‘They want us to go with them into their tribe-houses. We are scarcely welcome visitors,’ he translates, ’but they give an assurance that we won’t be harmed as long as we don’t interfere. I’m not sure what that implies, but I think it wise not to delve too deep. They have the power to enforce their request.’ He looks back at the circle behind him. He reads confirmation.

  ‘I think we should do as you suggest,’ says Yosay. ‘How is it you know their language?’

  ‘Because it’s ours, too, in a way.’ He does not elaborate.

  The Meerschraf wait for their response without any sign of impatience, until the nominal leader flings a glance up at the sky, where the sun was already dipping. He signalled, and began to lead the way into a silver settlement constructed of domed ivory halls, each of them built around the support of a tall spreading tree. Something less than a city, it straddles the river, and uses its dammed currents to power mechanical contrivances that are way beyond the traveller’s understanding. There’s a melancholy lethargy about the watching people – few, considering the size of the place, and an eerie silence other than the rattle of the horses. The group from The Drakkon file in a tight protective knot through broad thoroughfares, those who have weapons carry them in concealed readiness. Just in case. But before they’ve had time to absorb properly what they’ve seen, their guide signals that they’ve reached their destination, coming into what is obviously a megaron public reception area. They wait as an unhurried panel of elders take their place on thrones shaped from the meshed tusks of huge creatures, beneath the shade of a high column-supported ceiling. Three of the thrones remain unoccupied.

  Moongold steps forward, bows low. ‘Our mission is strictly of inquiry and exploration,’ he begins, then explains that The Drakkon offers no threat, and is merely seeking the Time Tombs.

  The council confer together in high whispers.

  Bahl is curious about this sad quiet people, their long history and the beasts from which the ivory tusks were derived. But his interest is in no way returned. There’s an inertia and lassitude about them, they seem to share the Shilmah’s bleak acceptance of endings. The crowd that gathered upon their approach, simply drifts away, returning to a passive normality. While the elders seem as much amused as intrigued by The Drakkon’s mission. Although they offer no obstruction. Indeed, they prepare a caravan to guide the travellers there. Irritably eager see them gone and the temporary interruption they represent passed over.

  Bahl and Kalyfaron return to The Drakkon as preparations are being made. After they’ve eaten and rested they decide to explore the Meerschraf settlement more fully. Close up it seems that the huge cranks and mechanical devices delving beneath the river-waters are poorly maintained, with rotting timbers from which weeds sprout in profusion. Puzzled, they trace their way between the tribe-houses back towards the central square. In contrast to Arhavj’s vigorous energies, no-one challenges them, or even seems remotely interested in their presence.

  Kalyfaron stands back and shades her eyes in order to look upwards. The trees, of some unidentifiable species, seem to form the central structural column for each hall, around which the walls are woven from bones and tusks, leaving high smoke-holes. There are no windows, and only a single arched opening for transit in and out. Bahl holds back – ’Moongold said we weren’t to interfere,’ he warns.

  ‘I’m not interfering. Just looking. More intrigued than scared,’ she tells herself. And against his better judgement, she stalks towards the nearest ingress. He watches her. She has her crossbow slung loosely across her shoulder. He fingers his blade in jittery readiness. But again there’s no attempt to stop her.

  At first she can see nothing inside. Just a smoky twilight spiked by sharp light from chinks in the walls, and lancing down from the high smoke-holes. There are the hunched shapes of people sitting around the floor, some of them leaning back up against the wall, as though sleeping. As her eyes adapt she can make out detail. And it makes her skin crawl with revulsion.

  She lurches out, and Bahl holds her as she throws up in retching sobs into the grass.

  Together they investigate the next enclosure, and the hall beyond. They are all the same. The air is sweet with narcotic decay. Most of the sleepers lie in a drugged trance-state, breathing in low shallow exhalations, their pupils rolled up, eyes showing only whiteness. Others are already dead. Some for a considerable amount of time, mummified, cocooned in flakes of fibrous tissue. There are also corrupted skeletons slouched in the same lethargic posture. Yet, even more horrifying, long curling stems resembling liana coil from that central tree to entwine the tangles of bone, snaking around the sleeping figures, parasitically insinuating into their mouths and other orifices, umbilicals growing into the base of their spines. There are people moving around between the sleepers, washing them, attending to their physical needs, but they are few.

