I knew that Maruman might be asleep, and it was notoriously difficult to locate a sleeping mind unless you knew exactly where it was, harder still with Maruman, whose damaged and distorted mind was always hard to find. In truth, I was relying upon the fact that, even in sleep, if I touched his mind, Maruman would feel me and instinctively open himself to me.

I paid particular attention to all of the old cat’s favourite sleeping places, but when the probe failed to give the slightest quiver, I sent it through the main gate of Obernewtyn and down the road that ran through the pass to the highlands. I could not scry beyond the pass for it and the mountains rearing up either side of it were streaked with enough residual Beforetime poisons to inhibit Talent. Once I might have used the Zebkrahn machine to penetrate the blocking static of the tainted ground, but it was no longer as effective as it had once been since one of its tiny parts had burned out. The teknoguilder Reul, who had made Beforetime computermachines his area of study, had told me regretfully that we had not the knowledge to repair it nor the tools to create the broken piece anew.

I ran my probe over a number of new buildings that had been erected just above the pass in the hope that they might find tenants once Obernewtyn officially became a settlement. I doubted there would ever be more than minimal traffic in such a remote region of the Land. Or perhaps, I thought wryly, that was what I hoped. Finding no sign of the old cat, I brought the probe back up the valley, moving it in a tight pattern from one side to the other. I came to the steep foothills on the western side of the long valley, where the Teknoguild had created a garden inside a honeycomb of caves fed by hot springs. It had not yet endured a mountain winter, but given the immense fertile forest that grew miraculously in a cavern deep under the subterranean Beforetime complex on the west coast, I did not doubt that a wintergarden was possible.

As ever when admiring human ingenuity, I could not help but acknowledge that, knifelike, the power had two edges: it had enabled the Beforetimers to conceive of a forest growing under the earth, but it had also led them to create weaponmachines powerful enough to destroy their world. I always wondered if we had learned from the Beforetimers’ mistakes to temper our imagination with enough humility to make us think twice before we set out to change the world to suit our desires. Of course the creation of a wintergarden was unlikely to cause any harm, but perhaps the Beforetimers had felt the same about some of the things they created.