In the cold light of day, Macel began to wonder if he’d been over-eager. It was a hard hike through the Easterwood, not made any easier by the weight he lugged in his pack. If the weather held, if he could remember the route, they could be at the Obelisks in a day or so. Where they went from there was hanging on a hunch. Guesswork. Hope. The assumption that Bess had left a riddle in the hopes he’d come looking for her.

  Last night, all hopped up on visions of her spectre, it had seemed like a wonderful idea. How wonderful would it be if he could play the gallant hero, swooping in to save the lost damsel? Ha. The more he thought about it, the more the plan seemed flimsy. Light of the moon called. If Bess had written that so Macel would be able to puzzle it out, she was one lucky girl indeed. The answer had only come to them through knowledge from Tema Caerlin; without Tema’s childhood stories, the key to solving Bess’ riddle simply would not have been there.

  It all would have been guesswork, more than it was now.

  Macel’s companions had been silent for most of the journey. Delie had rebuffed Sam’s attempts to spark conversation―and because it had been Macel putting his foot in it that had let slip Sam’s plan to leave with Hortense, Sam wasn’t talking to Macel now either. Poor Janna Davis, the young doe-eyed nurse, was caught in the middle of a three-way frost between people she barely knew. She’d squeaked out a few ice-breaking questions on the first part of the journey. One word was given in response, maybe two, and the girl had got the hint.

  They set up a temporary camp once they were hidden safely in the trees. A part of Macel had expected to find Janna gone by morning. He wouldn’t have blamed her for slinking away while she was still close enough to make her way back to the Watch. And she wasn’t beholden to Lieutenant Bennett’s whims, either―her orders came from Tema, and somehow Macel couldn’t imagine Tema Caerlin getting a strop on like Bennett often did.

  But Janna had stayed.

  The rest had thawed Delie, which was a small mercy. She still gave Sam short shrift, but she was smiling. While they walked, she was making conversation with Janna. “Are you sure you don’t mind coming with us? Don’t think wrong of me, I’m not trying to get rid of you―but do you not have friends in the Valley you’d rather be spending time with?”

  Janna shook her head. “Friends? Not me. Miss Tema’s nice to me, and a few of the girls, but they’re not friends. They’re just people I see, when I’m at work.”

  “But you must have friends,” said Delie. “You’re, what, twenty?”

  “A fresh nineteen, Miss Adela.”

  Delie folded her arms. “Call me Delie. Or I’ll have to slap you silly―in a friendly way, of course. Oh, I know it wasn’t that long ago, but when I was your age I was out in town with my mates every night.”

  “Where I come from there was no town.” Janna spoke softly. “And mum wouldn’t have held with me having strangers round. It wasn’t safe.” She laughed, and plucked a marigold from the ground at her feet. “I don’t expect I’ll ever get used to this place. Summer flowers on my birthday! I was a winter baby. Every time I celebrated my birth, there was snow on the ground.”

  “There’s no proof snow’s even a thing here,” said Delie.

  “Aye,” Sam butted in. “Maybe when it gets really cold the clouds all bleed over us or something. It’s not as if snow is a natural phenomenon caused by frozen water or anything. Physics? The stuff’s pure magic.”

  “Do you want to lose some teeth?” But when Sam turned away, Delie leaned in to whisper to Janna: “Snow is magic. I think Essegena will look beautiful in the snow.”

  Snow or not, the evening had turned bitterly cold by the time the Obelisks came into view again, the sun all but vanished behind the rising peaks as the planet’s two moons took their turn in the spotlight. Janna gazed around at the black stones―little more than shadows by now―with wide-eyed wonder; she’d not been here before, so she had some excuse, but both Sam and Delie had come with Macel to retrieve the wounded Eilidh Cailie. They might not have explored the place thoroughly, but they shouldn’t have been looking like slack-jawed children at the sight of it. Course, they wouldn’t admit to gaping. “I was just having a peep,” Delie insisted, when Macel approached her. Sam muttered something about trying to find the best place to make a camp.

