The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

CHAPTER THREE

Quirke opened his door, the sadness in the academic’s normally sparkling eyes a fair indication of what was to follow. ‘Amelia, do come in.’

Professor Harsh followed the head of the School of Archaeology at Saint Vine’s College into his comfortable old office, the sense of foreboding in her gut mounting. The table by the window held a steaming pot of caffeel, rising vapour from the brew obscuring the quad below, where gaggles of brown-gowned students were being called to seminar by the steam-driven whistles running along the battlements of the ancient university. The brew’s presence settled it. Quirke might as well have placed an executioner’s cap on his desk.

‘Do sit down, my dear.’ The elderly fellow pulled a polished gem out of his tweed waistcoat’s pocket and placed it on his desk. It was the same jewel Mombiko had removed from the tomb in Cassarabia’s mountains.

‘I thought the university would have that under museum glass by now – or sold off by one of the Cripplecross auction houses?’ said Amelia.

‘The High Table does not know of its existence yet, Amelia.’

She looked across at Quirke, puzzled.

‘This arrived for you while you were gone.’ He passed a cream vellum envelope across to her. Taking the copper letter opener from the academic’s desk, Amelia sliced the envelope open. She unfolded the notepaper, going numb as she read the words.

‘They can’t do this to me!’

‘You don’t have tenure, Amelia. Of course they can.’

She angrily crumpled the paper into a ball with a gorilla-sized arm. ‘Saint Vines is the last college that would take me. What am I meant to do now? Accept a job as a governess teaching the snotty sons of Sun Gate quality the difference between the great civil war and last winter’s bread riots?’

‘What was the Chancellor expected to do, Amelia? You were supposed to be working at a dig along the dyke wall. Instead some uplanders discover you wandering about half-dead along the desert border. Your obsession with the city is destroying your life.’

‘The High Table are fools,’ said Amelia. ‘Fools with closed minds who are so brim-full of prejudice that they can’t see that the city is not a myth. It existed. Out in the desert I found the tomb of the man who as like destroyed it!’

Quirke shook his head and spun the globe that sat on his desk, his finger brushing the vast expanse of the Fire Sea as it rotated. ‘The academic council values orthodoxy, Amelia. A legend without solid evidence makes for very poor archaeology. You should be thankful that the Cassarabian ambassador was expelled last year, or I don’t doubt we would have Greenhall’s civil servants and magistrates crawling all over the college looking for you with a bag stuffed full of embassy grievances.’

‘Give the jewel to the Chancellor,’ said Amelia. ‘The money from it—’

‘—Will not make a difference,’ said Quirke. He pushed the gem across the table to the professor. ‘Not this time. You could have come back with an original scroll of the Circlist tenets and he still would have dismissed you. Even if by some miracle you could find evidence that the city of Camlantis really existed, that it is still intact and locked as a floatquake in the heavens, how would you reach it? The aerostats we have access to are only pocket dirigibles – do you think the RAN can be enlisted on your goose chase?’

‘Admiralty House has been known to favour requests by the High Table …’

The old academic picked up a neatly folded copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated News. ‘This is what the navy are concerned with.’ He tapped a report about an airship of the merchant marine that had been savaged by a skrayper, one of the massive balloon-like creatures of the upper atmosphere that sometimes sank down to wreak havoc on Jackelian shipping. ‘You find a text in a crystal-book about how to drive skraypers off our airships and you’ll find the First Skylord willing to grant you an audience at Admiralty House quick enough. But searching the skies for Camlantis? What do you think the RAN will make of that proposal?’

‘The city is up there,’ insisted Amelia.

‘If the ruins of Camlantis were at an altitude we could reach, someone would have sighted them. Circle knows, the jack cloudies are as bad as their maritime counterparts with their superstitions and their rituals and their cant. It wouldn’t take much to add a story of a ghostly land ripped out in a floatquake to their tall tales of angels gliding around their airships and dark round stats of unknown origin whistling past their ears. And if your mystical city is resting at an altitude beyond our sight and reach, well … I am sure you can see the problem.’

‘The lashlites believe the city is up there,’ said Amelia. ‘I told you about my trip to their nests in the mountains. Their songs tell of a city that could have been Camlantis, rising past a flight of warriors out hunting a skrayper pod.’

