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get back to sleep so there was no point in lying there. He remembered the mushrooms he had found the previous day. A morning meal seemed like an excellent idea. One thing that he did like about his current life was being in charge of his own food.
    Outside the cave, Tao was glad to find that the air was still and the usual temperature for that time of year. The sky was still overcast, but the black cloud had gone. He filled his lungs with fresh air, free of the horrible smell in the cave. A small drift of melting snow and a scatter of fallen branches confirmed that the snowstorm and the ferocious wind had been real, not one of his nightmares.
    The sun appeared in the narrow band of clear sky between the horizon and the clouds. The rays warmed his face. It was a good omen. He collected some twigs and was about to light a fire when an anguished cry came from the cave – it sounded like someone banging copper bowls together.
    Tao ran into the cave. “What’s wrong, Kai?”
    “Can you not see?”
    All Tao could see was the after image of the sun rising. His eyes slowly adjusted to the lack of light in the cave, but he still couldn’t see much. The dragon was turning in a slow circle, staring at the floor of the cave in horror.
    “The round objects half-buried in the earth,” Kai said. “They are not stones.”
    A ray of dawn light had crept into the cave, and Tao could see the lumps and bumps on the cave floor that had made the night so uncomfortable. He peered at the round rock closest to his foot. There were tufts of hair attached to it. Kai was right. The round objects were not rocks. They were skulls. Human skulls. Tao shuddered. He picked up the twig that he had used to scrape up bat droppings. It was paler than wood and harder. It wasn’t a twig. It was a bone. A human leg bone. He let out a yell and dropped it. He looked around the cave. The hollow that Kai had dug wasn’t full of roots and rocks, it was full of bones. Now that it was a little lighter, Tao could see the cave floor was littered with half-buried human remains. There were three arched ribs; a skull with black eye sockets; finger bones reaching up, as if a skeleton was trying to escape from an underground prison. He took a step back and stumbled over a small jawbone with two tiny front teeth. Scraps of cloth, the remains of clothing, poked out of the earth among the bones. He could see a half-buried shoe.
    “They are corpses,” Tao whispered. “We spent the night on a grave pit.”
    He realised the smell in the cave hadn’t come from the bats. It was death. He clamped his hand over his mouth and nose, but he had to breathe. Death and decay were entering him with every tainted breath, seeping up through the soles of his feet. He wanted to run out of the cave, but his legs wouldn’t move.
    The bodies had been thrown into a large shallow hole without care. They lay strewn in all directions. Some earth had been carelessly scattered over them, but not enough to cover them completely. There were the remains of at least twenty people. It was hard to know how long the bodies had been there. Most of the flesh had decomposed, but fragments of rotting black stuff still clung to the bones in places.
    “There are so many.” Kai was as horrified as Tao.
    “It’s the villagers,” Tao said. “Someone buried them here, someone in a hurry.”
    Tao thought it was his turn to be sick. He managed to get his legs moving. He staggered out of the cave, sucking in gulps of mountain air as he leaned against a large rock for support.
    Kai followed him.
    “I have seen the aftermath of nomad attacks before,” the dragon said. “They do not take the trouble to bury the dead, even in this careless manner.”
    “Then who was it?”
    Kai had no answer.
    Tao didn’t believe in ghosts, but he sensed a presence, unearthly, deadly. “We have to get away from this awful place. I never want to see it again.”
    Kai didn’t argue.
    They walked away as fast as they could,