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darkling plain, the huddle of lights. ‘Well, it will keep until morning.’ Which was only a few hours away, so short were the nights this soon after the solstice.
    Teif nodded. ‘I’ll post a guard.’

    After a few hours’ sleep Xaia prepared to cross the last couple of kilometres to the Reef. She was accompanied by Chen, Manda, Teif, and a dozen warriors. Teif, never trustful, had them watched by scouts positioned behind the ridge by the oasis.
    As they neared the village, a man came out to meet them, riding high on a massive, slow-walking horse. Peering beyond him, Xaia saw a few people in the village itself, a woman standing with her arms defiantly folded, ragged-looking children peeking from behind doors. Fields had been cut into the dusty ground, and pigs and scrawny goats wandered, untethered. Judging from the number of shacks and lean-tos there could be no more than a hundred people living here.
    Teif said, ‘I wonder how they overwinter. Cellars, I imagine.’ He growled at Chan, ‘Why didn’t you tell us this lot was here?’
    ‘I didn’t know,’ Chan insisted. ‘I told you. Nobody from Ararat has been here as long as I’ve been alive, longer.’
    ‘Give thanks for the idleness of Ararat, Teif,’ Xaia said, grinning. ‘If the secrets of this place had been picked bare by generations of scholars, there would be nothing left for us to discover, would there?’
    As the villager approached Xaia saw he man wore a uniform of some black cloth laced with silver – but the uniform was shabby and patched, and didn’t quite fit his lanky frame. And the horse, huge though it was, was no warhorse like Xaia’s party’s but a draught animal, heavy-set and plodding. Still he came alone, Xaia noted with some respect, facing a party escorted by several heavily-armed warriors.
    The man unrolled a kind of rope ladder and climbed down from his huge horse. He patted its muzzle, reaching up to do it, and left it grazing at a sparse stand of grass. He walked up to Xaia, clearly identifying her as the leader. ‘Welcome. My name is Ossay Lange. I am the leader of this place, this scientific colony devoted to the study of the Reef, which we call Reeftown.’  
    Xaia thought she recognised his accent as a distorted form of the dialect spoken in Ararat. He was perhaps fifty, though his face was so weather-beaten it was hard to tell; he wore his greying hair long and tied back in a bun. He was missing an eye, she saw; a ball of what looked like steel, grey and moist, sat in one ruined socket.  
    Xaia introduced herself as a leader of Zeeland.
    Chan challenged Lange. ‘What scientific colony? I’m from Ararat. I work in the Shuttle Shrine. I know the curators, the scholars. There’s no record of such a colony, or even a recent expedition to the Reef.’
    ‘Boy, my grandfather led that expedition. His name was Heyney Fredrik Lange. Look it up when you go back home. This was his uniform. Surely you recognise it.’
    Chan shrugged. ‘Heyney Fredrik was, in fact, the first to discover the Reef, or rather to rediscover it after the Founders’ initial survey with their automatic flying machines.’
    ‘But he never came back to report it.’
    Lange said, ‘He suffered vicissitudes. Several of his companions died before he got here. And when he did reach the Reef he found a small settlement, a forerunner of Reeftown here. The people were drawn here by the aquifer. What they were doing so far north in the first place, nobody knows. He settled with them, intending to stay and survey the Reef for a season or two.’
    ‘But he never left.’
    Lange shrugged. ‘He found happiness here. Formed a family. He wasn’t sure he could bring his children back across the wastes to Ararat.’ He glanced across at the broken strata. ‘Besides, the Reef is here , not back at Ararat. He was a scholar. He devoted his life to a study of the Reef. And when he died his son continued the work – my father. And when he died -’
    ‘And in all