Drusher carried the small clutch of books back up the stairs to the library. They weren’t significant, just essays on wildflowers and ornithology. He’d borrowed them to ease his mind, to refresh his thoughts with something familiar and reassuring. But they belonged in the library, so he was going to put them back there. You didn’t borrow a fellow naturalist’s books and not return them. Even if that fellow naturalist was thirty years dead.

He heard hammering from the basement. Macks’ deputies had been ordered to seal the cold store.

The library was empty. The plastek sheeting on the windows rustled in the breeze. He started to slot the borrowed books back onto the shelves. The last one was the book of migration patterns in the Karanine area. It had been the most interesting, clearly one of Fargul’s favourites. The old man had filled the margins with pencilled annotations, remarks drawn from his observations of the seasonal influxes and exoduses. Those little jottings had been what Drusher had found most comforting. The marks of a man who had happily spent years wandering the hills in all weathers, witnessing the patterns of nature, noting unusual sightings, rare specimens and the most likely sites for the observation of particular species. The handwritten notes gave Drusher a sense of kinship.

He flipped through the pages one last time, before putting the book away, relishing the constant delight expressed in Fargul’s notes. How the crosshammers always congregated along the same stretch of river each year before beginning migration, gathering in such numbers the trees were bowed with them. How the forests rang with call-and-response in spring when the exhausted redbeaks searched for their life-mates to reunite after the arduous voyage back. How the returning charhoops flocked at the pass in early summer, swarming and mobbing in huge clouds before continuing on up into the hills…

Drusher paused. He read the note again. Surely…

He flipped through the pages and speed-read some of the other annotations. The same thing, several times. Could it be that simple?

He put the book down and began to skim along the spines of the shelves. Geographic history… The origin of place-names…

He pulled out a volume or two and put them aside when they proved useless. He lighted on another and tried that instead. There it was. The text confirmed his idea.

‘Holy Throne,’ he murmured.

He took the geographic text and the annotated book, and turned to hurry out. He stopped.

He’d just noticed another book, tucked away at the end of the shelves.

‘I’m sorry, that’s simply not appropriate, marshal,’ Eisenhorn was saying. He was sitting at the table in the main hall and looked more robust than he had the night before. Sleep had restored him, at least in part.