Four nations. One sky.
The Flotilla carry, the Crown makes, the Aerie fight, the Abyssal wait.
Nobody is self-sufficient, and the one thing everyone needs, transport, belongs to the one people who have never fielded an army.
The Zenith
The Sun-Forgers
Golden cities on the highest summits, directly under the Hole, built around the lenses that make the only steel in the world.
The Flotilla
The Nomads
A nation of a million with no ruler and no army, living on the backs of the herd and carrying everything the world moves.
The Aerie
The Cliff-Hangers
Riders of the storm, living in fortresses cut into the cliffs, the only cavalry in the world and the only people who know rain.
The Abyssal
The Deep Dwellers
The only people who have never seen the sky, living in the warm dark at the feet of the ranges among the bones of fallen gods.
Who has what
A Sun-Shard is Aerie ore, Aerie charcoal, Flotilla lime and Crown light, carried on a whale. None of the four can make one alone.
| Nation | Makes | Controls | Lacks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zenith | Sun-Shards, lenses, crystal | All permanent metal; the summit ports | Food, fuel, water, ore, charcoal, any way to move |
| Flotilla | Living oil, cloth, whale products, carriage | The herd, the roads, all transport | Permanent metal, ore, timber |
| Aerie | Ore, storm-wood, charcoal, bloomery iron, birds | The storm belt; the only cavalry | Steel, oil, cloth |
| Abyssal | Fallen oil, bone, bladders, fungal food, information | The Floor, where everything eventually lands | Light, cloth, anything from above |
Sun-Shards
The only steel. Melted at noon on the brightest days, in mirror bowls on the Crown's summits that gather the thread of fire at the Hole's lip onto a crucible. It holds an edge for generations and outlives its makers in the Crown's cold dry air. It is scarce the way gold is scarce, and it is money everywhere above the Floor.
Nobody is keeping a secret. Anyone with wood can make bloomery iron, soft and slag-laced, that pits in a season. Melting steel clean takes a forest of charcoal per blade, or the thread overhead in thin still air, and only the Crown has that.
Whale-iron
The gods grow iron into their own bones, iron that cannot rust because it already has. The Abyssal carve it into bone blades, the poor man's Sun-Shard.
Oil
Living oil is tapped from a living whale, a little at a time, and only the Flotilla can do it. Fallen oil is a dead god, a mountain of fuel sinking through every rung, and every fall is a race: the Flotilla getting their people off, the Aerie cutting into it inside the storm, the Abyssal waiting at the bottom.
Money
Stamped shards of Sun-Shard minted by the Houses, and whole blades for large sums. On the Floor, oil, measured by the bone flask. Between whales, Flotilla debts on notched bone tallies. The Abyssal accept anything and pay in information.
There is no coal under this ground, child. No sulfur, because it has never had a volcano. We have all the books and none of the earth. That is why the finest thing anyone has ever made here is a sword.
A Measurer, to a studentThere are no boats in the sky
Every way of moving belongs to one nation.
- The whale
- Flotilla. The city itself, about 50 km/h along a road, days or weeks between ports. A Zenith lord who travels hires a whale.
- Gas-craft
- Flotilla. A fat teardrop of cured whale-bladder about 24 m long, filled at a whale's vents, with two small sails and a trailing drogue. It goes back along a road, slowly, in tonnes. A balloon, never a boat.
- Courier bird
- Flotilla. Small, fast, unarmoured, one rider. Messages and single travellers, forward, faster than the herd.
- War-bird
- Aerie. The only cavalry, and the only thing that can reach a falling god in mid-air.
- The cable
- Zenith. Whale-sinew and bone-fibre rope strung peak to peak, iron-shod at the saddles, with silk cars.
- Bladder-craft
- Abyssal. Rising in stages over days, because a body built for the Floor cannot come up fast. Sinking is easy.
A port is a whale moored at a range where a road passes. The Crown charges for the mooring and the Flotilla charge for the cargo, and the two have argued about which fee comes first for fifteen hundred years. Where two roads cross there are Flotilla cities no range owns: that is where the market is, and where the Chorus sits.