He did not want to tell her that he could not remember himself.

She chortled, 'But I knew when you woke me up'

She pressed her hips against him, gently rocking, and ran her fingers through his chest hair, making little curls.

Wolfs body was responding to the girl. He tipped her chin up and kissed her, tasting the nightfilm on her teeth.

'You, you're insatiable,' she said.

She brushed her hair back out of her eyes and blinked.

'Just let me wake up. Ulric, but it must be past lunchtime.'

His mouth was dry. He snapped the half-root in two and offered her a piece. She waved it away and he popped them both into his mouth, chewing hard.

She stroked his sides, then bent down and pressed her face to his chest. As she nibbled around his neck, he stroked her long, fair hair.

He felt the dreams seep into his mind and chewed harder. The room expanded and his mind shrank.

He held up his hand and, for a moment, saw a clawed paw, tearing at Trudi's head, taking off her ear and half her face.

He froze and looked again.

'What is it, Wolf?'

His hand was normal. Her head was unhurt.

She kissed his mouth and he pushed a lump of rootpulp against her tongue. Accepting it, she swallowed and their dreams melted together.

They lost their perception of time but continued, slowly, to explore each other.

Finally, Trudi straightened up and took hold of her shift. She pulled it up over her head and shook out her hair, so it rested on her shoulders.

She put her hands on his chest and moved, gently.

He closed his eyes and touched her, moving from her shoulders, down across her breasts Something felt strange. He opened his eyes and looked. Trudi was lost in the moment, her eyes open but unseeing.

His hand had found four lines on her body, starting in one armpit, crossing her ribs and tapering off on her stomach. They were shallow cuts, already scabbed.

He tried to match his fingers to the marks, but they were too widely-spread. He managed to touch all four, but only by straining his knuckles.

He traced the lines, feeling Trudi shudder with something between pleasure and pain. Her stomach was ticklish, so when he touched her there, she laughed.

'Wolf,' she said, 'last night, you were a beast.'

VI.

'There,' said a voice, 'she's awake.'

Rosanna awoke to the stench of tobacco in her nostrils. It stung and she shook her head. Her scarf was gone and her hair was loose.

She had been back in the village in her dream, choking on the thick smoke of a spring clearance fire, hearing the sap hissing as green branches were eaten by the flames. Her father had been there, and her mother and sisters. She had been standing on her own, the rest of her family joined with the rest of the villagers as they sampled mulled wine to keep away the chill. Amid the sibilances of the fire, she heard voices hissing 'witch' and remembered the punishments formerly inflicted upon gifted little girls. Her grandfather's aunt, the last in the family to have her scrying talent, had been burned by one of the inquisitions. Rosanna only survived because the Cult of Sig-mar had put her under the seal of protection as soon as their village cleric had reported her gift. From the earliest, she had been raised to be sent to the Temple in Altdorf to serve the cult. Her cold hands were bleeding from her long hours with rough needles, pretending that she might have a future as a seamstress. She knew from their thoughts that her family would be as relieved to see her go as the rest of the village. She knew all their secrets. The thick smoke was wafted around her by the strong wind and her eyes watered. The smoke thinned and her dream was over. She was back in Altdorf.

Someone was holding a smoking pipe under her nose.

'Take that thing away,' another voice said. 'You'll poison her.'

She sat up on the cobblestones and hugged herself. There were three men around her, two officers of the watch and a distinguished-looking gentleman in the green cloak of a courtier. One of the watchmen, the captain in ordinary clothes, was waving the pipe.

Dickon, she remembered, of the Dock Watch. He had introduced himself before it overwhelmed her.

It. The fear.

'You must have had a shock,' said the courtier. 'Did you scry anything?'

She tried to remember. There was just a blackness, with flashes of red. It made her head ache. She thought there were eyes in the dark, but she couldn't tell if they were human or animal.

'Useless,' muttered the captain. 'They've sent me an imbecile.'

'No,' said the courtier, 'I don't think so. Sister, may I help you up?'

He offered his arm and she accepted.

On a plain of bleached bones and cast-off armour, men and monsters were fighting. She felt the cold wind and parried a blow. She was facing a hulking creature with a shaggy mane and finger-length teeth.

The courtier got her onto her feet and she walked a few experimental steps. She shook the vision out of her head. She was too used to them to take too much notice. Her ankles were weak, but otherwise she was all right.

'I'm not a sister, sir,' she said, 'I'm a miss. Rosanna Ophuls.'

'Baron Johann von Mecklenberg, at your service. But I understood you were sent from the Cathedral of Ulric.'

'Yes, but I am not a cleric, just a scryer. I was born with a gift, but that doesn't make me any more spiritual than the next woman. Sorry.'

The baron bowed his head slightly. Rosanna had seen him, she realized, at a state affair in the cathedral. He had flanked the Emperor himself. He was an elector. She would have to mind her manners. She remembered a story she had heard about him and thought she understood the scene she had picked up.

