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kilometers from the rock bridge when they made camp and bedded down for the night. Dark, heavy clouds roiled above the gray mountains beyond the canyon. Rain splattered on them as they ate their dinner of dried fish and fruit, and later as they slept. When morning cast a pale orange light on their faces the air had chilled considerably, and light specks of snow drifted down. They could not see across the canyon. The river in the chasm bellowed distantly as they mounted. Barthel walked first.
    They reached the rock bridge by midafternoon. Few people traveled this route, Kiril said. Commerce was carried on much farther west, where the canyon was swallowed up by a lush rain forest and the river went underground.
    Like ants on a highway, the three began the trek across the bridge. The slope to either side was imperceptible, but it eventually rounded smoothly into the sheer walls. At least four holes had been scoured into the sides of the bridge to emerge near the middle. Wind whistled through them with a fierce, mournful tone. When Kiril peered into one, the draft lifted the neck of his cloak up and batted it like a sail.
    “Wind and water did this,” Bar-Woten said. “Hegira has to have been here for millions of years.”
    “Been here?” Kiril asked. “Ah, if you're going to be profound, where is here?”
    “Wherever, it is not the land of the First-born. It has no stars, no sun, and no moons. Scrittori, can your learning explain that?”
    “Of course not.”
    “That's what I'd like to explain.”
    Barthel said nothing, but looked down the length of the canyon into gray shadow. Light never reached down there. The shadows were always the same. That seemed important, but he didn't mention it.
    By dark they were across the bridge. They camped again, ate, and slept until morning.
     
     
     
     
     
     

Hegira

Five
    Kiril pondered Bar-Woten's quest as the nearest mountains of Mundus Lucifa lowered like black giants through their clouds. Whatever the Ibisian learned, the Obelisks wouldn't help him — that Kiril knew as certainly as he knew he had two arms.
    The Obelisks were an enigma unchanged across the history of the Second-born. They were about a thousand kilometers tall, a kilometer across each side and as perfectly square as anyone could* measure. They vanished in the endless blue during the daytime and dimly reflected the light of the fire doves at night, rising until the eye couldn't trace them. Entire civilizations were indelibly etched on their faces: histories and philosophies and literatures, records of the home of the First-born called Earth. The arrangement of the texts by subject and date was seemingly random, but a rough progression existed — the higher one read, the more advanced in time and technology the records were. The highest the readers had ever gone in Ibis had been ten kilometers, using balloons like the readers in Mediweva and Khem.
    “From each you shall choose the flavor of your birth,” the first text on each Obelisk read, “the time of your time, the words you will speak and things you adore. All other things will be as nothing to you.”
    All Obelisks were the same. The civilizations of Hegira were not. That, Kiril's teachers had told him, was what the Obelisks meant. All shall choose differently from the texts, climb high or low depending on their technology, to pick what they need from the immortal needles.
    They were the only things on Hegira that could be relied upon. All else — penitents, armies, generals, and servants alike — were inconsiderable. Humans twinkled brief as candles. Obelisks stayed.
    “What do you want to know?” Kiril asked Bar-Woten.
    “Anything concrete. I'll feast on crumbs if I have to.”
    “The Bey knows about its name, Hegira,” Barthel said. “It refers to the flight of Momad from Mecca, among the First-born. The Qur'an tells many such wonderful tales. Not Yesu, not the Lotus Contemplative, nor any other can claim that namesake — not even, pardon