  Nauseated, they’re on the point of leaving when Kalyfaron seizes his shoulder, pulls him around, and points. Bahl draws his knife and lunges across the dirty floor, avoiding sprawled limbs.

  ‘Lo Withertree?’ The old Mystoneian is slumped in amongst the drugged sleepers, a sickly cast to his face, his legs already webbed by the vines. Bahl slashes him loose as Kalyfaron slaps his face to revive him.

  He gasps in a single huge gulp of air. His eyes slam wide open in shock. ‘No. No. What are you doing?’

  Bahl hauls him roughly to his feet.

  ‘No, leave me here. You don’t understand. Don’t take me away from paradise. Please, please, leave me here.’ His face streaming wet with tears.

  They kick and shove his long gawky figure towards the archway leading outwards. He fights back with all the wild strength of his old, wasted body. Out into the open air of the pathway between the tribe-houses, where they drag him back towards where the caravan is waiting to take the expedition further. His body limp now, wracked with huge whimpering sobs. Yosay looks up as they approach, the others taking defensive formation in case of attack. There is no attack. There are no repercussions. . .

  A party of ten has assembled, five from The Drakkon, plus five guides, with two extra horses drawing travois loaded with supplies. Bahl had ridden docile Mystoneian mules, but although none of them were experienced with horses, they swiftly adapt to their mount’s rolling gait. With the dejected Withertree restrained, his spirit broken, they move out of the city soon after.

  Following several hours travel he appears to revive.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ Kalyfaron enquires, with genuine concern.

  He looks up. Fixes the full force of his attention on her. ‘We have seen the last days of a unique evolutionary experiment,’ he breathes softly. His voice pitched scarcely above a whisper. A dewdrop quivering on the end of his nose.

  ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’

  He says nothing for long moments. ‘When the ice comes, as it will surely come, the Meerschraf will have lost their ability for independent action. They will simply cease to exist. And the trees, without human sustenance, will not survive either. They have grown together, fused into a symbiosis, interdependent upon each other, fed by the umbilicals. And as for myself, I have tasted the endless wonders of heaven, explored empires of the mind and of the senses, I will never again know such a state of ecstasy. I will always hold that vision of perfection within me.’

  If he wasn’t so intense, she thought, that response would be both yearning, and melancholy. She deliberately refocuses away from him to the vista of hinterland around them. The landscape they’re entering is flat and moist underfoot. A mysterious beckoning land. But the long-legged horses cross the marshy plain with ease. They pause overnight at dry island points, Bahl and Kalyfaron dismounting with aching sores in places they’d never experienced them before. Rising at dawn they find twinkling frost has turned everything white. Melting into mist as the low sun rises.

  And Lo Withertree is gone. He’s slipped away into the night, back towards the Meerschraf settlement.

  ‘The choice is his to make,’ says Yosay firmly.

  ‘Will he make it back safely?’ There’s anguish in her voice.

  ‘The fens are treacherous. Our guides know the secret paths. He doesn’t. His horse might have more sense. But another form of death awaits him once he rejoins with those dream-trees.’

  After more deliberation, they decide to continue the journey without him. Towards an uneven skyline, where a wind from off the marshland draws odd sighs and laments from the thin branches of sparse trees. And bees drone in lazy circles. There’s a chill bite to the breeze. A foretaste, Bahl thinks, of the age of ice to come. He remembers what Withertree had told him earlier in their trek. About how the ghost-people are insolently vigorous. They will survive. That with Mystoneian guidance they may even instigate a new world beyond the coming age of ice, once the ice again recedes and the planet emerges renewed.

