There was a line a hundred or so long at the gate, and Grace and Afi took their places at the end of it in tired silence. There was nowhere to sit, and no shelter here from the wind. Worse still, the long shadow cast by one of the verticals of the gate fell over all of them. It was going to be a long and freezing wait.

"Do people always have to wait this long to get in?" Grace asked him in a murmur.

Afi shook his head, and his expression was a little troubled. "There are usually just merchants and a few supplicants coming to and fro."

"Why supplicants?" Grace asked him. "Like, poor people?"

Afi gave a quiet snort through his nose. "Like rich people. The Queen accepts donations, and uses her magic where the people who can afford it ask. The poor are turned away."

Grace shook her head, disgusted. "I thought she liked to take people in? To help them?"

"Only a very few," Afi said, stonily. "And only to give herself the illusion of generosity."

His voice had an edge to it, and she saw the elderly couple in front of them in the line turn around, an anxious expression on their faces. Afi nodded at them, doing a good impression of nobleman's son, all considered. The couple nodded in return and turned back to face forwards. Grace hoped they hadn't heard what Afi had said.

"Something's changed since I was last here," he went on, more quietly. "There shouldn't be this many people asking for help. This is only one gate out of seven."

Grace craned her neck to peer along the line. There were a dozen palace guards clustered in the sun that poured through the gate, their bright scarlet uniforms almost festive. But even from this distance Grace could see that their expressions were taut and suspicious. Something had made them anxious.

This wasn't the first sign of something wrong. The shop Afi had taken them to had been locked up, and the tailor within had to be persuaded by the sight of Grace's bag of copper in order to let them in. He had smiled and simpered as he brought out fabrics and measured them both, which had been done using a small floating globe of light which tickled as it ran along their arms and backs and legs.

Afi had asked the tailor if there had been anything happening in the city, mentioning some strange rumours. The man had paused in his fabric-cutting, but then insisted that nothing had changed. Everything, he said, was just fine. But he had been more than a little nervous, and Grace hadn't missed how many times he glanced outside the extravagant windows.

Even as the middle of the day approached and they set out in their new finery, the streets in this district had been almost deserted. Such a contrast to the poor district, where she supposed desperation must have driven them onto the streets.

Grace had checked her reflection in the first four shop-windows they had come across, more than a little disconcerted by the strange image she saw there. Offered a choice of styles, she had insisted on a short skirt with leggings underneath rather than a full length dress. There was no way she could use her kick-boxing effectively if she was in long skirts, and the closer they came to the tower, the more she felt in need of every advantage.

But the skirt was full, multi-layered, and consisted of black and purple lacy fabrics in asymmetric arrangements. Little pieces of ribbon hung down and fluttered, and the tailor had insisted that the only thing to go with this was an ornate corseted bodice in black with purple details. He had finished the outfit with a long coat of black velvet and heeled black boots, and Grace was left feeling like a cross between a burlesque dancer and one of the goth-girls who stalked High Peaks in packs. She still hadn't adjusted to it, nor quite come to comprehend how quickly he had created this outfit with more of the glowing lights he called Help Hands.

"You look fine," Afi had told her, after the fourth time she had looked. "You look like a lady."

"I'll trust you on that," she muttered to him, tugging the skirt a little flatter. "It's just that this isn't how a lady dresses in my world."

Afi gave her a curious look. "Well how do they dress?"

Grace searched for a definitive image of a lady. "More... wool," she said.

Afi wrinkled his nose slightly. "That's a poor person's fabric, surely."

"Wool from pashminas," she told him, loftily. "They're a really rare kind of animal that only lives at heights of a thousand feet. And each one only grows two hundred hairs on its head. The fabric made out of it is just incredible."

"Oh." Afi squinted at her. "I don't know whether your world is crazy, or whether you're just making things up to get back at me."

Grace gave him a broad grin. "I'm not going to tell you which."

Afi muttered, "Double standards," but didn't argue.

Their conversation gradually fell away the closer they got to the vastness of the tower, and Grace could see that his expression was growing as solemn as hers. Her stomach was increasingly twisting with nerves, and she had felt her mood sink further as she had seen the queue. Knowing that they were going to go in there and try to free all the imprisoned boys was bad enough without having to stand and wait for endless minutes.

At least the clothes held warmth enchantments, at any rate. Without them, they would have had exposure within minutes, instead of feeling just chilly. Grace admitted grudgingly to herself that it had been worth the expense, even though at the time the sight of a third of her supply of coppers disappearing into the tailor's hands had made her wince.

In their first few minutes of waiting by the gate, Grace saw three groups who had made it to the front sent away, and none welcomed in. She cast a quick glance at Afi, who was watching them too. She hoped that he could talk his way in there. If he couldn't, then this might have been a very long trip for nothing.

The line moved painfully slowly. Grace had hidden her watch in her pack, which they had stowed at a strange storage house which was like a rich version of the cloakroom at High Peaks' one youth club. She had no way to track the time, but she thought it took them at least half an hour to make it a third of the way to the front.

Eventually Afi sighed, and offered to find them hot drinks and something to eat.

"That might just save me from killing and eating someone," she told him, and saw the couple in front glance at her in concern this time. She caught Afi's eye, and saw how hard he was trying not to laugh. It reduced her to silent, shaking laughter of her own, which only died when he left the queue to find food.

Shortly afterwards, Grace thought she should have expected something to happen the moment he was gone. It was the way these things seemed to go. But as it was, she was busy staring up at the intricate carvings of the gate, totally unprepared, when she caught swift movement out of the corner of her eye and snapped her head around in time to see something bound out of a side-street and into the middle of the queue. It was only a second later that someone screamed, but Grace was already three paces forwards and reaching to find her staff.  