'Miss Ophuls,' said the watchman who had not spoken, 'did you see anything?'

'This is Elsaesser,' said the baron. 'He's one of the smarter people on the Dock Watch.'

Captain Dickon snorted and put his pipe in his mouth. Rosanna did not have to be a scryer to imagine his attitudes. The watchman thought that Baron von Mecklenberg was an interfering dilettante, and young Elsaesser a naive hothead who would soon learn better.

Elsaesser shook her hand and she got the impression of tall trees and heady air.

'The Reikwald,' she said.

Elsaesser was impressed.

'Don't be. It's just a party trick.'

'When you arrived,' said the baron, 'did you scry anything?'

She thought back beyond the blackness of her fainting spell. She remembered opening the coach door and setting her foot on the cobbles. Then there were flashes of red in the dark. She heard the ghost of a scream and received the image of someone in a long, voluminous garment, bent over a shrieking animal, working away inside it. No, it was not an animal. It washad beena woman.

'It was horrible.'

'Did you see the Beast?'

She nodded: yes.

'What did he look like?' asked the baron.

'Long green coat,' she said.

'A coat?' He held her elbow. She saw his cloak rippling and was fascinated by the gold stitching amid the velvet.

'Long green'

'This is pointless,' said Dickon. 'She's on the same false trail.'

'No,' she said, 'not a coat'

'A cloak?' Elsaesser asked.

'Like this one?' said the baron.

'Yes no maybe.'

'Wonderful,' snapped Dickon. 'Yes, no or maybe. That narrows our options enormously.'

'Give the girl a chance.'

The watchman looked sullen and coughed out a brown cloud. 'Yes, baron. Although it's my guess that she couldn't scry a rain-shower if the sky were full of clouds.'

Rosanna was annoyed by the captain. She pretended to be unsteady and put her hand out to balance herself. She placed her palm on Dickon's chest and let her mind reach out to him.

'Ahh, captain, you are impatient, I see. You would like to be back at home with your wife and children.'

'You are mistaken, Miss Ophuls,' Elsaesser said. 'The captain has a wife but, I believe, no children.'

Dickon looked dark and shifty.

'Oh, I'm sorry. I had such a clear impression. It happens sometimes. I see now that your wife is childless.'

'That's right,' Dickon said, 'not that it's any of your business.'

'But you do have children. Two of them. A boy and a girl. August and Anneliese. Four and two. And there's a woman, too. What is her name?'

'The captain's wife is called Helga, Miss Ophuls,' said Elsaesser. Rosanna wondered whether the young watchman were really as naive as he seemed, or whether he was enjoying his superior's embarrassment.

'Helga, eh? I must be badly mistaken. The name I'm picking up is'

'I think we've wasted enough time,' said Dickon.

'Fifi.'

Elsaesser tried not to smirk and Dickon took a keen interest in the cobblestones, pulling his cap down low.

'If you'd come this way, Miss Ophuls,' said the baron. She consented and took his arm again. Dickon stayed away, making sure not to touch her.

Rosanna was afraid of what she would have to do now. She had volunteered for this job out of a sense of duty. The Cult of Sigmar had spent a lot of money educating her, a poor barefoot seamstress from the Grey Mountains, even though she had no intention of becoming an initiate. She owed the Cathedral the use of her gifts. And the Cathedral owed a debt to the city of Altdorf which it had succoured for three thousand years. So, with debt piled upon debt, she would have to step into the alley between the two inns and die again The baron helped her, as if he were assisting a very old duchess out of a carriage and escorting her to a ball. He led her to the alley, the watchmen keeping pace like train-holding servants.

'Everybody back,' said Dickon. 'She has to go in alone.'

Officers emerged from the alley and stood in the street.

Rosanna could see a form lying under a blanket and could see red patches on the blanket itself.

The first time, when she was a little girl, she had been asked to kiss her dead grandmother's forehead before the funeral. She had felt her lungs fill up with thick liquid and had coughed until her throat bled. By then, her parents were used to little Rosie's 'feelings' and understood only too well. She stayed away from graveyards after that but death was impossible to avoid. Lying in a bed at an inn, with her first boyfriend, she had experienced in succession the last moments of three people who had died in the bed: an old man with a fading heart, a young hunter with most of his chest shot away in an accident and an unwanted child stifled with a pillow by a mother barely in her teens. It was not a sensation she would ever get used to.

'This is your first time with the Beast?' asked the baron.

'Yes.'

'We've never called in a server before,' said the captain. 'It's a new approach.'

'What do you know about the murders?'

'That the Beast kills women, tears them apart.'

She was picking up the baron's own beast again. He was called Wolf. She smelled his breath, saw the steam rising from his pelt.

'You think you can go through with this?'

She took a deep breath. 'Yes, baron, I think I can. I believe it's important.'

'Good girl.'

'The first thing,' said Elsaesser, 'is to make sure that this is like the others. You understand?'

Rosanna wasn't sure.