He pushed up the steadily steepening grade for more than a hundred yards, the grass now wet with dew swishing past his calves and the occasional thistle plant adding scars to his ankles to match the ones on his rear end. As the house slowly vanished in the darkness behind him, he made a mental note of his course. If all else failed, he could go back to the mansion and try to find as much shelter from the night wind as its dark and depressing interior might offer. He felt the ground beneath his feet leveling out, saw another row of trees looming up, and passed between two of them.

Now the ground sloped downward. He had a vague sense of a vast, empty space in front of high, from which the wind now moaned unbroken and uninterrupted. He was staring into the darkness, trying to make out something recognizable, when the clouds passing overhead suddenly flared silver at their rear edges. A full moon glowed in a sky full of stars, pouring an almost incandescent silver light over the land.

The land ahead did indeed slope down. It moved on past another row of trees, past two more abandoned houses. Then it flowed out across miles of almost treeless plain to a broad river set deep in a high-walled gorge. On the far side of that river stood a city.

For a moment Blade wondered if the previous thought that he might see a city out there in the darkness was still working on his mind and making him see things. He focused all his attention on the city; it did not vanish. In fact, the neat rows of buildings stood out more clearly than before. Some rose only ten or twenty stories, others a quarter of a mile. Metal gleamed in the moonlight. One complex of thousand-foot towers, set in a close square, reflected the moonlight from walls of different vividly gleaming colors-red, gold, orange, silver. Other buildings were domeshaped, rising up five hundred feet or more and showing their frames, gilded frames that seemed to drip liquid moonlight, through transparent outer shells.