  For his part, Macel didn’t really want to make camp at the Obelisks at all. Perhaps it was just the residual bad memories of his night here with Bess. He liked to think that none of the others would have abandoned him by the time he woke up―but then again, he’d thought Bess would have waited for him before, and she hadn’t. But bad memories or no, the Obelisks were the only option they had. Essegena had already fallen into crisp night, and this was as far as any of them had ever travelled. There was no telling how far they’d have to go to find anywhere else even remotely suitable to rest.

  They found a spot right up tight against one of the outermost obelisks. Sam had a sheet of canvas among the things he’d packed―something else Macel had forgotten; he’d have been driven back by the elements or else succumbed to the wilderness by now if he was subsisting on only the few things it had occurred to him to bring. Some pegs were driven through holes punched in the canvas, and the whole thing propped against the obelisk, creating a lean-to just about big enough for the four of them. Macel experimented with using his jacket, bundled up, as a pillow. Within ten minutes he was shivering without it, so he put it back on and resigned himself to having a stiff neck in the morning.

  It rained in the night. Macel awoke at dawn to the thick smell of petrichor and the bare dirt darkened by water. Happily, the downpour had stopped by morning, though the sky was still grey and definitely not as warm as it had been the day before. He had put on his boots and taken out a breakfast portion for the four of them before anyone else had even begun to stir. Delie, the first of them to wake, did so as Macel was filling his mouth with the last bite of his breakfast.

  Their lazy start irritated him. Bess wouldn’t be so slow to rise; every minute they spent sat beneath the canvas, she was getting further away. Or maybe she was lost, or hurt, and desperately awaiting rescue. Macel was letting her down by dawdling. He paced while they ate, and suggested that they leave the lean-to as it was rather than wasting time packing it away. Sam responded to this suggestion with a resounding “no”, and proceeded to take his time folding it meticulously.

  At last, a good three hours after sunrise, they were on the move. With the Obelisks and the high rock-faces to their left, and the broad waters of a lake to their right, there was little room for questioning the route they took. Straight on. There was no other way Bess could have gone. Accordingly they made good pace, even if their boots did squelch in the mud which the rain had made. By lunchtime the grey skies had dissipated, and the sun was once again shining bright. It was balmy. Their fast pace―Macel wouldn’t accept anything less―meant they warmed up quickly. Before long he had his jacket tied around his waist, and his sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

  The flatland between the water and the cliffs shrank the further they walked. At its peak it was probably a hundred feet, much of that space adorned with obelisks. Soon that became a dozen feet, and steadily less, narrowing eventually to a small gully. Here, there was a steep hill on the waterside too. They walked the channel between the two hills, sweating and panting. Instead of dirt and grass, the ground was uneven slate, with nubbins and larger rocks poking up here and there.

  “It’s not healthy to keep walking in sweaty boots all day,” said Sam, hoisting one leg up onto a flat-topped rock and unlacing it. He pulled his foot free and wriggled the socked toes. “You have to air them out.”

  Delie rolled her eyes. “The rest of us did that in the night, Sam,” she said. “Besides, I think you’re meant to take the socks off too. That’s where the sweat is.”

  “Should I be flattered that you know so much about my sweat?” Sam asked. “Or should I be concerned?”

  Delie scowled. “I was talking generally.”

  The hills on each side became gradually steeper; as the grass which topped them gave way to more rocky crags, they began to look less like hills and more like small mountains. There were still a few obelisks here and there, though not nearly as many as there had been by the water. Most of them looked more brittle, too. Some were badly weathered, and a few had collapsed entirely. Macel resisted the temptation to look at them too closely. Finding Bess’ trail was his singular focus.

