come into his eyes. He looked at the pig. He looked at Hesk. He looked at the pig again.

“We’ll take the pig,” he said.

“You’ll what?”

“As payment. For the rescue. The pig.”

“You can’t have Petunia!”

“Why not? You said anything.”

“I didn’t mean Petunia!”

“Then you should have been more specific,” said Nibbles, “in the negotiation.”

It went on for some time. Dave sided with Nibbles, because Dave had always wanted a pig and had only just realised it. Thorn tried to explain that heroes did not take people’s pigs, and was ignored. Loki sat in front of Petunia and stared at her with the fixed attention of a dog who has seen something even better than a sausage. Derek tied up the sleeping Hammers, counted them, counted the companions, and then sat on a barrel with his face in his hands.

In the end Hesk Morrow, promising to think very seriously about the pig, gave them a pouch of coins instead, and a ride into Fallcrest on the back of his wagons. Nibbles accepted the coins under protest, and wrote in his ledger: One pig. Owed. Do not forget.

While the others loaded the wagons, Derek and Nibbles searched the fallen Hammers. Brakk’s pockets held a handful of silver coins, and these were strange. They were square, not round, and each one was stamped with the shape of a little lantern. Nobody in Almenor made money like that. And on the man in grey, the one Thorn had thrown into the ditch, Nibbles found a scrap of paper folded small.

The tower, after the bells. — M.

Derek turned it over in his fingers for a long moment.

“M,” he said quietly. “Like Maelis. From the letter in the manor.”

“What tower?” said Dave.

But nobody answered, because they all had the same tower in mind.

---

They rode into Fallcrest that afternoon sitting on bales of wool, with two Hammers tied up in the back and a sulking pig in the front. The guards at Knight’s Gate cheered them in. Sergeant Murgaddin took one look at the prisoners and his moustache did something that, on another man, might have been a smile.

“Two more for the cells,” he said. “You’re making my job easy.”

Then Derek showed him the square silver coins, and the smile went away.

“Foreign silver,” said Murgaddin slowly, turning a coin in the light. “In Hammer pockets.” He did not say anything else, but he kept the coin, and Derek saw him put it carefully away in an inside pocket, the way you put away something you mean to think about later.

Garnel left them at the gate. He had not slept in a real bed since the Hammers had carried him out of Sunfall, he said, and the Nentir Inn had real beds, and nothing, not ogres, not worms, not even Ethium, was going to come between him and one of them for at least a day.

Thorn had somewhere to be. He had been thinking about it for the entire journey, through the shrine and the stepping stones and the long walk past the barrows, and he went straight to the blacksmith’s forge without even stopping to put down his pack.

The smith was waiting for him. She went into the back without a word and came out carrying it wrapped in oiled cloth, and laid it on the anvil, and unwrapped it.

It was exactly the axe he had seen in the chalk drawing all those weeks ago. A broad, curved blade on one side. A long, wicked spike on the other. A handle wrapped in dark leather, balanced so perfectly that when he picked it up it seemed to weigh nothing at all. He turned it over. He swung it, slowly, once. He turned it over again.

“Blade for cutting,” said the smith. “Spike for punching through. Your choice, every swing.”

Thorn did not say anything for a long time. He now owned three axes. His old axe from home, which had seen him through goblins and wolves. The rune-carved Ethium axe from the tower, awake now and humming faintly blue, thanks to Garnel. And this one, which was his, made for him, the first of its kind.

“Have you named it?” asked the smith.

“Not yet,” said Thorn. “It has to be the right name.” He thought about it. “It might take a while.”

He walked out of the forge with three axes on his belt and the expression of a man who has finally become exactly who he always meant to be: a hero, with a collection.

---

That evening they ate at the Blue Moon, where the innkeeper had at last finished fixing the tables they had broken, and was watching them very carefully in case they did it again.

The talk in the tavern was all about two things.

The first was Tobbs. People had been seeing less and less of him. He used to be in the market every morning, chattering and dropping papers, buying ink and bread and bothering the bookseller. Now he hardly came out at all. And the tower lamp, the one that had burned in Nimozaran’s window every night for as long as anyone could remember, had not been lit for over a week.

The second thing was a ship.

“Painted red and gold,” said a fisherman at the next table. “Never seen the like. Came up the river four days back and tied up at the long wharf. Foreign. Proper foreign. Not from anywhere round here.”

