We make our way up the mound, pushing the carts, and then down onto the very point at which the white abutment is first exposed to the air. Setting foot on it I feel a flutter in my chest that makes me sigh, like a heart palpitation. There’s a crisp, snapping feeling this substance imparts to me when I step—I crouch to run my fingers across it. A fine-grained smooth material, like ceramic or unpolished marble, without veins or glints, opaque and a little dingy, like dusty snow. Everything tells me it is older than the Limiters, but no one seems inclined to ask about that. I notice Silichieh rubbing it, too. He sees me, and points to the upraised edge.

“Still perfect,” he says wonderingly, and I feel his curiosity is noble and saving.

The column slows, quietens, and we listen ... a sound like the clap of a horseshoed hoof on a cobblestone street, but without that rhythm. It comes from no fixed location, knocking here and there at random. We consult together—I have no opportunity to check my charm, but I feel we are still safe, and that the noise is natural and not threatening. Makemin sends the scouts ahead, and we continue. The woods seem to envelop us swiftly, in one gulp.

I feel vertigo, looking out into the trees, trees endlessly succeeding each other. The soil is white. Completely bare of brush, only the inky trunks of the trees emerge from soil like fine ash, and only the blue shadows of the trees darken the white ground.

The trees are huge, funereal, with heavy branches and peaked crowns. I can see the metal-colored bark is scored in a regular way, almost a grid, and glistens as though it were oozing grease. Each trunk is sheathed in amber, of a dim, barely-discernable blue color.

The hoof sound comes from all around us—it is the noise of these heavy, mineral branches knocking together, and now and then there is a chiming of glass in among the leaves, tingling. It sounds like a headache.

*

It’s the middle of a silent, suffocating afternoon. I follow pointing fingers—off to our right, something massive droops above the tops of the trees. It looks a little like a wheat sheaf made out of badly rusted iron rods, melted together at the top into an uncouthly shapeless globule. Slowly its scale becomes clear to me as shreds of mist drift in front of it; I have to raise my head a little to see the top, and it must be at least a mile away.

Late afternoon. A droning knell, like the muffled reverberation of a bell, pitched almost too low to hear. The sound is continuous, but with the pulse of a slightly higher tone going through it.

I recognize it; I’ve certainly heard it before. Where, I don’t know.