A giant bridge awaited them, wide enough for half a dozen wagons to travel abreast with room between for stretching. Hewn from curving blocks of the sand-coloured stone, it rose in a smooth arc over the sheer drop below, its surface worn by the passage of decades, if not centuries of traffic. At its end stood the boxy gatehouse, projecting from the sheer walls, its wide-open gates a flat, dark arch. Another, smaller gateway lay beside it, some way around the sweep of the walls. A stunted, orphaned thing, Chel traced its line back to the ruins of another bridge, now little more than broken spars and a severed stub of stone, jutting from the craggy edge of the gorge opposite.

The wind did not relent, carrying strong, exotic tangs from the waiting city: spice and saffron, woodsmoke and burning oil, cured meats and leather. White birds turned lazy circles overhead, riding the incessant gusts, occasionally swooping into the gorge or erupting from it like angels reborn.

Kosh watched the birds, her entire body juddering to the shakes of the wagon on the road. She gazed at them, jaw loose, her eyes as absent as the folk before the tree. Chel reached to prod her, to check she was well, then with a clatter of bumps the wagon mounted the long bridge, and Chel found himself staring past her into the depths of the gorge. At first he saw only darkness, a numb emptiness beside the glare of sun from pale stone, then he found he could pick out the curve of the vast rocky pillars through the blurred gaps in the bridge-side, the variegated strata of millennia stacked from lightless canyon floor to the creeping foundations of the city’s walls. Water flowed somewhere beneath, and fast; the spray from its emission drifted within the wind-sheltered gorge, sparkling like rainbows where it met the piercing shafts of light that angled within the clasp of the ravine. Chel squinted, seeing flashes of what could be waterfalls, or waterwheels, fixed against the rocky walls below, silver strips of water flushed over them and away by narrow aqueducts, into the shadow of the monstrous rock pillar on which the city sat. Could there be tunnels beneath? The angle of his view was poor, his window closing. Already they were nearly at the bridge’s end, and the city’s shadow had embraced them.