About three Home Dimension blocks away a relatively undamaged building rose a desolate twenty stories above the piled rubble at its base. It looked like the best prospect within easy reach, and time and weather were pressing. Blade began a lurching, scrambling advance toward the building, over the treacherous heaps of debris.
It was a long and bruising struggle across the wide expanse of wreckage along the riverbank, but finally Blade scrambled down the last slope into comparatively open street. The main door of the building was half-blocked by the spilled and heaped fragments of its former neighbors. But Blade scrambled in over the twisted metal and chunks of stone and plastic into what must have once been a lobby. A sudden flash of lightning sent light glaring in through the high windows fifty feet above ground level, lighting up an even higher vaulted ceiling, which was grimed with generations of dust. The glare also revealed the entrance to a flight of stairs leading downward. Blade was about to step past them and look for a flight upward; he had no desire to be trapped in a cellar by a band of the marauders. But as he passed the head of the stairs, he felt an unmistakable current of warm air flowing up out of the stairwell. In the dank lifeless chill of the building it was as unmistakable and as startling as a slap in the face.
Blade sniffed the air. No sign of smoke. Probably not the marauders, then. A fire large enough to produce that much heat would have been pouring out clouds of smoke. But he headed down the stairs, ready with sword and spear in his hands and mace in his belt.