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and the air cooler, then another land with its own spire. But they'd have to cross Mundus Lucifa first, and it had no Obelisk. Bar-Woten asked Kiril what he knew about Mundus Lucifa.
    “There are two parts, north and south. I only know about the south. It's a monarchy, fairly backward. A series of fortresses, usually with towns inside, with high mountains and many bridges. They're friendly with Mediweva, but not too friendly. Reluctant to advance their thought. They won't allow anyone to read Obelisk texts, so any knowledge they have is from the past — over two thousand years ago — or rediscovered independently. I've only met a few, none from this far east. They're a handsome, stubborn people.”
    “Momad?” Barthel asked.
    “No. Not Kristian, either. They worship a pantheon not mentioned on the Obelisk — not so far as we've read, anyway.”
    “Well and good,” Bar-Woten said. “Perhaps we can learn something from them — how much the Obelisks make us what we are. Sulay would have enjoyed the opportunity to investigate that. All the lands we passed through believed in the Obelisks. We had to make our own atlases as we traveled. No books were allowed that did not faithfully reprint the Obelisk texts or conservatively comment on what they said. And there are no maps of Hegira on the Obelisks.”
    “Can I see a map?” Kiril asked. “And an atlas?” He snapped his fingers. “I once read a book that mentions them. Atlas was a god — he held up Earth on his shoulders before Newton and Kopernick destroyed him.”
    Bar-Woten pulled a square of parchment from his shoulder bag and handed it to Kiril. “Careful with it. It may be the only surviving record of what our geometers and geographers learned. It's a map of what we saw on our March from Ibis.”
    Kiril unfolded it gingerly, trying to stay balanced on the horse. It was a network of lines and fields of color with shading and odd marks. He could read the names well enough — Obelisk script was universal, so people who believed in Obelisks could always read each other's alphabets — but their positions and other signs meant nothing to him. He had never bothered to read the Obelisk texts that discussed cartography — they seemed useless intellectual exercises, since no such maps existed on Hegira, and Earth was something of a myth.
    “Pretty,” he said. He folded it and handed it to Bar-Woten, who patiently refolded it and put it in his bag.
    “There's something in the canyon,” Barthel said. He pointed. Kilometers below lay a crumpled mass which at one time could have been a cylinder. The area around it was too rugged to allow easy access. It looked undisturbed.
    “Two or three hundred meters long,” Bar-Woten said. “Made of metal. Look how the sun glints off it. Do you know what it is?”
    Kiril shook his head, no. He was frowning.
    “Could be ... like the rockets of Khem,” Barthel said. “Same shape, only bigger.”
    “Gun powder would never lift that monster,” Bar-Woten said. “It must be a building. Someone put it together and it was destroyed by a rock slide.”
    But Kiril saw the gouged scar that trailed behind the wreck. He had read a text on missiles and other terrestrial weapons of war — the things on which the First-born had planned to ride away from Earth. “It's a rocket of a kind,” he said. He explained what he knew about them, and Bar-Woten raised his eyebrows appreciatively.
    “I'd like to know who could build something like that,” he said.
    “Not the Lucifans.” Kiril threw a small pebble into the canyon and rose from his knees. “It must have come from very far away. And it was no weapon — it didn't explode.”
    “That doesn't mean it wasn't a weapon. I understand the Obelisks say not all things explode by fire.”
    “True,” Kiril agreed. “But we have yet to run into explanations for those passages. We accept by faith.”
    “I think someone else needs no faith. They have proof.”
    They were some twenty