When you speak of the spheres, you must be more precise. Most outside of this city will think you are speaking about the worlds or the stars, but up near the academy they will assume you are speaking about much smaller things–much, much smaller things. Not that any of them are spheres really, except maybe stars, but I have yet to see that proven.

  -”Conversations: Eavesdroppings from the Mad City”

  A tapping sound brings me out of my thoughts. A ball of black sand the size of my fist spins above my fingers, slowly changing shape, occasionally bearing spikes or hard edges as I will it to change. It wants to stay a ball, that is the easiest shape, but there are others that it will stay in easily. Some are strange geometric patterns of links, sticking together in a lattice so small they are almost imperceptible. I tried to make it into a dog’s head, but the face was too sharp, too angular, to look like anything alive.

  The tapping comes again, a metallic knock, and I look up to see a man floating in the air, knuckles rapping on nothing. Then, I realize that he is knocking at the wall of the ship. At Galea’s control, at my command, the ship spins, bringing the door in line with the man. As the door opens, a name appears over his head, and the tension sags out of me. I had thought for a moment that I had somehow attracted the attention of a powerful magician, one capable of keeping up with the ship, but instead I see that he is just a normal man, bundled in woolen clothes to keep the chill off, enchanted boots allowing him to hover. The darkness of the door turns transparent, and I peer out at him.

  “Yes?”

  “I apologize if I am disturbing you, but you have been hovering over the dock for half an hour. Do you have a permit to land here?”

  The scene past his shoulder pops out to me, several platforms attached to the side of a huge wall of stone, each accommodating several buildings on top. Looking down, a vast ring of stone spreads out before me, a single docking branch of the platform the ship hovers over, other aerial ships parked and left upon it. A group of three men, dressed similarly to the one in front of me, stand around a barren spot down on the dock, looking up, shielding their eyes against the sun.

  “Permit?” I ask.

  He sighs, shaking his head. “If you do not have a permit or invitation, you will need to pay the docking fee,” he explains. Looking at the gilded outside of my ship, he mutters something under his breath about that likely not being a problem.

  “How much?” I ask.

  “Three silver rings a day,” he says.

  I gawk at the man. “That is robbery. Three silver rings should cover at least a week of stabling." Even that would have been extravagant. I would expect a pony to be feasted each night for that much.

  “This is not a stable,” the man says, motioning to the open air.

  “Right, you don’t do any work or maintenance for what is left here.”

  “We guard the vehicles,” he says.

  I can’t help but snort at that.

  “The price is not up for debate; it is set by the master of the docks. Take it up with the lord if you have an issue, otherwise, you will need to land outside of the city and leave your ship up to the whims of bandits and whomever might happen by.”

  I consider doing just that for a long moment, staring out at the man until his crossed arms and hard face start to wilt and he squirms a bit. In the end, it would be too much of a pain in the ass to schlep all the way up the wall, climbing ladders and what not. Maybe once I had more practice with these new wings.

  “Fine,” I growl, making it appear as if I fish into the pocket of my jacket to retrieve the coins.

  “It will cost a week’s worth, up front, Mrs.” He tried to add a bit of deference in there, but his mustache was set now that he knew she would pay up.

  “I don’t know how you sleep at night,” I grumble, handing a fistful of silver to the man.

  He pulls out his shirt to have a place to hold the coin so he can count it, but I have already turned away. “Take us down,” I command of Galea, walking back toward the throne.

  The man floating outside of the ship soars upward, the three down on the dock springing away, as my ship drops like a stone, arresting its fall at the last moment, and alighting smoothly on the stone dock. The slight bump wakes Jess, the woman sitting up suddenly, pulling the pillow off her head.

  “We’re here,” I tell her as she blinks sleep out of her eyes.

  She squints, the glare of the sun only slightly muted inside the ship, looking out at the sun-bleached dock, three angry men past us. “Already?”

  “It’s been two months,” I say. “Not exactly a short trip.”

  Grim is exactly as I left it, not that I was ever here long enough to get a proper sense of the city. It is a place of tiers, the lower platforms, nearer the earth, stand crowded with people, buildings built practically atop one another, and always abuzz with activity. In the middle platforms, people would sometimes find a small park on a long stretch built away from the wall, sheltering beneath a decorative shade or an imported tree, and watch the activity below for hours. It was kind of like watching an anthill at work.

