is fingertip glides over the inked ridges of the canyons. It follows paths across the flat, pale expanse – Shifting Desert, curling script spills across it – some thick and bold, some dotted, as if marked only by tenuous and fleeting footsteps. Morning peeks through the shutters, crisp and sharp; it spills through the slats and whispers across the page, picking out the bumpy soft texture of the paper.
It’s brighter than he’s bargained for. He squints; it catches on the rim of his glasses, flares gold. His tired eyes prickle. He takes them off, rubbing his eyes until colors and shapes flare in the dark of his eyelids. When he opens them again, he’s no more ready for the light, which swallows the low-burning oil lamp with its cheer and drives out all the shadows the night has thickened.
Nights aboard the Violet Herring are full of mysterious creaks, soft voices, thumps, the ever-present hum of the engines and the sway of movement. There’s no chance of forgetting where you are, up here; even those who love it know it, feel the altitude and the grumbling, snoring beast in their bones.
His spine still prickles with fear – he’s had them check and double-check security; he’s been to the engine rooms himself, and the engineers have humored the fussy incumbent – but it’s a fear he knows he needs. This is why he’s come early, on this small vessel full of politicians and their families. He will have the hotel room checked, too, when he has time, and again when – if – he returns from the desert, and he’ll never be without a riff.
Still, you can set it aside awhile. He has spent these nights in the company not of poetry or grimoires, but of a mant old Mugrobi atlas.
There’s feet thumping down the hall outside now; he pays them no mind, though he knows what they portend. Instead, he settles his glasses back on his nose and peers down through them again.
He’s sat with leaves unfolded on the little table, searching. He’s crackled them carefully shut, run his hands along the bindings, made sure there are no folds and wrinkles. He’s gone from index to index before he’s found it, and now that he has, he can only sit and look at it, a spilling swirl of black lines on the page, colorless as a tomb.
If he shuts his eyes, he can still feel the distant breath of vivid color, a swirl of lanterns upwards.
Serkaih, the words whisper and curl, and underneath them, a small dot: Dkanat, in block print. The labels for various parts of Serkaih are larger than the town’s.
A jolt. He knows it, when it begins: he’s prepared for the downward tug through all of him, the feeling that he’s going to unfurl upward into smoke. He shuts his eyes and swallows the sick tingling that creeps through him, knowing it for temporary.
When the room’s stilled, when the tapping and the deferential voice come at the door, the light that presses itself up against the shutters has shifted. Some hint of heat seeps in through the glass and wood. He thinks, not for the first time, he might not’ve packed well.
On shaky landlubber legs, he sidles his way out into the corridor, feels the first familiar tanglings of fields – mostly perceptive, quantitative; some clairvoyant. He inclines his head in brief, queasy bows to other politicians and their white lace-swaddled wives, lugs his briefcase and his satchel up the narrow stair.
He emerges to blaring-bright sun, a broad blue sky almost untouched by clouds. Sweat prickles at the back of his neck; he’s still wearing his respectable dark suit, though he’s brought a broad-brimmed hat tucked under one arm, remembering the isles.
For all the heat, he wears a familiar bird-yellow scarf round his shoulders – knowing that disembarking, at least, he’s just one old redhead in a flock.
His first glimpse of Thul Ka is industrial.
Over the gunwale, past the mooring mast, he can see a few rows of airship hangars catching the light, and other crowded docks, broad stretches of colorful cloth awnings ruffled by the wind. He squints, because he thinks, past another mooring mast, past a sea of sun-silhouetted shapes, he can see a distant shimmer –
Natt are carrying boxes down to the crowded platform, and a big human offers to help him down the narrow stairs after a couple of grumbling elderly Anaxi. He’s tired; he feels jellied. He accepts, and begins the descent down to the platform and then into the shade, skimming the heads of the gathered crowd.