Dark trees loomed like night-castles. I floated through soughing branches and leaves until the barkskin opened and ate me.

Within, a light. Flames in the dark.

Behind the flames there was a face. Wisdom and kindness were in the that face, but none of the kindness was for me; those eyes as hard as the voice that said to me, ‘Let her go.’

Fury. I felt its burn like a bubbling poison in my chest.

‘You are not of her kind, so you must spare her this shame.’ I followed the face as it circled the fire, feeling my own lips moving too, in answer, but I couldn’t hear my words. ‘If you love her, then spare her,’ urged the face. ‘Spare us all.’

My fingers tightened around a thing clutched in my hand. Smooth and warm. It was a gift. As it pressed into my skin I heard the voices that were chanting: ‘Nemae il veru deh gossa kerak . . .’

‘Little spark.’

That voice was different. The words it spoke were not a chant, but a call, drawing me away from the face and the fire and the dark. Spewed from the barkskin of the night-castle trees, I fell . . . fell down.

Black mud engulfed me.

When the mud subsided, all the trees had disappeared. The desert stretched away around me like a limitless back of soft blue skin in the moonlight. Empty. Still.

No, not quite empty. Faraway, on the sand, he was there. The white ghost. He beckoned, calling, ‘Little spark.’

My legs began to move, then ran. And ran faster. But no matter the distance, or how or hard I pushed my legs, I couldn’t get any closer.

‘Come, little spark,’ he kept calling.

‘I’m trying!’

Someone shook my leg and, at the pain, my eyes flew open. It was Kobi.

‘You were shouting,’ he said with a troubled look.

‘I know,’ I said, then swore under my breath as I sat up. He didn’t know about my leg, I guessed, or had shaken the wrong one. Again, the wound was partly open; again I’d ripped a stitch or two, I guessed when I’d jumped off that balcony and had to tumble.

Aching, I hugged my swathes against dawn’s chill. Branches still hung from my mind; branches I’d never seen before in my life. I felt angry. Or had. Now I didn’t know why. But when I lifted my sleeve, the torque was closed: another night without the Sight to steer my dreams. Another chance lost.

My whole body was stiff with the cold. Without tents, the company had slept in the open, and while the cavalry had found enough wood for a small fire, it had given little warmth after the wind had picked up. Neither my swathes nor the close-pressed bodies of Issachar and Kobi had offered much more. The cold was inside my bones.

That fire was now a smoking heap. I sat with my back to its embers and my face in my arms, not wanting to look at the movements around me; soldiers and servants who readied horses. Their hushed tones worried me now.

Abandoning the supply-carts while saving only a handful of torches along with the servants, they’d barely escaped from Shen Drumbar last night. The Rath we’d lured out from below had given chase, tailing for miles before our horses outran them; scattering back into the night just before the edge of the Northern Erg. It had been too dark to see how many, but I was sure none of the shots that I’d fired from the Marszal’s saddle had met with Ratheine flesh.

I wasn’t any kind of soldier and now, because of my failure, ten Methan soldiers were dead. Four women and six men. Others were wounded, although Aznath had been seeing to their wounds throughout the night’s watches. Four of the horses were lost too.

Scared of what I’d see, I turned my head to look back at the readying company: at Kobi, stamping embers, and past him to Eflan who smarted to remount. He’d taken a spear to his left upper arm; bandaged now.

I looked away just as Plamen passed in front of me. ‘You’ll ride in front,’ was all he said.

So I tried to swallow my sheer horror at what had happened, and stood up. When I faced the company again, I soon noticed that I couldn’t find Marszal Savhar. But as I began to fear the worst, five riders approached from the east with the supply-carts in tow. They’d been sent back to the shen before daybreak to get them, with three now soldierless Methan mounts to replace the carthorses left and slaughtered, and to burn bodies of the slain. A lot of our supplies had been destroyed; rations lost and tents shredded to ribbons. Two casks of water were untouched.

The cavalry assembled. Some glanced at me, none ever looking for long. It was far more attention than I’d yet had from most of them. And I knew why.

They’d seen it now.

I was given a horse. Savhar didn’t ask if I wanted one, simply saying that the bay stallion she’d chosen should suit my size and weight well enough. ‘Dulran was a small man,’ she said and I noticed that she didn’t meet my eyes. ‘Can’t have been much heavier than you.’