‘The lashlites are a colourful race,’ said the academic. ‘I dare say I could find something in their aural teachings to support most of the tales of celestial fiction printed in the penny dreadfuls, if I chose to interpret their sagas in such a way.’

‘You are sounding like the dullards on the High Table.’

‘Yes,’ sighed the academic. ‘I believe I am.’ He stood up and pulled out a tome from his shelves. ‘Uriah Harthouse. Two years’ worth of lashlite shaman sagas transcribed during an expedition to the peaks around Hundred Locks fifty-five years ago. I particularly like the story where the god Stormlick engages twelve ice demons in a whistle-song contest in a wager to end the coldtime, triumphing by cunningly adding a mustard-like spice to their wine goblets when the demons weren’t looking. Try selling the Department of Geographical Studies that gem as an explanation of the glaciers’ retreat from the continent.’

‘This isn’t myth we are talking about, it is history.’

‘History is out of fashion in these corridors,’ said Quirke. ‘We have too much of it, we are drowning in it.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and lifted out a coin in a glass box, the face on the silver so faded that the impression of the woman’s head was barely discernible. ‘How old do the wild papers in those disreputable journals of yours propose Camlantis might be? Seven thousand years? Eight thousand years? I found this coin in one of the archives downstairs while I was writing a piece on the reign of King Hull. Out of idle curiosity I had Pumblechook in metallurgy use that new dating process he’s been boasting about – do you know how old this coin is according to his new method?’

‘Chimecan slave-nation period?’

Quirke lifted an eyebrow. ‘Two hundred and seventy thousand years old. How’s that for a heresy?’

Amelia nearly spilt the contents of her cup. ‘That’s impossible. Pumblechook must have made an error.’

‘You plough the fields in Jackals and you trip over history, you cast a fishing net in the Sepia Sea and you dredge up history. We have too much of it, and the High Table have had too much of yours.’

‘What are you going to do with the coin?’

‘What am I going to do?’ Quirke opened the drawer and placed the artefact back inside the felt-lined case. ‘I shall keep it as a reminder that there are things in this world older than I am. You’ll see no papers from me speculating on the origins of the coin. I’ll leave it to you in my will – you can have it along with my office, when the High Table have forgotten your name and your impudence towards them.’

‘I shall never be the sort of person they believe fit to sit in here,’ said Amelia.

‘You’ll see,’ said the academic. ‘In time, you’ll see.’

‘Fools, they’re blind, bloody fools.’

‘Some advice, Amelia,’ said Quirke, passing a cup of cafeel over to the professor. ‘As one of your father’s oldest friends. Don’t publish any more papers about the city; keep your head down and let the procession of nature take its course. The membership of the High Table will change, and in time fresh faces will arrive who have never heard of you. There is a dig along the foothills of Mechancia, some Chimecan-age ruins overrun by glaciers during the coldtime. I can get you on the expedition – you’ll just be another anonymous face helping out, a few years beyond the reach of the official journals and your enemies.’

‘Academic exile.’ Amelia set aside her cup without drinking from it.

‘I taught you better than that, my dear. A tactical withdrawal. Entropy can be an astonishingly powerful ally in these sleepy halls of ours. The long game, my dear, the long game.’

Amelia stood up. They both knew she was not going to follow his advice, and the old man had damaged his own prospects enough already by making Saint Vines her last bolt-hole within the eight universities.

‘You stood by my father after he lost everything,’ said Amelia, ‘and you have done the same for me. You are a rare old bird, Sherlock Quirke.’

He shrugged. It had never even occurred to the old academic that there was an alternative way of doing things. He was a singular touch of humanity among all the bones and dust of forgotten things.

She made to open the door and leave.

‘Amelia, did it ever occur to you that some things that are lost are meant to be that way for a reason?’

Now that was a queer thing to say. Was that the master of archaeology, or her dead father’s friend talking?

Amelia shut the door on Quirke and her old life.

Amelia could see there was something wrong with the woman in the quad the moment she left the college building – something out of place. She was the right age to be a student but her poise was wrong; like a panther waiting patiently on the lawn, carefully watching the bustle of the undergraduates. Could she be a topper sent after her by the caliph? The Circle knows, there was always a surfeit of professional assassins in Middlesteel, ready to do the capital city’s dirty work when enough coins were spilled over the bench tops of the more disreputable drinking houses.

