Centuries had passed since its founders abandoned the deep-frozen harbour on the White Sea that had given it its name. Peoples from all over the north had joined their caravan as it journeyed on and on, creeping across the world’s steep face in endless search of fuel and pasturage. Their fighting men and landships were away battling the Movement’s northern army in the Fuel Country, but still the empire rolled, the huge heart-fortress of the Great Carn grinding along amid a ring of smaller traction-houses, and behind them the Kometsvansen, a tail of barges and wagons and mammoths and reindeer herds which stretched for eighty miles across the tundra. If there had still been people in the Ancients’ legendary skycastles, thought Cluny Morvish, they would have been able to look down from space and wonder at the Kometsvansen as it went creeping across the snows of Heklasrand like a line of ants; the biggest parade the world had ever seen. How astonished they would be at the power and glory of Arkhangelsk!