‘But marszalekh, I’ve never ridden—’

‘These are martial horses, boy, and finest training of any cavalry in our army,’ she assured me, stroking the neck. ‘You needn’t fear them, especially not this one. If it’s possible, he has even less spirit than Dulran. Come up.’

She helped me into the saddle, secured my feet in the stirrups – which she had to adjust, but only slightly, for my height – and put the reins into my hands. While it felt wrong to ride the horse of a man who’d only just died, it was true: the horse was docile and seemed to respond more to the column than to anything I did. I rode behind Plamen and Savhar, eyes of their soldiers on my back.

After last night – after the flames they’d seen me mould against the Rath out of the blaze of the Disc – it was hard to tell what they thought about me. Given my failure to detect so many Rath under the shen, if they did know that part yet, and the fact that their ten comrades were dead because of me, did it even mean anything now, my help? Or did it make things even worse? I feared to turn in the saddle and look any one of them in the face. Instead I focused on the movements of the animal that carried me.

The Empty River, when we reached it, was hardly more than a craggy split along hard ground, baked by the sun. As we moved southwest down its bank it widened slightly, then almost disappeared from view where there had once maybe been shallows. Now only dust. The Sight unearthed no secrets. It had been decades at least since any current had flowed through it and no matter how far I reached down through the cracks in its bed, there was no water to be found.

The morning got hotter and the terrain emptier with every mile. Except for the dunes of the Northern Erg that swelled away, always on our left.

Thoughts fretted back to that house. The Builders’ handiwork lay underneath Verunia too. It was only obvious then, that what I’d seen under Antissa was just a fraction of the whole; a web-like warren of some kind beneath Vorth’s desert. As far as I’d been able to see in the panic of the attack, the tunnel in which the Rath had taken shelter had collapsed, though there’d been no time to push the Sight beyond that blockade of green rubble. Beyond, there could have been water. But even if there had been, I realised, it would have been the wrong water. If it was cut off to the Rath, then it was cut off to our pipes.

Before midday we reached a fork in the dry river’s scribble and stopped. Here a bridge, or what was left of a bridge, crossed into northern Verunia. It was at this place, two months ago, that Plamen had met our escape party from the borderlands. Something I couldn’t remember; Jerome had told me.

One of the supply-carts had taken damage to an axle. Rath having tried to rip its wheel off last night, it had been hastily repaired by Issachar and Kadesh, but now the whole chassis was swaying. Marszal Savhar rated it would hold a few more miles on flat terrain.

‘Not if it’s forced,’ said Telmadh Shafra, who jogged his horse up alongside.

Standing with her hands on her hips, grimacing hard, Savhar studied the wheel almost as Pintle might have done. Then puffed, ‘There’s nothing for it. When it breaks, we redistribute the supplies between the others.’

A swift movement to the left of the column drew her eyes, then everyone else’s. It was gone in a second, leaving nothing but a black, wingless shadow on the sky. The shadow soared, fell and bit into the earth barely a yard from the column’s head.

Right in front of me, Plamen’s horse bucked. ‘Ready for fire!’ he shouted, eyes searching ground as he leaned forward and stroked its neck with a firm hand. As crossbows readied I stood in stirrups and craned to see, mistrusting every rock and stone of the nearest rise on our left. ‘Sit down,’ snapped Plamen.

I dropped down hard, which upset my horse. He stomped and loudly flapped his lips.

‘Could they have followed from the shen?’ Savhar bit off as she remounted.

‘No chance.’ This from Eflan as he rode up to the front. ‘We’d have seen them. For leagues there’s been no cover, sir. They can’t take the heat for that long.’

‘There’s no cover now,’ said Savhar, ‘yet there’s a spear in the ground. How’s it possible?’

She was right. There it stood in front of us like a bannerless flagpole and it hadn’t got there by itself. Eflan held his bandaged arm now, looking south, but there was nothing.

I didn’t like it.

