The three of them rode in the trotcart, following the track along the ridge. They hadn’t gone far, five stades or so, when blocks of worked stone began to appear, sunk in the ground and thatched with moss or dry grass, scattered singly, roughly stacked in low heaps. The track slanted into a cutting between tall stone walls and the cutting opened out and Righteous reined in the mara. The end of the ridge lay below, a blunt prow of flat ground raised above the confluence of two river valleys and occupied by a cluster of circular stair-stepped pyramids. Five, six, seven of them, standing amongst trees and scrub. One of the so-called new cities, built by a philosopher sect which had flowered just before the collapse of bear civilisation and the emancipation of their slaves, the many-times-great-grandfathers and -grandmothers of everyone now alive. Master Able owned – had owned – one of the sect’s books, a tall heavy volume with ragged pages of maraskin parchment bound between wooden boards that set out a cosmology based on concentric celestial spheres in which the Daughter Moon, planets and secondary spheres were embedded.

Sitting between Righteous and Mercy, Pilgrim leaned forward eagerly, taking in the view. He had heard stories about the ruins of bear cities from Grandfather Bearbane and Master Able, and had read about them in books, but this was the first he had visited. The pyramids were all the same size, around a hundred ells across and fifty ells high, constructed from big stone blocks with tightly fitted mortarless joints, rising in diminishing tiers. The flat top of one pyramid had collapsed in a dish of jumbled blocks, the side of another slumped in a great gash, but the rest were more or less intact. Massive, monumental, indifferent to the passage of time. Old stories claimed that because the philosopher bears refused to own slaves, they had instead enhanced their strength with potions, enabling them to shift those enormous blocks of stone as easily as a juggler flipped balls through the air. Pilgrim knew that the blocks had most likely been hauled up temporary earth ramps by a system of winches and levers, but even so the amount of energy and organisation it must have required was dauntingly impressive. He tried to imagine what the city might have looked like when it had been inhabited, tried to imagine the ruins cloaked in fog, with sharp green lights moving inside it.