  The middle third of the city was for the most part the destination for almost all of the traffic throughout Grim. It was where the ships came in and out, where the ones below climbed up to on their daily commutes to their work, where the good food and entertainment was found. The middle third grew out from the wall like tree conks, crowding together in thick layers, some of the platforms stretching nearly half a mile out into the open air. In some laughable design, likely at the hands of the guilds, they were divided almost completely by function. Smoke billowed up from one of the circular platforms, curling around the edge and choking out the outermost structures on the one above. Traffic flowed in horrible congestion, the noonday rush calling people to leave the busier, more industrious, platforms and migrate to where they could find food. People in the third above the middle probably got more of a kick out of watching that than the middle thirders did of the ones below them.

  The top third is where most of the important people reside: nobles, visiting dignitaries, those with enough wealth to flee the congested middle third, and the Willian Guild. It wasn’t until my trip out to see my ship at the docks that first time that I realized how blessed I had been to stay at Arabella’s rent free, dodging the hour long waits for elevating platforms, cursing and shoving other people as we all wait on the inspectors to make certain everything is safe before we are allowed to move. Then, I think back to that lavish street, and remember Dovik telling me how much a room in that hotel had cost him, and I wonder how bad it would really be to find a small shack down there to sleep in at night.

  Jess comes to stand beside me, one trunk held over her shoulder, fingers curling around the handle, staring out at the moss-like growths the platforms create on the side of the wall. “We meeting up with the others?” she asks.

  “If they are even still here,” I say. Despite the evident misery, it is so hard to tear my eyes from the sight of the spectacle. Grim has some clear problems, but I imagine that any city will, so many people living so close together. With my naked eye I can see right now more people than I have ever met in my life, and the enormity of that presses on me.

  “Down or up?” she asks. “Maybe we can ask Dovik if his family will let us stay with them.”

  “I’d rather not get more involved with the guild than we need to,” I say.

  She considers that, shrugging. “If you want to pay for the room and board, I suppose that makes it your pick.”

  I retrieve my small ledger, flipping it open and reading over the figures inside for a moment. “I still owe you six golden crowns, three gold thimbles, and forty-two silver rings,” I say, rounding up to the nearest silver. Gods, if my mother ever found out that I was rounding anything up a full silver ring she would ring my bell.

  “Sounds right to me,” she says. When I hold out my hand, the glint of gold showing between my fingers, she looks at me sheepishly and backs away a step. “Ah, what do you know. No pockets to carry that in.” She pats her baggy shirt with her free hand, deliberately avoiding at least six pouches strapped to her with leather belts.

  I have no idea why she is so against carrying her own money, but I don’t mind. I slip the coin back into my inventory, watching the number at the top of the window climb back up. I really, really like when that number goes up.

  The bridge leading off the platform we stand on is at a standstill, people lined up all along its length, two men with wheelbarrows stopped in the middle of the bridge, looking ready to come to blows.

  “Do you think they will let us through?” I ask.

  “You can make them let us through,” she says.

  “Too much effort,” I say.

  Jess stares up at the platforms above. “We should at least spend the night somewhere nice. We’ve been in the woods for so long; I miss modern furnishings and pleasantries.”

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  “We can,” I agree. “But I will be subtracting half the cost from what I owe you.”

  “Fine by me.”

  I sigh, looking at the backed-up bridge. “Best get in line.”

  “Or I could take us up the side.”

  “You are insane if you think that I will allow you to carry me like that again.”

  “Even if I promise not to drop you?” Jess asks, trying to put me at ease with a smile.

  “You promised last time.”

  “Your screaming distracted me.” She shrugs again. “You could fly up there on your own, big wings and all.”

  “I don’t think that up here, a thousand feet in the air, is the best place to try and learn how to use them.”

  “If you fall,” she says, “at least you won’t have to wait in line anymore.”

  “True.” At the bridge, the two men start to swing at one another, egged on by the people behind. Their wheelbarrows spill to the side, linen sacks spilling out over the bridge and sailing into the open air. “That itself might be worth it.”

  A bell chimes as I enter the store, a long shining note tinkling back and forth, its spell broken a moment later by the hiss of a cat. The tabby lounges on the windowsill near the door, looking up at me over its chubby stomach, hissing something furious but not bothering to get up.

  “Hush, Saki,” a woman hiss back at the feline as she comes into the main room from a door at the back. “Keep trying to scare my customers away, and I will throw you down to Pop’s Road, see how you like that.” The cat hissed at her. I note that Pop’s Road is what the locals refer to the platform beneath this one, a good eighty feet below.

