There were ruins of the Ancients all over the fertile land named for the Arbonne River that watered it: columns by the roadside, temples on cliffs by the sea or in the mountain passes, foundations of houses in the cities, bridge stones tumbled into the mountain streams and some still standing, some still in use. Many of the roads they rode or walked today had been built by the Ancients long ago. The great high road beside the Arbonne itself, from the sea at Tavernel north to Barbentain and Lussan and beyond them into and through the mountains to Gorhaut, was one of the old straight roads. All along its length were marker stones, some standing, many toppled into the roadside grass, with words upon them in a language no one living knew, not even the scholars of the university.

The Ancients were everywhere in Arbonne, the simple sight of one of their ruins or artifacts, however unexpected, would not have drawn a cry from Ariane.

But the arch by Lake Dierne was something else again.

Rising ten times the height of a man, and almost as broad, it stood alone in the countryside at the end of its avenue of elms, seeming to master and subdue the gentle, vine-clad landscape between the forests and the lake, Which, Aelis had long suspected, was precisely the purpose for which it had been raised. The friezes sculpted on both the near face and the far were of war and conquest: armoured men in chariots carrying round shields and heavy swords, battling others armed with only clubs and spears. And the warriors with the clubs were dying on the friezes, their pain made vivid in the sculptor's art. On the sides of the arch were images of men and women clad in animal skins, manacled, their heads bowed and averted in defeat, slaves. Whoever they were, wherever they now had gone, the Ancients who had set their marks upon this land had not come in peace.