The air was dry as if he was in a library. The floor was impacted mud. The only illumination was moonlight, entering at one end of the kennet. The walls were made of piled rock slabs, covered in painted patterns, swirls and grids. Quill looked closely at them and saw handprints and fingerprints, thousands of years old, and wondered at them. This is what that terrible night had been like, the memories of the dream said to him, grabbing him and shouting it desperately in his ear like a needy drunk. The swirls had been drawn by those who’d brought her body here, many decades ago, when her flesh had died. They had drunk the rotten beer, and the swirls and grids were what they had seen. The fingerprints were her own, pressed to the wall when her flesh was dead, to mark her passing, before they carried her into the chamber where she slept.

Quill tensed at the news that the woman whose dreams he was swimming in was dead. He felt for a moment that he was dead too. He watched and felt a reiteration of what he’d seen already, and realized that, though she was dead, the woman kept dreaming because of the shape of the kennet. It was shaped like this so that her information was kept intact, so living people could talk to her. But not for much longer after this terrible night that was being remembered. This was the night when it had all changed.

The kennet, he saw in his mind’s eye, as the woman’s dreams remembered it, ran along a low ridge near where the people of the hawthorn bushes kept their sheep. It was many paces from the road. It took an effort for the hawthorn people to bring offerings here. They brought their questions with them. They asked the wise woman what they should do.

So what this lot called a kennet, Quill found his own word for: a barrow. He was inside a barrow, a real place, somewhere. His detective mind kept grabbing onto the concepts swirling around him and pinning them down: he was in a barrow somewhere near where there were hawthorn bushes.

He reached out, instinctively starting to ask questions, and recoiled in horror from what he found. She was right here, just a few feet away, at the darker end of the kennet, this enormous, hugely powerful mind! She roared forwards at him again, trying to grab him, needing to know what he was, this ghost from the future. He retreated, cowered, hid.