Author's Preface
Umin is drawn along through an interrupted landscape of swaying, smokey low alleys and cascading architectures, gently and gracefully but with all the inevitability of season or tide.
The way winds a while like a crumpled tunnel from out the great basalt market plaza, deeper in towards the root of the Gate , past and through piling cloth-bound pillars and styles of stone artifice long abandoned by draughtsmen of the Upper Houses .
They drift abreast adumbrated alcoves where dust-clad figures hovel over greasy pit-fires, whispering.
Through and past both the occasional ruin and architectural reconstitution.
At a turn and widening of a yellow-silty, parallel lane Pyna stills and releases Umin's wrist, her cold supple fingers falling away.
Her ghastly-alluring, alabaster cheek warmed by a caramel light that courses from the thick, ill-fitting panes of a house brightly brooding ahead.