“Axirian,” said someone else, darkly, and several people nodded as though that explained everything.

Thorn looked at Derek. Derek looked at the window, out towards the cliff and the dark shape of the tower on top of it, with no light in its window.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” he said. “First thing.”

---

Nimozaran’s tower was very quiet in the morning sun. They knocked on the great front door. Nobody came. They knocked again. Somewhere inside, a long way up, a window opened and shut.

They knocked a third time, and at last there was a slow scraping of bolts, and the door opened about two inches, and a single eye looked out at them through the gap. It was Tobbs’ eye, but it was red-rimmed and hollow, as though it had not slept in days.

“Is the tiefling out there?” whispered Tobbs.

There was a pause.

Dave had been seven years old for his entire life, and he had never, ever been able to resist a moment like this.

“Yes,” said Dave.

The door slammed shut. Bolts shot home, one after another, bang, bang, bang. From the other side came a muffled wail and the sound of somebody running up a great many stairs.

The others turned slowly to look at Dave.

“Dave,” said Thorn.

“It was a joke.”

“It was a terrible joke.”

“It was a little bit funny,” said Nibbles, who was trying very hard not to laugh.

Derek closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door again, gently. “Tobbs,” he called. “Tobbs, it’s Derek. There’s no tiefling. It’s just us. Dave was being…” He searched for the word. ”…Dave.”

It took a long time. It took Thorn shouting up at the windows, and Nibbles shouting that he would personally guarantee there were no tieflings anywhere in the area, and finally Dave standing very close to the door and saying in a small voice, “Sorry, Tobbs. Sorry. There isn’t a tiefling. I made it up. I’m really sorry,” before the bolts slid back, one by one, and the door creaked open again.

Tobbs stood in the doorway, thin and pale and unwashed, his hair in wild tufts and ink all over his fingers. He looked at Dave for a long moment. Then he looked at the rest of them, and his face crumpled with relief.

“Oh, thank goodness,” he said. “Oh, thank goodness it’s you. Come in. Quickly.”

---

Inside, the entrance hall was dim and cold. Two huge iron figures stood on either side of the door, taller than Thorn and twice as wide, with blank iron faces and brass plates set into their chests. As the companions walked between them, both heads turned. Slowly. With a grinding of old metal.

“Friends!” said Tobbs quickly, flapping his hands at them. “Friends. They’re fine with you now. They’re my master’s guardians. They guard the door. They don’t do very much else.”

The iron heads turned back, grinding, to face the door.

“Can I have one?” said Dave.

“No.”

Tobbs told them the whole story on the long climb up the stairs, the words spilling out of him as if he had been holding them in for days. Nine days ago, his master had locked himself in his study, as he often did. In the morning the door was still locked. By the afternoon, Tobbs had begun to worry. By the evening, he had let himself in with his own key.

The study was empty. There had been no struggle. The fire was still burning in the grate. A cup of tea sat on the desk, half drunk. Books lay open, and a quill rested on a page of unfinished notes.

“As if he simply…” Tobbs’ voice cracked. “As if he simply stepped out of the world.”

Two days later, a tiefling woman had come to the door: beautifully dressed, very polite, with a soft voice and cold eyes. She had asked questions about the map, and about Ethium, and about the stones. Tobbs had not let her in. He had been frightened of the door ever since.

“Which is why,” said Derek, looking meaningfully at Dave, “you asked.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Dave.

The study was at the very top of the tower: a great round room with high windows, shelves of books, a desk heaped with papers, a fireplace with armchairs, and in the floor, carved deep into the stone a few steps from the desk, a wide circle ringed with runes.

“Will you help me look?” said Tobbs. “Please. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t see it any more. I’ve been looking at it too long. Fresh eyes. Anything. Anything that seems wrong.”

So they searched. They were not, it turned out, very good at searching. Thorn looked behind every bookshelf in case Nimozaran was hiding there. Nibbles looked in every drawer for anything valuable, purely in case it was a clue. Dave picked things up, looked at them, and put them down somewhere else. Loki sniffed the circle in the floor and sneezed.

It was Tobbs, in the end, who steered them, pointing at things and asking questions, until bit by bit the picture came together. The circle in the floor was not decoration. It was a teleport circle: Nimozaran’s great unfinished work, which Tobbs had sworn did not work yet. But someone had made it work. On its rim, beside the one rune that glowed softly for Fallcrest, a second rune had been burned into the stone, dark and strange, and nobody in the room could read it.