She noticed Amelia and started to walk towards the professor, the shadows falling behind her. The visitor was approaching with the sun in her eyes. Amelia relaxed. The woman was not planning to try to sink a blade between her ribs after all.

‘Damson Harsh?’ enquired the young lady with a slight accent. Where was that accent from? It had been softened by years in Jackals.

‘Professor Harsh,’ said Amelia.

The woman pulled a folded sheet of notepaper from her jacket. ‘You are, I believe, currently in need of employment. I represent an individual who may be interested in offering you a suitable position.’

Amelia arched an eyebrow. ‘You are suspiciously well informed, damson.’

The visitor handed Amelia the piece of paper. ‘The offer is contingent on you being able to translate the text you see here.’

Amelia unfolded the sheet. It was not possible! The script on the paper was nothing this young woman should have in her possession.

‘Is this a joke?’

‘I can assure you that the offer is quite genuine, professor.’

‘Kid, where did you get this from?’

‘The translation, if you would be so kind.’

‘The last – book – of – Pairdan. Reader-Administrator of … Camlantis.’ Amelia haltingly traced her finger across the ancient script. She had nearly died in the desert wastes of the caliph to get her hands on such a treasure, yet this young pup had breezed onto the college grounds blithely oblivious to the fact that she held in her possession the title inscription of a crystal-book that had been lost to humanity some six and a half thousand years ago.

‘The crystal-book that this was taken from, does it have information blight?’

‘Turn the paper over, professor.’

Amelia looked at the other side of the sheet. An address: Snowgrave Avenue – the richest district of Sun Gate, the beating heart of commerce that kept the currents of continental trade circulating for Jackals.

‘Go there now, professor. You may see for yourself if the book is functioning or not.’

It was all Amelia could do to stop herself running.

Snowgrave Avenue lay five minutes’ walk away from Guardian Wren station on the atmospheric, the underground transportation system that served the capital and was now spilling workers out onto the avenue’s wide boulevards. This season, it seemed that the women had taken to wearing the severe uniform of the clerks – dark suits cut long to cover their dresses, and stovepipe hats. Last season it had been bonnets bearing the badges of the parliamentary parties sewn in lace. Amelia still kept an idle eye on the milliners’ window displays in Middlesteel, even if she usually set aside her attentions and the increasingly slim pickings of her salary for following her vocation. Along the avenue, the richer denizens of the counting houses and commercial concerns were stepping out of hansom cabs clattering over Snowgrave’s cobbles, while the truly wealthy – the capital’s finest quality – brushed down their waistcoats and checked their gold pocket watches from the snug comfort of private coaches. To be poor of course, meant coming in by foot, trudging from the rookeries in the shadow of the vast new pneumatic towers, water-reinforced rubber gurgling over the vendors’ cries of eels and fresh milk for sale.

Amelia gazed up at the tower that matched the address on her sheet. Seventy storeys high, but unlike its neighbours, the pneumatic building had no granite plinth outside, no brass plate announcing the names of the concerns inside. Perhaps they had yet to get around to erecting one? A lot of new towers had gone up after Quatérshift’s invasion of Jackals a few years back; half the city had been left burning after Jackals’ aerial navy had been turned against her own capital in an unspeakable act of treachery.

Inside, the atrium was polished marble, tall men in ornate frock coats waiting as if they were the sentries outside parliament. Each doorman held a bulldog on a leash, the creatures’ black noses swollen to the size of a tomato. The canines had been twisted – either by worldsinger sorcery or by the even more disrerutable hands of womb mages.

‘Damson Harsh,’ said one of the doormen. ‘Please do come in. We have been expecting you.’

Amelia looked down at the bulldog sniffing suspiciously around her ankles.

‘You have discharged a firearm recently, damson?’

‘That’s Professor Harsh, and I may have been smoked by a little blow-barrel sap last month. Who owns this tower?’

‘A man of wealth, professor,’ said the doorman, ‘and taste.’ He took out a gutta-percha punch card on a chain, walked over to the other end of the atrium, and pushed the card into a transaction engine mounted on the wall. Drums clicked and rotated on the steam-powered calculating machine. A shiny copper door drew back, revealing a lifting room larger than the lounge of Amelia’s lodgings back in Crisparkle Street.

The large doorman indicated the lifting room. ‘Please, professor.’

Amelia stepped into the room and pointed down at the bulldog. ‘Can your pup smell out the edge on a dagger too?’

