It was more like an incantation than a song. Sustained on in-breath and out-breath, seamlessly rising and falling, endlessly changing, endlessly the same. Ysbel thought of wind moving in waves across tall grasses, rain seething on the surface of a lake, snow falling. When Seven stopped singing and opened his eyes and smiled, it took her a few moments to come back to herself.

‘Usually, I would sing more forcefully, and from a good high place,’ Seven said. ‘But you get the idea.’

‘May I ask what it was about?’ Ysbel said.

‘A place that doesn’t exist, except in dreams,’ Seven said. ‘Bears know about the ruins of their cities. Other songs tell stories about what they once were. This one is about a city that did not fall. Or rather, about the hope of the singer that such a city might be found somewhere in the world.’

‘Sing the other one,’ Raia said. ‘The one about the sky devils.’

‘That’s what the funny little figure in the map could be. A sky devil,’ Seven told Ysbel and Goodwill, and sang again.

This time it sounded to Ysbel like water running over and around rocks. Quick and bright on the surface, a powerful force beneath.

Another silence, after it ended.

Seven asked Goodwill if his people knew that song, and Goodwill shook his head.

‘It’s the only one bears sing together,’ Seven said. ‘After sunset, when the summer begins to fail and the first breath of winter can be felt at night. One begins it, and others in neighbouring territories take it up one by one.’

‘I heard it once,’ Raia said. ‘Late summer, two years ago. Growing fainter and fainter as nearer voices finished with it and more distant voices picked it up, like ripples spreading out into the world.’

‘There are many verses,’ Seven said. ‘But the first two are always the same. They tell of how my ancestors fell into evil ways and conjured devils from the sky, and of the fire the devils lit in every mind, and the great harvest of lives when all the cities went to war against each other.’

‘Are you saying that those sky devils infected your ancestors?’ Ysbel said.

‘With the fire that burns thought and memory,’ Seven said. ‘The fire that feeds unreasoning anger.’

‘What else does the song have to say about sky devils?’ Ysbel said.

‘That’s it. The rest of the song is a list of the cities that fell. What they were and what they became. It changes every time the song is sung because every bear remembers a different list.’

‘A requiem for what was lost,’ Raia said.

‘For what we lost to the fire,’ Seven said.

‘It seems that my people have done you a great wrong,’ Goodwill told Seven, and bowed low and spoke the formalistic phrases for accepting blame and asking for forgiveness.