11.

31^ST SEVENMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE ANCHOR YARDS, CORMA

Rowena Downshire couldn’t remember a time when trusting anyone to hold her things worked out well. And so, when the ship’s porter waiting at the gangplank to the Lady Lucinda offered to take her trunk, she flatly refused, sitting on its lid with a “you’ll have to shove me clean off” look to warn him away. It didn’t help that the porter was an aigamuxa. The last time she’d been this close to one, she’d been dangling over the skyline of Corma from a buttress of the Old Cathedral.

She kept her stubborn seat until the Alchemist and Anselm Meteron appeared beside her, having paid the clockwork carriage driver to carry their bags to the porter.

The burly creature’s face turned smug as the cat that had the cream as he tied their baggage on a barrow, his long, clawed hands moving deftly at latches and straps despite his eyes being turned to the ground. “You are certain you do not wish for help?” he rumbled.

Master Meteron raised an eyebrow at her. Rowena felt her face go hot.

“Guess I could use a hand after all,” she muttered, sliding off the trunk lid.

They walked up the plank before the aiga, just in case he proved less adept at strapping up the luggage securely than he had seemed.

“Feeling all right, girl?” the Alchemist asked, limping with an emphasis she didn’t like. It had been a bad morning for his knee—early, and busy, with the air humid and the gangplank steep.

Rowena shrugged. If she was honest with herself, it hadn’t really been her things she’d worried over.

Going overseas seemed at first an adventure, but in the six days since the midsummer ball, it had turned first into a chore and then into an iron lump of anxiety lodged deep in her stomach. Rowena had carried it with her as she made rush deliveries to customers all up and down the lanes of Westgate Bridge, preparing for a month or more of the shop changing hands. She had carried the lump to the Mercy Commission Home to visit her mother with a kiss and to ask for her help by way of taking in Rabbit (the old dog would be a danger to himself and others on the airship, assuming he could endure the rigors of the journey in the first place, and Bess would have her hands full with running the Scales). She rolled in bed with that anxious lump, ate meals around it, woke up too early dogged by the pain of it and stayed up too late turning it over in her hands, studying it past the point of Reason. Rowena’s Sabberday jaunts on the iron rail to visit her mother were all the travel outside Corma proper she’d ever done. Her world of alleys, bridges, bazaars, quays, and warehouses had seemed so vast just a week before. It had shrunk as the map of the world displayed on the Stone Scales’s main floor loomed larger in her mind, the peninsula and archipelago that were their destination suddenly, overwhelmingly real.

She wasn’t worried about her trunk, exactly. She was worried that her trunk would soon be the only thing left to her whose dimensions she understood.

“Didn’t want ’im grabbing at my things,” she answered, at last.

The Alchemist made one of his peculiar baritone notes of acknowledgement. But it was enough. Rowena smiled at him and, for the briefest of moments, saw his rare smile in return. By the time Master Meteron reached back to hand her up over the ship’s rail, she felt enough like herself to be more confused than alarmed by the Lady Lucinda’s crew.

Perhaps a dozen lanyani moved up and down the decks, their lanky forms distending into graceful networks of branches and twigs, reaching up into the mastwork and rigging, disappearing into the ship’s deck as if plunging into a puddle, or rising up from the hold with armloads of oakum rope and ballast sacks. Two of the creatures twined through the highest reaches of the rigging, where the giant gas envelope swelled like some monstrous sea creature. They looked to be adjusting some kind of firebox near the gas envelope’s base, though Rowena couldn’t be entirely sure, with the sun behind them, blurring her vision into a ruddy smear.

“I didn’t think . . .” She looked around, blinking as much at the sight of the tree-people silently carrying out their work as the sting of the sunlight. “What are lanyani doing crewing a ship? Don’t they need, like, soil and whatnot to get by?”

