They crossed the mouth of Salt Tongue Gulf, sailed past an inhospitable coast of scrub desert and bare mountains, and twelve days later, as Coral had predicted, put in at the harbour of Ogres Grave, the mainland port of the Broken Isles, a ramshackle town of low wooden buildings, clusters of shacks and dusty, unpaved and mostly treeless streets at the south-western side of a broad shallow bay. Everywhere around it, and on the islands strewn across the bay, were mine shafts sunk into layers of mudstone that covered the ruins of a great ogre city, the largest known.

Some of the islands were shrouded in the smoke of smelters extracting metals from iron pyrites and other salts bound to rocks or leached into layers above impermeable clays; there was also a thriving trade in ogre artefacts. There were fields of compressed and chemically altered bricks on the outskirts of the town, hills of milky glass fragments, charnel heaps of fossilised bones of ogres and the animals commonly associated with them. One excavation had revealed the massive concrete footings of buildings that archaeologists reckoned to have been several hundred spans tall; another had uncovered the remains of a maze of chambers and passages that floodwaters had filled with mud and sand, preserving their shape and the three-dimensional imprints of furniture which had rotted away long ago.

It was estimated that ogres had numbered in the billions when their civilisation had met its end, and they appeared to have colonised every corner of the world. Giants who had ravaged and despoiled the Mother’s land and seas, leaving traces of huge mines and quarries where they had ripped minerals and metals from Her skin. Historiographers reckoned that their civilisation had been destroyed by fires, floods and rising sea levels, and the final spasm of a global struggle in which firestorms had melted metal, fused brick and stone and stamped curious glassy craters that could still be traced in the ruins of their great cities and deposited the Burn Line’s layer of ash. Excavating and processing glass and brick and metal provided steady work for thousands of labourers, and along the shore and on every island prospectors searched for fossil artefacts, dreaming of finding something that the Sweetwater Collective could reverse engineer into a useful gadget or use to develop an entirely new kind of techne, and make them wildly rich.