Before that change, after the Merchants’ Revolt, parts of the boulevards had been built over, leaving mere streets between the enclave walls and the new buildings and a much-reduced central avenue in what had been the centre of each boulevard. Three generations later, some of the nobles still complained.
The ducal palace of Hemerje was an imposing, tall-ceilinged, solid-feeling building with dark, thick, heavy- sounding wooden floors. The compound’s high walls enclosed an ancient garden full of shaped lawns, shady trees, tinkling rills, quiet ponds and an abundant kitchen garden.
Aclyn, the lady Blisk, Oramen’s mother, met him in the hall, rushing up to him and taking him by the shoulders.
“Oramen! My little boy! Can it really be? But look at you! How you’ve grown! So much like your father! Come in, come in; my Masyen would have loved to see you but he is
“Mother,” Oramen said, taking her in his arms. “I’ve longed to see you. How are you?”
“I am well, I am well. Stop now, you silly, or you’ll crush my dress,” she told him, laughing and pressing him away with both hands.
Aclyn was older and heavier than he’d pictured her. He supposed this was inevitable. Her face, though more lined and puffier than it had been both in her portraits and his imagination, seemed to glow. She was dressed as though she was going to a ball, albeit with an apron over her gown. Her auburn hair was piled and powdered in the latest fashion.
“Of course,” she said, “I’m still recovering from little Mertis — that was dreadful; you men, you have no idea. I told my Masyen he was never to touch me again! Though I was only saying that, of course. And the journey here was simply ghastly, it went on for ever, but — this is Rasselle! So much to see and do! So many arcades and shops and receptions and balls! Who would be in low spirits here? Will you eat with us?” she asked. “The rhythm of the days here is so bizarre! We still dine at odd times; what must people think of us? We were about to sit down to lunch in the garden, the weather is so mild. Be our guest, will you?”
“Gladly,” he told her, taking off his gloves and handing those and his travelling cloak to Neguste. They walked along a well-lit hall, the dark floors swaddled in thick carpets. He adjusted his pace to hers, slowing. Servants were carrying heavy-looking boxes out of another room; they stood back to let Oramen and his mother pass. “Books,” Aclyn said, with what sounded like distaste. “All completely incomprehensible, of course, even if one did want to read them. We’re turning the library into another receiving room; we’ll try selling those old things but we’ll just burn the rest. Have you seen tyl Loesp?”
“I thought I might,” Oramen said, peeking into the top of one of the book-filled boxes. “However, I’m told now he has just left Rasselle to visit some distant province. Our communications here would appear still to be erratic.”
“Isn’t he a marvel? Tyl Loesp is
“I do, though only my baggage has made arrival there so far.”
“So you came here first! How sweet! This way; come and meet your new little brother.”
They walked down to the scented terraces.
Oramen stood on a high tower within the vast gorge of recession formed by the Hyeng-zhar, looking out to another great building which was, if the engineers and excavationers had it right, about to fall, finally and fatally undermined by the surging water piled frothing round its base, much of it descending from the Fountain Building nearby — this would be the second construction whose fate that bizarre edifice had hastened. The building he stood on was thin and dagger-shaped, allegedly still well founded; the little circular platform beneath him sat at the top like a finger-ring lowered on to the very tip of the dagger. The building he was looking at was tall and thin too, but flat like a sword blade, its edges glinting in the tenuous, grey-blue light of Kiesestraal.
The fading star was almost the only light left now; a thin band of sky, just a lining across the horizon, shone to farpole, in the direction of Rasselle. To facing, where Clissens and Natherley had disappeared some days earlier, only the most imaginative eye could detect any remnant of their passing. A few people, perhaps with slightly different eyesight to the norm, claimed they could still glimpse a hint of red left over there, but nobody else did.
Still, Oramen thought, one’s eyes adjusted, or one’s entire mind did. The view was dull under Kiesestraal’s meagre light, but most things remained visible. The twinned effect of Clissens and Natherley being in the sky together had been to make the weather oppressively hot at their zenith, he’d heard, and the light had been too much for many eyes to bear. They might be better off under this more rationed portion of illumination. He shivered, pulled his collar up as a biting wind snagged itself round the tower’s thin summit.
There had been snow, though it had not lain. The river was cold, ice starting to form upstream in the quieter pools along its banks. Further upstream, at its source, reports had it that the Higher Sulpine Sea — the first part of the river system to experience the complete disappearance of the two Rollstars from its skies — was beginning to freeze over.
The air was rarely still now, even well away from the Falls themselves, where the stupendous weight of falling water created its own crazed turmoil of forever swirling gusts. These could and did focus themselves into lateral tornadoes capable of sweeping men and equipment, whole sections of railway track and entire trains of carriages away with almost no warning.
Now, as the great wide strip of land on the Ninth denied all but Kiesestraal’s light gradually cooled while the rest of the continent about it remained temperate, winds blew nearly constantly, whining gears in the vast engine of the atmosphere as it attempted to balance chilled and heated parcels of air, creating gales that lasted for days on end and great sandstorms that lifted whole landscapes of sand, silt and dust from hundreds of kilometres away and threw them across the sky, robbing the land of what little light there was and hindering work on the Falls’ excavations as the generators, power lines and lights struggled to pierce the encompassing gloom and machines ground to a stop, workings jammed with dust. The larger sand blizzards were capable of dumping so much material into the river upstream that — according to the latest storm’s direction and the colour of the desert from which it had lifted its cargo of swirling grains — the waters of the cataract turned dun, grey, yellow, pink or dark, blood red.
Today there were no veils of sand or even ordinary cloud, the day might have been dark as night. The river still plunged over the cap rock and into the gorge in an ocean of falling and its roaring shook the rock and air, though Oramen had noticed that in a sense he hardly heard the noise now and had quickly become used to modulating his voice to the right level to be heard without thinking about it. Even in his quarters, a small compound in the Settlement a kilometre from the gorge, he could hear the voice of the cataract.
His accommodation, formerly that of the Archipontine of the Hyeng-zharia Mission — the man in charge of the monks who had chosen death rather than exile from their posts — was formed from several luxuriously appointed railway carriages surrounded by a set of sturdy but movable barbed walls which could be shifted across the sands and scrub to keep pace with the carriages as they were needed; a whole system of broad-gauge tracks lay beside the gorge and formed the most organised and disciplined district of the mobile city. As the gorge recessed and the Falls moved upstream, more tracks were laid ahead and every fifty days or so the official part of the Settlement, almost all of it on carriages and rail trucks, moved to follow the cataract’s unstoppable progress upriver. The remainder of the city — the unofficial districts of merchants, miners and labourers and all their associated supporting crews of bar people, bankers, suppliers, prostitutes, hospitals, preachers, entertainers and guards — moved in its own spasmodic jerks, roughly in time with the Settlement’s bureaucratic heart.
Oramen’s compound always lay near the canal that was forever being dug along the bank parallel with the river, ahead of the Falls’ retreat, keeping pace with the railway tracks. The canal provided drinking and toilet water for the Settlement and power for the various hydraulic systems which lowered and raised men and equipment into and out of the gorge, and removed plunder. At night, on the odd occasions when the winds were stilled, Oramen thought he could hear, even above the distant thunder of the Falls, the canal’s quiet gurglings.
How quickly he had become used to this strange, forever temporary place. He had missed it, bizarrely, during