  My hand lingers on the doorway. Perhaps it isn’t too late to find a different shop.

  “Come in, come in!” the woman demands, her voice hard. “You’re letting the good air out.”

  I step into the small shop, scuttling around a shelf that sits right in the middle of things, barely a foot from the doorway. The woman parks herself at a stool behind a large table, the top stained with unidentifiable colors here and there, marked with cuts from blades, one corner looking to have almost melted. Bottles, some open and half-full of liquids of all sorts of colors lay scattered around the table, between large sheets of paper that form a forest floor between them.

  “Are you Erika?” I ask, looking to the sign hanging above the woman, depicting a girl of twenty, raven hair fluttering in a breeze, chest puffed out and proud; the sign is identical to the one out on the street, though perhaps shelving a layer of dust.

  “Good eye,” the woman says. She is clearly in her mid-fifties, barely any hint of darkness to the tangle of gray sitting atop her head, eyes made big by the glasses she squints out at me from. “You after something?”

  I seriously consider leaving for another moment, but the previous enchanter’s store had somehow been even worse than this. You can only roll the dice so many times.

  “Yes,” I say, working around the shelf in the middle of the room, accidentally bumping into another as I try to move into the narrow aisle to get over to the table. I stifle a growl, notice a length of dust now in a line on the hem of my brand-new skirt that I purchased only a few hours ago, and stuff down a sigh. Probably best not to sigh in here, everything seems just about caked in a skin of dust. “I was hoping to find an enchanter’s shop with high-quality supplies.” Running a finger along a red, ceramic bowl, it comes away covered in gray.

  “You will find no–” the woman’s, presumably Erika, boast is cut off by the cat hissing once more in the window. “Hush!” she yells at it, but it has already gone back to laying in the sunbeams. “My daughter’s cat.”

  “Okay.”

  “You will find no better wares in Grim than what you see here in this shop,” Erika says, gesturing around to the open room, barely enough light to see by, the only source of radiance the two windows at the front.

  “That is what I thought,” I sigh. “Well, I was going to visit Conqur’s later,” I say.

  The woman spits, actually spits, a phlegmy mess into a tin can on the table. “The cheat will take you for everything that glitters in your purse and then will try to snatch your chastity after. No self-respecting person that knows quality goods from the ass end of a horse should step into his shop. Why do you think he moved it up six roads in the first place? Folk with sense got a smell of him, and he had to go somewhere where the air was too thin to think straight.”

  At least that bit of badmouthing your competitors was familiar. Most things in this city are so foreign; they have their own ways of doing things and no one will tell me the rules, but I can at least recognize some good old-fashioned gossip and rumor-mongering.

  “I’ll steer clear then,” I say. I look around the shop, really noticing that this is the first time I have ever been in a store like this. I have no idea what over half of the equipment in here is even for, and no real practical idea of how to use the other half. “I am looking for mediums,” I say, picking up a rod that looks like it is made of steel, it pulses in my hand like a heart, but you couldn’t tell just by looking at it.

  “Of course you are,” Erika says. “What kind?” I pause, not really expecting a question back.

  From what I have read, mediums are a necessary tool for enchanters to be able to work fluidly with affixed mana. Extracting mana from a material is only the first step in the process and infusing it into a lattice that has both form and purpose in its construction the last. The reservoir that the energy is placed into is a medium itself, but any material that you can infuse mana into also serves as one. Toying around with the new addition to my enchanting ability, I had ended up filling my soul index with different mana types completely, and as such I needed a medium to infuse them into in order to disentangle myself from them. If I could not free up the space, I doubted that my next attempt at disenchanting would go smoothly, I might even lose all of the affixed mana altogether.

  “I need a storage medium,” I say.

  “Storage,” she nods to herself. “And you said that you were after high-quality goods, so I assuming that you mean reusable storage medium. How many are you after, dear?”

  I think that over for a moment, considering. “Fifty.”

  “Fifty!” Erika explodes up from her seat, staring at me. “Honey, if you have that kind of coin to toss around, I will make damn sure that you have the best in Grim.”

  “I thought you already were the best in Grim.”

  She waves off the comment. “What are we talking about, liquid or solid-state?”

  I search her eyes, trying to puzzle out the correct answer, and she catches me searching.

