‘I can’t believe this!’ Horatio said, looking around at the fallen corpses of the Braxian magician they had just slain, Antonio the sea captain, and the crew members who had come ashore, which lay on the ground in various states of dismemberment and disfigurement. ‘How are we going to get back from the Waste now?’

Some way away, the ship which had borne them to the Waste continued to sink slowly into the sea in two frozen halves encased in glittering blue and white ice.

‘Do not worry,’ said Olivia calmly. ‘Once we have found the Sword, a way will present itself. It is our destiny. I have seen it.’

‘That’s easy for you to say, seer-girl,’ said Egea, no doubt particularly angry that she had lost the opportunity for trading with the sailors on the return voyage. ‘How come you and Gramps didn’t “see” that this guy Owen was bad news before? What gives?’

‘We had our suspicions about him,’ said Primus, still huffing and puffing from the battle, adjusting his Sage’s hat. ‘But we never detected any demonic aura about him. He must have been so skilled in magic that he was able to block our awareness somehow.’

‘There’s no use worrying about that now,’ said Ceres. ‘Great evil has been done today, but what’s done is done, and, with the help of Qind, we prevailed. The only way open to us is onwards. We must find the Sword as quickly as possible.’

‘I completely agree,’ said Olivia. ‘We don’t know whether this magician had already heard of the Sword if he found out about it from us and Ross, but either way, other Braxians may have learned of it. They may be travelling or even have travelled already to the Waste by other means, and they may be closing in on the Sword too. We haven’t a moment to lose.’

‘You speak truly,’ said Ross. Ross, who by now had entirely proven himself to be on their side by fighting in the battle with them against Owen.

‘Then let us get going,’ concluded Primus, his usual refrain.

The party set off at once on a brisk march north.

It really was bitterly cold up here, the wind carrying flecks of snow and ice that stung the cheeks and made the teeth chatter. Horatio pulled his white-wolf pelt tight around him against it. A little knot of guilt tugged in his stomach that they were just leaving the fallen sailors behind, that they hadn’t given Antonio and his crew members who had come ashore a proper burial. But their quest was urgent, and there really was no time to lose–the possibility of defeating the Demon King Brax, and thus the fate of the whole of Gard, hung in the balance.

Very soon the grass-dotted tundra of the edge of the Waste gave way to an entirely snow-covered, barren, white landscape, and the party found themselves marching through the snow. Horatio had absolutely no idea where they were going, except that they were continuing North, towards the jagged white peaks that rose up in the far distance.

‘How do you know what direction to go in?’ Wyvera asked the Seer, who led with Primus at the front of their pack, voicing Horatio’s question for him.

‘I am partly going on instinct,’ Olivia explained, ‘and partly on memory from what I saw in my vision. But not only that. As we get closer to the Sword, I can sense its presence. It’s only faint at the moment, but it’s getting stronger, and we are definitely getting nearer to it. It’s like it’s calling to me.’

Horatio wasn’t sure whether she could fully be trusted in this, especially after she and Primus hadn’t been able to “sense” Owen’s evil. But it wasn’t like they had any other choice. He kept marching with the others.

Before long, a blizzard struck up.

It began as a few especially cold gusts that made Horatio blink tears away from his stinging eyes, but then the gusts picked up in frequency, before becoming a continuous roar in his ears, a barrage of whistling white that threw snow into their freezing faces and obscured their vision.

‘Can you still sense the location of the Sword in this?’ Horatio called out to Olivia over the sound of the gale, still just about to make her out at the front of the group in the whirl of snow.

‘Yes!’ Olivia called back. ‘Its presence is getting stronger! Keep going!’

What she didn’t sense this time, however (and nor did Helen), perhaps because of the blizzard, perhaps because she was concentrating on trying to discern the location of the Sword, was the group of monsters that ambushed them, leaping out at them through the snow.

Battle 1