on their chests welcomed the High King with suspicious warmth.
Caliph accidentally bumped into an ugly woman with black hair and a nose like a fin who stood wrapped in fashion. As he apologized, Caliph noticed the debonair but visibly spineless gentleman she clung to. Both of them fawned over Caliph as though he were their long lost son.
Caliph’s stomach lurched slightly.
Somewhere below, the coupling had been released and the Byun-Ghala lifted off the roof of West Gate and powered east over Gunnymead Square.
Almost at once, the well-dressed herd pressed gently but persistently toward the observation deck and the mounted spyglasses, oohing and ahhing and pointing at the tangled sepia piles of architecture below.
“How many men does it take to pilot a zeppelin?” asked Caliph, turning to the Blue General.
It sounded like the beginning of a joke.
“Depends on the size, your majesty. This one here is the smallest of three basic designs. We call this a lion. It’s small, agile, but not as powerful as sky sharks or the largest: leviathans.”
“And crew size?”
“Sorry. Yes. A ship like this could run with anywhere from nine up to a dozen or so men. The larger ones range from eighteen to fifty.”
“How does it run?”
“The engines? They’re electric. Off monster chemiostatic cells toward the aft. They funnel air in different directions, over the fins and such. This one has a range of over a thousand miles but the big ones can go several times that. We’d like to get our hands on solvitriol or the coriolistic technology they have in the south. But so far no luck.” Yrisl looked at Vhortghast who seemed not to be listening.
“We’re lagging behind,” said Vhortghast with thin cynicism. “Shouldn’t we be out with the others? Mingling?”
“Absolutely,” said Caliph with underscored conformity. Mentally he tacked you shit onto the end. Caliph walked out onto the wide balcony that overlooked the sprawl.
Light from the enormous chemiostatic cells could be seen faintly, reflecting off the spines.
Behind and to the west, West Gate formed a swollen rupture in the city wall, spewing buildings out toward the farmlands and hills like the contents of an overripe blackhead. “That’s West Fen,” said Vhortghast.
Caliph allowed his annoyance to show. “Thank you, Zane. Isn’t that one of Isca’s two external boroughs?”
“My apologies,” said the spymaster.
Eastward, the sky moved with a grisly ivory color. Between the zeppelin and the indistinct haze of the dockside boroughs rose and fell the undulant jumble of Maruchine, Grue Hill and Os Sacrum. To the south, the long squamous blocks of Candleshine knitted together like cells under a monolcular.
Caliph remembered Sena standing beside him in the musty lab, her perfume purling up into his face as he leaned forward, pretending to look at pig muscle on the slide.
“There’s Cripple Gate!” shouted the woman in black, still clinging to her enslaved husband. She pointed at a pentagonal structure below and fore of the airship. “Where all the beggars go to panhandle. I do hope you plan to do something about them, King Howl. The Herald says they’re the main cause of disease.”
“I find that unlikely,” said Caliph.
The woman’s mouth opened in mute shock. “Well! The papers are written by scientists, your majesty. And they’re poor.” She said the word poor like she might have said the word evil.
Vhortghast’s eyes flicked to Caliph, scrutinizing him suddenly for any reaction.
“Actually I believe the papers are written by journalists,” said Caliph.
The spymaster smiled wanly and tossed back his brandy.
“Disease or no,” said Travis Whittle, the burgomaster of Lampfire Hills, “most of our expenditures go to mopping up after them. That’s just the way it is. We have eight thousand city police to pay!”
“And Ghoul Court should pay for seventy-five percent of them,” said Clayton Redfield. He was the burgomaster of Blkton.
Everyone laughed except Caliph and Zane Vhortghast.
The unpleasant woman was clearly drunk. “I think we should sell them as slaves to the Pplarians or collect them for the physicians to experiment on, not the police I mean but the poor. If we get some useful medicine out of them, it will be absolutely ticky.”
“Ticky?” whispered Caliph.
Vhortghast smiled. “Means clever or novel. That dress she’s wearing is ticky.”
“I see.”
The Byun-Ghala was churning east and Caliph could see the terrifying black splendor of Hullmallow Cathedral erupting from the chimneys of Grue Hill. The enormous structure utterly dwarfed every other building in sight. Like a diffuse nightmare, the ornamented spires and flying buttresses gave the appearance of a grossly fat, daemonic spider with sky bent legs and a horrid