“They do,” the Old Bear allowed. He grimaced as he turned his right hip over the side rail and, safely over, leaned against it. Meteron strode off into the thick of some of the tree-people, very much as if he knew what he was about. “The lanyani are poorly suited to longer journeys, which is why humans and aigamuxa crew travel along sea lanes. But the lanyani are better suited than men to air galleons. Less troubled by a thinner atmosphere, or the gases used to maintain buoyancy. A few crates of earth can suit the crew’s needs for short-term travel, cost far less than actual food provisions, and don’t suffer from spoilage. Many of the worst injuries a mammal could suffer working in the riggings—falls, lesions or amputations from unsecured lines, strangulation—are no concern to them. No need for medical supplies, no sleeping in shifts. If you need less than a tenday to get where you’re bound, lanyani make better and cheaper crews.”

The Old Bear delivered that speech with the almost-charming pedantry that had flavored all his tutoring since Rowena first came to the Scales. Still, at the end of it, he passed a look to Meteron that suggested there was something else about so many lanyani on the ship he wasn’t prepared to say. Or at least, not say to her.

“And the Rolands know they ask fewer questions,” Meteron added. He’d returned from speaking with a lanyani shaped like a yew forked by lightning. It stood further down the deck and gestured orders to its peers. One of them must have been to give the mooring line slack, for as Rowena put her head over the rail, she watched the anchor yard’s ramp drift farther off, the gas envelope lifting them lazily upward.

Rowena frowned. “But the other passengers will ask questions of us, won’t they?”

“They might,” a voice like a massive woodwind replied. “If there were any.”

The yew-like lanyani had stepped into conversational distance with their group. Its chest, knotted and creased with unshaved bark, expanded like a bellows. Another long phrase of musical language followed.

“I am Captain Qaar of the Lady Lucinda. Greatduke Roland owns our custom this season. We are most glad to welcome you aboard.”

The Old Bear nodded. “Can you give us our itinerary?”

Rowena noticed him looking back over the railing to the anchor yard, too, his brow knitted.

The bellows-voice sighed through the air once more. “Three days to Sakhida Island in Lemarcke, with a day’s leave to muster papers, then on to Nippon proper, where the Grand Library’s agents will see you to your lodgings. We return to Corma by way of Vladivostoy after taking on our next travelers, guests of Lady Roland.” Captain Qaar fluted out the last words. “The dock aiga have seen to your luggage in the berths below. We will drop our mooring line and ballast in thirty minutes, once the envelope is properly filled.”

Rowena nodded, only half-listening as Meteron and the Old Bear saw the captain off with appropriate handshakes. She shaded her eyes against the sun, peering into the rigging, and felt as if she were a book falling open on a table, thrown all at once from darkness and privacy into glaring sunlight. Islands and oceans and mustering papers. Reason’s rule, what did that even mean?

“Four days total in the air, then,” Meteron said behind her. “You can manage, Bear?”

The answer was a dyspeptic sound of more than a few indelicate syllables.

Rowena glanced at the Old Bear. He did indeed look a bit bleached.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Not much of a flier.”

Rowena pulled back her hair with a finger-rake and twist. “Seems stupid we can’t just head to Nippon straight away.”

They joined up in a line at the rail. Meteron passed a look clear across her to the Alchemist. The old man looked up from his pipe, tamping it with a thumb, and nodded approval of whatever idea his partner’s look suggested.

“What? What’d I get wrong now?” Rowena protested.

“History lesson,” Meteron said. “You’re going to love it.”

That last came in a tone which indicated Rowena might like having her toenails drawn out better. She turned to complain that she wasn’t that stupid and unschooled, thanks much, but the Old Bear was already making for the companionway stairs into the cabin hold, a trail of sweet smoke clouding the deck behind him.

“The maps are in my trunks,” he called.

Rowena had never gotten over how quickly the Old Bear and Master Meteron could set a space into functional disarray. In five minutes, they turned their shared cabin into a riot of equipment and papers—most of that untidiness Meteron’s doing as he tossed through the Old Bear’s bags with the rude familiarity of a man who knew where his mates kept their knickers and what they kept in them, too. The Old Bear sat on the starboard bunk, his bad leg raised on a stool before him, cane propped in a corner like some child sent off for a punishment. Rowena could tell from the lines in his face that he was the one feeling punished, at the moment.

