Stringing all of these pictures together into a story looked to be an all-day project, but Corvus didn’t have to go to all that trouble to get the drift: Calladons and other suchlike persons had come here a long time ago as part of an epic adventure featuring not only giants but floods, avalanches, packs of ravening beasts, flying bipeds with bright swords, and diverse other entities that did not look much like them. Strange-looking cities had been visited, caught on fire, fled. This had at some point given way to a more settled way of life in circumstances that were nicer but, on the whole, colder. Crops and orchards had been planted, animals husbanded, babies made, buildings raised. Efforts, apparently successful, had been made to defend all of that through the systematic application of violence. These doings accounted for most of the pictures. But there were a few that did not fit into that general scheme, in which extraordinarily good-looking individuals—at a guess, Calladons—went to outlandish places to fight odd-looking critters and/or collect peculiar objects. Which confirmed in the mind of Corvus that these “queer folk” would make adequate Quest material.

Thus nourished with an agreeable “breakfast” of carrion and historical imagery, Corvus flew out through an open window and soared high into the air above the hill on which the Calladons had built their house. The place was shrouded in mist and cloud; but once he had flown for some distance and ascended to a greater height, he turned into the east, and saw the Land stretched out before him.

He was back a year later. “My notions have firmed up,” he announced. “I know roughly where to go, and several ways to get there, and why some of those ways are preferable to others. What your mounts eat and how much it costs, how far arrows fly, why certain kinds of people automatically try to kill you. All this and more is known to me. Let us be on our way.”