‘I’ve read all about her,’ Totho was saying. ‘She’s the first of a new generation of lighter-than-air fliers. Most of the others of her size use hot air, you see, which means half the weight you actually lift is due to the boilers and the burners.’

Tynisa, walking behind him, had never seen him so animated. He was a real hermit crab of a man, she mused. What emerged infrequently out of his shell was nothing you’d guess at from the outside.

‘But the Sky doesn’t use air at all,’ Totho went on. ‘The bag’s filled with precipitate of mordant aquillin, which is actually lighter than the air, and so you can free up so much more space for the freight and passengers, and the engines-’

‘Toth, will you take a moment to think about who you’re talking to here,’ Salma said to him. ‘Old news to Che, I’m sure, and, well…’

Totho craned back at him. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t understand – not a word. You’re wasting your explanatory talents on me.’

‘Oh.’ Sudden comprehension came to Totho. ‘But even if you don’t, you must have seen-’

‘We don’t have air ships in the Commonweal, Toth,’ Salma said patiently. ‘Think about it. We don’t have artificers. We don’t have automotives or engine-mills or even crossbows in the Commonweal, now, do we?’

‘But…’ Totho floundered for a second. ‘Amongst all of you?’

Salma grinned. ‘You ever see a Mantis mechanic, Toth?’

‘I… No, of course not.’

‘You’ll not see one amongst the Dragonfly-kinden, either. Nor anyone from the Commonweal.’

‘Sorry, it’s just… hard to grasp. Tynisa?’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry, Totho. All machinery bibble-babble to me.’

‘But you were brought up here in Collegium!’ he protested. ‘Surely…’

‘Sorry. You ever see a Spider-kinden crossbow-woman? Being Apt to machines isn’t something you can just pick up. You’re born to it or you’re not.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Che patted Totho’s arm. ‘I was listening. Tell me.’ Privately, though, as Totho’s enthusiasm waxed again, she was considering what it must be like being Tynisa, or Salma, in Collegium. Or Doctor Nicrephos, or Piraeus, or any of them: all those who had lost out in the revolution, those centuries before.

She had seen Tynisa with a crossbow, once. It had been when they were both around twelve, and Tynisa had been determined to become good with it, as she had been with everything else she put her hand to. That day lingered in the memory because it was the first time Che had found something she herself could do, that her foster-sister could not.

But it’s not hard, she remembered saying patiently. You just point it at the target and pull the lever. And the staggering weight of her understanding that Tynisa just could not grasp the notion, could not understand that the action led to the result. She almost shot Stenwold when she finally clutched the weapon so hard she mistakenly triggered it, and she could not even begin to reload or re-cock it. It was not just that she had never been trained, or taught. It had all been there for her, if only she could adapt her mind to take it in.

Persistent myth related that the crossbow was the first tool of the revolution. Almost certainly there had been something else, something less warlike and more practical. The crossbow was what won the battles, though. Any fool could pick up a crossbow and kill a man with it, any Beetle-kinden, or Ant, anyone Apt. Bows were an art-form, crossbows but a moment in the learning, in the making. The world had been turned upside down within a generation by men and women armed with the crossbow and the pulley, the hand-pump and the watermill. All the old masters of the Lowlands had been unthroned, their slaves prising mastery of the world from their impotent hands. There were a few exceptions, as always. She had heard of itinerant Beetle scholars going native deep in the forests of the Mantids, propitiating spirits and painting their faces, and fifty years ago there had even been a Moth artificer at Collegium, brilliant and half-mad. The old races of the superstitious night were waning, though. Only the Spider-kinden held on to their power, and that because they could play the younger races like a musical instrument. The world belonged to the Apt: Beetles, Ants, and most Fly-kinden these days, the races of the bright sun that drove out the shadows.

And also the Wasps: an entire Empire of the Apt. That was not a comforting thought.

‘Salma,’ Che began. Nobody was going to like this question, and she knew the answer would be less popular still. ‘Your people fought the Wasps for twelve years?’

‘They did,’ he confirmed.

‘How… Don’t take this the wrong way, but how did they hold out for twelve years, with no artificers, no machines or modern weapons?’

He laughed at that, although his laugh was hollow. ‘We are archers without peer, Che, and the Wasp-kinden are clumsy in the air when we fight them. We are quick and skilled and stealthy by turns.’ Something lively went out of his voice. ‘But, most of all, we sent our soldiers against them in wave after wave after wave. We sold each inch of Commonweal land to them for ten times its weight in blood, mostly. That is what we did when the Wasp Empire came.’ He had suddenly stopped walking and they turned back to him, Che desperately wishing she had some way of taking her question back, of not hearing the answer.

He was still smiling at them and that was the worst part. It was Salma’s couldn’t-care-less smile that they all knew well, and it clung on even when he said, ‘At the battle of Shan Real the ground was so soaked in blood that their machines sunk in and could not be moved, and we flew over them and shot them as they tried to climb out.’

‘You were there?’ Che said. The other two were leaving this particular pitfall conversation to her, and quite right too.

‘No, I wasn’t there. I was too young, and far away,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘I do apologize, really. Tasteless stuff this early in the morning. Sometimes you… Low-landers, though, you just don’t understand how things are.’

‘I know, we’re all barbarians really,’ said Tynisa wryly, ‘scratching ourselves in public and sleeping in the same room as the dirigibles.’

His smile regained its stability. ‘Bunch of savages, the lot of you,’ he agreed. ‘Now let’s get on board this wretched flying machine before Totho explodes with impatience, shall we?’

The designer had fitted three decks into the gondola of the Sky Without, although without allowing much headroom on any of them. Relieved of the machinery that a hot-air dirigible required, the staterooms took up the top tier, where the view was marginally grander. Below that were the common room, the kitchen and the cramped crew quarters, and below that again those areas of the ship that the passengers would prefer not to see: freight storage holds and the mechanics’ walkways that led to the ship’s three engines.

As soon as his companions were ensconced in the common room, Totho made his apologies and found his way below with unerring instinct. He remembered when the Sky Without had been originally commissioned, designed in Collegium the same year as Totho had begun his studies, and with its major parts cast in the foundries at Helleron and then hauled at a snail’s pace overland during the best part of eleven months. The Sky was now due to make the return journey in a little over a tenday because, for such a gargantuan vessel, she was fast.

Up on an exposed gantry Totho found the secret of that speed soon enough. Out from the body of the gondola, but still in the shadow of the airbag, two engineers were testing the starboard steering propeller. They glanced at him as he climbed hand over hand up to them, and one of them said, ‘No passengers here. Go back to the decks.’

‘Excuse me, but…’ It was the first time he’d been able to say it. ‘I’m an artificer from the College and I just wanted to have a look at the engines here.’