3
hook Bilk up. Blik clouted him on the side of the head for it
There were so many strange new things to see in the city that they made Alan dizzy. Some of the buildings were as much as three stories high, and the windows of a few of the biggest were covered, not with wooden shutters, but with a bright, transparent stuff that Wiln told Blik was called "glaz." Robb told Alan in the human language, which the Hussirs did not understand, that it was rumored humans themselves had invented this giaz and given it to (heir masters. Alan wondered how a human could invent anything, penned in open fields.
But it appeared that humans in the city lived closer to their masters. Several times Alan saw them coming out of houses, and a few that he saw were not entirely naked, but wore bright bits of doth at various places on their bodies. Wiln expressed strong disapproval of this practice to Blik.
"Start putting clothing on these humans and they might get the idea they're Hussirs," he said. "If you ask me, that's why city people have more trouble controlling their humans than we do. Spoil the human and you make him savage, I say."
They had several places to go in Falldyn, and for a while Alan feared they would not see the Star Tower at close range. But Blik had never seen it before, and he begged and whistled until Wiln agreed to ride a few streets out of the way to look at it.
Alan forgot all the other wonders of Falldyn as the great monument towered bigger and bigger, dwarfing the buildings around it, dwarfing the whole city of Falldyn. There was a legend that humans had not only lived in the Star Tower once, but that they had built it and Falldyn had grown up around it when the humans abandoned it. Alan had heard this whispered, but he had been warned not to repeat it, for some Hussirs understood human language and repeating such tales was a good way to get whipped.
The Star Tower was in the center of a big circular park, and the houses around the park looked like dollhouses beneath it.