“Actually”—Dag cleared his throat—“that part I know to be true. The ruins of Ogachi Strand are only a few miles out from shore. When I was a young patroller up that way, some friends and I took an outrigger to look at them. On a clear, quiet day you can see down to the tops of stone wreckage along the old shoreline, in places. Ogachi really was five miles across, and more. These were the people who built the straight roads, after all. Which were thousands of miles long, some of them, before they got so broken up.”

Fawn stood up and dusted her skirt, and sat on the edge of his bed, her face tight with thought. “So—where’d they all go? Those builders.”

“Most died. A remnant survived. Their descendants are still here.”

“Where?”

“Here. In this room. You and me.”

She stared at him in real surprise, then looked down at her hands in doubt. “Me?”

“Lakewalker tales say…’’ He paused, sorting and suppressing. “That Lakewalkers are descended from some of those sorcerer-lords who got away from the wreck of everything. And farmers are descended from ordinary folks on the far edges of the hinterlands, who somehow survived the original malice wars, the first great one, and the two that came after, that killed the lakes and left the Western Levels.” Also dubbed the Dead Levels, by those who’d skirted them, and Dag could understand why.

“There was more than one war? I never heard that,” she said.

He nodded. “In a sense. Or maybe there’s always only been one. The question you didn’t ask is, where do the malices come from?”

“Out of the ground. They always have. Only”—she hesitated, then went on in a rush—“I suppose you’re going to say, not always, and tell me how they got into the ground in the first place, right?”

“I’m actually a little vague on that myself. What we do know is that all malices are descendants of the first great one. Except not descended like we are, with marriage and birth and the passing of generations. More like some monstrous insect that laid ten thousand eggs that hatch up out of the ground at intervals.”

“I saw that thing,” said Fawn lowly. “I don’t know what it was, but it sure wasn’t a bug.”

He shrugged. “It’s just a way of trying to think about them. I’ve seen a few dozen of them in my life, so far. I could as well say the first was like a mirror that shattered into ten thousand splinters to make ten thousand little mirrors. Malices aren’t material at all, in their inner nature. They just pull matter in from around them to make themselves a house, a shell. They seem to feed on ground itself, really.”

“How did it shatter?”

“It lost the first war. They say.”

“Did the gods help?”