‘Of course not, professor.’ He winked and indicated one of the other bulldogs. ‘That’s his job.’

Amelia looked at herself in the lifting room’s mirror. The yellow gaslight made her face look pale; she had still not recovered from the dehydration she had endured fleeing Cassarabia. There was no way around it, she looked like a mess and she could not imagine who in Jackals would possibly want to offer her a job now – Circle’s teeth, she would not offer herself a job if she had walked into her old study back at the college.

After the lifting room had silently pulled itself as high as it was going to rise, its doors slid open. Amelia found herself facing three women who could have been sisters of the lady she had met in the college grounds. Hard, beautiful faces inspecting her, weighing her up. Calculating how difficult it would be to bring her down.

‘Good morning, ladies,’ said Amelia. ‘Would you care to sniff my legs, too?’

‘There are few academics who stroll the streets of Middlesteel carrying weapons,’ said one of the guards, a scar across her cheek creasing as she talked. That strange accent again. All these whippers had lived in Jackals long enough for it to dwindle to a faint burr.

Amelia noted how one of the women opened the door for her, while the other two not-so-subtly positioned themselves behind her, just outside her field of vision. ‘Weapons? Just a sharp mind, today. Is all this really necessary?’

‘I believe so,’ said scar-face. ‘You have, after all, threatened to kill our employer.’

Amelia’s eyes narrowed when she saw who was waiting for her inside the room. Him.

‘So I have.’

‘You made the threat at your father’s funeral,’ said Abraham Quest, ‘as I recall.’

‘Just a fourteen-year-old girl speaking. I imagine you must have been reading the obituaries very closely back then,’ said Amelia. ‘How many suicides did you cause that year?’

‘None at all, professor. Suicide is caused when you place a gun to your temple and pull the trigger in a misguided attempt to cleanse the stain on your family’s honour. The pistol is not the cause, and the course of your life is not an excuse for it. If you take a walk in Goldhair Park you must expect that sometimes it will rain and sometimes it will be sunny. It is no good whining when you get wet. You cannot control the weather; all you can control is how you feel about getting soaked. If you do not wish to get wet, you should avoid taking the walk in the first place.’

‘It wasn’t a shower that bloody bankrupted my father,’ said Amelia, thrusting a finger towards Quest. ‘It was you.’

‘Everyone who places money on the Sun Gate Commercial Exchange knows their capital is at risk. That is what speculation is all about. The possibility of gains, or losses. I did nothing illegal. I merely leveraged my own wit to play the game significantly better than everyone else at the table.’

‘I understand the exchange feels rather differently,’ said Amelia. ‘Which is why you and any factor who works for you has been banned for life from setting foot in the building again.’

‘Mere petulance on their part,’ said Quest. He turned to gaze out over a commanding view of the towers and spires of Middlesteel. ‘It was not that I was a better player than the other members of the exchange that saw me disbarred, it was their cupidity – that I would not explain to them the predictive models I had set running on my transaction engines. They had not even realized it was possible to use a transaction engine in such a way and it does not matter how many engine men and cardsharps they buy in – they will never be able to reengineer my achievements. I showed them how unbearably dull they all are, and they will never forgive me for parading their ignorance in front of the nation.’

Amelia could not believe the sheer arrogance of the man. Abraham Quest, the only man in the history of Jackals to have a financial crash named after him. He had walked away from the table with all the chips and damn near shut down the whole financial gaming house in the process.

She screwed up the piece of paper that had led her here and threw it down on his expensive Cassarabian rug. ‘That’s what I think of your job offer, Quest. I’m off to join a dig along the Mechancian Spine.’

‘Don’t walk out of the door,’ said Quest. ‘At least, not until you see what I have uncovered. It appears we may disagree as to where responsibility for our personal choices rests, but believe me when I say I am truly sorry that your father lost his seat in parliament after he was declared bankrupt. I feel even sadder that he felt he had so little to live for that he took the so-called path of honour. When he was alive, I know he supported the Camlantean heresy – perhaps it is only fitting that it should be the House of Quest that helps you take a few steps closer to the lost city.’

Camlantis. ‘What do you know about the city, Quest?’

‘A few things that you won’t find in the musty journals circulating around the College of Saint Vine’s,’ said Quest. ‘Such as where the city is – or should I say, where the city was.’

