Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [8]
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