He turns suddenly to the rest of us. At once, Thrushchurl raises his hand.

“I’ll climb it,” he says, grins and nods,. “Only let the rope be tightly cinched and I’ll gladly climb, and look for you.”

We stand strung out on the abutment, watching Thrushchurl climb the secure rope. The sides of the tower are decorated with a mosaic of diamond- and disc-shaped tiles, all grey in heavy dark borders, all a little dissolved, and blackened strands with fossilized bubbles frothed into them run down from the tiles in long blisters. Silichieh stands at the base, keeping the ropes taut, and staring in a kind of rapt amazement at the tower. There’s no telling how long ago it was built.

Thrushchurl dextrously climbs the sides; he clambers up onto the top in a few lunges and vanishes from sight. That ditty of his still drips from his lips. Cats have got their lice. With a moan of complaining iron, three ribbons of reddish-brown liquid spew down from the side of the box opposite the road, but the box and its arm have not altered position or relation. The fluid stinks—it’s as if the box had been precariously balanced and filled to slopping with a broth of fluid corruption, steeped decomposing bodies, and Thrushchurl’s weight has tipped some of it out.

The stuff runs out and the ribbons turn to rags. A rumbling exhalation breathes from the top of the tower, a new, even drone that rises and falls, filling space above the trees, wafting up between us and the sky.

Now Thrushchurl lowers himself hand over hand, still smiling, down to us.

“There are ruins just up ahead there,” he says, pointing off to the left, “and a clearing further up, within a mile or so. I could see persons milling there, and rows of white bumps on the ground, all in a peculiar, lovely sort of dim light from the ruins.”

Saskia suddenly looks very animated.

“No, no, no,” Thrushchurl says quickly, “they’re not blackbirds, I’m sure of that.”

“Sure of it? How can you be sure of it?” Makemin snaps.

“They—they ...” Makemin is making Thrushchurl nervous, his grin pulls up in the center and down at the edges in a volatile grimace, “They’re all quite naked, sir, and appear to be starving.”

“Does this—” Makemin waves at the abutment, “continue much further?”

“As far as I could see, sir,” Thrushchurl says. “Dense as the fog is, I would say it goes on for two or three miles yet from here.”

“How far away are these people you saw?”

“Less than a mile, sir.”

Makemin glances up at the sky, lifting his chin. The tower chants its great note above us.

We march, putting the sound slowly behind us. After twenty minutes, Makemin orders us to halt again. We are to divide into groups, some to go along the abutment, others to go into the woods to the left and make our way toward the clearing, so as to have two sides open just in case. I don’t want us to leave the abutment and say so, but I still haven’t been forgiven my true warning about the storm.