  Meanwhile, they find their silent guides are leading them towards a single formation of rock that at first appears to be natural. It’s only as they near that it becomes apparent that the rise is too regular, to rectangular, the peak too cleanly defined to be anything other than artificial. As they ascend the gradual slope towards the great megalith, and see it through trees standing tall above them, they begin to appreciate its size and beauty. A towering pyramid silted by age and so overgrown that it’s become part of the landscape. There had obviously been other surrounding structures, but they’d fared much worst. The winding path, taking them up to where it’s swallowed by surviving arches, is steep but not especially rough. They emerge abruptly from the far side of blue-black shadow just as the setting sun explodes vividly behind the tomb’s peak, setting fire to the surrounding sky and throwing a vast lengthening wedge of darkness. The pyramid’s breath-taking proportions, even in decay, even with stone fallen asunder and overgrown with grass and weed, betrays proof of its former magnificence.

  The group set up camp at the very base of the monumental structure. Insects sing and chirrup somewhere outside their circle, as the mounts crop contentedly at gold-starred weed that covers the ground.

  ‘Surely they must have been a race of giants to construct such a wonder’ Yosay harrumphs, although his misaligned eyes are filled with a gleam of triumphant mirth.

  Moongold sits cross-legged beside the fire, and points at the horizon where a gleaming red star has appeared in the night sky. ‘Our journey is cursed. See, there’s an evil portent in the ascendant.’

  ‘That’s no evil star,’ states Bahl softly. ‘It is Mars, the home of my ancestors. It sings at us.’

  ‘Bahl, tell us of the Sea Lords,’ urges Kalyfaron.

  ‘Do you want to know? It’s only a story, long in the telling.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she insists.

  ‘I can’t tell it the way my father told it to me. Or the way his father told it to him. How far back it goes I have no way of knowing. I only know the story. The oral tradition. And if you don’t believe me, well – it matters not.’ He closes his eyes in concentration, reciting the phrases memorised from childhood, his voice deepens. ‘We are the Sea Lords who gird the red world from port to port, across shining hemispheres. Yet the planet grows tired and weary, the very air thins, the desert encroaches, sand fills the shrinking seas. There are huge irrigation schemes, a canal network, vast engines of oxygen-manufacture, yet – rather than cooperate on an equal basis to share the diminishing resources for the benefit of all, nations wage appalling wars in their battle for survival using weapons of ancient sciences. Then the barbarian horde flows from the west, more numerous than locusts. The city is fortified, but they use siege engines of terrible incendiary power, bombarding our towers and palaces into rubble. The siege extends for months until people starve, and disease is rife. Yet my father is a Sea Lord. He possesses secrets others could never dare imagine. I follow my father through the desolation that was once a city, where survivors cluster beside bonfires in the ruins of great buildings.

  The air splits with the terrific roar of new explosions, the ground beneath our feet shudders over and over again, the buildings that still stand on either side shed tornadoes of dust and stone-fragments so thick we can scarce catch breath. Pausing as new fusillades fall in arcs of fire to rip fresh devastation, and our defenders reply from towering walls with retaliatory barrages. We taste the taint of burning in every breath we draw from incendiary devices dropped by bulbous Skyships, a rain of live sparks storming from driving clouds of black smoke as the air grows sour with its stench. . .

  ‘Skyships?’ gasps Kalyfaron. ‘Is such a thing possible? That is such a powerful sorcery.’

  ‘Not sorcery. But science, based upon physical laws. Although sometimes the two can seem indistinguishable.’ She saw something shift in his face. A refocus. And he resumes.

  ‘My father leads me on, into gaps beneath jagged mounds of collapsed masonry, past iron shutters, through sealed gates on fantastic hinges, and down hidden but still accessible staircases, into subterranean chambers. It is dark. I’m excited with nervous anticipations, not knowing what is to occur. I conjecture weapons of ferocious retribution. Yet beyond the final doors there is only a group of harassed science-league practitioners, with a crystal lattice centred on two tall luminous pylons sparking energy discharges. As I watch, it conjures a humming violet portal out of the air, a roaring vortex to otherness. This is not a weapon, but an escape route to other realms. Even as I stand and stare there are titanic detonations from way overhead that shake the entire complex, plumes of dry dust spiralling down from the vaults above. A line of personnel begin to file through the shimmering portal membrane and disappear into other dimensions. My father pushes me forward. My legs are weak with fear. The ceiling is about to collapse as the lethal bombardment continues. I step over the threshold…’ His eyes had grown fixed and staring, his face shining ghastly pale in the flickering firelight.

