No one studied them any more. The deeds and efforts of those wars were remembered only by the pages of history texts that slept on the library shelves of Unkara Town, and were never opened. The sites of skirmishes and battles were lost in the woodland slopes and valleys, so overgrown and misplaced that even their particular significances and causes had vanished. Occasionally, a farmer, grazing high pasture, or a woodsman in the deeper forest, would stumble on a rusted buckle or spear tip, or a piece of bone that was not an animal’s, and realise that something had once happened in that empty place.

Only the fortresses remained as any kind of memorial to an age of conflict. Raised in the dark granite of the Karanines, they had taken longer to fade into nature. Most were gone: heaps of stone scattered on lonely hillsides; stumps of wall, furred with moss, lingering in forest twilight.

Some had endured. Talla Keep, far to the west of Unkara Town, was a ruin, but its architecture was so cyclopean and its prospects so magnificent, it had enjoyed a romantic afterlife as a site for visitors, hunters, recreational walkers and a few amateur historians. Korlok Fort, another ruin, was less accessible, but it had survived in a local children’s rhyme, and in the name of two hostelries in the town.

Helter Fortress was the most complete. It was the closest of all the fortresses to the town, and for the two centuries following its duties as a stronghold, it had served as the home of the Karanine Proctors, then as the summer retreat of the provincial governor, and finally as the estate of a local dignitary called Esic Fargul, who had retired there to enjoy the rewards of a successful career in the timber industry.

Fargul’s wealth had run out five years before his health. Helter sank into neglect, and the old man died there, alone, in a draughty bedchamber on the fifth floor of the tower.

Helter Fortress was shut up at his passing. Its windows were boarded over, its gates chained, and weeds took up residence. No one had lived there, or even visited, for thirty years.

Four

FOUR

Heuristic Amplification Disciplines

Garofar found Audla Jaff where he had left her in the old man’s library. She was still reading, but he noticed it was a different book from the one she had been intent on an hour earlier.

An early rain had come up after dawn. Garofar could hear it pattering at the plastek sheeting they’d taped across Helter’s broken windows, and tapping at what glass remained. There were wooden shutters, but Jaff had opened them for light, despite the glow-globes she had set around her perch on the ratty old chaise.