We’re coming up the avenue now. It’s lined with tombs the size of houses, made of metal time has turned to charcoal. They are solid, all cast in one piece without any seam. Filled domes stand on four legs with curved groins over stone platforms all carved with a regular serration pattern like choppy waves. Slots open into what must be shafts set down into the earth, the metal sarcophagi, featureless as eggs, are attached to spindles that rise from the slots, all in the shade of the filled domes. No decorations.

Streets open alternately to the right and left, breaking onto views of undulating ground stretching off into the distance, and narrowing streets of increasingly crowded, boxlike tombs. Very far away I dimly can see where they appear to be piled up on top of each other in heaps.

Thrushchurl walks beside me. While the others look warily for signs of the enemy, he is gazing about himself in awestruck abandon, almost sobbing with emotion. I wish I could feel it. Instead, a fear, like a robe of ice, is cinching and recinching itself around me, dragging the carbine in my hands.

Everywhere there are upright vanes and grills of black charcoal metal that don’t look ornamental. Some are set into blind loops in the walls, others lie on their sides, jutting out like awnings, and others stand upright on rods, like flags. To our left, a low rim of rock slides up out of the earth to form a ramp-shaped caer with grassy sides, and what look like cenotaphs on top of it. A small, circular plaza is set in its lee. The tombs surround the clear space like quaint, well-maintained little houses. The plaza has a metal platter set in its center. There are no tombs set against the base of the caer, and in the corner formed by its straight side and one row of tombs, there stands planted in the grass a whip structure, like a parabolic sheaf of reeds designed to sway and clatter in the wind. They make the cable-knocking sounds. There must be many more of them. That sound comes from everywhere.

Now we are nearer the base of the mound, and the avenue rises very gradually to meet it. Alone at its summit stands a squat tower. The road is taking us directly to it. Looking ahead, I see iron birds perched like statues on the vanes, watching us come. They never seem to move, but their heads are always trained directly on us, motionlessly following us like a portrait’s eyes. The sky is very dark, for daylight, and yet the shadows of the tombs are as deep and broad as if the sun were blazing across the sky at them.

Makemin takes two or three long steps ahead of us, turns stopping in place and raises his hands, calling “Halt!” He stands in one of the shadows of the tombs, and only his outline is visible.