‘Maybe,’ Tralane said, suddenly childish. ‘But I will be late.’
‘Wish I could go late, the first part is so boring,’ Minna said, sighing and sitting back up, brushing crumbs off her face. ‘All the names and the formal dances. The Empress won’t even show her face until gone ten and nothing will happen until after midnight.’
‘By happen you mean unwise drunken liaisons and foolish amounts of babble?’ Isabeau asked with a withering tone.
‘Of course, what’s the point of it otherwise?’
‘Well for you, nothing, obviously.’
Minna curled her lip at Isabeau contemptuously. ‘Like you’re there for a higher purpose other than showing off.’
‘I don’t have a reason to show off. I’m there as my Master’s student, because I have to be. None of it interests me in the least.’
‘Oh sure, like you don’t want to see that tigerman.’
‘He’s a Karoo. And I already met him.’
Minnabar stared at her, gearing up to denounce the lie but Tralane was faster.
‘When?’
‘The evening before yesterday. Night was called to a meeting with the Empress. He was there. It was the last thing I did before I came home.’ Isabeau gave Minnabar a so there stare.
Minna opened her mouth but Tralane waved her hand in front of it, ‘Zhzhshhh. What got said at this meeting? Who else was there?’
Minna clamped her mouth shut and glared at both of them but she was too interested to do more.
‘The Empress, her guard, Tzaban, General Borze, Parlumi Night and myself.’
Minna cracked with a high-pitched exclamation that bordered on a whine of envy, ‘You can’t seriously tell me you’re getting invited to state meetings?’
Isabeau gave her a contemptuous look. ‘I wasn’t invited to participate and I’m not allowed to repeat anything. I just say I saw the Karoo. What were you doing? Drinking cocktails and scoring points off empty-headed little heiresses?’
Tralane groaned with annoyance even as part of her marvelled in astonishment at Isabeau’s rise and rise to places of power. She got up in search of food and listened to the two of them bicker and bitch while she prepared it, finally interrupting with, ‘Minna, put that dress order in or we’re all done for. Issa, might I have your help with the Flit in ten minutes before you go?’
Ten minutes later, indigestion at full throttle, Tralane was inside her flight leathers and Isabeau was in her heavy overalls, both of them working on different parts of fixing the Flit’s tiny double-stream engine. Isabeau was cutting a new fuel filter pad out of natural sponge. Lane changed the oil and tested the prop shafts for cracks and vibrational inconsistencies. Outside the shed, the sky was a mixture of grey cloud with blue patches and was predicted to clear by evening. Appeals to the University Weather Station had suggested east was her best bet for locating the clashing air fronts that might bear storms but it could be a long flight, at the limit of her range. Winds would be enough, she had reasoned. Alide knew nothing of the workings of what he was gathering and by the time he might discover that the crystals did not contain the same potentials as the ones he had got before it would be much too late for either her or him to worry about it.
‘East is flat,’ Isabeau said as she worked, her small spanner flashing in the low light. ‘And it’s tornado season.’
Lane had thought of this too. Tornadoes rarely came as far west as Glimshard and if they did they were weathermanced away from it, but out east they were frequent, resulting in large areas of plain with relatively little human life of any permanency. Nomads and herdsmen dared claim it for themselves, a few farming groups clung to the edges but aside from them and caravans using the roads to cross the lengthy distances between the fertile west and the farther eastern Empire stretches it was a mostly empty place. If she crashed there she wouldn’t be going anywhere fast. The risk only sharpened her awareness. Whatever was to come, for the moment she was going to have some fun and later take the pleasure of giving Alide substandard crap.
Isabeau finished the lines and checked the air intakes. Tralane watched her proudly for a moment. It might not be her abiding passion but her daughter had a cool, swift accuracy about her that demonstrated a perfect working knowledge and excellent skills.
‘I didn’t know you were so familiar with the Flit,’ she said, having expected to at least answer a few questions.
