“I only hope he's all right,” she said quietly. She looked east, her view across the landscape soon blocked by trees and the contours of this high place. The air smelled fresher and sweeter up here; the sky was a deeper blue and the sun was warmer on her skin than she had experienced for a long time. Ramus would have loved such differences. They would tell him that he was somewhere else, and Nomi prayed to whatever gods would listen that he was feeling and seeing them right now.

BY MIDDAY, THEY had barely traveled two miles. The terrian was easy, but there was so much to see that they paused every hundred steps to examine something new.

They found snakes that carried hundreds of young on their backs. The serpents hissed and reared up when anyone drew near, but from a distance they seemed placid and calm. They ranged from yellow through to a deep brown, and their young waved infantile heads at the air, smelling every new scent. They saw fat, bulbous fungi that popped audibly when they were touched, releasing a mist of spores into the breeze. Noon worried about infection, disease and poison, but Nomi shrugged and carried on. If they were to contract a disease and die up here, it would happen, however careful they were.

Around the base of one large rocky mound, they saw hundreds of stones beginning to move. They ground and rumbled together, and it was only when the explorers approached closer that they saw legs protruding from the stones' undersides. There were small pincers hidden away too, flashing out when flies or bees came close and snapping back inside the stony shells as the creatures ate.

They moved on from one wonder to the next. Amazing new sights—animals or plants that resembled those they had known from Noreela but which displayed marked differences—and several new things they could not understand at all. They found a tall metal pipe protruding from the ground, ragged with splits and rusted tears, and they did not know what it was for. Several parallel trenches in the ground, thirty steps long, contained watery sand, tinged green by some sort of moss and smelling of rotting fruit. More pipes crossed these trenches, pierced with regularly spaced holes and knotted together in complex joins. “Something up here builds,” Beko said, but Nomi was more amazed at the extracted, melted and molded metals.

She welcomed mysteries such as these, because to understand everything would be to equate this place to Noreela. It was not Noreela. They had traveled beyond the world they knew, and there was still some way to go.