A map stretched over the bunk mattress like a cartographical quilt. Rowena sat at its opposite horizon, east to the Old Bear’s west. Meteron flopped on the bunk across the small room, arms folded behind his head, and closed his eyes, listening to the lanyani’s perfect silence amid the whistle and crack of the ship’s lines.

The Old Bear tapped the map with the stem of his pipe. It left a dent on the page, an island suddenly sprung up from its waters.

“This—” he began.

“Is the Western Sea,” Rowena answered smartly. “It’s about three thousand-odd miles across from Corma to the nearest other land mass, and it tends calmer than the Atlantean Ocean to the east.” She peeked at Meteron. “Which is where Rimmerston is, on the east coast of Amidon.”

Meteron sniffed. “So you know your right from your left on a map. That’s a start, cricket.”

Rowena’s face turned hot as a skillet. “I know a lot more than—”

“And this is Nippon,” the Old Bear continued.

His pipe stem touched an archipelago: four big islands and a scatter-shot of small ones, all curving like a waxing crescent moon, their backs to the broader sea, bellies facing the vast body of land the Vraskans called “lower Vraska” and the Mongolian people simply called their own.

“What do you notice about Nippon?” he quizzed.

His voice had settled into the gentle baritone hum he used when the Stone Scales’s shingle was turned and the shop theirs for the night. Books and maps and grammars and formulae. It had been a busy winter. A busier spring. Rowena meant to prove she’d learned her lessons well.

“It’s . . . pretty isolated? I mean, there are some places kind of close by, like this land thingy.”

“Peninsula.”

“Yeah, this peninsula here, Koryu. And the rest of lower Vraska, too, is kind of close, but not really. There’s still a lot of water to cross to get from its islands to the Vraskan mainland.”

The old man’s raptor eyes smiled, even as his mouth stayed flat around his pipe. “That kept Nippon out of the Unification Wars. History might have told a different story, if not for geography intervening.”

Rowena considered the map. “But they’re part of the Lemarckian Protectorate, right? Logician territory?”

“They are now,” Meteron answered through a yawn. “‘Unification’ is a funny name for what happened after the declaration of the Ecclesiastical Commission was pinned to the high kirk in Saint Mungo, cricket.”

That much, Rowena knew. It had started small, like so many things. A group of clergy. A public posting of a theory, long debated in their order’s colloquia. Street preaching turning to cults recruiting atheists and academics with the promise of a way to unite the power of religion and science. Cults that turned into secret churches, which, in time, had the right kind of members in the right kinds of places—nobles and merchants and higher clergy with flexible, progressive views. And before long, the outsiders were the insiders, and the only way to insure their power was to draw a very clear, bold line between themselves and everyone else.

You could believe in the Grand Experiment, the rational nature of God’s creation and His ongoing effort to teach humankind to emulate Him through the act of dispassionate experiment and rational understanding. You could believe that one’s distance from the divine could be measured in precise units, recorded in significant figures, turned into data tables, framed as a hypothesis. Or, you could believe anything else and be a Kneeler: primitive, superstitious, ritualistic.

You could believe that God called upon humans to be more like Him, and gave them the tools to achieve that purpose through science. Or you could believe that God was something humans could never fully understand, and be powerless and small.

As it turned out, there were millions of people the world over who didn’t see the choice quite so clearly as that.

“Unification took almost a hundred years,” Rowena murmured. Collectively, folk in the many countries under EC influence called the period “the Unification Wars,” but you might as well have called them purges, or pogroms, or conversion efforts. Communities reorganized under carefully designed educational programs. Families broken up, with children redistributed to households loyal to the EC—homes that could help them understand how they needed to change, and put their mothers’ or fathers’ ways behind them.

There were still places where the EC’s hold was tenuous, at best, and some where it didn’t exist at all. Meteron and the Old Bear seemed peculiarly knowledgeable about the dissidents of the world, Kneelers of every color and creed and origin. Even Anselm’s family was converted— Hasids or Tzadikim. Rowena wasn’t sure which, and the difference was mostly lost on her. She knew only that some of his ancestors’ people still lived around Oldtemple Down, and none of them looked as if they knew half the wealth and privilege that Master Meteron’s father had made shrugging a prayer shawl off his shoulders.

