It saddened Caledor that his own people should have taken to slaughtering each other, as if there were not enough enemies in the world. Somehow all of this was connected with Aenarion and his cursed blade. It would have been better for the elves if it had never been drawn from its altar.

Another image sprang into his mind – a great metal mirror, forged in the ancient manner, had been set up within the pavilion. Potent spells were woven into its magical glass, a strange intelligence glittered in the crystal eyes of the metal dragons that held the frame in their claws. The glass itself was many-layered and magical. It could be used to communicate across distances by those who knew how.

Before it stood a powerful-looking dark elf in the elaborate armour of a high officer. His head was bowed as if in grief. That surprised Caledor. It was not what he would have expected at all. The dark elf was waiting for someone or something. He had already invoked a spell. There was a sense of a powerful cold mind being brought to bear through the mirror. Caledor knew that mind, or had done in the past, although back then it did not have the aura of ruthless evil it emitted now. It was Malekith, son of Aenarion, much changed from the quiet lad he had once been.

Caledor expended a morsel of his carefully husbanded power, disrupting the spell that the mirror contained, making it impossible for its master to look out of it or speak through it.

‘Interesting,’ said Death, ‘although I don’t see what good it does you. A messenger will work as well as that mirror albeit more slowly.’

Caledor smiled at him, knowing that in this game tempo was all-important. Time might work as well for him as it did for his enemy.

Death reached out to pick up a piece. ‘I believe that was a mistake,’ he said.

‘We shall see,’ said Caledor, wishing that he felt as confident as he tried to sound.

General Dorian, Marshal of the North, by Grace of Malekith the Great Commander of the First Army of Conquest, stared into the mirror bleakly. Cassandra was dead. The thought hit him harder than he would have expected. In some ways it weighed on him more heavily than his failure to capture the Everqueen; and that was most likely going to cost him his life.

What did it matter? Life seemed bleak and empty now. He felt the woman’s absence in a way he had never felt her presence in life. Or perhaps he had, and had just never noticed until today, the way one never notices the presence of a limb until it is amputated. He told himself it was only a foolish, sentimental attachment – as a druchii such things were meaningless to him. He could not convince himself of the truth of that.

He glared into the mirror, willing it to come to life so that he could get things over with, but all he could see was his own reflection: pale, angry and scared, glaring back at him. His armour was dented, his face was bruised, his lip was split. His side was bandaged and bloody.

He did not look like a successful druchii general. He looked like the broken survivors he had sometimes seen after a great defeat. He wore the expression of one of the slaves he used to capture when raiding the Bretonnian coast immediately after it had been put in chains.

He forced himself to smile coldly, to make his face a mask of confidence and command. The expression was not convincing.

What was taking the Witch King so long? Dorian had already made the offering of blood and invoked the spell that should have let him speak to his master over the long leagues of Ulthuan. Why had Malekith not made contact? He had never taken this long before.

Was his master toying with him, like a great predatory cat tormenting its prey?

He thought about the warrior who had done this to him.