“There is no sky in Anvard.

“One looks up at buildings collaged together, gabled and buttressed and grown into one another like sugar crystals.

“No stars. No moon. No wind or mists or snow.

“What there is—are—are rooms. Rooms within rooms like a holy cavern. From the vaulted cathedral halls of the great highways to the vast arenas decorated with stalagmites and stalactites made not of stone but of concrete and brick, steel and glass.

“Look down and you see bottomless pits. The city descends far below the surface of the land it sits on.

“Windows sparkle in the gloom of the sun globes.

“It’s a sunlight that never moves with the hours or the seasons. Never bright or dark.

“No rain cleans out the dusty corners.

“All the trees in pots and carefully tended gardens.

“Networks of open aqueducts surface for subterranean rivers, feeding lakes and pools on every level.

“The burial canoes of the Cimargue Indians pass through all this chaos largely untroubled, borne up by the poisonous red river.”

Anvard is the greatest of the domed cities, grown to fill its housing and the ground below with an infinitely intricate honeycomb of buildings and byways, streets and rooms. The domes are ancient—constructed well before recorded history—and largely self-repairing; no one is sure of their precise nature, nor of who built them.