the five days he had spent in Rasselle and the four days it had taken travelling there and back. It was something like the effect of the cataract’s stupendous voice; that vast, never-ending roar. You got so used to it so quickly that when you left the place, its absence seemed like an emptiness inside.
He perfectly understood why so many of the people who came here never left, not for long, not without always wanting to come back again. He wondered if he ought to leave before he too became habituated to the Hyeng-zhar as though to some fierce drug. He wondered if he really wanted to.
The mist still climbed into the slate skies. The vapours curled and twisted round the exposed towers — most plumbly upright, many tipped, just as many fallen — of the Nameless City. Beyond the doomed height of the flat- bladed building, the Fountain Building still stood like some insane ornament from a god’s garden, scattering slow billows of water all around it. On the far side of that building, visible now and again through the spray and mist, could be seen the horizon-flat, dark-skirted edge which marked the start of the great plateau situated halfway up the height of the taller buildings and which many of the Falls’ scholars and experts thought marked the centre of the long-buried alien city. A wall of water tipped over that edge, falling like a pleated curtain of dark cream to the base of the gorge, raising yet more spray and mist.
As Oramen watched, something flashed dim blue behind the waters, lighting them up from inside. He was startled for a second. The explosions of the quarriers and blasters were usually only heard not seen; when they were visible in the darkness the flash was yellow-white, sometimes orange if a charge did not explode fully. Then he realised it was probably a cutting crew; one of the more recent discoveries the Deldeyn had made was how to slice through certain metals using electric arcs. This could produce ghostly blue flashes like the one he’d just seen.
On the other hand, the excavationers and plunderers — an easily unnerved and highly superstitious bunch at the best of times, by all accounts — had reported seeing even more strange and unusual things than they normally did, now that the only external light came from Kiesestraal and the focus of so much of their work and attention had shifted to the buildings under the kilometres-wide plaza, where it would have been dark enough even had the days been of normal brightness.
Working in that doubled darkness, by crude, unreliable lights, in an environment that could change at any moment and kill you in so many sudden ways, surrounded by the ghostly remains of buildings of near unimaginable antiquity, the wonder was that men ventured there at all, not that they experienced or imagined anything out-of- the-ordinary. This was an out-of-the-ordinary place, Oramen thought. Few places he’d heard of were more so.
He raised the heavy binoculars to his eyes and searched the view for people. Whenever you looked, wherever you looked carefully enough, the Falls — so vast, so impersonal, so furiously of a scale indifferent to that of humanity — proved to be swarming with human figures, animals and activity. He searched in vain, though. The field glasses were the best available, with great wide lenses at the front to gather as much light as possible, so that, if anything, they made the view lighter than it really was, but even so it was still too dim to see in sufficient detail to make out individual humans.
“Here you are! Sir, you give us the slip and the conniptions in equal measure, running off like that.” Neguste Puibive arrived on the viewing platform holding various bags and a large umbrella. He leaned back to the doorway. “He’s here!” he shouted down the stairs. “Earl Droffo also in attendance, sir,” he told Oramen. “Happily not Messrs V & B, though.” Oramen smiled. Neguste was no more a friend to Vollird and Baerth than he was.
Oramen had told both knights that their presence was unnecessary. He didn’t really see the need for such closely dedicated guarding; the main dangers posed in the gorge itself were not caused by people and he just didn’t go into the parts of the Settlement where the violence happened. Still, the two men accompanied him, sullenly, whenever he didn’t take particular care to lose them, claiming as excuse that if anything did happen to Oramen, tyl Loesp would crack their skulls like eggs.
