If he had been devout, he might think it a sign from the Mother that he had been too hasty in abandoning his promise to finish Master Able’s work. For here was a fresh mystery, a new angle. Had the visitors haunted bears before the fall of their civilisation? Or was the figure purely symbolic, a mythic image representing the power bears had once held over people, or the power unleashed when the people had been liberated from slavery? An image so deeply imprinted in the common psyche that it re-emerged in visions and hallucinations six hundred years later …

Pilgrim made a copy of the map and sent it to Swift Singletree and Ardent Whitesand with a letter that explained what it was and where he had found it, and asked his friends to try to locate the city beside the figure of the visitor and to look for similar figures in bear murals and documents lodged in the archives of the Library of All People. He would have to wait a long time for any reply. While he had been working amongst the books, winter had crept across the land. It had been snowing almost every day, mostly flurries of sleet or showers of icy pellets that rattled on the panes of handblown glass in the windows of the towers of the Hearth, and shortly after the coastal trading ship carrying Pilgrim’s letter to his friends left Stonehaven a sudden storm rolled in across the sea and delivered the first blizzard. It lasted three days, blanketing the Hearth in a span of soft snow that rounded every edge and corner and plastered walls that faced to windward. When the weather cleared, Gentle helped Grace Wren Saltmire dig out the paths between the towers, and had to do it over and again as succeeding blizzards blew across the coast and deepened the drifts until the paths that cut through them were sunk deeper than even Gentle’s height, and the towers wore caps of snow which shed erratic flurries that sparkled in frigid sunlight as they fell.

Between storms the skies were clear and achingly cold. Pilgrim wore a ragged fur coat while he worked in the library, warming his hands on a ceramic cylinder stuffed with coals from the kitchen fire. He was less than halfway through sorting through the books in the second-floor chamber and the chamber below it was as yet still untouched, but the discovery of the map had rekindled his desire to continue and complete Master Able’s research.

‘The first thing I need to do is locate and visit the ruins of the bear city associated with that mysterious image,’ he told Gentle. ‘If the map is a copy of a map made by bears, other images might still survive in carved panels and the like. Images that may explain its context and significance.’