have done some modification to his skin, because it was not charring, not melting, not burned. There were no holes in him. His hair was intact.
His hair was like gold wire. It was not burned.
I said, my voice all hollow with surprise, 'It's Victor. The phone is useful to him...'
The voice over Vanity's cell phone said, 'This is Victor. I've lost power to my hull...'
Colin blenched. 'His... 'hull'? Did he say-?'
'... certain of my nerves and muscles will take time to repair. Prop me up so that my eye is facing East The signal controlling the gun came from-'
Vanity interrupted, 'Leader! We're being watched!'
I said, 'Leader! A hole is opening in space-time. It's the enemy Phaeacian.'
I was looking at Quentin, and saw, about two miles behind him, a tower set with stained- glass windows, rising suddenly out of the ground like a piston. It was near the edge of the burned area.
Trees and soil were carried upward on the roof of the tower as it rose, and nodded over the tower sides like the crown of a colossus.
A smaller tower, this one made of brown stone, with narrow archer slits instead of windows, rose up to one side of the first tower, throwing soil and rocks each way. Dirt, like black water, dribbled and trickled down its eaves.
A third tower, this one in the burned zone, reared aloft out of the earth, carrying a cluster of stumps and ash on its head. A fourth tower a hundred yards beyond reared up, but was caught in a tangle of shattered and smoldering tree trunks, and could only get half its windows above the ground.
Quentin's eyes were focused behind me: Awe and astonishment had robbed him of expression.
I turned. There were more towers behind me. At least two dozen, rearing up, taller than the burned trees around them.
And trapdoors were opening, some slowly, some quickly. Not one, not ten, but hundreds. I saw doors an acre wide, rising up, carrying huge segments of the landscape with them, lifting rocks and tree stumps. Deep in these vast doors could be seen the heads of staircases fit for giants, inset with ivory ramparts, five hundred yards wide. There were battlements and windows like gems being pulled up to the surface, carried by the posts that lifted up these titanic roofs.
And beyond these hundred doors, one vast door that ran from horizon to horizon made itself known.
The hills opened.
Imagine that all the mountains and hills that embraced a quarter of the horizon, as far to the north and south as could be seen without turning, were not hills at all, but the rooftops and turrets and tower-tops of a buried city: and not merely a city, but also its suburbs, and a goodly section of the surrounding farms and villages.
Now imagine that all the million columns supporting the roofs and towers, halls, palaces, esplanades, and wintergar-dens of that underground countryside moved upward with one ponderous, silent, earthquake-potent thrust Those roofs and tower-tops with all the countless tons of rock atop them, and all the wide acres of burned forest-tops crowning them, were all moved upward with untroubled, infinite strength.
That was what we saw.
Vast pillars of ivory and marble pushed the miles of hillside, rock and trees and stream and woods, birds' nests and salt lick and brush, earth and stone and steaming wreckage of forest stump, acre upon acre, upward. A hundred yards aloft, two hundred, more.
Upward and upward. The underside of the hollow hills gleamed with the reflections of that ceiling, like a firmament, of a world that shone up from underfoot.
We saw the tops of pillars the size of skyscrapers holding up a sky of stone. Light from beneath, bright as the sun, but colored like moonlight seen through rippling water, played back and forth across the underside of this pillar-upheld firmament.
Like jagged teeth in the wide gap between the lower brink and the upper hill-covered roof now held aloft, we saw the many fortresses and walls, overlooking wide passes between them. These passes were the heads of roads and highways leading down into that underground universe. Only the tops of the roads were visible to us, but the shape of the mighty slope down which they rolled could be detected from the contour of the pillars, minarets, and hanging gardens that overtopped them. The upper battlements of the chain of fortress walls fell lower the farther they were from the lip of the pit-or should I call it the boundary of the landscape- and the roadways were no doubt parallel to them.
There were pennants and battle flags hanging from every window and archer slit. Siege guns peered from over the fortress walls, and sixteen-inch guns, something that would grace the heaviest dreadnought afloat, looked down from pillboxes and fortified positions beyond.
And from this chasm, roaring and murmuring, came a noise of many voices calling out.
My ear heard only a roar of ocean noise. A higher sense detected an inner meaning: 'Death!