The Old Bear, though . . . He never talked about his people, though of course they must have come from Leonis, once. Nearly everyone in Amidon with his coal-dark skin came from somewhere on the continent Friar Leon claimed to be the “first man” to have found (never mind the hundreds of thousands of people already walking its savannahs and forests). And nearly all of those had fled Leonis when the aigamuxa rose up against the EC missionaries who had demanded their devotion, killing the Leonine natives in reprisal.

But before the EC missionaries came to Leonis, there had been all manner of others. Atavists. Mohammedeans. Ecumenes, even, with their queer bloody wine and fleshy bread, or whatever that ritual was supposed to have been. It gave Rowena the creeps.

She’d never asked the Old Bear about where he stood with the EC, but he owned a great many books no proper Deacon at a free school would have countenanced her seeing. Rowena had been taught to read out of them. She had her suspicions. But she kept them to herself.

“A hundred years,” the Old Bear affirmed, “and still, there were places on the globe the EC couldn’t touch.”

“Like Nippon?”

He nodded.

Rowena circled the sickle-shaped archipelago with her fingertip. “Lots of water. No neighbors.”

“Unless you count Vraska,” Meteron said. He’d opened his eyes and looked at Rowena with a knowing, crooked smile.

“Well, yeah, but Nippon’s under the Logicians in Lemarcke, innit? They’ve got Koryu and some of the Mongolian coast—lower Vraska, I mean,” Rowena corrected herself hastily. “But what’s that got to do with Vraska proper?”

The Old Bear lit his cold pipe again, tamping its bowl. Soon, the room grew hazy with smoke redolent of marjoram and fennel. “When the EC itself began to fissure into subgroups—radicals within its own ranks agitating for more power, less leniency toward those who had not agreed to sacrifice their heritage for scientific progress—those radicals had to find places to rally themselves. Vraska is the second largest landmass in the world.”

“The first is Leonis,” Rowena blurted. “The first is Leonis,” he echoed. “But it was already well in hand after the aigamuxa were turned into a diaspora.”

“Diaspo-what?”

“Scattered community,” Meteron murmured. “A fractured people.” There was an edge to his voice. She remembered odds and ends of things folk said back in Oldtemple when she was just old enough to pay attention to the grown people around her and some of what they said. Nobody had used the word “diaspora” for the Hasids and Tzadikim, but that sounded more or less like what they had meant.

“Oh. Right.”

The Old Bear continued. “Several extremist factions headed for Vraska, looking for a place to regroup. Eventually, they found one another and put aside their differences to agree on the one thing they each cared about: the rest of the EC wasn’t seeking truth through Reason seriously enough. So they called themselves the Logicians, and Bishop Professor Amabella Lemarcke made herself their leader. Before long, any territory the Logicians controlled became ‘Lemarcke’ by common usage, until finally the various small countries and principalities they’d gathered together formed the Protectorate.”

Now Meteron was sitting up, his focus sharp as an arrow. They were talking about his expertise now: politics.

“The Logicians are the only EC faction that actually combines secular and clerical authority. The rest of the world, from Amidon to the Zairr, recognize the EC as a powerful influence on governance, but they aren’t the actual government. The Logicians turned Lemarcke into a proper theocracy. A lot fewer roadblocks to transforming the world through the grace of Reason that way.”

Rowena nodded. “So that’s why everybody says Lemarcke puts Corma to shame for all its shiny doohickeys and doctorish stuff.”

“I don’t recall referring to the Logicians’ work as ‘shiny doohickeys,’ nor being everybody,” the Old Bear murmured around his pipe stem, “but yes. That’s said because it is true.”

“We still haven’t gotten to the story behind Nippon, though.”

