The weakness came upon her which had oppressed her since everything had gone so fatally wrong. For a moment she could not move, could not stand, could not even bear to think. Some part of her tried its very hardest not to be.
But the world would not oblige, and she understood that she was still aboard the Windlass, of course, and it was aloft. Catching her balance against the constant shifting motion, she went aloft to find Allanbridge at the wheel. Normally she would have been woken by the Windlass ’s oil-drinking engine, but today the airship was moving under clockwork power alone, and using as little of that as Allanbridge needed to keep the craft steady. Instead, most of the work was being done by the burner hoisted up beneath the balloon. The aviator had tried to explain how it all worked, how there was some special gas in the canopy that pulled up, and how it pulled up more when it was heated, but none of it had made a great deal of sense to Tynisa.
Now, though, whatever the gas was, it was pulling like a team of draught beetles, and the Windlass was ascending with all the ponderous grace of a Collegium matron taking to the air. The cracked and riven wall of the Ridge coursed past them to port, and it seemed that at any moment the airship would be dashed against it, its balloon ruptured and hull smashed to splinters, but Allanbridge knew his trade, and so the Windlass maintained her steady climb.
‘Suon Ren’s just over the edge?’ Tynisa asked him.
‘A little further than that, but close enough,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll put you down in sight of it.’
Tynisa glanced up at the looming curve of the balloon above. ‘I thought you weren’t welcome there. If you’re in sight of the city, then they’ll be able to see that,’ pointing at the great swell of inflated silk above them.
Allanbridge shrugged, his expression closed. ‘Your man there, Felipe Shah, he’s progressive, so if he looks out of the window and sees an airship, he won’t think the sky’s falling on his head – not unless it’s black and yellow, anyway. As for the rest of them, you’d be surprised what they can make themselves not see.’
They cleared the crest of the Ridge shortly after, and suddenly the sky was whole again, the late autumn sun crisp and clear over them. Allanbridge made adjustments that sent the Windlass scudding over a rugged landscape of abrupt hills and heavy jutting outcrops of stone. It looked to Tynisa almost as if some great cresting wave of rock had been rolling forward with the intention of burying the Lowlands for ever, but here it had frozen in a rubble of stony foam.
She watched shadows duck and bob as a trio of bees, bigger than she was, bumbled over the rough ground. ‘Where are the people?’ she asked. The land was green enough, but wild and devoid of human life.
‘Commonweal’s a big place, girl,’ Allanbridge told her. ‘Galltree told me that the locals reckon it drives you mad to live too close to the edge. Given most of ’em can fly, seems strange to me. Maybe the lords and princes and what have you spread that word, to stop people getting ideas about heading off elsewhere, eh?’
Soon after, the Windlass was making her leisurely way over irregular fields ribbed by the plough. Some were deformed by the contours of the land, but a little further on the land had been cut to fit them, each hill stepped and tiered so that, from their lofty perspective, the land appeared as a series of concentric rings.
‘There,’ Allanbridge prompted. ‘See there?’
‘What’s that?’ She spotted a little arrangement of buildings ahead, though still nothing much that she would call civilization.
‘It’s Suon Ren, girl.’
‘That’s a village.’
‘It’s Suon Ren,’ Allanbridge repeated. ‘Round these parts, that kind of place qualifies as a centre of trade and culture.’
At this distance it was hard to tell, but there were just three stone-built structures that looked like civilization to her. Beyond that, there stood some absolute fantasy of a building on a hill overlooking the rest, four floors high, but most of it either wooden-walled or with no walls at all, and crowned with an overflowing roof garden that cascaded trailing vines and creepers halfway to the ground. All the rest of the place was a loose-knit circle of small dwellings around a central space, nothing but little slant-roofed wooden buildings, and each far enough from its neighbours that the community seemed a collection of hermits. North of it all, the sun caught two silver lines that must be rivers, save that they were too straight to be natural. On one, a long boat of some kind was making a slow, sail-less progress.
Allanbridge was now guiding the Windlass down by some complex artifice, cutting even the clockwork and letting the vast bulk of the airshop ghost silently along, its keel almost brushing the flattened peaks of hills. At the last, he did something that caused a rattling within the ship’s bowels, and shortly after that they had dragged to a stop.
For a moment the Beetle aviator stared at her, his face fought over by expressions of sympathy and dislike. At last he sighed, plainly about to make some gesture he fully expected to regret. ‘I’m heading north, you hear me? Siriell’s Town, it’s called. No place that Felipe Shah and his like would be seen dead in, either. North of here the land runs lawless – or else the only law is Siriell’s, and she’s no noblewoman nor princess.’
Tynisa was not even trying to keep the look of disdain from her face. Those were the same people that Salma’s family must have fought against, the enemy of the Commonweal before the Empire came. But Master Allanbridge needs his profits, is that it?
‘Look…’ Allanbridge got out a scroll and a reservoir pen and began sketching, quick, rough outlines. ‘Here’s us, Suon Ren there.. . canals, you see them north of us… hills… woods, just the basics, the lie of the land. There’s no road, but if you keep to this course’ – a dotted line on the map – ‘you’ll see Siriell’s Town soon enough. Can’t miss the place.’ He thrust the makeshift map at her as though it was a weapon, making some part of her instinctively twitch for her sword. ‘Going to be doing business there, and then a round of some other contacts in the vicinity, and then back there to pick up what goods I’ve asked after. Then I’m gone, set for Collegium, and won’t be in these parts for half a year at least.’ When she still seemed not to understand him he sighed mightily and went on. ‘You’ll want back. This Commonweal is a madhouse. You come find me at Siriell’s Town, I’ll take you back home, and maybe neither of us need to mention this entire journey.’
‘I won’t be going back,’ she told him firmly.
‘I’m just saying.’ When at last she took the map from him, Allanbridge stepped back, plainly indicating that his work was done.
Minutes later she was standing on the earth of the Commonweal, and the Windlass was receding like a dream.
She set a good pace for Suon Ren, keeping her eye on the three stone-built structures that clustered together as though ready for an attack by the savages. As she grew nearer, the closing of distance mended some of her initial impression. The Commonweal houses were delicate, looking as though a strong wind would blow them away, but equally it was plain that they had been where they were for a long time. One moment she was the surrogate child of Beetles, born to stone and brick and tile, amid the foundries and the factories and the bustle of industry. Then some inner voice in her called out to awaken her vision, and she saw Suon Ren as its makers had intended.
The graceful dwellings of the Commonwealers were built from wood, true, but also from artistry and exacting skill. Each was like a puzzle-box, its walls composed of sliding panels so that this building was open down half one side, the next one open from halfway up to its roof, the very boundaries mobile and changeable. The roofs were each a single slope, and all sloping in the same direction, as though the entire town was a field of flowers angled at the sun.
She saw it then, although she could never have put it into words. She saw the world from which Salma had sprung.