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once.
    Nylan is the Black City, and it will always be that.
    From the High Road, at first it looked like a low black cloud of road dust, then like a small hill. Only when I came within a kay or so did I recognize its size. The walls are not high, perhaps sixty cubits, but they stretch from one side of the peninsula to the other, with the one gate, the one that ends the High Road. I'd seen paintings of the walls and castles of Candar, Hamor, and Austra, but Nylan was different. The walls were featureless. No embrasures, no crenelations. And no ditch, no bridge, no moat. The High Road ran straight to the gate.
    The other end of the High Road is at Land's End, nearly a thousand kays eastward. Land's End is just that-where Recluce ends. Once it was a seaport, before the currents and the winds changed the Gulf of Murr from a sheltered haven into the most storm-tossed section of the Eastern Ocean. Ships landed there occasionally, but not generally by choice. The only official port was Nylan, which seemed strange to me even when Magister Kerwin taught us that.
    The walls are not the most impressive feature of Nylan. The cliffs are. Black as the stone walls, smooth as black ice, they drop two hundred cubits to the dark gray-blue of the waves that crash against them.
    I saw both walls and cliffs at midday, with the sun full upon them. Even in full sunlight, they resembled shadows. I shivered, grasping my staff, which felt warm in my hands, as if it were trying to dispel that inner chill.
    Just looking at the massive black metal gates, the black stone, and the cliffs, I could see why they called it the Black City. I could also see another reason to worry about what I was getting into. Except I didn't have much choice.
    The gate was open, wide open, with no one in sight.
    So I walked up the last cubits of the High Road and into the narrow band of shadow before the gate itself, looking up at the featureless walls.
    "What's your reason for being here, traveler?"
    The voice was pleasant enough, and I looked for the speaker, finally locating her seated on something in a walled ledge seven or eight cubits above the road and beside the archway. Where she sat would be covered by the gates when they closed.
    She wore black-black trousers, black tunic, black boots. A staff, dark like mine, rested by her hand. Her hair looked to be brown in the shadow.
    "Your reason for entering Nylan?"
    "Dangergeld," I answered slowly.
    "Your name?"
    "Lerris."
    "From where?"
    "Raised in Wandernaught; apprenticed in Mattra."
    "Just about on schedule." Her voice was polite, but bored. "Once you go through the gate, turn left and go straight to the small building with the green triangle beside the door. Don't go anywhere else."
    "And if I do?"
    "Nothing. Nothing at all. Except you'll waste your time, and someone else's, if they have to go find you. Anyone who sees you will direct you back to the orientation building." Her voice was so matter-of-fact that I felt chilled again.
    "Thank you."
    She did not speak, but nodded as I passed beneath, through the archway that was another fifteen cubits overhead. The walls were thicker than I'd thought, perhaps as thick as they were tall. Up close, each stone looked like granite, but I had never seen black granite. Inside the archway, the shade and the breeze from the water were both a welcome relief.
    Once back into the sunlight, I stopped at the crossroads for a moment to take in Nylan. One road went right, toward a squarish and massive low building. Another went left, and the largest split in a circle around a black oak and headed due west.
    The city itself was a disappointment in some ways, fascinating at first glance in others. Trees, welcome after the featureless plains and fields that had led up to the wall, were scattered throughout Nylan. Some of them were apparently ancient, like the huge black oak lying directly before me that stood taller than the wall itself. I stepped several paces to the left and kept looking.