This skyfortress had driven itself into the ground, bow-first, at about a forty-five-degree angle. Maya could only imagine what it must have been like on the day it fell, because the thing had hit hard enough to punch through the soil and into the valley’s bedrock. Four hundred years later, it remained where it had fallen, jutting out of the earth and trees that had filled in around it. The stern hung in the air, hundreds of meters above the streets of the city.
Looking closer, Maya could see that the skyfortress’s lines were not entirely intact. In places the unmetal skin had broken, peeling outward like the petals of a flower. She glanced at Beq, who was still staring fixedly at the thing.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Beq said. “There isn’t a skyfortress in the whole Republic that’s so well preserved. The Harmony in Judgment lost its whole stern section, so it’s only the bow that’s in the city square in Carvoria. And of course Faith, Certainty, and Generosity were lost over the sea in the Last Contact. They say Purpose is somewhere on the other side of the Shattered Peaks, but no one knows exactly where.”
“I … uh … did not know that,” Maya said, glad to see Beq coming out of her funk. “Do you know a lot about this one?”
She nodded eagerly. “It was called Grace in Execution—they named the city after it. Its last captain was Ghaea-Ven-Tilophani, and she brought the ship down herself. They’d been boarded by ghouls and plaguespawn, and there were barely enough Chosen aboard to keep the ship in the air. This was late in the war. Grace was the last skyfortress, you know, the last of the eight to fall.”
“What damaged it, where the skin is broken?”
“Nobody really knows!” Beq sounded excited about this lack of knowledge. “It has to be deiat, obviously, only deiat can damage unmetal, so it was probably one of the mechanisms inside the ship failing. There’s a lot more damage around the bow, where it’s buried. I hear there are even tunnels that lead inside. Grace got its start as a center of arcana selling off pieces of the ship, and Centarch Garinus Bloodbane led an expedition here in 268 to gather up all the most dangerous relics and bring them back to the Forge. Scavengers have stripped the rest by now.” She paused for breath, then pushed her spectacles back and glanced at Maya. “Sorry. I’m talking too much, aren’t I? Sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” Maya said gently. She grinned at Beq, then turned back to the view. “I knew there was a wreck here; I just didn’t think it would be so …” She gestured lamely. “Big.”
Beq was about to respond with some facts about the dimensions of the skyfortress, Maya was certain, but Kerchwite shouted to them from the road. “Keep moving, you two! You can get a closer look tonight.”
As they continued downward, Maya realized that the scale of the thing had tricked her once again. The sheer size of the skyfortress made distance hard to judge. There was still most of a day’s travel between the edge of the valley and the city wall, and the whole time Grace in Execution’s broken frame loomed larger and larger. By the time they were on the flats, following a packed-dirt road away from the Chosen highway, the wreck looked more like a mountain than a ship, its huge shadow sliding across the valley floor to provide a preview of night.
The city that huddled against it was decidedly less impressive. The wall was a human-built thing of mortared stone, only four meters high, and already crumbling in places. It seemed to be intended less for defense and more to channel people to a few well-guarded crossing places, so the queen’s tax collectors could take their due. Traffic was brisk, carts loaded with food mixing with larger wagons like the caravan’s, carrying manufactured goods from the Republic. Loadbirds, thickheads, and other beasts of burden squawked, rattled, and hissed at one another. Guards on warbirds with lances and red tabards passed by at regular intervals, halting to sort out disputes between rival carters.
Maya endured an exuberant hug goodbye from Kerchwite, which both Beq and Tanax emphatically waved off. The three of them collected their packs from the caravan’s wagons and hiked past the queue of farmers and merchants to a smaller gate for those on foot. The armored soldier waiting beside it gave them only a cursory look before waving them onward, under the arched gateway and into the city.
Immediately beyond the wall was a broad, muddy square, packed full of makeshift market stalls. Wares were spread on portable tables, arranged in the backs of carts, or simply laid on blankets on the ground, their owners standing nearby to shout to the crowds and keep an eye out for pickpockets. It was a familiar sight for Maya—she’d been to any number of market days, in cities much larger than Grace—but Tanax looked overwhelmed by the sheer chaos.
“Doesn’t Skyreach have a market?” Maya said, raising her voice to be heard.
“Of course it does,” Tanax said, a bit wide-eyed. “It’s just a little bit more … orderly.”
Another difference, they soon discovered, was in the kind of goods available. There was food, of course, and the usual things any city needed—leatherwork, masonry, smithing, medicine, and so on. But here in Grace, it all seemed like a sideshow beside the city’s economic heart: the trade in alchemical products and arcana. Maya had thought the market in Deepfire was vast, but this was on another scale entirely, and far more permanent-looking. Staples like quickheal, bone-break potion, firestarters, and glowstones were everywhere, but that was only the start. There were bombs and torches, powders and philters, stoppered bottles roiling with colored gases and greasy tonics promising the impossible. Maya doubted half of it was real, but that didn’t seem to discourage the sellers from shouting over one another about the fantastic benefits of this or that elixir.
“Dhak,” Tanax muttered, setting his jaw. “A whole market full of dhak. Chosen defend us.”
“It can’t be that dangerous,” Beq said. The lenses in her spectacles clicked and whirred rapidly as she zoomed in on one interesting tidbit after another. “The city’s still standing.”
“That doesn’t tell you how many people have been killed by contaminated medicine,” Tanax said. “Or sacrificed by dhakim. Life is cheap in the Splinter Kingdoms.” His lips tightened. “We ought to have burned this place to the ground decades ago.”
Maya shook her head silently. Nicomidi’s flight might have made Tanax question his place, but apparently it hadn’t shaken his Dogmatic sympathies. His face only grew more thunderous as they made their way through the market, to a section where the stalls were watched by armed and armored men. The merchandise was displayed in locked cases fronted by iron bars as well, a necessary precaution when a sneak thief could slip thousands of thalers into a pocket. The goods on offer ranged from broken junk—bits of unmetal, cracked crystals—through rare but comprehensible devices like rockcrackers and blaster rifles, all the way to apparently complete but utterly incomprehensible machines. The latter drew Beq like a fly to honey, and Maya was forced to take hold of her arm and pilot her away from one crystal-and-glass mechanism after another.
“That one is a flight motivator,” she muttered. “And that one looks like the amplifier from a relay node, but the bottom part is different. Maybe …” She trailed off into incomprehensible jargon.