He turned the cover around the thick night candle, letting light into the compartment. It was very cold; he coughed — one more fading remnant of a typical Settlement affliction that had laid him low for a few days — and watched his breath fume out in front him.
It had taken him a while to work out what seemed so wrong: it was the silence. There was no sound from the Falls.
He walked out at the start of the next working period, into the perpetual-seeming half-night. Droffo, Neguste and the two surly knights were with him. All around, the usual crowds and teams of men and animals were marshalling themselves, ready for their descent into the gorge. A few more today than the day before, just as it had been every day since Oramen had arrived here.
Shuffling and stamping and shouting and bellowing, they made their slow way to the lifts and cranes dotted along the cliff edge for kilometres down the sheer edge of the gorge. An army dropping into the abyss.
The skies were clear. The only mist rose from the broad backs of some beasts of burden, hauling heavy carts and larger items of machinery. Chunsel, uoxantch and ossesyi; Oramen hadn’t even known these great warbeasts could be tamed sufficiently for the work of hauling and carrying. He was glad he wouldn’t have to share a hoist platform with any of those massively impressive but frightening beasts.
From the gorge side, the Falls were a fabulous, disturbing sight. No water ran. No clouds obscured any part of the monumental gulf the waters had formed in the land. The view was uninterrupted, startlingly clear. Frozen curtains and shawls of solidified water lay draped over every cliff. The channels at the foot of the gorge — each of which would have been a great river in its own right, anywhere else — were sinuous black wastes half covered by sprinkled frosts and snows.
Oramen felt as though he was looking out to a site of some vast butchery, an eaten landscape — chewed into by an animal of unimaginable scale — which had then suffered further diminishing but still enormous quarryings as that first monster’s young had come along and each also bitten into the greater semicircle, after which some smaller monsters had taken still tinier nips out of the perimeters of those secondary bites, leaving bite upon bite upon bite all torn from the landscape, all devoured and swept away by the waters.
And then, in all that structured desolation, that tiered advancement of fractured chaos, was revealed a city beyond the skills and fashioning of any portion of humanity Oramen had ever encountered; a city on a scale that beggared belief; a city of glassy black towers, bone-white spires, twisted obsidian blades, outrageously curved, bizarrely patterned structures of indecipherable purpose and huge, sweeping vistas leading to canyons and strata and ranks of glistening, glittering edifices, one after another after another until only the vertical gorge wall on the far side of the silent Falls, ten kilometres away, intervened.
Half the view was sliced across by the plaza, the spaces beneath now also shuttered in by the frozen walls of water draped unmoving over its edges.
“Well, they can get anywhere now,” Droffo said.
Oramen looked over to where the cranes, hoists and lifts were already ferrying whole platforms of men, animals and equipment down into the chasm. A few were coming back up, quitting their own shifts. “Yes, they can,” he said. He looked over at where Vollird and Baerth were both leaning on the railing, staring into the gorge. Even they seemed impressed. Vollird coughed; a sharp, hacking, choking noise, then he gathered phlegm in his mouth and spat it into the gorge.
“Are you all right, Vollird?” Oramen called.
“Never better, sir,” the fellow replied, then cleared his throat and spat again.
“By God, they are a hard couple to like,” Droffo muttered.
“The man’s not well,” Oramen said tolerantly.
Droffo sniffed. “Even so.”
This latest cold was affecting everybody in turn. The field hospitals were full of those it was striking most fiercely, and the scrubby ground on the very outskirts of the Settlement, part of what was claimed to be, and probably was, the longest cemetery in the world, was filling up with those it had not spared.
“But yes, they can get to the centre,” Oramen said, staring out to the revealed city. “Nothing hinders them now.”
“It does seem to be their focus,” Droffo said.
Oramen nodded. “Whatever’s there.”
The latest briefing by the Falls’ scholars and gentlemen engineers had been fascinating. Oramen had never seen them so animated, though of course he hadn’t been here long. He’d checked with Poatas, who had; he said
There were structures at the city’s very centre, deep under the plaza above, of a type they had never encountered before. Every effort was being made to investigate and penetrate that dark, frozen heart, and for once they had the luxury of time, and some surety that the ground would not shift beneath their feet on an instant; the Falls would not quicken again and the waters wash all away once more for another forty or more days. It was auspicious; a piece of luck to be grabbed with both hands and exploited to the full. Meanwhile more of tyl Loesp’s reinforcements, his new toilers, were arriving with every incoming train, eager for work. There would never be a better time. This was the very peak and centre of the whole history of the excavations of the Nameless City, indeed the Falls themselves. It deserved their every energy and resource.
Poatas was personally true to his word, having made a new headquarters down in the gorge itself and quartered himself and his staff there in a portion of building deep under the plaza near one of the recently discovered artifacts that appeared by its size and central location to be of particular importance. Oramen had been given the distinct impression that his own presence at the focus of all this furious activity was not required, and indeed might only hinder matters, given that when he was around additional guards had to be deployed to ensure his protection and a proportion of people would always stop work to gawp at a prince, so inhibiting the expeditious and efficient progress of the great works being undertaken.
Nevertheless, he had been determined to see what was going on and had already visited various parts of the excavations even while the ice had been spreading and the waters falling back. He had gone unannounced, with as few people in attendance as he could, seeking to cause as little disruption by his presence as possible. He was certainly not going to be stopped from seeing closer up what was going on now that the waters had frozen solid altogether, and he especially wanted to see something of this new class of artifact that was turning up; he felt he had been kept in ignorance of their importance by Poatas, as though this latest revelation was none of his business. He would not, could not tolerate such disrespect.
They would be flying down on caude; the animals complained about the cold and low levels of light, but their handlers assured Oramen and his party the creatures had been fed a couple of hours before and were warmed and ready to fly. They mounted up, Vollird cursing as his first attempt was wrecked by a fit of coughing.
It had been so long since Oramen had flown he had thought about asking for a practice ground-flight, getting the beast to pad along the flat and rise up a little, giving him time to recall his old flying lessons in relative safety, but that would have been demeaning; a sign of weakness. He had the biggest of the caude, and had offered to take Neguste with him, saddled in behind, but the lad had begged to be excused. He tended to throw up. Oramen had smiled and given him the morning off.
They launched into the air beyond the cliff; Oramen taking the lead. He’d forgotten quite how alarming was the stomach-lurching drop at the start of a flight as the air-beast fell before starting to gain height.
The cold wind bit at the exposed parts of Oramen’s face as the caude dropped, stretching its wings out; even with a scarf over his mouth and nose and wearing flying goggles he felt the chill enter him. He pulled on the caude’s reins, worrying that it seemed sluggish and felt slow to answer. The beast pulled slowly up, shifting beneath him fretfully as though not yet fully awake. They were still falling too fast; he glanced up and saw Droffo staring down at him from a good ten metres higher. Vollird and Baerth were a little further up still.
The caude shook itself and started beating across the chasm, finally catching the air and levelling out. Oramen watched it raise its great long face and swivel its gaze to each side as it looked groggily up at its