She remembered as her hands closed on empty air that she'd left it with her pack, and it was like putting her foot into a hole she hadn't seen. She realised then how much she had come to depend on wielding possibility, in only two short days. She felt unprotected and impossibly fragile without it.

Three more shapes bounded out of the side-street, and she had time to see that they were halfway between apes and hyenas, with huge over-developed arms and fists which they drove themselves forwards on, and sloping backs and small back legs. Their jaws were oversized too, and she saw the first one open its mouth as it dived at a soldier. He fell under it, and she was certain that he wouldn't be getting up again.

But they're not in the book, she thought, numbly. They're nothing I've read about. I have no staff, and I don't know what they are.

She stood still and frozen for as many as ten seconds, while amongst the guards a captain was yelling commands and the soldiers were drawing themselves back to attack. And then the people around her started to run, fleeing from whatever these things were, and in the clear space that was opened up, she saw a woman on the ground with one of the things on top of her, its wide jaws open to bite at her head.

She was moving before she had time to think, and despite the stiffness of her muscles and her tiredness, she crossed the ten yards between them in a second. Afterwards, she tried to remember what she had been thinking, but she suspected she hadn't been thinking at all. Somehow years of being the older sister, the one who looked out for the others, kicked in and directed her body.

Luckily for Grace, her kick-boxing training kicked in too. She ended her run with a jump, and both of her feet drove sideways towards the dog-thing.

There was a satisfying thump as her boots hit home, and the creature span off sideways. Grace almost landed perfectly, but her foot tangled with the woman's flailing arm and she stumbled.

The dog-thing clambered to its feet as she righted herself, and launched itself at her. She had time to do nothing more than shove her foot out sideways, but it connected with the open jaws, and the creature gave a yelp of pain.

"Run!"  she told the woman, as she circled around the thing. She didn't spare the time to watch her scramble away, but she heard her go.

Instead, she flicked her gaze towards the gate, where another four or five of these things were lunging at the clustered palace guards, who were down to ten now. Three of the creatures lay on the ground, fallen to the strange semi-circular blades the guard seemed to carry. Though in the brief moment she looked at them, she realised that the blades were straight until they were swung, and that it was magic which created a curve of lethal cutting edge behind it.

She snapped her eyes back to the dog, satisfied to see that it was watching only her now, and not the remaining civilians who were trying to flee. There were only a handful who hadn't made it, one of them an elderly robed lady who was being helped away at a painfully slow pace by two servants.

She kept her feet moving, circling, wondering what she was going to do about it.

I need a weapon, she thought, and spared a momentary irritated thought for Afi with the knives he had concealed around his outfit. What was the use when he vanished at the wrong time?

The dog lunged at her, and she kicked at it again, eliciting another yelp and making it back away again, but having no other effect. The thing's head was solid. She wasn't going to kick it into submission, she was pretty sure of that.

She glanced around again, trying to look for anything she could use to defend herself. But the street was empty, the houses on either side closed and almost certainly bolted. And the dog-thing was snarling at her now. She was pretty sure it wouldn't just give up if she ran away.

It was starting to feel like one of those dreams where the monster keeps coming just for you, a dream Grace had experienced many times. The more she circled and saw nothing to help, the more frantic and frightened she became. It had been one thing to attack it when someone else had been under threat, but now she was alone with it.

"Here!" she heard the shout and spun around, confused.

It was the captain of the guards, a big, bearded bear of a man. He was holding four of the creatures at bay with a long, barbed rod which crackled with sparks. There were others attacking the remainder of his men. More of them must be arriving all the time.

He kicked something towards her along the flagstones, and as she lunged for it she realised that it was one of the enchanted blades they used. Her hand closed round it at the same time as the hound charged at her.

She brought it up in a quick movement, and the force of the animal's run brought it straight onto the end of the blade. She grimaced as it hit, and slid forwards over the point. It went limp, and it was so heavy that her arm buckled under the weight of the blade and the creature. She let the point of the weapon hit the ground and put her foot on the unmoving creature and drew the blade out.

As she turned, her heart squeezed. There were twenty or thirty of the dog-things spilling out of the side-street. The Captain was already down to half-forces, and she could see no sign of any reinforcements.

As if to put the lid on any hopes of rescue, the gate gave a hissing sound and suddenly there was solid metal covering the opening up to a height of twenty feet, leaving them all standing in deep shadow. Only the creatures were illuminated.

"Get your backs to the gate!" the Captain yelled, and Grace wondered whether she ought to just run. But he had helped her, and she wasn't going to leave him with six men against five times that many of the beasts.

She started to jog towards the remaining soldiers, afraid and increasingly certain that she might die here. The animals were gathering into a bunch in front of the guards, their mouths open and a chilling chorus of growls rolling out of their mouths. She made it to the gate just as the first of them charged.

And then there was a rush of movement, and a blurring shape was amidst the animals, spinning and turning and lunging with such speed it was breathtaking. The beasts began to rearrange themselves, facing this new threat, but they weren't fast enough. Two dazzling points flashed in the narrow band of sunlight falling over the gate, and creature after creature fell.

Only that single beast in front hadn't seen the attacker. It had carried on its charge, and came to a quick end on the point of the crackling spear the Captain held.

Grace could easily have stood her ground and watched the lethal beauty of the figure in front of her, and she admitted to herself that he probably didn't need her help. But she had a grim sort of pride, and she knew how much she cared what he thought of her. She sighed as she realised she couldn't stand by and let him fight alone, however well he did it.

Darn you, Afi, she thought, a little unfairly, as she charged into the fray with a cry.