Oramen spent quite a lot of time avoiding people he found disagreeable; General Foise, who was in overall charge of the security and guarding of the Settlement and the Falls, was one such. The man Fanthile had described as entirely tyl Loesp’s was in no way sinister and gave nary a hint that he was anything less than a loyal functionary of the army and the state. He was, however, boring. He was slight, short-sighted behind thick glasses, had a thin, never-smiling face and a quiet, monotonous voice. He was nondescript in most other ways and seemed more like a merchant’s chief clerk than a true general, though his record in the recent wars had been creditable if unspectacular. The junior officers around him were similar; efficient but uninspiring, managerial rather than swashbuckling. They spent a lot of time working on plans and contingencies and determining how best to guard the highest number of sites with the lowest number of men. Oramen was happy to leave them to it, and tended to keep out of their way.
“You must stop sprinting off like that, sir,” Neguste said, opening the large umbrella and holding it over Oramen. There was a fair bit of spray around, Oramen supposed. “Every time I lose sight of you I think you’ve fallen off a building or something, sir.”
“I wanted to see this,” Oramen said, nodding at the great flat building across the mist-strewn waste of frothing waters. “The engineers say it could go at any moment.”
Neguste peered forward. “Won’t fall this way, will it, sir?”
“Apparently not.”
“Hope not, sir.”
Between the blade-building and the Fountain Building, another flash of blue lit up the curtain of water falling from the vast plaza set across the buildings beyond. “See that, sir?”
“Yes. Second one since I’ve been here.”
“Ghosts, sir,” Neguste said emphatically. “There’s proof.”
Oramen looked briefly round at him. “Ghosts,” he said. “Really?”
“Sure as fate, sir. I’ve been talking to the tinks, scrimps, blasters and the rest, sir.” Oramen knew that Neguste did indeed frequent the notoriously dangerous bars, smoke tents and music halls of the Settlement’s less salubrious areas, thus far without injury. “They say there’s all sorts of terrible, weird, uncanny things in there under that plaza thing.”
“What sort of things?” Oramen asked. He always liked to hear the specifics of such charges.
“Oh,” Neguste said, shaking his head and sucking in his cheeks, “terrible, weird, strange things, sir. Things that shouldn’t be seeing the light of day. Or even night,” he said, looking round the darkened sky. “It’s a fact, sir.”
“Is it now?” Oramen said. He nodded at Droffo as the other man appeared. Droffo kept to the inside of the platform, next to the wall; he was not good with heights. “Droff. Well done. Your turn to hide. I’ll count to fifty.”
“Sir,” the earl said with a weak smile, coming to stand behind him. Droffo was a fine fellow in many ways and possessed of a dry sense of humour of his own, but rarely found Oramen’s jokes funny.
Oramen leant on the platform parapet and looked over the edge. “Not that far down, Droff.”
“Far enough, prince,” Droffo said, looking up and away as Oramen leaned further out. “Wish you wouldn’t do that, sir.”
“Me too, for all it may be worth, sirs,” Neguste said, looking from one man to another. A gust of wind threatened to pull him off his feet.
“Neguste,” Oramen said, “put that contraption down before you get blown off the damn building. The spray’s mostly coming upwards anyway; it’s no use.”
“Right-oh, sir,” Neguste said, collapsing and furling the umbrella. “Have you heard of all the strange occurrences, sir?” he asked Droffo.
“What strange occurrences?” the earl asked.
Neguste leaned towards him. “Great sea monsters moving in the waters upstream from the Falls, sirs, upsetting boats and tearing up anchors. Others seen downstream, too, moving where no boat could ever go. Spirits and ghosts and strange appearances and people being found frozen into stone or turned to no more dust than you could hold in the palm of one hand, sir, and others losing their minds so that they don’t recognise nobody who is even their nearest and dearest and just wander the ruins until they step off an edge, or people who see something in the ruins and excavations that makes them walk to the nearest electric light and stare into it until their eyes go blind, or stick their hands in to touch the spark and die all jerky, smoking and flaming.”
Oramen had heard all this. He might, he realised, have contributed a strange occurrence of his own.
Just ten hours earlier he’d been woken from the middle of his sleep by a strange, insistent little noise. He’d turned the cover on the candle-lamp and looked round the carriage in the newly increased light, trying to trace the