  The manmade relics stopped only a short distance from the valley of obelisks, but the terrain didn’t get any easier on them. Dotted by the occasional tree, the steep slopes penned them into a single path for large portions of the day; occasionally two routes opened themselves up, but these had the annoying habit of merging back into one another very soon afterwards. “I’d almost say this place used to be a riverbed,” said Delie, just before midday. “It’s got the shape.”

  Sam grunted. “The water level must have dropped a bit,” he said. “My feet are bone dry, at the very least.”

  “I’m not a geologist,” Delie replied. Her tone was frosty, and she levelled a hard glare at Sam.

  He didn’t appear to notice. “Then don’t spout off like you are. You just look like a fool.”

  Delie pursed her lips so tight that Macel worried she was going to suck them in, imploding her face like a black hole. He moved between her and Sam before they came to blows.

  “What’s the matter with the two of you today? Sniping at each other.”

  Delie had the grace to look abashed. Only for a second. After that she stalked off, taking care to walk as far from Sam as she could manage while still following the same course. Janna went with her.

  Macel rounded on Sam. “I don’t know what’s going on between you and Delie right now,” he said. “Whether it’s to do with Hortense or something else. But right now we need to stick together. At least until we’ve found Bess. Do you think you can hold your tongue until we’re back at the Watch?”

  Sam shrugged. “If she does.”

  Happily, it appeared that Sam and Delie’s tiff didn’t extend to the rest of the group. Delie was quite happy to keep to herself, chatting away quite pleasantly with Janna and vaguely matching Macel for direction and pace. And so long as Macel kept Sam distracted with conversation―and that conversation was on topics other than Delie―he was amenable too. With that arrangement, the day passed quickly. In late afternoon, the narrow path between slopes suddenly became a wide open expanse of flat land. Stubby trees dotted the landscape here and there. Far off to the north, the grey silhouettes of mountains rose up towards the sky.

  A line of beige bisected the green grass, curving gently and stretching off out of sight both north and west. “It’s a road,” said Sam. “What’s left of one, at least. Some of these stones have been cut into shape.” Delie’s scoff was clear enough to make Macel wince―but Sam was right. Blocks of sandstone were set into the ground, each one roughly a square two feet across; at the edges, where the road bent, the stone had been precisely cut. The grass had begun to reclaim the territory it had lost to the sandstone road; tufts of vegetation grew through the cracks between stones, and the edges were overgrown. Still, even abandoned a long time, it had clearly been put there deliberately. It must have been made by the same people who carved those obelisks, Macel figured. Whoever they were.

  Delie wanted to make camp by the roadside―dusk was advancing, after all―but Sam disagreed. “If someone put a road here, there must have been people living nearby to use it,” he reasoned, and Macel could see the logic in what he was saying. Delie didn’t look convinced.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “We should set up camp while there’s still some light. And we could do with the rest. Poor Janna’s nearly dead on her feet here.”

  “I’m fine,” squeaked Janna. She didn’t look fine. Her face was flushed, doused in sweat, and she was flagging as she walked.

  Sam held out his arms. “The lady says she’s fine,” he said. “We should go another mile at least. It’ll be easier walking on some proper paving, and if we’re lucky we’ll find somewhere with a roof to spend the night. Even if it is a haunted roof.” He didn’t wait for deliberation. He just started walking.

  Macel glanced at Delie, who was looking back at him with resignation. Janna just puffed. They’d no choice but to go after Sam. When he set his mind to something, got it into his head that he was going to do it, it would have taken the combined might of all the Gods to convince him otherwise. Clearly he wanted to see where this road went. Stubborn as he was, he’d probably walk on for an hour or more even if the rest of them stayed put. An hour from now it would be truly dark; they might not see Sam ever again, and they’d be spending tomorrow searching for him as well as for Bess.

  “I hope this road does go somewhere,” Macel confided, talking quietly to Delie so that Janna wouldn’t overhear. “We’ve gone through more than half of our water already. If there’s not a river or a well or something soon, we’ll have to start rationing it out.”

