He had decided to inspect the quarry after his conversation with Willow, and was relieved to see that it was little changed from the time when he had hunted for fossils as a precocious stripling. Conical spoil heaps piled along the north side of the cliffs. Tough thorn bushes growing amongst tumbled boulders; half-shaped blocks of stone lying alongside an open-walled shed with a broken roof of sunbleached planks. A splitting maul half as tall as a person leaned against one of the shed’s supports. A tiny, gem-green lizard, perched alertly on a stone, flicked away when his shadow passed across it.

The limestone quarried there had once been part of the floor of a warm shallow sea, built layer upon layer by the chalk shells of tiny animals and plants snowing down from the sunlit surface. Larger animals had fallen to the sea floor, too. Some had been covered in silt before scavengers could devour them, and their shells and bones had mineralised, turned into stony replicas. Coilshells, jaguar toenails and clams, sea flowers, fish, turtles and a single specimen of a big marine reptile, commonly called a snakefish, that quarry workers had uncovered and now stood in the men’s lodge. People had once believed that these creatures, along with thunder lizards and other monsters, had been made by ogres to spite the Mother, and were destroyed in the same catastrophe which had burned and flooded the world when the Mother had put an end to the ogres’ blasphemous tenure. But those floods could never have washed as high as the Saltmire tribe’s mountain territory, and it was generally agreed now that the thunder lizards had been destroyed in an earlier catastrophe; that they and creatures like the snakefish and all the rest had lived in an age long before the Mother had quickened the ogres, and in the millennia since then Her restless surface had wrinkled and creased and raised what had once been the floor of a sea to its present elevation.

Pilgrim tethered his mara in a shaded spot under a clump of saw palmettos and limped about piles of broken slabs and thorn bushes and pipe cacti on the quarry floor, the sun’s heat beating on his back, his head sheltered by a conical straw hat. Ever mindful of snakes and scorpions, he levered up stones with his stick and used the brick hammer he had borrowed from the Hearth’s workshop to crack promising specimens along fault lines. The smell of dust and broken stone kindled vivid memories of earlier expeditions. A clandestine chorus of crickets sent up a metallic buzz that came and went in waves. The motionless air trapped inside the quarry’s cirque shimmered with heat, and time seemed motionless too. An eternal now in which past and present dissolved and mingled.