I had not seen any beasts or birds that night but when I got up at dawn and went a little apart from the others to relieve myself, I was startled to find myself face to face with a mountain goat. It was a big slaty blue male with a white rump and belly set off by black face markings. He had long, thick horns, oddly dainty cloven hoofs and slotted golden eyes. I greeted him but he merely emanated hostility and trotted away to a small herd of duller pelted spindly females. The male led them out of sight and I wondered at their refusal to communicate. Certainly it was harder to beastspeak wild animals than those that had spent time around humans.

I stood with the blanket wrapped around me watching the sky lighten, awed by the immensity of the silence and feeling how small and insignificant I was alongside the vastness of the mountains, and yet all the life they contained would perish if I failed in my quest. This time it was I who woke the others.

We had not got far along the ridge when I realised that the top was not merely flat, it was the remnant of another ancient road cut into the stone. Indeed it looked as if the Beforetimers had actually sheered off the top of the mountains along the ridge to make a flat road. And instead of being merely smoothed bare stone, there was a strange surface to the road, a thin black layer of some unknown material that crackled strangely under Gahltha’s hoofs. Seeing it, he had immediately insisted Maruman and I ride on his back.

We had not gone far before Darga wordlessly moved into the lead for the first time. I looked around uneasily, unable to see the blackness that often indicated tainted terrain, but my senses fizzed enough that I knew there was taint nearby. It also occurred to me that I had not seen a single bird that day, not even at dawn. Indeed, there was something in the quality of the silence that reminded me unpleasantly of the heavy, dead stillness of the Silent Vale, where I had been forced to collect poisonous whitestick as an orphan child.

Before midday I had to get down and walk. It was simply too cold to sit still atop a horse, for while the ridge had looked flat, it was in fact ascending in steps.

It was then, as I trudged on alone, that I was struck by the strangeness of walking along the remnant of a Beforetime road cut through the high mountains, and I wondered why the Beforetimers had created such a thing in an area that Jacob had called remote and sparsely populated. Was it because of the Taillard Observatory?