  ‘So did all of you escape here, to Earth?’

  ‘No. A few did. Others were scattered across a series of realms, other Earths. We survived. The line of Sea Lords. That is why wanderlust is the family trait that flows in our blood, a gift, and a curse, that carries certain obligations. We continued, down through time, to today. Now my father is gone, and I am the last.’

  Yosay was silent for long moments, as though turning ideas over in his mind. ‘Do you believe this tale to be fundamentally true?’

  ‘You once told me of charts devised by ancient playful cartographers who drew in imaginary islands in order to tease and perplex,’ Bahl explains carefully. ‘And how, when those maps were copied by later generations of map-makers they incorporate those imaginary islands, assuming them to be real, and with each subsequent copy the whimsical islands become more solid, taking on greater truths of existence? In the same way, I believe that with every telling, this story becomes more true.’

  ‘Once an idea is spoken, that thought is shared, and is safe within each other,’ says Kalyfaron softly.

  *

  The following morning he wakes sour-mouthed. Still sodden with sleep. He moves his tongue warily around his teeth, and swallows. Ghosts fade and disappear in the air around him, one by one, dissolving like morning frost across the fens. Ghosts of his own past. The ghosts of the tomb-builders. How long he lay there, he couldn’t tell, but all the while he could feel the reassuring warmth of Kalyfaron’s body sleeping close to his own. Listening to her gentle regular breathing. Her contours defined beneath the embroidered saddle-rug that covers them. He holds her softness tightly to him. In a time of unreality, she is real. She is tomorrows yet to come.

  After a snatched meal, they begin the ascent as amber sunlight turns harvest gold across a vast sky. It soon becomes apparent that the material they climb is a conglomerate mass of grey-toned fused opaque glassine, and that at one time there had been human-height tiers, because sufficient trace of them remains to create steps leading laboriously upwards. They pause every now and then. The air thin and cold, their legs already as heavy as dead logs, their fingernails cracked and bleeding. Bahl can feel his fatigue gathering in the form of a slow ache in his legs and arms. They eat and drink, then continue. About a third of the way up they see a series of black mouths. Without hesitation their tall silent Meerschraf guides lead them across that threshold.

  Bahl thought he could sense the Ligeia’s tremble in his mind, their ululating song sends a silver shiver down his spine. He could sense the Shilmah Mother questing, her presence warm in his mind. He thought of his father’s voyages to the strange mythic isles of his endlessly inventive tales. None of them compare to this. He reached out and caught the echo of his father’s laughter, eased with the blur of violent wine. For once there is no resentment. No anger.

  Kalyfaron was compelling herself to control her instinctive fear. Hesitation and delay could weaken that overstrained self-control. Stepping forward, it’s slightly cooler inside, and uncomfortably damp, the stone-hard glassine corridor opens out into galleries infested with blankets of rotting vegetation that leaves the ground watery-soft underfoot. Windblown islands of dirt sprout gold-starred weed, littered by the scat of feral beasts. What those galleries once contained had long since been looted and plundered. What was not taken by tomb-robbers had decayed and corroded to dust. If there were books, there are none now. If there were luminous panels to spell out the movement of stars, worlds and seasons, it had faded and decayed into nothing. They’d expected more. Anticipated the astonishing task of exploring this relic of such vast antiquity. Of being one of the first people in thousands of years to step into these chambers, to experience this vastness, this mystery. A magnificent moment. . . surely? And yet it’s not like that. There’s only mouldy dereliction and lack of repair. Welcomed with perfect silence.