“He went through it,” said Thorn slowly. “He didn’t leave the room. He went through the circle.”

“To where?” said Nibbles.

Nobody knew.

“There’ll have been a component,” said Tobbs, wringing his hands. “There always is. Something you use up. Something the magic eats.”

“An Ethium Stone,” said Nibbles at once. “It’s always an Ethium Stone.”

They searched the circle for a stone. There was no stone.

And then Dave, who had been crawling about on the floor under the desk for no particular reason, said, “Ow,” and held up his hand, and in his palm, in two jagged pieces, lay a small square of blue glass.

It was not the blue of an Ethium Stone. It was a deeper, colder blue, like the sky just after sunset, and the broken edges glittered.

“What’s that?” said Thorn.

“I don’t know,” said Dave. “It was under the desk. It’s broken.” He turned it over. “I’m going to try something.”

He closed his eyes and spoke the words of a spell he had copied into his book weeks ago and never yet had a reason to use: a spell to see magic. To show its glow in the air, the way a lantern shows dust.

He had forgotten where he was.

Nimozaran’s tower was the home of one of the most powerful wizards in the north, and it was full of magic. It was in the walls, the floor, the books, the doorknobs, the iron guardians downstairs and the circle at his feet and very possibly the teacups. The instant the spell took hold, the whole room blazed in Dave’s eyes like the inside of the sun.

“AAARGH,” said Dave, and fell over backwards into an armchair with both claws over his eyes.

“Dave!”

“I’m all right! I’m all right! It’s just very bright! Everything’s glowing! The chair is glowing! Why is the chair glowing?”

“It’s a wizard’s chair,” said Tobbs apologetically.

Squinting, his eyes streaming, Dave peered through his claws at the pieces of glass in his hand. Against the dazzle of everything else in the room, it was very hard to see. But there it was: a faint, thin, flickering blue light, like the very last ember of something that had once burned brightly.

“It’s magic,” he said. “Just a little bit. It’s nearly all gone. Like it’s been used.”

Tobbs went very still.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “That’s the component. Not a stone at all. Glass. Blue glass. The circle burned it up when he went through, and it cracked.” He stared at the broken pieces in Dave’s palm. “If we want to follow him, we’ll need another piece. A fresh one. And we’ll need to work out the rune, and prepare the circle, and…” He trailed off, overwhelmed.

“Where do you get blue glass?” asked Thorn.

Nobody knew that either.

---

They went shopping, because Nibbles said that when you didn’t know where to find something, the best place to look was a market, and because Dave’s eyes needed a rest.

They did not find blue glass in the market. But from the top of the cliff stair, looking down over Lowtown towards the river, they found something else.

The ship was impossible to miss. Among the grey barges and fishing boats at the long wharf sat something that did not belong there at all: a tall ship painted red and gold, with a carved heron rising from her prow and her name written along her side in curling, foreign letters. The Amber Heron. Porters were carrying crates down her gangplank: rolled carpets, sacks of spice that made people sneeze from twenty paces away, and jars of glass that glowed a faint, cold blue.

The porters were Axirian. They wore long lacquered coats of red and gold, and their heads were shaved except for a single braid, and every single one of them carried a lantern. Not an ordinary lantern. A lantern of glass that burned with a cold blue light instead of a flame.

The companions stood at the top of the stair and looked at the lanterns.

Then they looked at each other.

“Blue glass,” breathed Dave.

---

They went down to have a look. They told each other it was only to have a look.

They were halfway along the wharf when a voice said, warmly, “Thorn Axehand. Derek. Nibbles McPicklepants. And Dave. And of course, Loki.”

A tall man was coming down the gangplank towards them. He wore a lacquered coat finer than any of the porters’, red and gold and stiff with embroidery, and his head was shaved, and he smiled. It was a faint smile, and it did not move. Thin lines were tattooed across the backs of his hands.

“Kassander Vey,” he said, with a small bow. “Merchant. Lantern glass, mostly. Welcome. I have heard so much about you all.”

The companions stopped dead.

None of them had ever seen him before. None of them had told him their names. Not one of them could think of any way he could have known that a dwarf cleric called Derek existed, let alone what a dog called Loki was called. A cold feeling crept up the back of Thorn’s neck, the same feeling he had had on the North Road, in the moment before the goblins came out of the trees.