‘I read the schematic,’ Isabeau replied, replacing her tools in their box with exacting care. ‘You keep it pretty well maintained. I can’t find any real issues with it.’
‘Real issues?’
‘Well if we had the money and time I think we could make a better one, a much better one, but that would require a significantly larger workshop and testing area, not to mention raw materials and we don’t have diddly squat to spend, do we?’ Isabeau looked up thoughtfully. ‘My internship isn’t exactly going to turn any profits I can see either. I think we need to put our family heads together and open a shop.’
Tralane stared at her. ‘A shop.’
She nodded, lining up her screwdrivers so that all handles and tips were in a perfectly straight line before closing the case. ‘Selling small things that people like to have and need. Like timepieces, and household gadgets and another one, larger, for farming machinery, once we’ve collected enough finance to open a factory of our own. I looked into the materials’ sourcing and it just happens that this region is quite well stocked in the kinds of minerals and ores we need. But I don’t think we should finance our own mining company as they already exist and have their own expertise. We could however do a deal with specialised drilling equipment which could get us some very profitable rates.’
Isabeau looked up into the silence, cleaning her fingers on a rag as Tralane stood watching and realised she, Tralane, was an idiot. ‘Minna would be good in a shop, selling and bossing people around. She was made for it,’ Isabeau added.
‘You’re right. I never thought of any of that.’
‘I know. Why would you? You discover things, you make them work. You’re not like me. And you’re not like Minna. We’re only similar. Mom, you look terrible, what is it?’
‘I— This saving our butts thing is supposed to be my job. But all I’ve done is sit and watch everything fall apart.’
‘Not everything. You’re kind and you looked after Carlyn and Bestie and the House families who’ve been with us for donkeys’ years, and you took in Minna’s web of idiots, and you let me do whatever I wanted even when you thought I was mad. You’ve written oodles of papers for other disciplines which were all good, and brought lots of machines back to life, and now it’s my turn to do something useful.’ Isabeau smiled and folded her cloth up. ‘I need to get this oil off my hands before I report to Night. We can discuss it after the ball sometime. When you’ve got a minute.’
Tralane found herself speechless. Isabeau left and she was still speechless as she finally shook herself and pushed the Flit out of the shed and on to the end of the runway. The rig sang in the breeze lightly as she unfolded and braced the wings. After all its treatments the engine started first try. There was that brief, uncertain moment when she opened the throttle and waited for it to shift from purr to roar, wondering if it would still hold, all these years after it was machined into being, older than she was, but it did. The brakes creaked as the power increased and then she let them go. Rattling, quivering like a sensitive aunt, the Flit rolled forwards. Swiftly it flinched from weeds and cracks, then she opened the gas and aether flow nozzles and felt the shimmering change from nervous to smoothly assured as the magery honed the basic works into a perfect, easy fusion of speed and lift. The Flit rose into the air with purpose and turned into the wind. For a few moments she had an unprecedented view of the city. She oriented by the palace’s asymmetric towers and took a due east bearing, already so high that to onlookers from the plains ground she would be no bigger than a sparrow. Cloud quickly engulfed her as she rose and she had to put on her mask a
nd breathe bottled air. It was colder in the high airstreams but she didn’t mind it. Icy air rushing through the odd chink in her protection reminded her of how precarious every moment was, and filled her with joy.
East she went, for an hour, more or less directly as the flows of the wind let her, noting their increasing strengths. She took her time to look about, making small adjustments on her maps as she matched the human settlements on the land with various geological features. The Flit behaved perfectly, even the usually erratic meteorometer flashing regular updates as it collected data blurts from the ancient weathermasts. These were sturdy bits of kit, basic but robust, located at the trig points where the geological surveyors had left them hundreds of years ago when Glimshard first came to this region under Atsueen. A half Sircene Empress, her obsession with the gathering of scientific knowledge had used up nearly every penny the city and its environs had been able to muster on grand projects. They had paid out for the most part, although now the ‘pure’ ones, such as the weather listening posts, had been neglected in favour of the profitable benefits of hydroelectricity, aquifer management and geothermal heating.
