The stream coursed through a ravine that grew deeper and narrower the farther up they climbed. Nefertity walked alongside it, picking her way faultlessly among rocks and shattered blocks of limestone that seemed to be the remains of some huge building. Eventually Hobi had to clamber from the stream and join her. While shallow, the water flowed faster here, and it grew more difficult to keep his footing on the moss-covered stones. The sun passed fitfully in and out of the clouds, clouds so dark that the light seemed more like that inside the domes. The spindly trees cast shadows of an inky blackness against the green sky. As he stumbled through prickly pear and thorny underbrush birds flew up in a flurry of squeaks and trills, and once he nearly stepped on a fistful of yellow bees clustered on a rotting log, too lethargic to fly or sting him.
Nefertity cautioned him against speaking—“You will grow too tired, we must reach higher ground before the winds strike.” His head and body had resolved into one great pulsing ache. Several times he paused to lean over the ravine and drink, and pull bright red fruit from the prickly pears—not as sweet as those grown inside the vivariums, but something at least to fill his stomach.
“Hobi—look—”
He turned from where he crouched beside a cactus knobbed with fruit. Nefertity had disappeared. The monotonous vista of twisted greenery and dun-colored thornbushes stopped abruptly a few hundred feet in front of him. He stood, catching his trousers on a cactus spike, and pulled away heedless of the tear on one leg. His ears hurt from the wind battering at them. When he looked behind him he could see nothing but a dense web of green and brown. Ahead of him the trees fell back, so that it was mostly cactus and spare brush that had been tortured into anguished shapes by the relentless wind.
“Hobi, here—it’s the top of a hill, there’s something here—”
He hurried after her, sliding through a loose scree of pale limestone. He fell once, cutting his hand on something. When he drew his bloody fingers back he found a wedge of metal buried in the dry soil, bright blue and yellow, with teeth painted on it. It glowed eerily in the aqueous light, and Hobi shivered as he tossed it away.
In a few minutes he reached the top of the promontory. The wind was so loud that he covered his ears. When he tried to stand he nearly fell over, buffeted by air blasting warm and strong as from a huge oven.
Nothing grew here. He stood at the edge of a flat plateau that stretched perhaps a mile across, rimmed with stunted cactus and a few sturdy mesquite. Odd shapes littered the barren landscape, some of them big as houses, others smaller, like toppled statuary. Through it all the stream ran, a dull thread nearly invisible beneath the lowering sky.
“What is it?” Hobi shouted, but the wind ripped his words into a whisper. He turned to look behind him.
Under a range of black and umber clouds roiled the sea, so distant that he gasped to think they had climbed this high. From here all of Araboth could be seen, rising straight above the sand on a peninsula barely large enough to contain it. The small lip of sand beneath the Lahatiel Gate glittered in the ominous light, and glints of blue and gold flickered from the spires of the Gate itself. But elsewhere there was scarcely enough sand to keep the water from lashing at the foot of the domes. Even knowing nothing of its history, Hobi realized that it could not always have been like this. Erosion, or some natural disaster unmarked inside the domes, must have gnawed away at the sands surrounding the city. Otherwise how could it have been built there, with the waves coursing so near its fundament? An awful vertigo seized him—to think he had lived there all these years with the ocean lapping right there, with nothing but that fragile shell to protect him, and the vigilance of the Architects. He swayed, and would have fallen but for a cold hand clenching about his elbow.
“Hobi, come with me. There is shelter here.”
Reluctantly he let her drag him away, his eyes fixed upon the vision of the domes like five clouded eyes set into the sand, the water churning around them and casting up long streamers of white and green beneath a somber sky.
The wind howled so loudly that they did not try to speak. An overpowering reek filled his nostrils, like water clogged with blossoms. Even with Nefertity gripping his arm he stumbled—the ground was uneven, covered with sharp stones that cut through the soft soles of his boots. But when he looked down he saw that they were not stones, but bits of metal and glass, some of them worn smooth but others sharp and rusted as though just torn from some huge machine. And they were all brilliantly colored, red and yellow and green and blue and orange, and striped or spotted or laced with intricate designs. He saw fragments of words spun across sheets of metal or plastic sticking up from the ground like severed limbs. ILLER, they read, or DOL, or ING. A scalloped yellow plate, a sort of canopy twice his height, rose from where it was half-buried in the ground, and flapped in the wind.
It shouted in bold red-and-yellow letters.
Other things lay sprawled on the stony ground. Hollow images of creatures many times the size of a man, their huge misshapen ears cracked and bent, bulbous noses knocked awry or sometimes buried next to their crushed heads. Centuries of neglect on the exposed tor had caused their paint to ripple and crack, flaking venomous chips of acid-green and candied blue onto the scarred earth. And everywhere were the remains of machines, huge blackened metal arms shooting up from beneath heaps of rubble, flattened engines and broken domes of glass, a gigantic skeletal wheel rising against the turbulent sky like a charred and deadly moon.
Hobi stopped. His voice croaked thin and shrill above the wind.
“Where are we?”
Nefertity shook her head. Her translucent body glowed dull cobalt, its shining spindles and circuits shuttling back and forth inside her chest. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “The ruins of something—a funfair, I think.”
“A what?” Hobi yanked his arm from her and clasped himself. In a way this was worse than first seeing the world Outside alone: because that at least he had been prepared for, that was a nightmare he had fought and thrashed through all his life. But this? It was grotesque, all those inhuman faces with their lumpy grins, random letters like shrapnel flung against the desolate earth, immense scorpions of blackened steel crushing one another beneath the weight of a huge fallen tower. And through it all the stream coursing in its rust-colored bed. His stomach knotted to think he had drunk from it before.
“ ‘Fun,’ ” Nefertity quoted softly. She pointed at the broken canopy. Her voice shifted into its crystalline recitative mode.
“Roundabout, coconut shies, big wheels, swingboats, rock stalls, all the fun of the fair. Midget pantechnicons bearing such legends as: ‘Loades of Fun, Fun on Tour,’ etc. You press the time-switch; the lights go on; everything clicks into motion. Then stops. Until you press the switch again.”
She stopped. The wind rushing through the broken chambers of a small building made a howling sound.
“It’s making me sick,” said Hobi, shouting to be heard above the wind. “Who would do this?”