the horse, maneuvering it toward a horse-sized sling. Why would they do that? It’s not even my horse . . .
Master Sergeant Timms was grinning in Caliph’s face, white teeth and blue goggles reflecting Caliph’s sordid condition like a mirror. He jerked the cable several times and Caliph felt himself float up into cool air, away from the squalid heat of the pasture, reeled in like a fish by the hand of providence.
He moved from thoughts of Sena to thoughts of Stonehold. What will happen when I get there? Wretchedly submit to the tenure of public service? And then there was the other logical notion that being High King might not be so bad a thing.
Caliph vomited again from a hundred feet above the ground, hoping he missed Sergeant Timms. Landing on the deck was a blur. The winch stopped. There was a smell of hot machine grease. Then Caliph was in a small metal shower stall cleaning off, getting dressed, crawling into a bunk that smelled of bleach. He shivered from the trauma, the violence . . . but was soon asleep.
A change in engine pitch woke him. It was dark. He rubbed his eyes, trying to remember where he was. He pulled a robe from the back of the tiny room’s door, tied it on and stepped out into a gray corridor.
There was a man stationed outside his room who said nothing. Caliph looked both ways and arbitrarily chose right. The passage led him outside onto a deck that stared into the night. Flashing lights reflected on the railing from the overhead zeppelin skin.
Below, in the black abyss, green-lensed gas lamps erupted from turrets, hooded and massive like grotesque helmets. Their ornate leaded glass launched groaning beacons into the dark, lighting an aerial highway not just for this ship, but for pilots ferrying metholinate to the Independent Alliance of Wardale and the Free Mercantilism of Yorba.
Beyond the beacons, twinkling in the distance, a massive sprawl of lights smoldered beneath a pancake of brown clouds. Naobi burned, staring out from just beneath the cloud cover, turning the Dunatis Sea into a hypnotist’s cauldron flecked with light.
Master Sergeant Timms appeared at Caliph’s side, summoned suddenly by the look of it. His short ash-brown hair was slightly crimped and his eyes looked bleary. “Did you sleep, your majesty?”
Caliph made the hand sign for yes. “I guess so.”
“Not very luxurious,” Timms said, “but it’s the best we could do for you on this ship.” He looked out at the approaching landscape of lights. “They know we’re coming. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day. Can I get you anything to eat?”
Three hours later, Caliph Howl landed in Isca.
Maps lay scattered across the old tactical table of the High King’s tower, rustling in a breeze from the window where Caliph stood staring out at the city.
He tried to follow the arcaded gutters that sluiced rain and night soil and anything else that oozed or floated but tracking them was impossible. His eyes drifted through the blackened spires of Temple Hill, down into Ironside where the Iscan navy bristled and the Dunatis shone like a colony of golden beetles.
Almost mythic, Caliph thought.
The Duchy of Stonehold had not been a true duchy since Donovan Blek liberated it from the Kingdom of Greymoor six hundred sixty-eight years ago and shortly thereafter choked on his own tongue.
As the years passed, a queer mongrelization of southern technology and northern hocus-pocus settled across the land.
Much of the original tribal ferocity persisted in aristocratic form, as barristers with familiar chieftain surnames like Cumall and Hynsyil flung opinions like spears around the courtrooms of the north. Others became constables and burgomasters and sometimes even kings.
Backward by most accounts, the Duchy of Stonehold was a pseudo-feudal monarchy buttressed by a complex aristocracy composed of wealthy merchants, factory owners, artisans and businessmen. It was a cobbled mess of governmental offices and overstated positions. It was five duchies, five kingdoms really. Four lesser kings unified by the High King in Isca, all of which echoed obsolete tribalism: tribalism that stoked the main fires of Stonehold’s nameless hybrid political engine.
Miles away, the industrial yards of Growl Mort and East Murkbell spewed smoke as cohesive as black ink. From the weltering ooze, little golden lights winked and twinkled—all that remained of holomorphic energies poured into furnaces at Vog Foundry and the shipbuilding yards of Bilgeburg.
Caliph turned his back on the phantasmagoric vista and focused once again on the gruff interplay of voices barking all around him.