Saskia shambles out among them, where they crouch or stand shivering in groups. She lumbers, bellows like a bear, gesturing to them to stand. Jil Punkinflake walks behind her, accentuating her gestures with his own, face like a ghost’s. He’s perpetually at her side now, and she seems to tolerate him. His eyes are like smouldered out holes in his head; they gleam like the glint of fish scales deep in a well. The soldiers are rising to their feet now.

Silichieh passes me on some errand, with no expression.

“This wind blew all bits of glass away again. There must be something that keeps it from dispersing in all these windstorms.”

That’s the kind of thinking he relies on.

The land on the far side of the Lake of Broken Glass is split by a ragged, turf-lipped crag. The exposed chalk wall bends acutely down to barren white ground dotted with small clumps of brush. The fog is denser before us, and nothing of the land beyond can be seen. It seals us in behind as well. Not far from the point at which we approach the brink, one of the scouts finds a subsidance, where the ground seems simply to have lost cohesion and melted apart. A cleft in the crag opens like a harelip, its mineral filling lies in an oddly neat, conical heap, the tip trailing from the cleft’s base. We can employ this as a ramp.

Even without the assistance of the scouts, Makemin picks out the confused footprints of booted feet in the cindery dust around the top of the cleft. Here, perhaps shielded from the wind by the irregularity of the surface, we can still make out footprints the blackbirds left behind them.

The taling heap is loose as gravel; the men come down slowly, waving their arms, half-crouched to keep their balance. The pack animals have to be led down, and this takes time; then the carts are unloaded, their contents portaged down; finally the carts themselves are lowered, restrained by ropes the men above let out hand over hand. By the time we are assembled on the ground at the base of the crag, the dim sky darkens to black within a few minutes. It feels less like the onset of night than being suddenly engulfed in smoke.

There’s a small building made of metal plates down by the base of the crag, mostly buried in the talings. I wander in as the carts are being let down. A steel implement a little like a can opener hangs from a peg on the wall trembling in the wind without stopping, still glinting. A skeleton lies on the floor. I brush dust from a long bone uncertainly. Do I cover it up, or uncover it? The metal implement taps irregularly on the wall as I think ...