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these years,’ Manda said sceptically, ‘nobody came to visit. And none of you tried to get back to Ararat to report on whatever it is you have learned.’
    ‘Some have come,’ Lange said defiantly. ‘Explorers, merchants blown off course in their ships, wrecked and looking for water – and bandits.’ His face set hard, and that eerie steel eye glinted. ‘Most paid their tolls, however.’
    ‘Tolls?’ Teif shook his great head. ‘You set tolls? Your grandfather must have had the genes of one of those Shuttle keepers back at Ararat. And, having come here, proved just as grasping and indolent.’
    Xaia touched his arm. ‘He’s just a fool, Teif,’ she murmured. ‘Him and his fathers. Look at this place. Perhaps he’s got a heap of obsolete money piled up in some hole in the ground, from all the tolls he’s collected. What can he spend it on? Don’t waste your anger.’
    Lange didn’t seem to have noticed Teif’s insults. ‘My grandfather was the first scholar ever to have come here. Even the Founders never set foot here, only sent their flying drones over, and they never travelled further to the north.’  
    Xaia frowned. ‘Are you sure? Does nobody live north of here?’
    ‘Of course not. The seasons are too harsh. And there is other evidence.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the village. ‘Sometimes we have – disputes. Fallings-out between brothers. You know the sort of thing. Then one or the other will walk off into exile.’ He waved a hand at the dusty panorama. ‘East, west, south – if they go that way, generally we hear from them again, even if it’s just a grovelling apology and a plea to be let back. But of those who went north, no trace has ever been seen again. Nobody lives up there – nobody can live there.’
    Xaia glared at him. ‘If the Founders never came this way, how can there be stories about a City of the Living Dead to the far north?’
    Lange said dismissively, ‘Whatever you’ve heard it’s all a legend – lies spun out for the credulous in inns and taverns. Travellers’ tales. This is the farthest north any human can travel. And this,’ he said, waving a hand at the Reef, ‘is the only trace left by the Dead on all this world, save for those ramshackle ruins on Little Jamaica.’
    Manda glared at him. ‘He’s the liar. Talking up this place, his own importance.’
    Lange watched them, expectant, calculating. ‘You would be welcome in my home, Lady. My wife makes a fine cactus tea which -’  
    ‘No,’ Xaia said briskly, growing angry. ‘We came to see yon Reef. The sooner we do that the sooner we can move on.’ She strode that way.
    Abandoning his horse, Lange hurried after her. ‘Madam, the question of the toll -’
    ‘Teif, make him rich beyond his grandfather’s dreams. We can afford it.’
    Glowering his reluctance, Teif took fistfuls of Brythonic jewellery from his pouch and ladled them into Lange’s grasping hands.

    Lange led them through the straggling wire that fenced off the Reef from non-payers of the toll.  
    The Reef itself was a shelf, protruding from a layered wall of rock that towered above their heads. The day was hot, and it was a relief to step underneath, and into its shade.  
    You could see at a glance that this particular stratum was different from the familiar crimson sandstone above and below it. Maybe a metre thick, it was a mottled black and grey, and seemed to be made of some harder material, for it protruded where the softer sandstone had worn away. And Xaia could see where the sandstone had been purposefully cut away above one part of the black shelf, leaving a kind of shallow cave only maybe half a metre high; a crude wooden ladder led up to it.  
    Some of that protruding black ledge had broken off, and a thin scree of pebbles, flakes and sheets lay at the foot of the cliff. Xaia inspected this rubble. She picked up one fragment, like a slate the size of her palm, with a strange, almost regular pentagonal pattern