I was about to go back down to the camp when I noticed something protruding from the side of the next dune. It was a dark shape rising up to about thigh height from the sand. I hurried over to find that it was the top of one of the Beforetime stone poles that stood here and there about the Land, and whose purpose no one had ever clearly been able to fathom. Like some of the tallest in the land, this one had cross posts jutting from the sides and it occurred to me that most of it was probably buried inside the dune. Then it struck me that this, if exposed to its base, might be the very thing that Rheagor’s ancestor had taken for a stone tree. If I were right, and I was suddenly certain I was, we had only to find another pole to be able to work out in which direction the city lay.

I squinted and ran my eyes over the dunes beyond the one I was on, and then my heart leapt, for sure enough, the sandstorm had uncovered the top of another post, two dunes away. I made my way across to it, noting that the two together pointed more directly north than north-east, which meant Ahmedri had gone the wrong way.

I turned to go back and tell the others what I had found, only to be confronted by a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a silver safesuit and some sort of large silver helmet that hid his face.

An efari, I thought, seconds before there was a flash of light from his head and then something thudded into my body.

I fell into unconsciousness like an arrowed bird.

EPILOGUE

Epilogue

My mind drifted aimless as a shipboat without master or tiller.

I dreamed of Ahmedri walking over moonlit dunes with Darga, but there was no sign of Rasial or Gavyn. The dream slipped silkily away and I seemed to float down and down.

I dreamed of a wolf padding along a black road through a Beforetime city. Rising up on either side of the road were the same high square towers as in drowned Newrome under Tor, but instead of the walls being broken and crumbled away to expose the rusted metal frame underneath, many sections of the towers stood sharply intact, and where the wall had crumbled, the metal bones gleamed silver, reflecting the light of a fingernail moon.

The city was abandoned. It was not only that streets and buildings were deserted but the black roads were covered here and there in white sand that had run up against the sides of walls in bleached mounds, and there were tumbleweeds rolling unchecked along paths where a sparse fringe of dun-coloured saltweed grew up through a multitude of small cracks.

Beyond the city I saw a plain shining white in the moonlight.