“How do you know our names?” said Thorn.

“Everyone knows your names,” said Kassander Vey pleasantly. “The heroes of the Blue Moon. The goblin cave. The old manor. How could a humble trader not know?”

It was a perfectly friendly answer. It was said in a perfectly friendly voice. And there was something wrong with all of it, though none of them could say what. His voice was pleasant in the way a painted door is pleasant: it looked exactly right, and it was not really there. He seemed to know everything. He answered every question smoothly, as if he had been expecting it. Dave said afterwards that talking to him was like talking to a very clever clockwork man who was pretending to be a person, and was nearly, but not quite, getting it right.

He admired Thorn’s new axe, by name of maker. He asked after Dave’s spellbook, and his blue ink. He asked Nibbles whether he had found any more buttons lately.

Nibbles’ hand went very slowly to the pouch where he kept his brass button with the anchor on it, and stayed there.

Derek, meanwhile, had stopped looking at Vey at all. He was looking up, past him, into the rigging of the ship, where something small and grey sat perfectly still on a yard-arm, half hidden by a furled sail. Something with thin limbs, and a hunched back, and wings of stone folded tight.

“That creature,” said Derek. “On the yard-arm. What is it?”

Kassander Vey did not even turn round. He simply lifted one hand and clicked his fingers.

The little grey creature opened its wings, dropped from the rigging, and glided down in a long silent swoop to land on his shoulder, where it folded its wings and fixed its tiny glinting eyes on Derek. Derek knew it at once. He had last seen it on the roof of the Blue Moon, the night the Hammers came.

“My companion,” said Kassander Vey. “He keeps me company on long voyages.”

A creature that came to a click of the fingers, thought Thorn. A creature that watched from rooftops. A wizard’s servant. That was what Tobbs had called it. A homunculus. A wizard’s servant. And this smiling merchant, who sold lantern glass, had just called it down from the sky without even looking.

Nibbles was looking at the homunculus with great interest.

“What’s its name?” he asked.

“I don’t tell people his name,” said Vey pleasantly.

“Why not?”

“Because it is mine.” The smile did not move at all. “Please don’t ask me that again.”

There was a pause. In that pause, everybody who knew Nibbles knew exactly what was about to happen.

“What’s its name?” said Nibbles.

“I asked you not to—”

“What’s his name, though?”

“Nibbles,” said Derek warningly.

“I’m only asking. What’s its name? Is it Gerald? It looks like a Gerald. Is it—”

And for a single moment, the smile went away.

It did not change. It did not slip. It simply was not there any more, and in its place was something else: a face that was cold, and hard, and older than it should have been, and that looked at Nibbles the way a cat looks at a mouse it has decided not to eat yet. The air on the wharf seemed to go cold. Loki, who was afraid of nothing, took a step backwards and growled very low.

Then the moment passed, and the faint smile was back exactly where it had been, as if it had never left.

“It was a pleasure to meet you all,” said Kassander Vey warmly. “Do enjoy Fallcrest.” And he turned and walked back up the gangplank, with the little grey creature riding on his shoulder, its head turned all the way round to keep watching them.

Nobody spoke until they were well away down the wharf.

“He’s a wizard,” said Dave quietly. “He’s definitely a wizard. You don’t click your fingers at a homunculus unless you’re a wizard.”

“He’s not a merchant,” said Derek.

“He’s a bad guy,” said Thorn.

“He’s a very bad guy,” agreed Nibbles. Then, after a moment, because he was Nibbles: “But he did know about my button.”

---

They found a quiet corner behind a stack of wool bales, where they could see the ship, and they made a plan.

It was not a long plan. It was a very good one, and it was entirely theirs.

Every one of the porters carried a lantern of cold blue glass. The porters came and went all day long, up and down the gangplank, between the ship and the long wharf warehouse. They did not look at each other much. They looked at their crates, and their feet, and the gangplank.

And Nibbles had a trick that nobody on the wharf knew about. Ever since the tower, he had been able to call up a hand: a floating, invisible hand that did whatever his own hands did, from across a room. It could open a lock. It could lift a purse. It could, just possibly, unhook a lantern.

“I’ll need to get close,” said Nibbles. “Close enough to see. Without them looking at me.”

“How?” said Thorn.

Nibbles grinned, and spoke a word, and his face rippled.

