The raptor tilted its head the other way and opened its beak. He could see the sharp spear of its tongue. Such a majestic creature, so–

It stooped from the roof ridge into the yard, killed one of the pecking tarkonils outright, and took off with it in its talons. He watched it fly away into the dawn sky, lugging the limp prey with hefty beats of its wings.

A few tarkonil feathers drifted in the air around Drusher like snowflakes.

‘Typical,’ Drusher said.

‘Who are you talking to?’ asked Macks, stepping through the back door.

‘Myself,’ said Drusher.

‘Ready?’

‘I’m supposed to be a magos biologis, Germaine, but every day I realise I know nothing about anything. You sure you want me for this?’

‘Not really,’ she said, ‘but we’re going anyway.’

Three

THREE

Helter Fortress

Several roads converged in Unkara Town – the highways from the Peninsula to the south and the western routes through to Ottun and the ocean – and the least of them, a track, wound north into the hills for ten kilometres until it found the fortress.

The hills were not hills. They had earned that insufficient title in ages past, because they were a four hundred kilometre spur of the Tartred Range, and all peaks on Gershom were hills compared to those monsters.

They towered in their own right: younger mountains, sharp-edged, clothed in evergreen forests below their shoulders, sweeping up into spires of naked dark granite. They were called the Unkaran Hills, known too as the Karanines, and they formed the northern and eastern limits of the province. Their older, glowering cousins, the Tartreds, could be seen, from high ground on a clear day, as a blue shadow two hundred kilometres away, like the front wave of a great deluge, frozen solid and forever about to roll in and sweep the province away.

The history of the territory had been fraught. It had evaded Gershom’s recent conflicts, including the long and complex civil war that had ravaged the Peninsula, spared by its outlying state and lack of significance. But the fortresses that clung to the long spur of the hills spoke of older disputes. Outer Udar lay to the east of the Tartreds’ flanks, and in the early days of settlement, its territories had bred fierce nomadic peoples with an expansionist mindset. Long, ungainly wars of invasion and repulsion had haunted the Karanine belt.