They were close now. The Warden almost imagined that he, too, could smell the prisoner. Kyrick had assured him the trail was now fresh. The Warden saw the evidence of this: a footprint in the mud, a thread of fabric snagged on a thorn. Someone had passed through these woods at a swift pace.

  But not fast enough to outpace us.

  The horse upon which the Warden rode was not built for speed. It was a huge destrier, muscled for war. But it could still outrun any man or fox.

  There was a huge roar. The Warden and the others brought their horses to a standstill. The whole forest seemed to be quaking. Then a noise like a shrieking gargant split their eardrums. A bright light flashed. Flames shot up into the sky and wind rushed through the trees, nearly blasting them from their saddles. In mere moments, however, the hurricane ended.

  “What was that?” Grygory whispered.

  “It… it sounded like a meteor,” one guard said.

  The Warden could not deny it had been as if the fire went upwards into the sky, not down, but he said nothing on the matter.

  “More likely it is magic!” Grygory hissed.

  “That means we draw close to our quarry,” the Warden said. “Prepare yourselves.”

  They rode on and soon spotted a clearing. A pool of water shimmered, its waters undulating as though disturbed by movement underneath. Some great disturbance had occurred here—no doubt the cause of the flashing light and thundering sound—for many of the surrounding trees were missing boughs; they littered the floor like severed limbs on a battlefield. Oak leaves and pine needles lay so thick on the ground they muffled the horse’s steps. Above, there was a breach in the canopy, as though a meteorite had indeed torn through the latticework of branches.

  The smell scorched the Warden’s nostrils. He needed no Daimonically enhanced senses to determine what it was.

  “Daimsonblood,” he said. “Fire.”

  “Yes,” Kyrick said, nose likewise wrinkled. “A great quantity of it.”

  A patch of ground nearby the waters was scorched black, the earth itself scoured. Someone else has been lighting black fires, he thought. How odd. There were strange marks on the blackened earth too, as though a large object had lain there but recently moved. Meteorites do not move once fallen… Perhaps it rolled? Something big had evidently come through this way, breaking the boughs off the trees, scoring these tracks on the earth… But nothing of that size walked on Yarruk. The huge monoceros of Qi’shath might have been large enough, but the idea one had made its way to these shores was laughable.

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  The Daimomancer frowned suddenly. He kicked his horse’s flanks. The horse made a whinnying sound as it trotted over the scorched ground. Clearly, it was still hot. Stranger and stranger, the Warden thought.

  “Over here,” Kyrick said.

  The Warden followed. His destrier did not complain about the burning earth. He doubted anything could phase it, trained as it was to stand in the midst of screaming, dying men.

  Kyrick pointed to a gash resembling the excavation site at Ob-koron, only smaller. Bones gleamed, half-unearthed. Pools of Daimonsblood shimmered. The dig-site was perhaps five feet deep, and looked to be fresh.

  “Someone was digging here,” Kyrick said. “They must have had good instincts for where the fossils were, for there are no failed dig locations, and this place is remote…”

  The Warden frowned. There was something else odd about the dig-site, something moving down there.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  Kyrick stared in wonder. Slowly, he dismounted from his horse, handing the reins to Grygory. He paced over to the rend and crouched over it.

  Something stirred in the sediment of buried remains. It was no more than a twitch, a sort of pulse beneath the surface of the blood, which was thickening into a kind of film. It reminded The Warden dreadfully of the way a chrysalis bulges and swells as the butterfly within tries to push its way out…

  “It is… it is as if the Daimon is trying to… regenerate.” Kyrick’s eyes were owl-bright, alive with excitement.

  The Warden scoffed.

  “The Daimons have been dead for more than three-thousand years. We use their bones for timber and their blood for oil.”

  Kyrick did not pay his words any mind, but stared at the glacial progress of the blood as it congealed and formed a layer over the ancient fossils.

  “May I take a sample?”

  “Do what you will but waste no more time!” The Warden snapped. “Where is Telos?”

  Again, Kyrick did not answer. He retrieved one of the empty decanters of Daimsonblood from the saddle of his horse and, with a long branch, carefully scooped a portion of the quivering substance into the decanter. The Warden noted it continued to move even when parted from its source. Kyrick sealed it and remounted.

  “Where is the prisoner?” The Warden said, through gritted teeth.

  “Very close,” Kyrick said. He sniffed twice. “He… He’s not gone far. He is here, somewhere...”

  “SURPRISE!” Telos cried as he swung down from a tree above them, landing a double-footed kick squarely in the Warden’s central breast-plate. Though the Warden wore heavy armour, the momentum Telos had acquired from his acrobatic manoeuvre was enough to unseat him. He crashed to the ground with dizzying force.

  Grygory went for his sword, but Telos smacked the horse’s flanks and Gyrgory’s steed reared and bolted. The other two guards tried to bring their steeds around but they were blocked off by Kyrick and by the thick forestry.

  Telos kicked the destrier’s flanks and the horse, not phased in the slightest by the change in management, broke into a gallop.

  As the Warden clambered to his feet, the burning smell of Daimonsblood was nothing compared to the rage he felt as he heard Telos laughing.