The hunting party moved through the forest from the pool.

‘What did you find?’ Drusher asked Nayl.

‘A ruin,’ said Nayl. ‘Deep in the undergrowth. From the scale of it, it may have been a fortress, but nothing’s stood there for a long time.’

‘How long?’

‘Very long. Hundreds of years.’

‘That doesn’t fit the data we have,’ said Drusher.

‘That happens a lot in my line of work,’ Nayl replied. ‘Unless you’re prepared to scare yourself silly and believe it does fit the data. Just not the bits of the data you’re comfortable thinking about.’

‘Garofar’s shade hall?’ Drusher laughed, nervously.

‘I’ve seen worse things,’ said Nayl. He paused and reached into his backpack. He held out a small handgun to Drusher.

‘It’s the one I took off you,’ he said. ‘I took the liberty of cleaning it and loading it.’

‘Wasn’t it loaded already?’

‘These are better bullets,’ said Nayl. ‘Customised. From my special stash. I thought you might need something.’

‘I’m not really a gun person,’ said Drusher.

‘Do me a favour and take it anyway, magos,’ said Nayl.

The stones that had once been a fortress lay tumbled together under the trees, swathed in moss and climbing creepers. The mist hung heavy and still.

It had been a place of significant size. Some of the stone blocks were massive and suggested a heavy outer wall. But even these slabs, their edges worn smooth by years of erosion, were half-buried in the loam. There was no longer even a sense of any ground plan that could be recognised.

‘If this is Keshtre,’ said Audla Jaff, ‘then Keshtre is not the site we are looking for. This isn’t just derelict. It has been vacant for hundreds if not thousands of years.’

‘Audla’s very pragmatic,’ Nayl said to Drusher, sidelong. ‘She likes to deal in facts. She’s not very taken with other possibilities.’

His grin suggested he was sharing a joke with Drusher, but Drusher didn’t find that reassuring. The idea that their speculation was correct, and some kind of supernatural truth lay beneath their immediate physical reality, was not reassuring.

‘I heard your comment, Harlon,’ Jaff said. ‘The information provided by Magos Drusher asserted that Keshtre had been occupied by Draven Sark and in use as recently as a few decades ago. But this intelligence was imparted as a by-product of an auto-séance. The warp lies and deceives. Its whispers cannot be trusted, or at least, cannot be understood on face value. The magos’ encounter with the ghost of Esic Fargul is open to many interpretations, not least that it was utter, ungrounded fancy.’

She walked through the undergrowth to a nearby tree and ran her hand across its bark, ‘This is a Southern Spur Pine, is it not, magos?’

Drusher nodded.

‘A mature specimen,’ said Jaff. ‘To reach this size, it would take… what? Three hundred years standard?’

‘At least,’ Drusher admitted.