13
We’d been planning for many months. Horace had seen something on his pilgrimage into the land of Nod with Sam’s body, before he’d fallen into the crevasse. Up on a ridge bare of everything but the tall grasses, high above the dry scrub of the wasteland, there was a white house. If that wasn’t strange enough, the house had a tall chimney, and on the chimney was painted the same sign we’d been marked with in the queen’s camp.
I asked Margaret about this, because she was wise, and told her that I was mystified that such a thing could be way out here in Gehenna. She said it might be that the early resistance to the cities had adopted an ancient symbol as its emblem and that the queen’s strange religion, though not widely known before the Awakening, might have become a kind of emblem too.