‘Boy,’ said Plamen. He didn’t have to turn his head; I understood even if I didn’t see the point. Awake, it was just too empty out here; like Calvallagh’s plain, too few interruptions I could get my mind to grab—nothing to grip—and the heat too overpowering for me to simply let it go. I’d just get lost in the open and then probably be sick. The most I could do was let the Sight dart out in stabs, a lizard’s tongue, never lingering anywhere long enough to dip into the earth. I saw nothing. Whatever arm had cast that spear was gone, and if the same tunnels ran underneath us now, I couldn’t reach them. I closed the torque and shook my head.

We held more closely to the bank. For two more miles it led us south, then turned west again for ten more. Rounding southeast at midday, we pressed on closer to the dunes of the erg. No spears flew. No Rath were seen.

Still, the day was long and hot and hard. Riding was better, in some ways, to sitting aboard a jolting cart. In other ways it felt like punishment to have to stay always alert. The bay cared more about the movements of the other horses, it was true, than anything I seemed to want from it, but our pace along the bank was brisk so I had to pay some attention. Two or three times I did doze off, listing forward a little and letting the reins go all lax. The bay took care of himself the first two times, without my help, but on the third I came awake to laughter from the column, some yards away behind me now, a manly pull at my reins and a firm smack in the chest. Eflan. ‘Knees in and sit tall in the saddle,’ he said, a bit stern. But as he guided me back he gave me two sips of water.

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After that I did my best to keep my eyes out of my lap and forward between the horse’s ears, as Eflan said. It helped. And by the time we reached the Empty River’s scraggly, dried-up end, the cool of evening was coming.

The dunes still followed on our left, about a mile off to the east, splashed vivid orange in late sunlight. And as I stared out at their crests and slopes, a row of shadows caught my eye.

‘What’s that?’ I said, though then I noticed that I’d fallen from the front by several lines; the only men and women riding near me stiffly silent. I looked about for Telmadh Eflan and, when I saw him, gently tugged my horse’s reins to bow his head to one side as I’d been shown. That slowed his trot, annoying soldiers right behind me who must circle, muttering curses.

‘Can’t just stop short like that, young man,’ said Eflan, trotting alongside. A passing slap on my bay’s rump had me keeping pace again soon.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Never done this.’

‘Ya don’t say.’

Once I was steady, a rhythm going, I looked east again. ‘What’s that there?’ I asked him, and pointed to what I’d seen. In a saddle of two dunes, small sandy squares like smiling teeth seemed to jut out of smoother slopes. The shade of crude right-angles showed in gaps; at least enough of them to tell that something man-made was there. ‘Is it another one of the temples?’

‘No temples this far north,’ said Eflan. His gaze had found it quickly. ‘Been here a long time, those ruins. Can’t usually see so much of them sticking out the erg like that, though. That southern wind must’ve been strong the past few nights.’ He got the attention of some of the other soldiers riding around us, pointing it out to them in turn. They seemed surprised, amused maybe, but that was all.

‘But, ruins of what?’ I asked him.

‘Ahh, some old tower or the like,’ he shrugged back. ‘Would’ve been a fair few farming shens out on these plains before the River emptied. Maybe even a trading post back in the day.’

‘What day?’

‘You ask some questions,’ he grinned back, then glanced at the dunes again and creaked, ‘To be fair, kid, I’m not all that read up on ancient times and that. You’re as well asking Spiv here’—he grabbed a handful of his horse’s mane and stroked it—‘Three, four hundred years ago? Aye, reckon that’s about right, back when the fortress wasn’t much more than an outpost. Just a guess though,’ he admitted as he borrowed my reins and righted my sidewinding mount away from his. ‘Don’t think anyone knows exactly. Knees in, remember.’

I had to know. Not only what it was or what it had been, but what it could be hiding now. There was always that chance. I said so to Eflan. Not wanting me to disrupt the moving column again, he had me ride on in formation while he rode ahead and spoke to the Commander.

I didn’t see him for a while. Pace slowed but we didn’t stop. Minutes passed, the peeping windows in those dunes passing us by. What was taking so long, I wondered, imagining an argument up ahead? I’d have expected Plamen to send me there himself, to search the site. Didn’t he see that I had to? Didn’t he want to find the river?

Frustratingly, on our left, that dune slid further and further past, almost behind.

