It felt like I'd barely closed my eyes when a crashing and yelling yanked me back to awareness.

A lot of the old school guys in the military - the ones you met at the Legion or down the pub after the Act of Remembrance or something - would talk about that lingering paranoia from the bad old days in East Belfast and the like, when no one slept heavily and there might be a bomb under your car or something. They were twitchy, damaged guys with a string of failed relationships who struggled to connect with their kids. For all that we treated them like legends of a storied past, no one wanted to be like them. For my part, I always slept deeply. It kept the hands steady and the mind sharp. But as a consequence, I didn't do well with a sudden awakening - especially after a late night with Anthelion. It took me several seconds for my brain to catch up with the events of the last few days, to orientate itself and to recollect that I still had a readied pistol in the outside zip pocket of my smock.

So by the time I had lined up all of these details, the chaos had already reached me, a hand was around my throat, a dagger at my eyeball and a mouth spitting angry, incomprehensible words in my face.

But hang on, no, the words weren't completely incomprehensible. I heard Dilyn first and remembered the guy I shot. That cued me onto the word for "you killed", oh, and "dlokin", the exact meaning of which still eluded me but which was certainly very rude, judging from the expression Anthelion had pulled when I used it.

On instinct, I left the pistol where it was and instead grabbed the knife hand with both of mine, wrestling it away from my face as I tried to get my attacker off me. She - definitely a woman, my brain clocked as the dagger swung back and forth - might have been angry, but she still knew how to fight and she released her grip on my throat to punch me on the cheek. It would've been my nose, but I moved my head at the last second and used the movement to roll us both off the pallet and onto the floor, where she landed on the M4 with the sound of metal on metal and I realized she was wearing a metal breastplate over chainmail. No wonder she had been so heavy!

I yanked the blade from her hand just as an upward-rising knee caught me between the legs and I tumbled backwards from the simple shock of it before the pain caught up with me.

'Enough!' I heard someone shout in a commanding but reedy tone. 'This is the house of Anthelion, and you are g'dzechni premtop!'

It was Thenum, I dimly realized as the immediate stabbing pain receded to a merely agonizing throb. I hadn't been kneed like that for years and I think I'd forgotten how much it really hurt. The young servant stepped over me with a drawn sword in one hand, and the invader backed away from him.

'Forgive me, Servant of Anthelion!' she cried. 'But I ask for pad nok faylin.'

'Then go and ask Gethlyn!' Thenum replied, angrily. And followed that up with too many words that, between my still-groggy brain and my pounding testicles, I couldn't follow.

'What's this?' created Anthelion, finally staggering down the stairs, half dressed and wielding his staff before him like Gandalf at Khazad Dûm.

Thenum was already manoeuvring the invader past me, towards the door she had broken in, at the point of his sword.

'She is leaving, Master,' he insisted.

'Ryan!' he cried out in alarm, rushing over to me. 'Are you hurt?'

'I am thinking you summon my ex-wife,' I replied with a smile through gritted teeth. 'Not injured. Just... red face?'

Anthelion helped me up and turned to the woman now back at the door and staring daggers at me, even though her real one lay discarded behind me.

'Marlinya,' said Anthelion to the woman as she backed out through the door. 'We'll speak when the sun is higher.'

She broke her gaze on me to meet his eyes for a moment, nodded, then turned away.

The three of us looked at each other for a moment.

'Too early for breakfast?' I asked.

***

'We don't have time to be distracted!' complained Anthelion. 'Ryan is still learning our language. And until he speaks it well enough, we can't learn his magic!'

I was learning fast, and could follow a lot of what was going on already, but after that morning's attack, we had decided to underplay that a little. I didn't understand enough for Anthelion to explain it in detail, but I had the impression that there were factors in play beyond the simple need to kill a dragon, however powerful. I guessed that Anthelion was trying to buy time to get a handle, himself, on what I could do.

We were meeting in the central keep with Gethlyn, in a side chamber off the main space. I say "meeting", but Gethlyn, Master of Paladins, had summoned us to this room just a couple of hours after we'd got rid of the woman, Marlinya.

Anthelion had explained that Marlinya was a paladin, like Dilyn. Thenum - who had turned out to be an unexpected bad-ass in his own right, which was a story I needed to hear - explained that she had been Dilyn's lover for several months, and the pair of them had been highly reputed monster hunters both separately and together.

Now Gethlyn - their boss as far as I could tell - was dealing with some employee conflict and I was in the middle of it.

'He killed Dilyn when we knew nothing of his powers,' growled the Master of Paladins. He was a mountain of a guy, at least six and a half feet tall, with a hipster-level beard and a face marked with a patchwork of vicious scars. 'Marlinya has handed us a chance to watch him work, first-hand, without having to wait for him to wrap his head around civilized speech. No, my decision is made, Anthelion.'

'Zaynek would not have indulged Marlinya's nonsense!' Anthelion complained.

This elicited a grim-faced, silent stare from Gethlyn, and Anthelion took a step back.

'Forgive me.'

'I have forgiven much of you, Anthelion,' he rumbled. He was in full armour, a chainmail coif over his head, and a pair of swords on his belt. His left hand fell to the pommel of the larger of the pair. 'But Gazenthlion will be solved by force of arms, not wits. She is beyond your wits. But maybe, with the magic of this... summoned man, perhaps she is not beyond the strength of my arm. If we had time, we could learn your way. But we do not. We will learn my way.

'Prepare your... champion.'