Midnight moved ahead with far less difficulty, and with considerably more elegance. She passed from one fragment of stone to the next, choosing only those few remnants that still possessed enough integrity to bear her weight. She found them with the same instinctive precision she used when stalking prey; one brief assessment, the slightest transfer of weight through a forepaw, and then commitment. Yves watched her spring from a tilted slab to an exposed ridge and from there onto the broken length of a column within no more than five seconds. Then she had to wait another fifty for him to catch up. By the time he did, she had already selected her path through the next stretch of ruin.
As they climbed, the wrongness of the place sharpened into structure. The ruins bore no resemblance to the crude mudwork of the northern desert peoples, nor did they correspond to any stone architecture Yves knew from 
, except perhaps in distant echoes of Ayenfora Academy. There was a single tower there that had been raised according to similarly rigid geometric principles; not in ornament or material, but in the severe divisions of mass and proportion by which something already immense had been made to appear impossibly more imposing. That said, there was no surviving sense of grandeur here. Destruction lay everywhere, though not as destruction usually did. There was no sign of civic order diminished by time, no recognisable arrangement that slowly surrendered to abandonment. Neither did this resemble the aftermath of siege or spell or monstrous passage. Beasts tore through structures. Giants crushed them. Wizards left tell-tale signatures of their spectra, or at the very least some directional evidence of whatever they had been trying to accomplish. Even indiscriminate violence usually betrayed where it had begun, what it had struck and how force had travelled through what remained. This did not. No, this was not a place broken by any intelligible form of violence.
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