  “Ah,” she says with a click of her tongue. “A novice. Taking your first steps on the enchanter’s path? Did perhaps your mother demand that you cultivate a skill? If so, you chose a fine one.”

  “I decided to be an enchanter after my friend stabbed me and threw me off a cliff,” I say, trying to shock her into silence.

  Erika merely nods, looking up toward the ceiling. No, she is looking up toward the platform above us, the next one up a good fifty feet. “Not the first girl to tell me that. Must have hit your head on the way down I assume, but then, the best enchanters are a bit cracked up in the noggin. I’ll tell you plain and straight then, if you are looking to use the mana quickly, liquid is cheaper, but it will begin to evaporate over time, especially if you don’t keep it stored in a dark place. The fluid can only hold a certain density, you see, so once enough has evaporated, you start losing potency. Solid-state is good for the long-term, but it’s pricey.”

  I give that a think. Honestly, with all of the disparate types of mana I have sitting in my inventory, there is no telling how long it will take for me to get to it all. It kills me to spend more than I need to, but I don’t think that it can be helped in this case. “Best make it solid-state then.”

  “I love to hear it.” Erika slaps her hands together, rubbing them against one another so hard I fear she might make smoke rise. Nimble and quick, she dips beneath the table, reappearing with a wooden case. She snaps open the bronze clasp on the front, revealing a row of six different rods lying inside the case on a bed of blue suede. “These are examples of what I am capable of supplying. Go ahead and test them, find one that you like, that feels right to you.”

  Immediately I am drawn to the rod that on the surface looks to be made of gold, a thin reed not even as thick around as my pinky, twice as long as my hand. There is some kind of lacquer applied to its surface, a clear coat that runs down its length, encasing it, the only bare spot a hole drilled into the top. I at least know from my studies so far that the hole is where an infusing tool is meant to be attached, but given my soul index, that is one tool I do not need. The rod is pretty, I do love gold, but I move on.

  The copper and silver rods that I inspect next are also pretty and of the same form as the gold one, though I have picked up from the glossary that silver will be a better container than either of the other two metals. The fourth rod is made from wood– Casterwood my eye identifies, and there is something about it that makes me like it immediately. Even before I pick up the fifth piece, I notice that the last is made of a special kind of silk and know that it is a trap. Silk can be infused, there are very special kinds of it created for such a purpose, but it does not hold magic for long without being integrated into a moving pattern. It abhors stationary magic for some reason.

  The final rod is of a deep purple, and as I pick it up it bends in my hand under its own weight, falling back over my fingers with only the barest rigidness to it. It is almost comical, bouncing in my hand.

  “What’s this?” I ask, though my eye already tells me that is it made of some material called Deeprubber.

  “That is a deeprubber rod. Quite good for holding affixed mana, though it can be somewhat of a pain to infuse and get it back out again. The resistance is high, so you will require a powerful infusion device to see it done with that.”

  “Never heard of it.” Despite myself, I find bending the weird purple rod delightful. “Why use it over something like silver or gold?”

  “Elasticity,” Erika says, her eyes tracking the bouncing tip of the rod. “Silver and gold can be incorporated into designs well, and their resistance to mana flow is low, but when you have flexible joint locations in a given craft or any piece that bends a lot, they will become brittle over time and break. Deeprubber is a bit of a middle ground between various silk types and metallic mediums. “In practice, it is sliced thin and can be almost as flexible as silk. There are other various edge cases to use it.”

  “Interesting.” I put the rod back in the box, studying all of the mediums.

  “Anything leap out to you?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’ll take all of them. No, actually…twenty of each gold and deeprubber, and let me see your silks.” If I am going to spend my money, I might as well experiment a little bit.

  “Of course,” Erika says.

  I point to a bookcase at the far end of the room. “Also, anything from there that you would recommend for a novice enchanter to use to learn with. That pattern there.” I point to a mannequin that stands apart, seeming to have a blouse tacked to it with needles, the shirt itself split open and revealing the ends of medium leads that curl back into the fabric. “Mannequin too. I also require a thaumatometer.” I have absolutely no idea what one looks like. “And finally, any equipment that you might recommend for decanting.”

  Erika’s mouth is practically watering as she nods along with each of my requests. “Anything else that you might need, young Mrs.?" Her smile is so nice, almost a pity to ruin it.

  “Of course, I expect some kind of discount for making such a large purchase. I imagine that I am going to spend quite a lot while I am in Grim; I expect to get my money’s worth.”

  Ah, there goes the smile.

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