Free Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe by Stephen Baxter Page A

institution, and a network of roads to link it to Orklund and beyond. I’m told there is a proposal to name a wing of the Library after me. I am quite sure they will name the new city for you, as a memorial to your visionary leadership that will last for all time - even through the next precession event.’
    Or I will be condemned as the greatest fool since the Landfall, Thom thought gloomily. Thom hadn’t felt in control of events since the Proctor’s party had turned up at the parliament halls so many months ago with his outlandish proposal. If only Xaia were here.
    Come home, Xaia Windru! Come home!

IX

    The crew had to be forced to enter the City of the Living Dead. Only Xaia herself went willingly, and Chan – and Teif, because he hadn’t left Xaia’s side since the nest of Eykyn, even though he loudly despised the inhuman place.
    ‘Inhuman, yes,’ he said as once again he walked with Xaia through the City. ‘The very light that bathes us is inhuman.’ A violet glow coming from all around them, it cast no shadows. ‘And human cities stay still ; they don’t swim around you. There’s nothing here for us. There never was …’
    ‘It has some similarities with our cities,’ Xaia protested, and she quoted Chan’s analyses back at him. ‘It’s finite, for one thing, with an edge. Different within than without. It has internal structure that Chan is trying to map -’
    Teif swung a leg at a structure like a low, softly glowing wall. It broke up into clouds of violet spores. ‘It’s just Purple! Just a heaping-up of weeds …’ But the gentle action had hurt him, and his hand went to his lower belly.
    Xaia was concerned for him. But he wouldn’t even admit the wound’s existence. There was nothing she could do for him, because there was nothing she was allowed to do.
    He was right, in some ways, about the City of the Living Dead, however.  
    At least they had found it, however enigmatic it was. She had achieved her goal. She supposed history would remember that about her, if it forgot everything else – always assuming she survived to tell the tale.  
    After the nest of Eykyn they had returned to the coast and pressed on with their dual journey, the ships at sea and the scouting parties on land, heading ever further north. At last there had come a day when the sun hadn’t shown at all, and there had only been a vague, reluctant glow on the horizon at high noon. This was several days ahead of the sun’s disappearance at the latitudes of Orklund and Ararat, Chan said, itself a measure of how far north they had travelled. The cold bit hard, turning the ground to rock and the sea to a plain of pack ice. Soon the ships could no longer follow, for fear of being caught in the ice and crushed. So Xaia had ordered the construction of sleds, with runners made from polished ship beams, and harnesses for the huge warhorses that had endured this journey for months in the ships’ holds. And on they had pressed, with sleds laden with tents and food and fuel dragged by horses with iron grips nailed to their hooves, and when the horses had failed and died and been butchered, still a remnant of the party had pressed on over the frozen land, the sleds dragged by human muscle alone.  
    It had been an epic journey; nobody would deny that. But in the end, it was perhaps only Xaia herself who had continued to believe – until at last the forward scouts had spotted the violet glow on the northern horizon.
    Presumably the vanished race called the Dead had been nothing like humans, to have built such a city as like this. Even the lighting was exotic. There were no lamps or fires. The City itself glowed, the streets and the structures that lined them all shining a faint violet. Often, when the skies were clear, this strange, subtly shifting glow was answered by the flapping of auroras far above, as if the star-strewn sky was a mirror.  
    And there was an endless mobility. It was a ‘city’ of streets and blocks and