I withdrew from the cave gardens without bothering to dip into the minds of the teknoguilders working there. If any of them had seen Maruman, I would be informed of it soon enough.

I sent the probe further up the valley until I came to the high, jagged peaks that were the end of a great, thick chain of mountains running away across the vast landmass of which the Land and Sador were the smallest untainted parts. I lingered briefly over the hot springs bubbling up into pools at the feet of the mountains, remembering the times Rushton and I had ridden up to bathe there. My probe would go no further for it could not penetrate the taint-streaked mountains that were regarded as the outer border of the Land. One could wind a crooked trail on a horse and go higher, and I knew there were clean places much deeper in the mountains, for the mystic Agyllian birds lived there in high eyries, but there was no way to reach them, save to fly. Once I had been carried there near dead with infection, and it was after my body had been taught to heal itself that the Agyllian Elder Atthis told me it was my destiny to find and destroy the weaponmachines responsible for the holocaust that ended the Beforetime.

‘Long ago … I dreamed one would be born among the funaga, a seeker to cross the black wastes in search of the deathmachines, one who possessed the power to destroy them … you,’ Atthis whispered in my memory.

Was it possible that Maruman had gone to the Agyllians? I wondered suddenly. As well as making him one of my guardians, the birds had often used him as a messenger, yet it was hard to imagine the irascible old feline submitting to the indignity of being carried in a net, and why would the Agyllians bother summoning him when they had never before needed physical contact to reach his strange mind?

Abandoning my search I reeled the probe back in. It took time but simply allowing it to rebound would have left me with another headache. Opening my eyes at last, I saw that the shadows of the surrounding trees now striped the clearing. Overhead, black storm clouds filled half the sky, though beams of pale sunlight still shafted down through their tattered edges.

‘Maruman is not a tame cat,’ Gahltha beastspoke me mildly as I got stiffly to my feet. I grimaced, knowing I had been foolish to imagine that the black stallion would suppose I had been sleeping.

‘I know he is not tame,’ I sent. ‘I just don’t understand why he tells me that the oldOnes want me to come back to Obernewtyn immediately, and then he disappears the minute we get here without explaining what I am meant to do.’