‘I don’t believe—’

‘Please,’ said Quest, opening a door at the side of his office. ‘See for yourself.’

Whoever had installed the reader knew what they were about. The hexagonal crystal-book sat in a snare of cables and wires, bubbling chemical batteries supplying the power electric – the wild energy. Quest must have hired colleagues Amelia had worked with to set up his apparatus. It was a rare skill, handling crystal-books; his mechomancers could not have worked this out for themselves.

‘You have one,’ whispered Amelia. ‘You really do have a working crystal-book.’

‘Not just any book,’ said Quest. ‘This is no ledger of raw trade data or random collection of personal poetry. This book belonged to one of the greatest Camlantean philosophers, one of the ruling librarians – Pairdan. He knew the Black-oil Horde was over-running their empire’s provinces one by one. His story was inscribed on the crystal towards the end of their civilization.’

‘This is priceless,’ gasped Amelia. ‘This could change everything we know about the Camlanteans.’

‘Oh, the book had a price, professor,’ said Quest. ‘Believe me. One that made even myself think twice before paying it.’

‘Why do you care about Camlantis?’ demanded Amelia. ‘This is my life’s work – but for you? What is this? A minor distraction, in between raking in more money than the Greenhall treasury takes from the nation in a year’s taxes?’

‘It is ideas that truly interest me, professor. Concepts that fascinate me. Sadly, it must be admitted, more than people ever have. The legends say the Camlanteans had the perfect civilization. That they lived together in peace for centuries – lived in a society that had abolished hunger, poverty and violence. What lessons could we learn from their lives, what lessons?’

‘That pacifists should build bigger walls to keep their enemies out,’ said Amelia. ‘Where did you get this crystal-book, Quest?’

‘An antique dealer spotted it being used as a doorstop in a bakery in Lace Lane, sewn into a leather bag. The baker had taken it from his grandmother’s cottage when she died and had no idea of its true worth. Unfortunately for myself, the dealer had all his wits about him when it came to placing an accurate value on the crystal-book.’

Amelia ran her fingers along the crystal-book’s cold surface. ‘You can’t keep this here, Quest. Not even you. It has to be studied.’

‘And so it shall be, but not by those dullards at the High Table for whom the existence of a functioning Camlantean society is tantamount to archaeological heresy. You know what they would do with this artefact as well as I do. They would bury the book in the vaults of Middlesteel Museum and take it out once a year for a good polish.’

‘You want me to study it?’

‘More than that … watch.’ Quest walked over to the chemical drums and threw an activation lever, tiny sparks leaping from the wires coiled around the base of the book. With a green nimbus enveloping the crystal, a finger of light crept from the jewel’s surface, fanning out in front of them like mist. The light resolved into an image of a man. He was speaking, but could not be heard – script scrolling up the air to the right of him.

‘This is Pairdan you see here, professor, the last Reader-Administrator of Camlantis.’

Amelia barely heard Quest. She was following the ancient characters crawling up the air while simultaneously trying to watch Pairdan. How old was he? Thirty, perhaps? Young for such an elevated position of power. Pairdan’s head moved to one side, his crown with a single jewel at its centre glinting from the fury of the fires outside, and Amelia saw what he was looking at. Pairdan’s city was ablaze in the distance, fireballs of burning petrol-soaked straw and tar arcing across from the catapults mounted on the Black-oil Horde’s besieging war wagons. The juxtaposition between the communication crystals turning sedately in the high towers of Camlantis’s ethereal spires and the pure animal carnage of the horde was almost too much for Amelia to bear, even with the passage of so many thousands of years. It was as if it was happening now, to one of Jackals’ own cities.

‘Poor Pairdan,’ said Quest. ‘Watch the sadness in the Reader-Administrator’s eyes. He is gazing upon the end of his world, and you can tell that he knows it. The start of a dark age that lasted until the rise of the Chimecan Imperium.’

‘Quiet.’ Amelia was trying to keep up with the scrolling words. ‘I need to concentrate. He is saying something about a plan.’

Quest moved the reader’s control lever up a notch and the image froze in front of them, the bubbling of the vat filling the room with its rotten-egg stench. Amelia started to protest but Quest waved her to silence. ‘The translator I hired lacked your proficiency, professor, but I already have the gist of the story.’ Quest pointed to a high mountain in the image’s distance and the stars glittering above, frozen in aspic and lost in time. ‘This mountain is the key, Amelia. The glaciers passed it by during the coldtime. It hasn’t changed that much over the ages.’