And then we stopped. Marszal Savhar cantered her great roan back down the line with Telmadh Eflan. She was brief with me: ‘We can’t camp here, there’s no cover, so search quickly. You’ve till sunset.’ That was all, at least to me; the rest, instructions to Telmadh Shafra and the riders who’d go with. Fifteen this time. That spear had got the Marszal worried.

I made my five-point fusil check, loaded my schot and primed the chrozite, making sure she saw me do it. Ahead, the orange of the dunes had turned so intense it stung my eyes as I joined the party, still on horseback. The ride was fast now, but there wasn’t any column to guide the bay. He didn’t fight me or veer off from our direction but I made sure to keep well balanced, knees in tight, and lean close over the saddle as we rode. It took so much of my attention that it wasn’t until we were almost at the feet of the slopes that I saw Kobi was with us, sharing Shafra’s saddle.

Though these were only the first dunes at the westernmost edge of the Northern Erg, they were still tall: almost two hundred feet, I guessed, from base to crest. We wouldn’t have to climb that high; the ruins blinking out from cover inside a dip between two peaks.

Five of the party stayed below to guard the horses while we climbed. It wasn’t easy. The sand was loose and so much steeper than it looked from far away. For every step I took, it seemed I sank the same step down again, which meant I had to stretch my stride so far it hurt my groin. Nor did my sandals help me much, sand always filling them and banking up inside, weighing me down. I would have simply pulled them off and climbed without them if the sand wasn’t so boiling-hot to touch. It seared my hands each time I tripped forward or tumbled. I felt a little foolish now, not because of how I struggled against the slope in front of Kobi and the cavalry but because of how I really might be wasting time. Plamen had known that, probably, but then the dunes had looked so gentle! Kobi kept up close behind me but I didn’t look around to see just how easily he did.

Now we were close I made out three sections of structure clear of sand, although sand heaped high between each one and covered half the top part’s dome. Sandstone, obviously, but this was sandstone the same colour of the sand – now almost red in bending light – with only rough, round holes of windows, maybe there some wind-worn arches, to tell a building still stood here. At least until the winds changed course, I guessed. I made a clumsy job of getting myself up the lowest part, which was an arcing rim with sweeps of sand in bitten, broken places. Faint ruts ran along its outer edge; my guess, some long-lost chiselled fascia.

I waded on and upwards, sand now all the way up to my knees and looser still, and Kobi followed. He was quiet. I knew he hadn’t seen the eruption of the Disc-blaze at the shen, but he’d have heard something by now.

The middle section of the ruin, a curving wall not quite as wide, bore arch-like openings along it. I didn’t think the stone between them were true pillars, but the wind had done its work; whittling it thin, sometimes right through. And while the space inside was filled, in places right up to the ceiling, I could just about make out a bit of wall at the far end: enough at least to imagine there were patterns on it too, eroded carvings or inscriptions. But the sand that blocked my way into the space was just too much, and when I started pawing at it Kobi shook his head at the effort.

So that was why he’d been sent with. Eflan must have figured, since I sometimes didn’t listen to the officers in charge, someone closer to my age would have a better chance of keeping me on course and working fast. Anyway, Kobi was right. There wasn’t time even with a spade, the red light purpling already and a wind starting to pick up. The crests above us had those ghostly standing hackles of soft haze as fine sand skimmed over their peaks into the air. So I moved on to reach the top.

In better shape, it seemed, the dome stuck almost fully from the dune like a thumb. Its wall had openings as well but these were round, or had been once, so maybe those below were too. The slope that banked the roof swept through the inside, through the holes, but hadn’t drowned it. I crawled in through heaps and dips and went as far as I could. The sand was much cooler in here, and though no patterns could be seen in any clear stretches of wall, a pair of short sandstone pillars stuck up from the floor at separate points.

Were they pillars? Their lengths were mostly straight and mostly smooth, but then the tops went all bulbous, strangely uneven. As if the smoothness hid the detail of some shape someone had made. Was that a head and that a body? Those, there, short arms? Couldn’t be. That would mean that those were hands and they were too big to be hands.

I looked at Kobi who had taken off his headscarf to wipe his face, but he shrugged back. Then glared with duty: ‘Hurry please.’ I heard the party coming up below the level of the dome; Shafra’s voice less rigid now among the soldiers who idly combed the old stone thing.

