"Nobody's seen it all!"

—MARCO POLO

THOSE OF YOU who have been following my mishaps know me as Skeeve (sometimes Skeeve the Great) and that I grew up in the dimension Klah, which is not the center of culture or progress for our age no matter how generously you look at it. Of course, you also know that since I started chronicling my adventures, I've knocked around a bit and seen a lot of dimensions, so I'm not quite the easily impressed bumpkin I was when I first got into the magik biz. Well, let me tell you, no matter how sophisticated and jaded I thought I had become, nothing I had experienced to date prepared me for the sights that greeted me when I dropped in on the dimension Perv.

The place was huge. Not that it stretched farther than any other place I had been. I mean, a horizon is a horizon. Right? Where it did go that other places I had visited hadn't, was up!

None of the tents or stalls I was used to seeing at the Bazaar at Deva were in evidence here. Instead, massive buildings stretched up into the air almost out of sight. Actually, the buildings themselves were plainly in sight. What was almost lost was the sky! Unless one looked straight up, it wasn't visible at all, and even then it was difficult to believe that little strip of brightness so far overhead was really the sky. Perhaps this might have been more impressive if the buildings themselves were pleasanter to look at. Un fortunately, for the most part they had the style and grace of an oversized outhouse... and roughly the same degree of cleanliness. I wouldn't have believed that buildings so high could give the impression of being squat, but these did. After a few moments' reflection, I decided it was the dirt.

It looked as if soot and grime had been accumulating in layers on every available surface for generations, give or take a century.