As for the fifty or so Qin, they ranged wide as they scouted the lay of the land until, he supposed, they knew it as well as a farmer knows his fields. They kept watch over lads who shepherded flocks of sheep and goats, and several of their number stayed with the herd of horses grazing the slopes. They supervised a contingent of debt slaves who were digging an underground irrigation channel farther inland. They hunted antelope and black deer through the tableland, not unlike the eagles. They explored the long-abandoned hilltop ruin in pairs, harvesting from sinks of naya near the ruins.

Every day they drilled the hirelings in weapons and formation. Those who could ride they brought hunting with them, although none could ride as well as the Qin.

Rats are known to be impatient, quick to become restless, eager for a change. But he had to think like a patient Crane. She was but one small pale young person. And yet she was born and raised on the grass, as the Qin were: She was a hunter. As animals return time and again to a watering hole, so did the Qin keep going back to the ruins.

HE APPROACHED THE ruins on foot just before dawn. Long-abandoned buildings leave a footprint: buried and broken walls; sunken lanes where folk once walked; scatters of potsherds and broken masonry. He almost stumbled into a well, half filled in with debris. At intervals, he heard hissing, and although he watched for snakes he saw only birds, rodents, and the ubiquitous thumb-sized flying roaches. He passed between the collapsed ruins of an old gate and climbed a ramp of stone now buckling and mostly covered by earth. Who had built all this?

A bewildering maze of ruins greeted him at the crown, whether residences, temples, storehouses, or courts of justice he could not tell. He heard snatches of a gulping sound, like a man’s exaggerated swallows. The hiss had returned, and the sulfurous smell grew stronger as he pressed toward a craggy bluff. He kicked through heaps of shattered pottery and broken figurines, fragments of stone carved with staring eyes that had no face, mouth with no eyes, a long-fingered hand, a bare foot—a woman’s foot, surely, for its delicacy. The ruins of an octagonal building and its pillared courtyard lay before him.

As he came to the crag’s edge, the rising sun spread a glow across the waters, several mey away but nevertheless striking as they shone with coppery-pink light. She had crouched beneath an intact archway cut low to the ground. She watched a pair of Qin soldiers who were riding toward the ruins.

Cursing, he ducked through another opening, crawling over rubble to get inside. He saw her form limned by the light. She did not acknowledge him. Within, steps carved out of the stone led down into the rock. A stink, rising from the depths, was strong. Cautiously, he edged down, stepping over fallen bricks, until he came into a wide underground chamber lit by shafts. He sneezed at the dust raised by his feet. In the center of the chamber rose a round platform with a cleft struck through its center, and in this cleft a disembodied flame burned. Its hiss echoed like a thousand whispers, a story told in a language he did not know.