I had closed my eyes but now I opened them to see a half moon had risen high enough to spill its silvery light down into the defile. The sky was clear and there was a dusting of stars visible. It was cold, but less cold than I had feared it would be. A bird fleeted over the waxing face of the moon, reminding me of something I had wanted to ask Maruman. I sensed he was drowsing rather than asleep, though his eyes were closed.

‘Who will rule the Agyllians now that Atthis is dead?’ I asked him, knowing that he was less like to be furious at being questioned when he was sleepy.

‘A new Elder,’ Maruman said, drowsily. ‘The Agyllians seek her now.’

This startled me and yet of course the eldar must have a new Elder. I ought to have realised it at once.

‘They seek one in their midst capable of finding and absorbing the oldOnes,’ Maruman continued.

I was baffled. The old cat seemed to be referring to the collective memories of the previous Elder, which Atthis had carried in her mind. But how could they exist outside of Atthis? Would not they have been drawn into the mindstream at the moment of her death? Or was the task of an Elder to go to the mindstream and draw those racial memories into her own mind?

I had never before wondered about the mechanism by which Atthis had taken the minds of the past Elder from her predecessor, assuming that a dying Elder would pass on the oldOnes’ minds directly to the new Elder by some means at the moment of her passing. But Maruman had said the Agyllians were seeking a new Elder, and Atthis was already dead.

Perhaps I had been wrong to think of the oldOnes as memories absorbed from the dying Elder by her successor. I had sometimes heard their voices when Atthis had spoken to me, and that had made me wonder if the oldOnes were not merely the memories of the previous Elder, but some part of their spirits. I thought of what Bruna had said about Straaka’s spirit haunting the living. I had dismissed it because I had felt a spirit would not be able to resist being absorbed by the mindstream without flesh to anchor it to life, but perhaps a spirit could linger after the death of its flesh.