I drew my sleeve. It was so obvious that Kobi avoided looking at the torque. So, asking him only that he stayed nearby and kept close watch, I crossed my legs underneath me, closed my eyes and pulled my lever.

Forms found me instantly. There were more. More little pillars with bumpy tops, each to a window. Eight in all. Out of the eight, three had been broken, two had toppled, but one had kept some detail. The Sight closed all around its shape and yes it was a sculpture. The pillars were statues after all: little figures with big eyes and hands, like grossly malformed children.

Without a push or a pull, even a wriggle from my mind, the Sight sucked me straight down through the floor.

Inside the section underneath us, buried too, were other pillars. Six of them. But these were bigger likenesses; statues reaching almost to the ceiling of the room. Detail was lost, as with the others, but they didn’t look like men: all far too tall, like narrow, graceful gods or giants. Or did they only seem so narrow because the winds had worn them down?

I plunged below that, into the part that was completely submerged. Broadest of the circles of the tower, its ceiling highest of the three, it had no windows in its wall; instead a great circular door sealed by the dune. Only the middle of the space was covered up with breaching sand, and not so high. Around the sand stood four more statues, well preserved. Less wind had reached into this place over the years. And these were men. The Sight explored smooth graven faces, rippling robes and lengthy weapons snapped at fists. Ancient Antissans, I wondered . . .?

Beneath the sand-floor, then, the Sight closed over something that felt different. The only part of the whole structure that wasn’t shaped out of sandstone, this was a barrier of metal. Solid iron.

And I passed through it.

Sandstone again, I found the steps that curled down under the foundations . . .

. . . angles clean and sharp like new . . .

Another circle room appeared. And here they were, heaped in the middle of that rutted, slate-grey floor: those weirdly stacked-up shapes I knew now as the Stones of the Builders. Just as I’d seen them at Calvallagh.

It was a temple. A temple somehow lost, forgotten.

I felt when Kobi touched my arm but didn’t hear what he said. Held to the Sight . . .

Four outlets branched out of the room, each to a smaller stone chamber. All I found to be in each was a rectangular dais, dense and metallic to the Sight. ‘You have to hurry,’ was what I think Kobi was saying, but this was placeless. Outside noise.

I don’t remember when I started hearing other, stranger sounds. The voices, chanting from somewhere . . .

Nemae il veru . . .

I let the Sight sweep across the floor.

. . . deh gossa kerak.

Here, safe from the scoring of wind-thrown sand, the floor’s ruts were so much sharper and their interweaving patterns that much easier to follow.

Nemae il veru . . .

But the floor was pulling.

. . . deh gossa kerak . . .

Like iron weights tied round my ankles, something was dragging me down. I’d thought the slate floor was solid. It was solid, same as the iron of that seal above this room. And yet whatever was below me was that much bigger, vaster, stronger; turning stone and hardest metal into butter in the Sight. I sank right through the barrier, feeling my mind let go of something. Going weak.

Weak enough to fall and let the Sight take up command.

I wasn’t falling, no, but diving, all the time hearing the chanting like a far-off drum of words. Walls were stone, but not sandstone. I knew that deep greenstone at once!

Nemae il veru deh gossa kerak . . .

For just a moment I thought I glimpsed a blurring light above my fall—a golden circle, turning, turning. Then it vanished.

Nemae il veru deh gossa kerak . . .

Down, down, down, down.

Greenstone.

‘Boy!’

Little spark!

My eyes flicked open. That greenstone tunnel still ahead and those two faces peering at me, all at the same time, was so weird and confusing that I listed forward. Kobi caught me, then Shafra took my arm and shook it. Coming to, I cut the Sight off with my lever. ‘It’s been too long already, boy, we have to leave now. Let’s get going,’ the Telmadh said.

He shuffled through the shifting sand, crawled from the dome and out again into the lower evening light. We followed him. Outside the air was slightly cooler and the dune had changed again; the vivid red dimmed now to purple. The sun had dipped behind what looked like silver mountains to the west. I also saw a river’s line—a flowing river, not a dry one—scribbling, sparkling through the haze. It was the Elm.

Those were our mountains.

Eyes low as he passed me, Kobi murmured, ‘Think you started sleeping.’

I went, ‘Mm-hm,’ and followed him.

He didn’t ask.