A pair of glittering swords appeared in the dancer’s hands, ghostly blades that Camille had no doubt were as deadly as they were beautiful. The shadow woman spun through the air with a shriek of unimaginable fury, her swords incandescent as she somersaulted towards Camille.

With a gasp of disconnection, Camille snatched her hand from the object, her flesh pale and cold, trembling with the aftereffects of powerful emotions. Her breath came in short hikes, and she looked down at the buried object with a mixture of fear and amazement.

Her flesh crawled with chills, and a feathered breath turned to vapour before her. The incongruous sight of breath on such a hot day made her laugh, the sound nervous and unconvincing.

“So what is it?” asked a man’s voice, startling her. She jumped in surprise.

“Throne, Lemuel! Don’t sneak up on people like that!”

“Sneak up?” he asked, looking down into the trench. “Trust me, my dear, a man my size doesn’t sneak.”

She forced her face to smile, though the memory of the dancer’s sadness and fury was still etched in her features.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You startled me.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Camille, feeling her heart rate returning to normal. “I could use a break anyway. Here, help me out.”

Lemuel reached down into the trench with his arm extended, and she took hold of his meaty forearm as he took hold of her slender one.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” she said.

Lemuel hauled her upwards, and she scrambled up the sides of the trench, hooking her knee over the edge and hauling herself the rest of the way.

“Dignified, huh?” said Camille, scooting onto her belly before pushing herself to her feet.

“Like a dancer,” said Lemuel, and Camille flinched.

“So, what is it?” asked Lemuel again, pointing at the buried object.

Camille looked down at the battle helmet, the violence of the woman’s shriek still echoing within her skull.

She shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said.

THE PIT HER servitors had dug on the outskirts of the Aghoru settlement was a hundred metres by sixty-five. Initial excavations had revealed a promising number of artefacts that were not of Aghoru or Imperial origin. Half of those servitors now stood in immobile ranks beneath a wide awning set up at the edge of the pit.

The idea of servitors needing to take breaks had amused Camille no end until Adept Spuler of the Mechanicum told her that he had been forced to decommission six of them due to heat exhaustion. Servitors didn’t feel fatigue or hunger or thirst, and so continued to work beyond the limits of endurance.

Still, they had achieved more in one day than Camille could have hoped for.

Her dig site lay to the east of an Aghoru settlement named Acaltepec, three hundred kilometres north of the Mountain, and this landscape was as lush as the salt flats were barren. The settlement’s name meant “water house” in the local tongue, and Camille had come to understand that the term referred to the oval-shaped canoes used to fish the lake alongside which the sunken village was built.

The dwellings of the Aghoru were dug down into the earth, and provided shade from the sun and a near-constant temperature, making them surprisingly comfortable places to live in. Camille had been welcomed into Acaltepec’s homes, finding its people quiet and polite, the barrier of language easily crossed by small gestures of kindness and courtesy.

Camille’s servitors had dug into a series of structures that had long been abandoned. The best the lexicographers could approximate for the Aghoru’s explanation of why they had been abandoned was “bad dreams”. Adept Spuler had dismissed such claims as primitive superstition or a meaning lost in translation, but having touched the alien battle helm, Camille wasn’t so sure.

She had enjoyed her time on this world, relishing the relaxed, unhurried pace of life and the lack of history pressing in from every individual. She had no doubt that life was hard for the people of Aghoru, but for her it was a welcome break from the hectic life of a remembrancer of the 28th Expedition.

Masked tribesmen swatted droning insects in the shade of tall trees hung with bright purple fruit, while the women worked on the shoreline, fashioning long fishing spears. Even the children were masked, a sight that had unsettled Camille at first, but like most things, it became part of the scenery after a while.

Wild plants and fields of sun-ripened crops waved in the breeze, and Camille felt a peace she hadn’t known in a long time. There was history to this world, but it was buried deep, far deeper than any world she had set foot on before. She relished the sensation of enjoying a world simply for what she could see of it instead of feeling its history intruding on her every waking moment.

Lemuel knelt beside a long tarpaulin where the day’s finds had been laid out, and lifted a broken piece of something that resembled a glazed ceramic disc.

“A regular treasure trove,” said Lemuel dryly. “I can see why I came now.”

Camille smiled. “It isa treasure trove actually. The artefacts here aren’t human, I’m sure of that.”

“Not human?” asked Lemuel, rapping his knuckles against the flat edge of the disc. “Well, well, how interesting. So what are they then?”

“I don’t know, but whoever they were, they died out tens of thousands of years ago.”

“Really? This looks like it was made yesterday.”

“Yeah, whatever it’s made of, it doesn’t seem to age.”

“Then how do you know how old it is?” asked Lemuel, staring right at her.

Did he know? No, how could he?

Camille hesitated. “The depth of the find and earned instinct I guess. I’ve spent long enough digging around the ruins of Terra to get a good instinct for how old things are.”

“I suppose,” he said, turning the disc over in his hands and looking at the edge where it was broken. “So what do you think this is made of? It’s smooth like porcelain, but it looks like an organic internal structure, like crystal or something.”

“Let me see,” she said, and Lemuel handed her the disc. His fingers brushed the skin above her glove and she felt a flicker of something pass between them, seeing a white-walled villa surrounded by sprawling orchards at the foot of a mountain with a wide, flat summit. An ebony-skinned woman with a sorrowful expression waved from a roof veranda.

“Are you all right?” asked Lemuel, and the moment passed.

Camille shook off the sadness of her vision.

“I’m fine; it’s just the heat,” she said. “It doesn’t look manufactured, does it?”

“No,” agreed Lemuel, standing up straight and brushing dust from his banyan. “Look at the lines running through it. They’re lines of growth. This wasn’t pressed in a mould or stamped by a machine. This material, whatever it is, grew and was shaped into this form. It reminds me of the work of a man I knew in Sangha back on Terra, Babechi his name was. He was a quiet man, but he could work wonders with things that grew, and where I came from, that was a rare gift. He called himself an arbosculptor, and he could grow trees and plants into shapes that were simply beautiful.”

Lemuel smiled, lost in reminiscence. “With just some pruning shears, timber boards, wire and tape, Babechi could take a sapling and turn it into a chair, a sculpture or an archway. Anything you wanted really. I had an entire orchard of cherry plum, crepe myrtle and poplar grown and shaped to resemble the grand dining chamber of Narthan Dume’s Palace of Phan Kaos for a charity dinner.”

Camille eyed Lemuel to see if he was joking, but he seemed completely serious.

“Sounds extravagant,” she said.

“Oh, it was, ridiculously so,” laughed Lemuel. “My wife pitched a fit when she found out how much it cost. She called me a hypocrite, but it was so very beautiful while it lasted.”