Madimi lay in her cradle, her eyes and her deeper senses fixed on the screen before her. It showed to her eyes the vista of the Night Land seen from the great Tower of Observation, itself atop the Monstruwacan citadel of Augyre Siege, eight miles above the ashes, stones and warped life of that place. She did not watch solely with her eyes; there was a deeper perception that she exercised under the guidance of the sovereign Order. With her subtler senses, she could see, almost feel the glimmerings and vibrations of life down on the Land, the twists of the aether that marked the passage of more strange and inimical beings… and always, always the great overbearing masses of the Five Watchers that, surely, orchestrated the little puppet-plays that were enacted about them. No one else, save her, could have borne that vision.

Madimi was thirteen years old, her identity on the cusp of adulthood, the strangeness of the Land more familiar to her than the society of her brothers and sisters. In her times of recreation she would talk with a weariness and familiarity about the things that she had seen and listeners would see her fascination and think that she was already half-lost to the Land and withdraw a little, stirred by atavistic traces of superstition. Lately she had become aware of this and did not know if she should care.

“Steady,” warned her handler, ready to pull her back from her spyglass should she falter.

“I beg your pardon sir, I was distracted.”

“ ‘Distracted’?”

“It is of no account.”

“Then continue.”

Turning back to the oval screen she let her mind relax, and like the needle of a compass her attention turned naturally and immediately to the Seventeen as they marched across the Grey Dunes.