“If you’re of a mind to push science and engineering to their outer limits,” Meteron said, “you’re good for that only until you reach the outer limits of your own resources. Amidon had been mining for coal and drilling for oil in the high north of Vraska for a generation before the Logicians crept north from Mongolia and Koryu. When the EC and its sovereign counterparts divided up the globe, everyone imagined there would be fuel enough in Vraska to last the world a millennia. It seemed too big to be stripped bare. And, in the end, that wasn’t actually the problem.

“The problem was the Lemarckian Protectorate’s lands weren’t resource-rich, and their technological progress depended on a greater share of what northern Vraska had to offer. But since they were in conflict with the rest of the EC, they eschewed . . . diplomatic means of obtaining their needs.”

“Another war,” Rowena finished. “The Coal Wars. Amidon against Lemarcke, with Vraska in between.”

“With Vraska pulled both ways,” the Old Bear corrected, his face darkening over the map. “Pockets of territories were claimed and conscripted by either side. Vraskan troops mustered to whatever cause rolled into town first. That was how I met Ivor.”

It had been some time since Rowena last heard that name. It left a sour taste at the back of her mouth, a bile risen and never properly expelled. There was a whole story, a whole context, lurking behind the old man’s statement, but she left it there. Maybe she would ask him to explain more someday.

Maybe.

“The Logicians had made some terrible weapons,” the Old Bear continued. “Science was good for that. But they had no practical experience in warfare, and even less ability to organize their scattered Protectorates into a coordinated army. They needed the help of seasoned warriors, so they turned to Nippon.”

He settled his back against the cabin wall, grimacing as he shifted his weight to keep his knee comfortable on the stool before him. “Geography did much to protect Nippon from the Unification Wars, but so had its reputation. Its people were accomplished, highly coordinated warriors, all the members of their noble caste trained in strategy and most in actual combat, as well. It wasn’t a big nation or an especially scientifically advanced one, at the time, but it had companies of soldiers from its own internal civil wars already trained and prepared. The Logicians negotiated Nippon’s entry into the Protectorate most favorably. In exchange for several thousand soldiers in smaller units that could be distributed into the Protectorate army and used as a model for training and discipline, Nippon would receive preferential employment of its researchers, schooling for its upper castes to make deacons and reverends of them, access to Lemarcke’s best technologies. And, most importantly, the right to absorb the Logicians’ special library collections into its Grand Library. In one political agreement, Nippon became both a Logician territory and the jewel in the Proctectorate’s crown.”

Rowena frowned. “And after that?”

“After that . . .” The Old Bear sighed. “Lemarcke won the Coal Wars. Amidon was pushed out of Vraska. Vraska proper became a Logician power center. Nippon became the seat of Logician information, if not of its politics.”

“But what I don’t get,” Rowena pressed, searching between the two men, “is where the book that started all this fuss even came from. I mean, the Grand Library, okay, but where did it come from in the first place? Did the Logicians have it and move it there? Had the Nipponese had it all along, somehow?”

Master Meteron offered his familiar, one-shouldered shrug. “Perhaps Chalmers will know. I’m not sure that it matters. When last we saw him, he was trying to learn where the book might be now, and what else it might have revealed, and to whom. Where it used to be matters only so far.”

“Only so far as it might give a clue where it’s going now,” Rowena challenged.

“Possibly. But I doubt the book has fallen into organized use yet,” said the Old Bear. “If it had, we surely would have seen signs of it already.”

Maybe, Rowena thought.

There wasn’t time to think anything else, though, before the whole cabin lurched. Rowena’s stomach tilted in response.

Her eyes met Master Meteron’s. He smiled. “Care to see what the view looks like, sailing from Corma in a private air galleon, cricket?”

She bounded to her feet, then paused, looking at the Old Bear.

He waved, grunting something that wasn’t a word. Go ahead. And he put a hand under his wounded knee, gentling it into a slight bend with a wince.

“We’ll be back soon,” Rowena promised.

As it turned out, they spent an hour watching the ground grow smaller and the clouds grow larger, tracing the distant shoreline of Amidon with their fingers. Rowena raised a hand before her eyes, blotting the world she knew away. It had never looked so small before.