There’s a small open space on the other side, gigantic wreckage all around it hampering our view of the rest of the city. Blankets of rusted mesh and elaborated metal beams with branches, mats of rusted wire, broken blue mortar, blue enamel shells like conches hundreds of feet high, crumbled metal plates beneath our feet. The shrieks of the Predicanten have died away; apart from the sounds we make ourselves, there is only the distributed creaking of a vast ruination to listen to.

There are ways through the ruins: I know which one. What we see is impossible, no sun’s light could show it, but we see it through the dead white light of the fog that wreathes the spires and high ramparts. To the left, what looks like a metal honeycomb, all the steel frame’s angles are wrenched and the building is leaning over and twisted on its foundation, with a long colorless cracked mantle of glass sweeping down one side like a cape, all flowed melted from the windows and made this mineral waterfall, and charred objects are frozen inside. On the right and all around are vast shapeless hives of coagulated rust. Rust like cinnamon powders the ground, which holds many white puddles. Silichieh points to slabs of the white substance the white abutment was made from, still impeccably white, studded with blackened wens of metal looking like warts, old black excrement on new-fallen snow. Shelves of blue cement between us and the foundation of the unbuilt wall, some stacked up with a few long branches of metal, like pillars or bridge pilings, that seem to have melted and slumped against the stacks, forming ribs or veins there.

As we walk, guns out, looking carefully this way and that, Thrushchurl nudges me and points to the buildings, where intermittent gestures are happening here and there, parts of figures and parts of motions, like raising a glass, or handing someone a letter, flash there dimly and almost without light. There is nothing magical about them, they are banal shapes thrown around by the wind; I can see the wind has abstract faces in it, black eyes and black mouth in a round piece of wind going by.

Lights flit in the buildings ... a human skull protruding from a mound of rust as big as a house ...

Some blackbird droppings, too. Charred remains of stamped-out campfires, and a few tin cans, still wet inside.

Thrushchurl is turning round and round, a weird, foolish sort of smile on his face. He stops, staring at something—rushes toward it. He so loves anything eerie, and he never seems to get frightened. Dying doesn’t scare him. He’s like an animal that way, but I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t think about it. His way of understanding doesn’t involve fear.