Again though, the people of the Ninth — or at least the ones that he met at ducal house receptions, city chambers lunches and Guildhall dinners — seemed rather pathetically keen to show that they were glad the war was over and thankful that order had been restored. To think that he had once thought to lay waste to so much of this, to have the skies filled with flames and weeping and the gutters and rivers with blood! And all in the cause of besmirching Hausk’s name — how limited, how immature that desire seemed now.
These people barely knew or cared who Hausk had been. They had been at war and now they were at peace. Tyl Loesp had the disquieting yet also perversely encouraging impression that the Deldeyn would adapt better to the state of peace as the defeated than the Sarl would as victors.
He had started to dress like the Deldeyn, reckoning that this would endear him to them. The loose, almost effeminate clothes — billowy trous and frock coat — felt odd at first, but he had quickly grown used to them. He had been presented with a fine, many-jewelled watch by the Timepiece Makers’ Guild of Rasselle, and had taken to wearing that, too, in the pocket cut into his coat specifically for such instruments. In this land of railways and timetables, it was a sensible accoutrement, even for one who could command trains and steamers to run or not as his whim dictated.
His temporary palace was in the ducal house of Dillser on the shores of the Sea. The pleasure steamer — paddles slapping at the water, funnel pulsing smoke and steam — was heading for the much beflagged dock now, beating through waters that were merely warm and gently misted beneath a wind-cleared sky. Far mountains ringed the horizon, a few of their round, rolling summits snow-topped. The slender towers and narrow spires of the city rose beyond the ducal house and the various marquees and pavilions now covering its lawns.
Tyl Loesp drank in the cool, clear air and tried not to think of Oramen (would it be today? Had it already happened? How surprised ought he to act when the news came through? How would it actually be done?), turning his thoughts instead to dinner that evening and the choice of girl for the night.
“We make good time, sir,” the steamer’s captain said, coming to join him on the flying bridge. He nodded to tyl Loesp’s immediate guard and senior officials, gathered nearby.
“The currents are favourable?” tyl Loesp asked.
“More the lack of any Oct underwater-ships,” the captain said. He leant on the railing and pushed his cap up. He was a small, jolly fellow with no hair.
“They are normally a hazard?” tyl Loesp asked.
“Movable sandbanks,” the captain said, laughing. “And not very quick about getting out of the way either. Dented a few vessels. Sunk a couple; not by ramming them but by the Oct ship moving up underneath and capsizing the steamer. Few people been drowned. Not intentional, of course. Just poor navigation. You’d think they’d do better, being so advanced.” The captain shrugged. “Maybe they just don’t care.”
“But not a hazard to navigation today?” tyl Loesp said.
The captain shook his head. “Not for about the last twenty days. Haven’t seen a single one.”
Tyl Loesp frowned as he looked out at the approaching quay. “What normally brings them here?” he asked.
“Who can say?” the captain said cheerfully. “We’ve always assumed it’s the Boiling; might be even more impressive down at the bottom of the Sea, if you had a craft that could get you down there and back again and could see whatever it is that goes on. The Oct never get out of their submarine craft so we can’t ask them.” The captain nodded at the quayside. “Well, better get us docked. Excuse me, sir.” He walked back under the covered bridge to the wheelhouse, shouting orders. The steamer started to turn and the engine exhausted a plume of smoke and steam through its tall funnel before falling back to a steady, idling puff-puff-puff.
Tyl Loesp watched the waves of their wake as they curved away behind them, the last ragged, extended cloud of steam from the funnel settling over the creamy crease of sparkling water, shadowing it.
“Twenty days or so,” he said quietly to himself. He beckoned his nearest aide. “Strike our camp,” he told him. “We return to Rasselle.”
An uncanny stillness had settled over the Hyeng-zhar. Allied with the darkness, it seemed like a form of death.
The river had frozen across its breadth, the middle channel last. Still the water had continued to fall across the Nameless City and into the gorge, even if at a much reduced rate, appearing from underneath the cap of ice to plunge, wreathed in mist, to the landscape of towers, ramps, plaza and water channels beneath. The roar was still there, though also much lessened, so that now it seemed a fit partner for the glimmer that was the weak, paltry light of the slow-moving Rollstar Kiesestraal.
Then one night Oramen had woken up and known something was wrong. He had lain there in the darkness, listening, unable to tell what it was that was so disturbing. A kind of terror afflicted him when he thought it might be another device left behind from the Archipontine’s time here, awake again now, calling him. But there was no sound. He listened carefully but could hear nothing, and no winking lights, green or otherwise, showed anywhere.
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.