‘You really do know where Camlantis is!’ cried Amelia.

‘Where its foundations were. As best as we can tell, Pairdan’s plan was to deny the city to the Black-oil Horde. It was no random floatquake that destroyed Camlantis, professor.’

Amelia was dumbstruck by the implications. Among the few scholars who treated the Camlantean legends with any respect, Amelia knew the speculation had always been that after the city had been sacked, and the librarian-sorcerers murdered, there had been no one left alive to drain the flows of the world’s energy and it was struck by a floatquake. The worldsingers’ first duty was to tame the leylines that could rip miles of land from the ground and send it spinning up into the cold night. The order of worldsingers mastered the power of the Earth and used it to fuel their sorcery and rituals. When civilizations fell, when order broke down, the incidence of floatquakes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes striking the land also proliferated; that was an undeniable fact.

‘Then the Camlanteans destroyed their own city.’ Amelia could hardly believe her own conclusions.

‘The barbarians weren’t fools,’ said Quest. ‘The horde did not want to burn Camlantis to the ground out of pique or envy. They wanted control of the city of marvels for their own ends. They would have strapped the librarians to their wagons as slaves. With Camlantean power at their disposal, the Wheel Lords would have swept effortlessly across every kingdom of their age. I can imagine no worse fate for a society of pacifists, can you? Turned into grovelling court wizards for a pack of murderous warlords. Watching while the horde tied the children of their conquered subjects behind their wagons, dragging them to bloody ribbons over gravel in their honour races. Abetting in the sack of cities other than their own.’

Amelia looked at the noble frozen image of the Reader-Administrator. ‘Poor man. Poor Pairdan.’

‘Think of it, professor.’ Quest walked towards a porthole-like window cut into his pneumatic tower’s rubber walls. ‘Somewhere in the heavens Camlantis is still spinning around the world. Not a sacked ruin of marble and stone, but intact, its empty streets a home for nesting eagles and the dust of Pairdan’s hopes. That is your dream too, is it not?’

Damn his eyes. Quest knew it was. ‘You said you know where the city was located, before the floatquake?’

‘And the reason why its ruined foundations have never been discovered.’ Quest led her back to a table in his office where one of his Catosian soldiers had unfurled a map. His finger hovered over a large swathe of territory, most of it coloured black for the unknown and the unexplored. ‘Liongeli.’

Amelia looked askance at the featureless, uncharted expanse. A jungle hell without end. An environment so forbidding that only distant cousins of the race of man such as the shell-armoured craynarbians could make their home there. ‘Your geographers must have made a mistake, Quest. All the ancient texts suggest that the location of Camlantis should lie far further north. My best guess is somewhere north of the Catosian League, or perhaps buried beneath the pampas of Kikkosico. It may even be underneath the wastes controlled by the polar barbarians.’

Quest shook his head. ‘Trust me, Amelia. I have established my place in the world by following my contrarian instincts. Would it surprise you to learn that yours is not the only academic heresy I have been following? In matters of continental geography, there is a hypothesis currently proscribed by the High Table that posits our entire world may have shifted its position many times in the past, with north exchanging its position with south and the whole skin of the world sliding in upheaval. Earthquakes, floatquakes, fire and brimstone. You are correct, professor, in a manner of speaking. The foundations of Camlantis are further north – it is just that further north is now further south by seven hundred miles.’

How could that be true? Was their world so flimsy? But if it was, if it was …

‘All those years scrabbling about the pampas,’ said Amelia, the enormity of Quest’s words sinking in, ‘petitioning the God-Emperor of Kikkosico for just one more set of travel papers for just one more province. We weren’t even searching for the city in the right country!’

Quest rolled out a second, more detailed map of Liongeli. A private trader’s map, no doubt very expensive to obtain. Depressingly large areas of the jungle vastness were still left unmarked on it. ‘But your instincts were correct, Amelia. The city is no myth. It is – was – here!’ He tapped the source of the River Shedarkshe, a vast lake-like crater that fed the mightiest watercourse known to Jackelian cartographers. ‘When the city was uprooted and blown into the sky by the Camlantean sorcerers it left a basin, one that was filled by rain and sink water. It’s an inland sea now, called Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo.’