He felt his eyes close; weariness and pain lapped over his mind, shutting out the world. This was the worst part of growing old: the slow, endless failure of his body that was slowly isolating him from the world, from other people, immersing him instead in a tiny, claustrophobic universe of his own weakness. Even now, even with the Mantle in its greatest crisis...

Well, a small, sour part of him thought, at least I won't grow any older, to find out how much worse it gets.

"...Adda." There was more wonder than fear in Farr's voice. "Look at the City."

Adda looked at the boy, then turned his aching neck to the distant tableau of Parz.

The City had already drifted far from its usual site directly over the Magfield Pole, tilting and twisting slowly as it traveled. Now that drift was accelerating. Parz, with all its precious freight of life, swung through the Air like a huge spin-spider. It was oddly graceful, Adda thought, like a huge dance. Then there was a cracking noise, a sharp sound which traveled even to this distance, uneasily like breaking bone. Wood fragments burst around the junction of the City and its Spine — splinters which must be the size of Air-cars to be visible at this distance.

The Spine had snapped off.

The Spine remained suspended in the depths of the Polar Magfield, like an immense, battered tree trunk. The Spine must have been supplying much of the City's residual anchoring in the Magfield, for now the box-like upper section of Parz, with green wood-lamp light still gleaming from its ports, rolled forward like an immense, grotesque parody of a lolling head.

The structure could not long stand such stress.

The Corestuff anchor-bands, dull and useless, folded, snapped and fell away in huge pieces. The clearwood bubble which enclosed the Stadium burst outward, popping. The Palace buildings on the upper surface, like elaborately colored toys with their miniature forests and displays, slid almost gracefully away into the Air, exposing the bare wooden surface beneath.

And now the City itself opened, coming apart like rotten wood.

The carcass split longitudinally, almost neatly, around the central structural flaw of Pall Mall. From the cracked-open streets and shops and homes, Air-cars and people spilled into the Air. The Market opened up like a spin-spider's egg, and the huge execution Wheel tumbled out into the Air.

The sounds of cracking wood, of twisting Corestuff, carried through the Air, mercifully drowning the cries of the humans.

Adda tried to imagine the terror of those stranded citizens; perhaps some of them had never ventured beyond the Skin before, and now here they were cast into the Air, helpless amid clouds of worthless possessions.

Now the residual structure of Parz imploded into fragments. All traces of the City's shape were lost. The cloud of rubble, of wood, Corestuff and struggling people, drifted through the Air away from the amputated Spine, slowly diffusing.