  As luck would have it, though, there was a river, not more than half a mile after they joined the road. Quite a wide one, too, its water flowing at a rapid pace. Macel let the others go on ahead a little way while he found a small sandbank at the river’s edge; crouching, he filled three empty skins of water, dropping into each a filtration tablet from the gear Delie had packed, and replaced the caps. It would take a bit of time for the tablets to do their job, but by the time they’d gone through what was left of the water they’d brought with them, it would all be fit for drinking. If indeed it wasn’t already. The Clearwater didn’t need to be filtered in order to be safe, though this river did look a fair sight muddier.

  He caught up to the others fairly quickly. One man alone moved faster than three, it seemed, and Janna especially was slowing down. Macel wondered whether Sam had noticed or not, or indeed whether Sam even cared.

  The further they walked, the more visibly Janna was struggling, and the more Delie became correspondingly irritated with Sam. Three times Macel caught her shaking her head behind Sam’s back, and―when Janna missed a step and nearly fell―she opened her mouth to demand that they make camp. Only, before she could say anything, Sam raised his arms into the air. “What did I tell you? Civilisation.” There was no mistaking the smug lilt in his voice. He’d been right, and Delie had been wrong, and it seemed like Sam saw that as the best thing to ever happen to him.

  Delie’s face was sour as rotten milk. Sure enough, just coming into view over the crest of a gentle hillock was a small village, or what was left of it. A hill at its back sheltered it from the wind. No more than half a dozen buildings, most of them nothing more than brickwork forming an outline of what once had been occupied. The buildings were arranged in view of a gnarled tree with bare limbs as thick as both of Macel’s legs put together and what looked disconcertingly like a hangman’s noose suspended from one branch. One of them, a small shack, still had its roof. It would be a tight squeeze, for sure, but Macel felt pretty confident that the four of them could all fit inside.

  There was, however, another issue. The road didn’t just pass through this thorp like the river did; it split into six different paths. Bess might have come this way―Macel was increasingly sure she had―but they’d have to take a chance on which route she’d have taken from here. He turned to the others. “Anybody got any ideas?”

  “Why don’t we make camp here for the night?” suggested Delie. “It’ll give us time to figure out where we go from here, and it’ll be nice to take advantage of actually having a proper roof. Especially if it rains again.”

  Sam looked up at the sky. “Doesn’t look likely.”

  “And if we camp in the open and get rained on, you’ll spent all day tomorrow moaning about soggy trousers,” said Delie shortly.

  “Fine,” Sam huffed. “We’ll sleep in the little hut.”

  The roof might still have been on the one almost-whole shack, but the floor was another story. The heavy slabs which had once been used were thoroughly cracked, and shoots of grass poked through. The whole floor was dotted with bits of rubble, which Sam and Macel set about throwing to one corner of the shack while Delie prepared a fire just outside the door. Janna, who had looked like death before they even reached the shack, collapsed to the ground the moment she was safely inside, seemingly unconcerned by the uneven floor, and immediately began to snore.

  The shack consisted of a single room with no furniture of any kind remaining. If there’d ever been a door, it had long since rotted away. A square hole bored into the stone right beside the open entryway, glimpsed briefly by Macel as it had caught the light from Delie’s fire, suggested that there had once been a hinge there―but it had eroded to little more than an iron nub. The air was still at the moment. A good thing; if a wind were to find its way through that doorway, they’d be in for an unpleasant night’s sleep.

  While Delie tinkered with the fire, Macel went to join her. Sam, rather pointedly, did not; he stalked past her without a word and stood under the big tree, staring out at the water. Delie sighed as he walked by, but did not comment.

  “What’s the deal with you two?” Macel asked, after a few seconds. Delie continued to whittle at the stone in her hand. Sparks stubbornly refused to grow the flame. “You’re supposed to be friends, but you seem to hate each other all of a sudden. I don’t understand what’s happened.”

  Delie dropped the stone to the ground and pocketed her knife. “You wouldn’t, would you? Men never do.”

