Chel spat the last of the mouth-dirt over the wagon-side. ‘I’m no student of terrain.’

‘Evidently. Then look at the features of the city, the stupid little flags—’

‘They’re called pennants.’

‘—the wind-drivers. The fixed constructions. All clear indications of the prevalence of this “piss-cursed” gale. The land around funnels it, and its denizens harness it. Effective, if uninspired.’

‘It’s always windy here?’

‘Best learn to keep your mouth closed, perhaps.’

He offered Kosh a sour, close-mouthed smile, and sat back against the wagon-side. She hadn’t exactly been amiable company since the news of Denirnas’s destruction – her usual self, except more so, as Chel thought of her – he was sympathetic to her directionless, miserable anger. Sympathetic, but not impervious.

Their re-expanded cortege rode down into the plateau, rumbling over its undulating surface, weaving down the cleared roadways of the expansive camp. It was huge, a city before a city. It seemed to have districts, regions, lines of demarcation between arrivals of differing origins. He recognized standards of the south, the east, the wetlands, some from along the coast, the pennants brought north by the refugees as mementos of home.

A great congregation stood gathered at the edge of one of the camp divisions, spilling into the roadway. The lead riders bellowed for them to clear the way and they shuffled back beneath the spindly shade of a blackened, withered tree, set apart from the dwellings around it. Chel stared at the tree as they rolled past, the gathering beneath it, the expectant expressions, glassy-eyed with wonder, their arms painted like spreading roots. So the message of the Mother of Storms had made it to Serica ahead of him. Then they were gone, lost behind the skeleton of a half-built structure adjoining the road, bedecked by a team of southern craftsmen hammering away beneath the hot sun.

They were close to the city now, close enough to see the ring of small towers that marked the camp’s end and the clear scrub before the gorge’s cleft, close enough to slip between the long shadows of the tallest towers crowding over the walls above like eager children. One tower in particular stood out, a narrow, twisted construction of sand-coloured stone, its lines gently spiralled, garlanded with slow-turning wind-drivers like pale flowers, rising from the heart of the city into the pastel sky.