The meteorometer acted up, blinking warning lights nearly as soon as she reached the tornado corridor marked on her maps with a hashed red border and on the meter’s display coloured in orange. Whether this was lucky or unlucky she wasn’t sure but at least there were storms ahead, that was certain. She adjusted her flight path accordingly and tightened her safety straps, checking her parachute harness and just playing a little with the controls to feel them working now when it was only bluster before serious weather came to play with her. While she had the time she turned and checked her crystals and the array, tested its aerials and pickups in case something had come loose on the way out, and then put up her lightning hood – a wire cage that surrounded her shoulders and head and connected to the metal cage of the pilot’s seat frame and the discharge router, intended to protect her and her instruments from being fried by a strike. She felt better with it there but there was really not much sense of great security in these things: the cockpit was still open and the Flit was undeniably tiny and she was about to do something foolishly dangerous.
She waited, to see if her hands would turn her from it, to feel if she wanted to run away from it, but the overpowering sensation was in the other direction; she felt, contrary to much she might have thought, that she was completely safe and this was what she was meant to be doing. She and the wind, the rain, the cloud, the air, the land – they were all one thing, her body felt this, and felt it in the machine too, it was her, the wind was her, the rain was her, the storms and the gyres of restless airmasses, they were her. She was everywhere and it was purely stupid to think she could be only a tiny creature alone in a lifeless machine inside a chaotic and unpredictable system of massive and indifferent powers. That was simply not true. Her conviction was bone deep and at the same moment she knew there was no way at all she could ever have convinced someone else of this, or even her own mind, if it gripped its principles and its knowledge and started to talk. What she came for, what was up here was this mindless stillness, this experience of one-ness, not alone but at home, always and everywhere at home. Here she knew nothing of fear.
Tralane banked into the direction of the storm. She was so focused on the skies that for a long time she didn’t look down or check her maps, and so when she had crossed two thirds of the plain and moved almost as far easterly as she dared the sight that temporarily blotted out thoughts of fuel levels was so surprising that it made her jaw drop. Below her on the sweeping grasslands was a large tented encampment. She saw coloured banners of the Empire and light flashing off something metal or glass.
Bracing the control stick with her knees she fumbled with her goggles to reset their viewing and took a better look over the side. Spire, she thought. That was her symbol of the lit tower on their purple banners. It was no trade group either, but a war force, accompanied by medium weight artillery and at least two separate groups of engineers bearing things in covered wagons, some of them steam operated, others pulled by heavy oxen and horses. Light cavalry was plentiful, and she saw creatures she’d only seen in books before too – the half-reptile, half-bird Vashrapten, armoured and ridden by the archers and crossbowmen, their humanoid hands so bizarre as they held packages or range weapons of their own. All of them had dull plumage, relatively, brown and green. There came the flash of light again, on glass she was sure this time, and she knew herself seen from below. Instinctively, she pulled on the control stick and went higher, though she was already way out of range for any shot.
The Flit bore no markings but its very existence meant she could only have come from Glimshard. She looked up and the magnification of the lenses suddenly brought her face to face with a huge stormfortress of clouds, greenish and grey with their own weight, higher than the Gleaming or any mortal structure. She heard at the same moment the bleeping warning of the meteorometer as it took readings using the delicate sensors on the Flit’s nose and wings. It was predicting the formation of tornadoes imminently a short distance ahead, within ten miles, not that Tralane needed a beep to tell her that considering the looks of the sky. There was a clear line of cloud-meet-clear-air and huge, pendulous masses of water at multiple levels in that cloud, lit by flashes of hidden lightning. She banked slowly, staying high, fighting the wind a little as it became stronger – enough to start the strange, deluded song of the crystallograph wires though it was too soon, she thought, to turn the switch yet. Because it might be her only chance she pulled out her bread and cheese and took a few hearty bites, slugging it down with watered juice from her canteen and steering with her knees.