  “Delie―”

  With a huff, Delie strode into the shack. The whole thing was entirely bemusing to Macel. Sam had been watching from his spot beneath the tree; his mouth opened and closed a bit like a fish. “It’s normally me that pisses her off,” he said, moving to join Macel by the fire. “What have you done?”

  “Spoke in your defence,” said Macel, wryly.

  Sam went off to bed a few minutes later. Macel wasn’t sure at first whether Sam actually intended to sleep, or whether he was just hoping to rile Delie up a little bit more. There were no sounds of arguing wafting on the night air to him, though, and neither of them stormed out of the shack, so presumably all was well. He stayed a bit. The fire crackled, and he poked at it with a stick. He wasn’t sure what it was supposed to achieve, but he’d seen people doing it before, and it seemed like the right thing to do.

  For a while Macel tried to put himself in Bess’ mind. What would she do when faced with this choice? Where would she go? Would she go anywhere at all? He briefly considered the possibility that Bess had been paralysed by choice here, and was still in the ruined village. It wasn’t realistic, though. They’d been here much of the evening, and not quietly; Bess would surely have heard them and come to investigate if she were here. Moreover, she would definitely have plumped for the building with a roof, given the choice. And that was certainly deserted before they’d arrived.

  Try as he might he couldn’t occupy Bess’ mindset. Her thoughts were closed to him, opaque and firmly barred. It was concerning. Had he started to forget her already? Or did he just not know her as well as he’d liked to think?

  When the smoke from the fire started to feel at his face, Macel turned to the shell of the village. Questions whorled in his mind. Who had lived here? When? Where had they gone? It was another confusing piece in a puzzle that made no sense. The salient detail was that the Eia crew were the first to come to Essegena. Yet there was no squaring that with the wealth of old architecture lying in wait for them. Somebody was lying. Maybe it was the Governor, or maybe it was somebody even higher up the chain. Macel didn’t really care. It was the same outcome either way.

  What concerned him more was where all the people were. Old as it was, the village they were in was far from ancient. At most it was a couple of centuries old. And yet it was totally abandoned. Why?

  It was distinctly possible that some threat from then was still here, circling them in the gloom, always out of sight but waiting to pounce and wipe them all out. When he looked out away from the tumbledown shack, when he really stared into the darkness, he almost began to imagine that he could see eyes in the night, watching him. And maybe that was doom-thinking, but Bess was alone out in the wild.

  The longer she was on her own, the more danger she was in.

  It was late indeed when Macel joined the others in the shack―tucking himself in the small space between Sam and the farthest wall. Such was the swirling of anxiety in his head that it was even later before he actually managed to nod off. Dark dreams pecked at him all the while. Uncommonly, he was the last to rise in the morning. In the forlorn remainder of the old shack, with the only light a narrow rectangle blazing through the gap where once a door had been, Macel was momentarily lost. Where am I? was the first question to his mind. It was answered, shortly after, by the previous day’s memories come swirling back. Regret came next―a whisper of it from the notion that it had been stupid to even try to find Bess, and a much larger yell of regret from his legs, burning in pain as two days of solid walking finally caught up to his muscles.

  The curiosity of a tiny pall of smoke―tiptoeing through the empty doorway and dissipating to nothingness as it rose for the shack’s cobwebbed ceiling―compelled Macel to rise. He followed it outside, to where the others were. Sam and Janna were around the rekindled remnants of last night’s fire, cooking breakfast in a steel pot. Where the pot had come from, Macel wasn’t sure. Sam had a talent for finding useful things. Delie watched them from a distance, arms folded, leaning against the fragmentary wall that had once been another of the village’s buildings. Macel went over to her, braced for prickles.

  “I’m concerned,” said Delie, seeing his approach. That was good, Macel thought. Concerned meant not prickly.

  “What are you concerned about?”

