There was the sound of thunder coming down the stairs, and the door of the room burst open as Luna put her hands behind her head. She knew cops. In their gold-edged, fitted uniforms, they looked out of another time than the farm people that Luna and Asta had come to know.
“Get them!” said one of the magistrates, who must have been the leader. The others swarmed around him with heavy iron cuffs which they clamped around the women’s arms and legs.
“Back in chains, eh?” said Luna to Asta in Standard, which earned her a sharp backhand from the lead magistrate.
“No tribal chatter!” he said. “Speak Tond or be silent!”
“Tond…” said Luna. From its place in the sentence, it must have been the name of the city or the language.
“What have you done, Luna?” said Shten, his hands held behind his back by one of the magistrates. “They’ll punish all of us for hiding you!” Seeing her look of disbelief, he elaborated: “The way they see it, you’re spies from another nation-”
“Spies?” said Luna incredulously. Vich spat on the floor.
“You thought it would be easy?” he said. Then the back of a magistrate’s hand shut him up. Luna and Asta looked at each other.
“Listen,” she began. “These people, they didn’t have anything to do with this-”
“Save it,” said the head of the magistrates. “We’ve heard all we need to hear.”

Ren joined them, hands cuffed behind her like they were. The only absent member of the household was the farmer – Lern. That question was answered when they were led out the door and he was standing in front of the house, taking a small cloth pouch from one of the magistrates. Slowly he walked up to Ren, reached up to his neck and yanked at something on a chain, which he tossed at her feet. It glinted there, tarnished silver. He hissed a few words to her that Luna couldn’t quite catch, as good as she was becoming at following the language.
“Anything we should know about?” said Luna, her barrier against speaking the language well and truly broken. Ren shook her head and glanced back, and the look that she and Vich shared told Luna all she needed to know.
“Move it!” said the magistrate, and the five were shepherded onto a low cart with no animal hitched to it. Luna’s confusion died when four of the magistrates stepped forward and lifted the front of the cart, where a horse might be hitched. It shouldn’t have been possible for just the four of them to move the whole arrangement but somehow, counted in by the leader, they got it rolling. Slow at first.
“Hey, at least they’ll take us to the city!” said Asta. “Maybe someone in those towers will have seen where our ship came down!”
Shten laughed bitterly. “The only way any one of us is seeing those towers is if we’re thrown from them, my friend.” He turned away from the others and looked outward, his elbow resting on the side of the cart. The magistrates were building up a surprising head of speed, and Luna raised her hand to shield her eyes from the oncoming wind. The sun was rising behind the city, throwing luminous rays across the sky ahead of them.
To Luna, it looked as if the city was on fire.

One by one, the magistrates pulling the cart tired and were replaced by the ones riding on the cart. By following this system they could keep going indefinitely as long as they had food and water, according to Vich-Clac. Luna marvelled at the physical conditioning that must have taken place to grant this kind of strength and stamina, but Shten scoffed. He refused to elaborate in front of the magistrates themselves, but would later explain that the magistrates were widely known to be dosed up on the sap of the Kaii tree, distilled into a stimulant essence that was laced into their meals. Vich berated his brother: “Must you always shatter every hint of the magical and strange?” he said.
“I owe no allegiance to illusions,” said Shten broadly. “And very little to you, dear brother, after today.”
Luna watched them. Shten did not look back at his brother once for what must have been more than an hour.
“What happened back there?” she said, finally. Ren, very small and huddled in the corner of the cart, began to sob. Vich drew up his shoulders and hunched over, twisted away from Shten like a sulking child.
Shten shrugged. “Vows made in the light are easily broken in times of darkness,” he said.
Luna rolled her eyes. “Is that right?” she muttered. She glanced down at Ren. “Does that sound right?” she said. “Sounds like the sort of thing a man says.” Ren said nothing. Asta coughed.
“We’re getting close to that, uh, place where the carts stop,” she whispered, searching for a word that might describe the well-guarded checkpoint up ahead. “If we want to… leave… Now would be the time.”
“You should have left as soon as that damn fool pig started speaking our language!” said Vich to his brother, who swung his chained wrists like a club into Vich’s chest with a thunk.
“Shut your mouth!” said Shten, baring his teeth like a dog. “Or I’ll shut it for you! It’s not their fault we’re here!”
“Quiet back there!” said the head of the magistrates from the front of the cart. “Or I’ll get the gags out of storage! You’re all as guilty as each other as far as I’m concerned.”
“Can we make a run for it?” asked Luna to Shten under her breath. He shook his head.
“No way. You’ve seen what they can do. Our best hope is to make a break for it when they take us into the city, lose them in the warren.” He shot a sidelong glance at Asta. “Are you sure about her? Every body we bring with us is a liability.”
“Dead sure,” said Luna. “Where I go, she goes, where she goes I go.”
“If you’re certain…” Shten trailed off, and Luna recognised the inflection that men usually got when they realised it wasn’t happening for them.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she said. “The dice were loaded before you started playing.” Actually, the idiom involved a chance game that the boys had tried to teach Luna and Asta a few weeks previously.
“You knew?” he said, a brief expression of surprise crossing his face. Luna shrugged.
“When you started following me around after the shackles came off? I suspected. Next time, maybe try a woman you can actually talk to,” she said with a smirk.
“Talking’s overrated,” said Shten. “I don’t want to be remembered for what I said.”
“What do you want to be remembered for?” Luna asked. Shten grinned.
“Freeing my people from the yoke of the-” and then he used a strange word that Luna didn’t understand. Seeing the confusion on her face, he elaborated. “A change-doer? Makes things happen? Strange power?”
Luna glanced at Asta, who she knew had a superstitious streak. “Strange power? Like doing things without using people? Magic?” This last word she said in Standard, hearing Asta perk up behind her.
“Maj-yik,” said Shten. “Your language is strange. He rules over the mountain lands, where my people live small, scared lives. He brings down great metal things from the sky using his strange power – this maj-yik you mention.”
Luna felt as though she had been slapped in the face. “You’re telling me our ship was brought down by- by an evil sorcerer?” She was slipping in and out of Standard now, and the magistrate in front of the cart was beginning to shoot evil looks back at her.
“Cut the nonsense!” he said, although Luna correctly guessed that what the word actually meant was much ruder from the way that Shten bristled.
“I should break your nose,” he said to the man, pointing to his own nose and pounding his fist into his palm. Luna put her hand on his shoulder, pushing him back down.
“Shten, let me talk to him,” she said. The long-haired man sighed and slumped back down. “Hey,” said Luna. The magistrate turned around, and her fist met his face with a sound like a hammer on steak. She rubbed her knuckles as he groaned, blue-red blood seeping between his fingers. He fell back, clutching his face as his compatriots chuckled. They were well and truly in the shadow of the walls now. They were flat, straight and made of rock that had clearly been quarried and cut close by. The gate up ahead was square and functional, made of criss-crossing layers and strips of wood that strengthened its primitive-looking form.
“She broke by dose,” said the wounded magistrate to the gate guards, pointing to Luna who smiled sweetly. They laughed at him.
Inside the gate was a second gate, obviously intended to deter invaders by funnelling them into a kill-zone. The first gate shut behind them, and they were thrown into darkness.
When the second gate opened and morning light streamed back into the chamber, Luna and Asta were nowhere to be seen.