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achieve the goal they had set out with when they started this expedition into the green hell of the Lustrian jungle.
    In the end they only managed to find a few humans alive and capable of following them. Fortunately one of those was their guide, Leiber, the one man who claimed to know where the lost city of Zultec lay. They divided the remains of their supplies between them and then wearily trudged on, deeper into the deadly jungle.
    Giant plants blocked out the light. The air stank of perfume and rot. Brightly coloured birds shrieked amid the boles of the huge trees. Small scuttling things moved through the carpet of mulched plant life on the forest floor. The heat was sweltering. In the distance something huge and reptilian crashed through the undergrowth. Tyrion thought of the stegadon and slowed his pace accordingly. Reduced in numbers as their party was, it would be better to go around than encounter another of those great bad-tempered beasts.
    He pushed an enormous cloying leaf to one side. It stuck to his skin. When he pulled his hand away from its sticky surface faint drops of red clung to his fingers. They were already disappearing from the surface of the leaf. He knew then that if he took his blade to the plant, blood would mingle with the gushing sap. Even the plants here were vampiric. Everything seemed to live to eat anything else that came within its grasp.
    He glanced enviously at his twin. A faint aura of silvery light surrounded Teclis. He looked as cool as if he were out for a stroll along a windswept beach in Cothique during a day in early spring. His spells protected him from the heat and the jungle’s claws.
    Despite all the hardships they had encountered, Teclis looked confident and at ease. Over the past century, magic had filled out his scrawny form and removed the worst effects of the wasting ailments that had crippled him in childhood. The potions he mixed for himself kept him healthy and active. He would never be as tall or as muscular as Tyrion, but now he could go for leagues through the tropical heat and endure hardships that would have killed him only a century ago. The only sign of his many debilitating childhood illnesses was the faint limp with which he now walked and which no amount of alchemy seemed able to get rid of.
    At this moment Tyrion very much envied his brother’s mage-craft. He was sweating heavily even though he had stripped off everything except the undergarments he needed to keep his light mail armour from chafing. His face and clothes were dirty and torn although not as much so as their human guide’s.
    Leiber looked like a lunatic: tall, emaciated, with madness glittering in his bright blue eyes. His long hair was thinning on top and drawn back in a dirty blond ponytail at the back. A moustache that reminded Tyrion of a rat’s whiskers drooped down past his chin and gave his whole face a mournful air of defeat.
    Leiber was originally from the Old World, a shipwrecked sailor from the human city of Marienburg, but he had spent much of his life looking for gold and treasure amid the ruins of the slann cities of the Lustrian continent. He claimed to know these jungles better than any man alive, although Tyrion was starting to think that perhaps this was not so great a feat as Leiber made out.
    Very few humans lived long in Lustrian jungles. They came here seeking fortunes but what they mostly found was death. Already most of the company of men the twins had hired as porters or guards had died or vanished, some from mysterious fevers that not even Teclis’s medicines could cure, some from the attacks of the giant jaguars common in this part of the jungle. This had only been the latest of the misfortunes to bedevil their expedition.
    One man had died screaming when the larvae of a bloodwasp emerged from where he had been stung a few days before. The foul little maggots had eaten their way out through his entrails. Two thralls had been devoured when a skittering cloud of