“Just so,” tyl Loesp said. “Well, they rule here no more. I expect great things from this place, Poatas,” he told the other man, turning briefly to him. “By your own reports this is a treasure house whose potential the monks consistently downplayed and underexploited.”
“A treasure house which they resolutely refused to explore properly,” Poatas said, nodding. “A treasure house most of whose doors were left unopened, or were left to the privateers, little more than licensed brigands, to open. With sufficient men, that can all be changed. There’s many a Falls Merchant Explorer who’ll howl with rage to be denied the continuance of their easy stipend, but that is to the good. Even they grew arrogant and lazy, and lately, in my lifetime, more concerned with keeping others out of their concessions than fully exploiting them themselves.” Poatas looked sharply at tyl Loesp as the wind began to change. “There’s no guarantee of finding the sort of treasure you might be thinking of here, tyl Loesp. Wonder weapons from the past that will command the future are a myth. Quell that thought if it’s what exercises you.” He paused. Tyl Loesp said nothing. The veered wind was blowing a hot, desert-dry stream of air across them now, and the clouds and mists were beginning to shift and part before them in the great, still mostly unglimpsed gorge. “But whatever’s here to be found, we’ll find, and if it needs ripping out of some building the brethren of the Mission would have left intact, then so be it. All this can be done. If I have enough men.”
“You’ll have men,” tyl Loesp told him. “Half an army. My army. And others. Some little more than slaves, but they’ll work to keep their bellies full.”
The clouds throughout the vast complexity confronting them were rolling away from the new wind, lifting and dissipating at once.
“Slaves do not make the best workers. And who will command this army, this army which will like as not expect to go home to their loved ones now they think their job’s done here? You? You return to the Eighth, do you not?”
“The armies are well used to foreign travel and distant billets; however, I shall — in prudent portions, leaving nowhere unmanned — so allowance them with loot and easy return they’ll either beg to see the Ninth again or be each one a most zealous recruiting sergeant for their younger brothers. For myself, I return to Pourl only briefly. I intend to spend half each year or more in Rasselle.”
“It is the traditional seat of power, and of infinite elegance compared to our poor, ever-onward-tramping township here, but whether by train or caude it is two days away. More in bad weather.”
“Well, we shall have the telegraph line soon, and while I am not present you have my authority here, Poatas. I offer you complete power over the entire Falls, in my name.” Tyl Loesp waved one hand dismissively. “In bookish legality it may be in the name of the Prince Regent, but he is still little more than a boy. For the moment — and it may, in time, seem a long moment — his future power is mine now, entirely. You understand me?”
Poatas smiled parsimoniously. “My whole life and every work has taught me there is a natural order to things, a rightful stratification of authority and might. I work with it, sir, never seek to overthrow it.”
“Good,” tyl Loesp said. “That is as well. I have in addition thought to provide you with a titular head of excavations, someone I’d rather have quite near to me but not at my side, when I’m in Rasselle. Indeed, their presence here might aid the recruitment of many a Sarl.”
“But they would be above me?”
“In theory. Not in effect. I emphasise: their seniority to yourself will be most strictly honorary.”
“And who would this person be?” Poatas asked.
“Why, the very one we just talked of. My charge, the Prince Regent, Oramen.”
“Is that wise? You say he’s a boy. The Falls can be a pestilential place, and the Settlement a lawless, dangerous one, especially with the brethren gone.”
Tyl Loesp shrugged. “We must pray the WorldGod keeps him safe. And I have in mind a couple of knights I intend to make the essence of his personal guard. They will take all care of him.”
Poatas thought for a moment, nodding, and wiped a little moisture from the stick he leant on. “Will he come?” he asked doubtfully, looking out towards the great, gradually revealing spaces of the Hyeng-zhar’s awesomely complicated, twenty-kilometre-wide gorge of recession.
Tyl Loesp looked out to the gorge complex, and smiled. He had never been here until their armies had invaded and — having heard so much about its peerless beauty and fabulous, humbling grandeur from so many people — had been determined not to be impressed when he did finally see the place. The Hyeng-zhar, however, seemed to have had other ideas. He had indeed been stunned, awestruck, rendered speechless.
He had seen it from various different angles over the past week or so, including from the air, on a lyge (though only from on high, and only in the company of experienced Falls-fliers, and still he could entirely understand why it was such a dangerous place to fly; the urge to explore, to descend and see better was almost irresistible, and knowing that so many people had died doing just that, caught in the tremendous rolling currents of air and vapour issuing from the Falls, hauling them helplessly down to their deaths, seemed like an irrelevance).
Poatas himself expressed some astonishment at the Falls’ latest show. Truly, they had never been more spectacular, certainly not in his life, and, from all that he could gather from the records, at no point in the past either.
A plateau — perhaps, originally, some sort of vast, high plaza in the Nameless City, kilometres across — was being slowly revealed by the furiously tumbling waters as they exposed what was — by the general agreement of most experts and scholars — the very centre of the buried city. The Falls, in their centre section, four or five kilometres across, were in two stages now; the first drop was of a hundred and twenty metres or so, bringing the waters crashing and foaming and bursting down across the newly revealed plateau and surging among the maze of buildings protruding from that vast flat surface.
Holes in the plateau — many small, several a hundred metres across or more — drained to the darkened level beneath, dropping the mass of water to the gorge floor through a tortuous complexity of bizarrely shaped buildings, ramps and roadways, some intact, some canted over, some undercut, some altogether ruptured and displaced, fallen down and swept away to lie jammed and caught against still greater structures and the shadowy bases of the mass of buildings towering above.
By now the mists had cleared away from nearly half the Falls, revealing the site’s latest wonder; the Fountain Building. It was a great gorge-base-level tower by the side of the new plateau. It was still perfectly upright, appeared to be made entirely from glass, was a hundred and fifty metres tall and shaped like a kind of upwardly stretched sphere. Some chance configuration of the tunnels and hidden spaces of the Falls upstream had contrived to send water up into it from underneath, and at such an extremity of pressure that it came surging out in great muddily white fans and jets from all its spiralled levels of windows, bursting with undiminished force even from its very summit, showering the smaller buildings, tubes, ramps and lower water courses all around it with an incessant, battering rain.