"You told me once," she continued hesitantly, "about your life in High Cromlech. You told me about when you left. What happened then? Where did you go? What did you do?"

Doul shook his head, almost helplessly. After a time, Bellis gestured at his scabbard.

"Where did you get that sword? What does it mean, its name?" she said.

He drew his bone-white weapon. He held it flat in the air and stared at it, then looked up at Bellis and nodded once again. He seemed pleased.

"It’s a large part of why they trust and fear me as they do: the Possible Sword." He moved it slowly in a precise, curving sweep. "How I got this sword? At the end of a long search… and a great, a phenomenal amount of research. Everything’s there, in the Imperial Canon, you know. All the information you might need, if you know how to read it." He watched Bellis calmly. "The work I’ve done. The techniques I’ve learnt.

"The Ghosthead broke open the world, when they arrived. They made the Fractured Land with the force of their landing, and it was more than physical damage.

"They used the break. You’ve heard the refrain about the Ghosthead always ‘digging for their chances’? It’s normally taken to mean that they had an uncanny kind of luck, that they gripped every chance they had, no matter how tenuous." He smiled slowly.

"Do you really think that would be enough to keep control of a continent?" he said. "A world? To hold absolute power for five hundred years? You think they could do that by keeping a lookout for opportunities? It was much more than that. ‘Digging for chance’ is a clumsy rendition of what the Ghosthead really did. It was an altogether more exact science.

"Possibility mining."

Uther quoted something like a singer. " ‘We have scarred this mild world with prospects, wounded it massively, broken it, made our mark on its most remote land and stretching for thousands of leagues across its sea. And what we break we may reshape, and that which fails might still succeed. We have found rich deposits of chance, and we will dig them out.’

"They meant all that literally," he said. "It wasn’t an abstract crow of triumph. They had scarred, they had broken the world. And, in doing so, they set free forces that they were able to tap. Forces that allowed them to reshape things, to fail and succeed simultaneously -because they mined for possibilities. A cataclysm like that, shattering a world, the rupture left behind: it opens up a rich seam of potentialities.

"And they knew how to pick at the might-have-beens and pull out the best of them, use them to shape the world. For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers-and one comes true.