township here, but whether by train or caude it is two days away. More in bad weather.”
“Well, we shall have the telegraph line soon, and while I am not present you have my authority here, Poatas. I offer you complete power over the entire Falls, in my name.” Tyl Loesp waved one hand dismissively. “In bookish legality it may be in the name of the Prince Regent, but he is still little more than a boy. For the moment — and it may, in time, seem a long moment — his future power is mine now, entirely. You understand me?”
Poatas smiled parsimoniously. “My whole life and every work has taught me there is a natural order to things, a rightful stratification of authority and might. I work with it, sir, never seek to overthrow it.”
“Good,” tyl Loesp said. “That is as well. I have in addition thought to provide you with a titular head of excavations, someone I’d rather have quite near to me but not at my side, when I’m in Rasselle. Indeed, their presence here might aid the recruitment of many a Sarl.”
“But they would be above me?”
“In theory. Not in effect. I emphasise: their seniority to yourself will be most strictly honorary.”
“And who would this person be?” Poatas asked.
“Why, the very one we just talked of. My charge, the Prince Regent, Oramen.”
“Is that wise? You say he’s a boy. The Falls can be a pestilential place, and the Settlement a lawless, dangerous one, especially with the brethren gone.”
Tyl Loesp shrugged. “We must pray the WorldGod keeps him safe. And I have in mind a couple of knights I intend to make the essence of his personal guard. They will take all care of him.”
Poatas thought for a moment, nodding, and wiped a little moisture from the stick he leant on. “Will he come?” he asked doubtfully, looking out towards the great, gradually revealing spaces of the Hyeng-zhar’s awesomely complicated, twenty-kilometre-wide gorge of recession.
Tyl Loesp looked out to the gorge complex, and smiled. He had never been here until their armies had invaded and — having heard so much about its peerless beauty and fabulous, humbling grandeur from so many people — had been determined not to be impressed when he did finally see the place. The Hyeng-zhar, however, seemed to have had other ideas. He had indeed been stunned, awestruck, rendered speechless.
He had seen it from various different angles over the past week or so, including from the air, on a lyge (though only from on high, and only in the company of experienced Falls-fliers, and still he could entirely understand why it was such a dangerous place to fly; the urge to explore, to descend and see better was almost irresistible, and knowing that so many people had died doing just that, caught in the tremendous rolling currents of air and vapour issuing from the Falls, hauling them helplessly down to their deaths, seemed like an irrelevance).
Poatas himself expressed some astonishment at the Falls’ latest show. Truly, they had never been more spectacular, certainly not in his life, and, from all that he could gather from the records, at no point in the past either.
A plateau — perhaps, originally, some sort of vast, high plaza in the Nameless City, kilometres across — was being slowly revealed by the furiously tumbling waters as they exposed what was — by the general agreement of most experts and scholars — the very centre of the buried city. The Falls, in their centre section, four or five kilometres across, were in two stages now; the first drop was of a hundred and twenty metres or so, bringing the waters crashing and foaming and bursting down across the newly revealed plateau and surging among the maze of buildings protruding from that vast flat surface.
Holes in the plateau — many small, several a hundred metres across or more — drained to the darkened level beneath, dropping the mass of water to the gorge floor through a tortuous complexity of bizarrely shaped buildings, ramps and roadways, some intact, some canted over, some undercut, some altogether ruptured and displaced, fallen down and swept away to lie jammed and caught against still greater structures and the shadowy bases of the mass of buildings towering above.
By now the mists had cleared away from nearly half the Falls, revealing the site’s latest wonder; the Fountain Building. It was a great gorge-base-level tower by the side of the new plateau. It was still perfectly upright, appeared to be made entirely from glass, was a hundred and fifty metres tall and shaped like a kind of upwardly stretched sphere. Some chance configuration of the tunnels and hidden spaces of the Falls upstream had contrived to send water up into it from underneath, and at such an extremity of pressure that it came surging out in great muddily white fans and jets from all its spiralled levels of windows, bursting with undiminished force even from its very summit, showering the smaller buildings, tubes, ramps and lower water courses all around it with an incessant, battering rain.
“Well, sir?” Poatas demanded. “Will he? This boy-prince of yours; will he come?”
Tyl Loesp had sent the command to Aclyn’s husband just two days earlier, informing the fellow that he was to be the new mayor of the city of Rasselle; this would be a permanent position and he must bring his entire household with him from far Kheretesuhr with the utmost dispatch, on pain of losing both this once-in-a-lifetime promotion, and the regent’s regard.
“Oh, I think he will,” tyl Loesp said, with a small smile.
18. The Current Emergency
“Bilpier, fourth of the Heisp Nariscene colony system, is small, solid, cold-cored, habiformed to Nariscene specifications within the last centieon, dynamically O2 atmosphered, one hundred per cent Nariscene and seventy-four per cent surface bubble-hived.”
Holse and Ferbin were lounging in the sitting area of their generously proportioned suite of cabins within
Ferbin had thought to ask the ship for more information. “Hmm,” he said, little the wiser. “I seek a man called Xide Hyrlis,” he continued. “Do you know if he is there, in this Bilpier place?”
“I do not,”
Ferbin and Holse exchanged looks. This was news. “You have no idea how long our journey will be after we leave Bilpier?” Ferbin asked.
“Given you travel aboard a Cat.5 SwellHull, your destination is unlikely to be within the Heisp system,” the ship replied. “The Cat.5 SwellHull is a long-range interstellar class.”
Ferbin nodded thoughtfully. “Oh!” he said, as though just thinking of something. “And can you get a message to a fellow named Oramen, house of Hausk, city of Pourl, the Eighth, Sursamen—”
“That is within a mandated Nariscene Protectorate,” the ship interrupted smoothly, “and so subject to special clearance provisions regarding direct contact between individuals. Specific instructions forming part of your associated travel particulars mean that I may not even begin the relevant message process. I am sorry.”
Ferbin sighed. He went back to watching screenage of bat-like aliens hunting flying, twisty, gossamery things in a Towerless place of soaring yellow-pink canyons beneath pastel clouds.
“Worth a try, sir,” Holse told him, then returned to his own screen, which showed a sort of map-with-depth called a hologram depicting the courses of Nariscene and associated spaceships.
The galaxy was linked like chain mail, he thought. It was all loops and circles and long, joined-up threads and looked like that old-fashioned stuff some old knights from the deepest, darkest shires and valleys still wore when they ventured to court, even if they rarely polished it in case it got worn away.