She assumed these were reinforcements for the dig project, sent a long way overland because Spire had no portals, or because until lately Glimshard had had no portals. The distance from Sprianshi, Empress Jagorin’s city in the uplands, meant this group had set out weeks before and were finally only days from arrival and that was plausible given that the dig portal had only been tested and verified later than that. If the soldiers had been moving across the plains from Sprianshi’s best approach in the north-east, then they had been several days already in this grassland and must realise the dangers of it, but they were horribly vulnerable right now on their present vector which was taking them faultlessly towards Glimshard. She considered warning them, but what good would it do? There was nowhere to go and the paths of such spiral storms were notoriously unpredictable. It suddenly struck her as odd to dare a race straight across when a journey clinging to the hilly ground on either side would have been longer, but far safer.
A shear wind suddenly almost tumbled her out of the sky and she had to throw the remains of her sandwich overboard and grab the stick. She struggled for a while, lost in the elemental fight of machine, mind and weather as she got within a mile of the predicted drop zone and decided that was close enough. The crystallograph was whining, shrieking – she reached to switch it on, then it took all her concentration to flow and glide with the wind, into and out of cloud, hail and rain streaming, as she waited for the instruments in her goggles and on the Flit to tell her yes, that was enough, we are full of storm, we have eaten the readings of its powers and stored its songs, we can go.
She had no doubt that storms were living things or that at least thinking about them as if they were felt more correct than calculating wind and water, heat and cold. A storm lives as a dream, a dream that can be fatal or beautiful or both, it is never more than that, or less. She felt, as she was borne in it, by it, at its whims with which she could not negotiate, only bend herself, that this was true of all things. They were nothing at all, but she dreamed them into being and in so doing made them alive. And the Flit. And herself. These moments were the easiest to remember that; mostly in her life she forgot and went back to being Tralane. But here, when she remembered, she could make anything of the storms that she wished, monstrous devils, glorious angels – anything, and it would be the truest truth, or the
baldest lie told with a laugh and a giggle, not true at all. Storms then, were alive, glorious and terrible angels, unknowable and untouchable, so far beyond control or understanding in their essential whimsy they were utterly alien but still familiar and beloved in that wild alien being that had nothing to do with her at all and yet lived only for her.
‘I wish I could put that in a crystal and shoot someone with it,’ she thought, dully recalling the true purpose of her crazy flight. But if there was a capture method for deeply personal experiences she had never heard of one, save poetry perhaps, and even then that required an attuned listener. Her own efforts at poetry were merely embarrassing. She forgot even that as she struggled to survive against the weather until finally the all clear beep came, the crystallograph’s signal for completion. She turned at once for home, her focus altering to returns and the world beyond the clouds, only to see that the promised tornado had nearly concluded formation. There was a broad grey downdraft searching for the earth about two miles from her position, between her and her vector of choice. She knew that to go closer to it was to dance with the angels of hail in a deadly way, and automatically checked the fuel gauge. She saw with a sudden stab of nerves that it was low and flicked the meteorometer to get a prediction. As she waited she saw the massive gyre touch down and draw sudden shadow from the ground. She imagined horses and men caught up in it, banners and gold twisting, screaming, but the sky was so gloomy she couldn’t make out any detail.
The next five minutes saw her find a position clear of the rain and hail front. She coasted at about five thousand feet and cued the crystallograph. She had no intention of grabbing anything from the rotator or the supercell, and prayed for a shear-free minute as she adjusted her goggles and looked down again. The camp was abandoned at half rip, and not a second too soon. Banners and tents were in the path of the tornado and already being lifted from the ground a hundred feet ahead of it. Fires went out and leaped to the skies, abandoned heavy wagons shuddered and fell, tipping crates on to the ground. A broad wave of men, women and animals fanned out across the vast grassplain, rushing away from the path of the storm. She saw some keep rough formation but mostly it was panic and rout. Luckily for them the actual tornado itself was shifting slowly, making a stately southwards roll. As long as it didn’t change direction and accelerate suddenly they should manage to survive although their heavy gear might not.
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