This was nothing like any village he had seen. Trapped between walls as if snared in a giant web, the houses were far apart, defying the notion of streets. They refused to face one another and there was something shameful in this unwilling regard, as if community offered no gifts and necessity was cause for resentment. Most doorways were without doors and the blackness they framed seemed strangely solid; even in surrender something remained that was impenetrable, mystifying. They did not invite inside with the lure of curiosity; he felt pushed away, and whatever remained in the hidden rooms, behind shuttered windows and beneath sagging ceilings, was a secret tale written in wreckage.

This was the civilization of the Azathanai, desultory and forlorn. In its impoverishment it besieged the soul, and the most horrifying thing of all, to Arathan’s eyes, was that some of these houses were still occupied. He saw solid doors, latched shut, and the smudged ember-glows of candles leaking through shutters. He saw figures standing in shadows, beneath porches made of huge granite stones so perfectly cut that no mortar was needed, and he felt the unyielding pressure of strangers’ eyes upon him and his companions as they rode slowly through the settlement.

His imagination recoiled from the poison of this place, from all the rejections – the casting away of pointless possessions, the indifference to weed-snarled yards and the broken barrows of burnt wood that had once been buildings. This was not his world and to breathe of it, to look upon it and take inside each and every detail, whispered of madness.

The day’s lifeless light was failing. Lord Draconus led them through tumbled gaps in the walls, cutting through the centre of the settlement. The horses walked as if exhausted by grief, and upon the dusty neck of Besra, the flies barely crawled.

When his father reined in opposite an oversized house of stone and timber, Arathan felt his spirits flinch. It stood a short distance away, somehow more alone than all the others, and upon its granite facade the grey stone had been carved in endless, meaningless patterns of what seemed to be circles or rings. The sawn ends of the wood rafters, forming a row above the squat, wide door frame and marching on to the very ends of the front wall to either side, all bore similar shapes, like the imprints left behind by raindrops on mud. Three low walls reached for the building but all seemed to have shattered or crumbled with the effort. The air around the house felt dead and cold.

‘You might think,’ said Draconus, half turning to regard his bastard son, ‘that your thoughts are your own.’

Arathan blinked.

Behind him, Sergeant Raskan whispered something like a prayer, and then cleared his throat. ‘My lord, is this sorcery, then, to so plague our minds?’