  “This village... I don’t know, I was turning it over in my head all night, and the more I think about it the more uncomfortable I get. It’s not even the fact that it’s all clearly manmade. So were the Obelisks. I think it’s pretty firmly decided that all that stuff the Unity said about us being the first people ever was bullshit, just a lie to sell us on the whole mission, and I’ve made peace with that.” Delie shrugged. “Who cares if we aren’t the first? I didn’t sign the form because I wanted to be some kind of pioneer, I signed it because I didn’t want to be home any more. But all this... I’ve seen villages like this, Macel, exactly like this. Forgotten. Abandoned. People abandon villages because they want to move to the big city, or because something kept killing them. Have you seen any big cities?”

  “So then what happened to the people here?” Macel finished the thought. “I wondered something similar.”

  “Do you remember, in the old stories, Thezeol Caldashal and the Knights of the Darkhand?” Delie laughed faintly. “The one I liked most was the Ride to Nephitrey. I remember every night I used to ask my mother to read it to me―that story, over all the others. And I always used to ask her about all the villages they found on the way to Nephitrey, with nobody in them. How can they be empty? Where are all the people? I was too young to realise that it was the same people that sacked Nephitrey who had killed everyone in those villages.”

  “That was your favourite story?” Macel asked. “I preferred the ones where the bad guys died and nobody innocent got hurt.”

  “I was jaded as a kid, okay? Anyway, my point is that I was asking exactly the same questions in my head last night. Where are all the people? And I should have been asking where whatever killed the people is.”

  “Perhaps nothing killed them,” said Macel. “Perhaps they just got bored of living here. Perhaps they wanted something else. We all did.”

  “So where did they go? We haven’t seen them, so even if they did all just up and leave... they died anyway.” Delie looked suddenly, piercingly into Macel’s eyes. “I think we should start back.”

  “No.” Macel shook his head. They hadn’t found Bess―how could they turn back so soon? “I think, if there’s something on Essegena that’s dangerous―be it the people who were here before us, or some monster that killed them and is going to kill us―we owe it to the rest of the colony to keep going and figure out what is going on here.” Delie looked unconvinced. She opened her mouth to argue, but Macel cut her off. “One more day,” he said, pleading. “Give me that, at least, before you give up.”

  For a moment he thought Delie was going to argue with him. Instead, she nodded. “One more day.”

  It had been Macel’s hope that the night would revitalise them and breathe new life into their search, new ideas. Apparently, that wasn’t the case. The four of them shared a miserable breakfast of overboiled bean rations in silence―Sam and Janna’s combined might was apparently worse at cooking than their own individual shortcomings. Even after the beans had all been eaten and the fire doused once again, nobody could come up with a good way of deciding which path to follow. Their night’s rest hadn’t been enough to turn random chance into a science. Delie, apparently exasperated by Sam’s third suggestion of putting it entirely to chance, asked Macel if Bess had ever said anything to him which might hint at the solution. They’d never talked about mazes, though. Insofar as they’d discussed navigation at all, it was just Macel marvelling at Bess’ apparent talent for orienteering, and not delving into the details of how she did it.

  It would have been too easy if she’d said she always followed the right-most road, or something.

  Sam’s next suggestion was that they all take a different route. Barring a couple of fatal flaws―that they’d have no way of knowing if somebody else had found the correct path, and that even splitting up they couldn’t cover every road―it was a solid suggestion. And by a solid suggestion, Delie pointed out, she meant that it was marginally more sensible than his earlier idea of waiting for the first wild animal to appear and then seeing which path the animal took.

  “At least I’m offering suggestions,” Sam pouted.

  They played it safe in the end. With no possibility of magically divining the correct route, and the day slipping away from them, they went straight across. It was inaction, really, Macel reasoned. Taking any of the other paths would have meant changing their direction of travel. This way if they’d taken the wrong route it wasn’t their fault.

  In truth, he knew, they’d just gambled. He hoped they’d gambled correctly.