They hadn’t even known the city was there and certainly had no idea what its name was. The Oct, the Nariscene, the Morthanveld and even the allegedly near-omniscient Elder cultures of the galaxy didn’t appear to know either; it had all been long ago and under earlier owners, the responsibility of the previous management, an unfortunate problem associated with the last, late, lamented tenants. The one thing everybody did know was that the city’s name wasn’t Hyeng-zhar.
The result was that the city came to be called the Nameless City. Which meant, of course, that its very name was a contradiction.
The Falls had been a Wonder of Sursamen for millennia just due to their sheer scale, famed even on levels of the great world the vast majority of whose inhabitants would never see them directly. Even so, the most prominent or important or just plain rich denizens of the Kiters of the Twelfth and the Naiant Tendrils of the Eleventh and the Vesiculars of the Tenth and the Tubers and Hydrals of the Fourth sometimes made the effort to come and see the Hyeng-zhar, so were transported by the Oct or the Aultridia up or down one or more Towers and then across to the site – those from profoundly different environments encased in whatever suit or vessel they required to survive – to gaze, usually through glass or screen or other intervening material, at the thunderous majesty of the celebrated cataract.
When the Falls began to expose the outskirt buildings of the buried city – almost a hundred years before Djan Seriy first saw them – their renown increased and spread even further, and took on too an air of mystery. The gradually uncovered metropolis was no mere primitives’ settlement, albeit – as more and more of it was excavated by the Falls and its true scale started to become clear – one of extraordinary size; it was undeniably ancient but it had been highly advanced. Even ruined, it held treasures. Most of the plunder was conventional in form; precious metals and stones that would struggle to occur naturally on a Shellworld with its lack of plate tectonics and crustal recycling. Some, though, was in the form of exotic materials that could be used, for example, to fashion blades and machine parts of conventionally unsurpassable sharpness or hardness and fabulous if incomprehensible works of what was assumed must be art.
The materials the buildings were made from themselves possessed properties almost unthinkable to the people who did the discovering on the Ninth. Spars and beams and thin claddings could be used to build bridges of enormous strength and amazing lightness; the main problem those who would use this extravagance of booty faced was that the raw materials rarely came away in handy lengths and chunks and were usually impossible to cut or trim.
Intact or ruined, the interiors of the buildings also often provided strange artifacts and occasionally useful supplies, though never any bodies, fossils or tombs.
The city grew as it was eaten away, the extent of the building debris eventually spreading to beyond the width of the Falls on both sides – the cataract was over seven kilometres across at present, and the city must be broader than that.
Its buildings were of a hundred different types and styles, to the extent that it had been suggested the city had been host to several – possibly many – diverse types of being; doors and interior spaces were different shapes, entire structures were built on disparate scales and some had basement or foundation levels of bizarre designs that went deep below the floor of the gorge base, all the way down to the Prime of the Shellworld itself, another eighty metres below, so that these few buildings remained standing even after the Falls had exposed them and retreated far beyond, leaving them as enormous slab-sided islands towering above the braid of streams that formed the reconstituted river making its way down the great gorge to the Lower Sea.
A series of wars amongst the humans who inhabited the Ninth, centred around the control of the Falls and their supply of treasure, resulted in an Oct-brokered peace that had held for a few decades. The Sarl and a few other peoples from the Eighth – allowed to travel to the relevant region of the Ninth by the Oct – had taken a peripheral part in some of the wars and a greater part in the peace, generally acting as honest brokers