When it settled again, it was not his face. He was taller and broader, and his red scales had gone smooth and brown, and his head was shaved with a single braid, and he wore a long coat of red and gold. He looked, in every way, like an Axirian porter. He looked down at himself, pleased.

“I could get used to this,” he said, in his own voice. “Do I look trustworthy? I feel trustworthy. I feel like I could sell anything to anyone.”

“You still sound like Nibbles,” said Derek.

“Then I won’t talk.”

“You always talk,” said everyone.

Dave, meanwhile, had gone quiet and thoughtful. Every morning since they had left the healing pool, he had woken up with two numbers in his head. He didn’t know where they came from. They were just there, bright and clear, like the last bit of a dream: something Dave’s magic had begun to do all on its own, as though it could see a little way into the day ahead. And every so often, when it mattered most, Dave found that he could take one of those numbers and give it to the world, and the world would take it.

This morning, the numbers had been very good ones.

“Nibbles,” said Dave. “When you go, I’m going to help.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” said Dave honestly. “I’m just going to.”

---

Nibbles walked out onto the wharf in the shape of an Axirian porter, with a crate on his shoulder that he had borrowed from a pile, and joined the line going up the gangplank as if he had done it every day of his life.

The porter at the top of the gangplank looked straight at him.

Behind the wool bales, Dave closed his eyes, and reached for the first of his numbers, and let it go.

The porter’s eyes passed over Nibbles, slid on to the next porter, and moved away. Nibbles was just another coat. Just another braid. He set his crate down on the deck, picked up another, and walked back down.

Halfway down the gangplank, three porters stood together, resting, their blue lanterns hung on hooks on a post beside them while they argued about something in their own language. Nibbles set his crate down, very slowly, and bent to tie a boot that did not need tying. And from his hand, which nobody could see, an invisible hand reached out across the gap.

Behind the wool bales, Dave reached for his second number. He held it a moment, the way you hold a breath before jumping into cold water. Then he let it go.

The invisible hand found the nearest lantern. It lifted it, very gently, off its hook.

The lantern rose into the air.

It hung there, glowing cold and blue, three feet off the ground and in plain sight of anyone who happened to turn round. It swung. It tilted. For one terrible, endless moment it tipped sideways on the invisible fingers that held it, and the glass knocked against the post with a small, clear tink, and Thorn, watching from the bales, stopped breathing altogether.

One of the porters began to turn his head.

The lantern teetered. It slid. It dropped, a whole inch, towards the planks.

And the invisible hand caught it.

At that exact moment, at the top of the gangplank, somebody dropped a sack of spice. It burst open across the deck in a great cloud of brown and red, and every porter on the gangplank, the one turning his head included, began to sneeze at once, enormously and helplessly, with their eyes screwed shut.

When they opened them again, one of the hooks on the post was empty.

They never knew how close it had been. It was, by any reckoning, the narrowest of margins. Nibbles said afterwards that if Petunia the pig had sneezed at the same moment, it would have been the end of them. Nobody knew why he thought this, and nobody asked.

---

They regrouped behind the wool bales with the lantern hidden under Thorn’s cloak, its cold blue light glowing through the wool. Nibbles let his disguise go with a ripple, and was himself again, and sat down hard with his back to the bales, shaking a little and grinning a lot.

“That,” he said, “was the finest piece of work in the history of Fallcrest. And I’d like it noted that it was entirely free of charge.”

“It wasn’t free,” said Derek. “We stole it.”

“Free to us.”

Dave sat beside him, quiet and pleased, with the warm feeling of having done something important without anybody quite knowing how.

Thorn lifted the edge of his cloak and looked at the lantern: at the deep, cold, sunset-blue glass that glowed in the shadows, the exact colour of the broken pieces Dave had found under Nimozaran’s desk. Somewhere beyond it, beyond the circle and the dark rune, was the old wizard. And this was the way to follow him.

He let the cloak fall.

“Tobbs will need time,” said Derek. “To read the rune, and prepare the circle. Him and Garnel, both.”

“Then we’ll take it to them,” said Thorn. “Tonight.”

High above them, on the cliff, the tower stood dark against the evening sky. Below it, Fallcrest was lighting its lamps, and somewhere in the town, the bell-ringer was climbing the stairs of the bell tower, ready to ring the end of the day.

In Nibbles’ pocket, folded small, was a scrap of paper.

The tower, after the bells.