“And about a thousand strides of that is without water, is that right? Where islands in the stream upriver block the flow.”
“Nearer two thousand strides,” Poatas said. “The figure changes constantly; so much here does. At any one time there might be three or four hundred separate falls within the greater cataract.”
“So many? I read of only two hundred!”
Poatas smiled. “A handful of long-years ago, that was true.” His smile might have looked a little brittle. “The young sir has obviously done his book research, but it has to cede authority to that which actually pertains.”
“Of course!” Oramen yelled as a howling gust of rain-filled wind shook the rail car. “How quickly it all changes, eh!”
“As I say, sir; so much here does.”
The mayoral residence in Rasselle had been sacked and burned during the taking of the city. Oramen’s mother and her new family were staying in the old ducal palace of Hemerje while the repairs and renovations were effected.
Built on a wide fertile plain, the Deldeyn capital had grown according to quite a different plan compared to Pourl on its hill, with broad, tree-lined boulevards separating a variety of extensive enclaves: noble estates, palaces, monasteries, League and Guild trading yards and Public Commons. Rather than city walls, the inner city was ringed with a double set of canals overseen by six Great Towers; tall forts which were the highest buildings in the city and remained so by statute. The citadel, near the Great Palace, was a giant, barrel-shaped barracks; purely a place of last resort with no pretensions towards luxury in the same way that the Great Palace was purely a great royal house with little intrinsic defendability.
Every element of the city had been linked through the boulevards and, originally, by canals – later railways. 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 so busy! But you must come to dinner. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after. My Masyen is dying to meet you! And him mayor! Mayor! Really! Of this great city! I ask you; who’d have thought it?”
“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 such a fine man! So brave and dashing, such authority. I was most impressed. You are in safe hands there, Oramen, my little Prince Regent; he loves you dearly. Do you stay in the Great Palace?”
“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 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.”
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