Thresholder

The blimp was awkwardly shaped, more like a floating pillow than a sphere or a cylinder. There were no internal supports, as the fabric of the outside was kept rigid on its own through magic. Advanced material science had made everything possible, and it was apparently light on the lantern use, at least for an eastward journey that was following the prevailing winds. Perry didn’t trust it much, but the ships were in common use, and weren’t filled with explosive gas. His mind went to the Hindenburg more than once.

The trip would take a week, which was faster than by the sailing ships which mostly moved cargo. Perry and Mette were sharing a cabin, while Nima was in the hold. There were two hundred people aboard, which was right at the very limit of what the Caster could carry, and all of them were bound for Berus. It was an eclectic crew of volunteers and expats returning home, all to ‘help’ the former kingdom get settled into place by people who had relevant skills, who had run symboulions, and who understood the culture that they wanted to put into place. It was one part diplomatic corps, one part engineering corps, and one part random people who had some excuse to be going, the miscellaneous volunteers and those returning to a home they had left.

“It flies,” said Mette as she looked out their small porthole window. “Can you imagine if we could have managed this on Esperide?” She looked over at Perry. “No worry about bugs.”

“That would have been something,” said Perry. “No farmlands though, and the weather never would have cooperated with you, not with the winds as they were.”

“It was an option we thought about,” said Mette. “It’s an engineer’s disease, thinking about radically different ways to do it all.” She shivered slightly. They were only a handful of minutes into their flight, having just lifted off, and she was already finding the ground to be too far away. “What do we do if it goes down?”

“There are some emergency craft that are much faster than this one,” said Perry. “But they spew effluence. Presumably one of those would come to get us while we try to stay afloat. Though naturally, I would open the shelfspace for you and we could either wait there in safety or I could just spend a handful of hours flying back.”

“Mmm,” said Mette. “They don’t have long-range communication though.”

“Not once we’re out of eyeline of the city, no,” said Perry. “But it’s safe, so long as we don’t run into a storm.”

“And if we do run into a storm?” asked Mette. The sky outside their window was pleasant, just a light breeze that was blowing puffy white clouds with flat bottoms along.

“Didn’t you look this all up?” asked Perry.

Mette went over and laid on the small bed they would be sharing with her hands folded together on her chest. “I didn’t want to make myself more nervous. You know, part of my job was trying to find the pain points before they became issues. But when I found those pain points, I was able to do something. I wasn’t just at the mercy of a handsome stranger and some people whose skills I don’t really trust.”

“This is routine,” said Perry, ignoring that she’d called him handsome. Her flirting was different now that they were away from the Natrix, and she presumably wasn’t doing it because she wanted his child. “But … it’s not about whether it’s routine or not, it’s about the lack of control. Right?”

“I guess,” said Mette. She closed her eyes and winced. “Is airsickness a thing?”

“It is,” said Perry. “I would hold off on a diagnosis though. There are medicines that can help with it, some herbs and teas you can have. There’s a mess hall, I can go try to find you something, if we want to go a prophylactic route.”

“I think I’m just nervous,” said Mette, though she hadn’t opened her eyes. “It seems like it would be easy to shoot us down.”

“I was going to walk the decks,” said Perry. “I’ll find Nima and see how she’s doing, make sure I know the layout of this place.”

“Bring back tea,” said Mette. She laid down on the bed, then flipped herself over to bury her face in the pillow.

“You could also hop in the shelfspace if you need to,” said Perry. “At least it’s not going to be swaying.”

“Blegh,” said Mette. She was hard to hear, as her mouth was pressed against the fabric of the pillow. “We’ll see if I can stabilize. I keep getting worried about being trapped in there.”

Perry shrugged and left her behind. The cabin they had was small, barely large enough for the two of them, but at least they had a cabin. The airship wasn’t meant to carry this many people, and the main hold that was normally used for miscellaneous cargo had a bunch of hammocks put up in rows to fit more people. Perry would have thought that this was the sort of situation where those with scrip would pay to get the better places to bunk, but instead they’d had people volunteer for the worse conditions, which filled up those spots in a hurry. That was the culture, and to Perry’s surprise it actually worked. He still didn’t really understand it.

After the Natrix and the Crypt, the Caster was the third large vessel that Perry had traveled on, and he couldn't help but make some comparisons. The Caster was relatively cramped, though nothing like the Crypt had been, and the fact that they were surrounded by open air, easily able to get a breeze just by stepping outside, meant that it felt like there was more room. It was also a work of art in its own right, not a utilitarian machine meant for transporting people from one place to another. Someone had gone to some effort to make sure that every one of the posts that held up the railings had a carving on it, and it couldn’t have been a mold, because there were obvious differences in the carvings, giving it an eclectic feel.

The inflated white pillow above the gondola moved only slightly in the winds that were pushing them along, but there were engines at the back, ‘clean’ lantern light ones that supposedly produced no effluence at all. They made a bit of popping sound that couldn’t be heard from inside, and there was a long strut that kept them separated from the gondola, with a walkway that the pilots and technicians had to walk along.

They were eight hundred feet above the ground, which felt extremely close in comparison to an airplane. Perry leaned over the railing and looked down at the waves below them. The water was clear enough to see the vague shapes of rocks far below. They would pick up speed later on, once some checks had been done, but they’d never be going all that fast. It was faster than a sailing ship, but not that much faster.

“It’s glorious,” said a man who’d stepped up beside Perry.

“It is,” said Perry. The man was a dwarf, wearing heavy leathers with a fur collar. The exterior railing came up to just below his eyeline, so he was stooping slightly to look between the bars at the waves below. His brown beard was flapping in the breeze. “Sorry, did you mean the ship or the waters?”

“Both,” said the dwarf. “For different reasons.”

“Mmm,” said Perry.

“The oceans are healing,” said the dwarf. “They didn’t used to be that blue you see now.”

“What color were they?” asked Perry.

“Oh, still blue, just not that shade,” said the dwarf. “Not this close to the city, anyway.” His eyes briefly went to the city they were leaving behind, then back down to the waters. “The schools of fish have come back. There’s a special mask you can make, a fisher’s mask, that lets you see straight through the water as though it weren’t even there. It was a tool of the fishermen, when there were still fishermen.”

“There are fishing boats now,” said Perry.

“Not like there were,” said the dwarf. He shook his head. “You live short lives. This is all you’ve known, isn’t it?”

“I suppose that must be true,” said Perry. He folded his hands behind his back.

“There were trawlers, huge ships with nets that would pull in fish by the ton,” the dwarf said. “It’s almost difficult to imagine the scale of it, given what little there is now. They had thought the ocean endless, that nothing they took could possibly make even the slightest dent in the populations, even as the effluence was poisoning the waters, making the fish come up wrong. Every year, the trawlers that went out would be bigger, their nets straining against the haul. And when it became clear that they were taking too much, do you know what they did?”

“Bigger trawlers,” said Perry. “Bigger nets.”

The dwarf chuckled. “Ah, so you do understand how it was in the old days. They had gotten used to their giant hauls, their ships puttering along spewing effluence into the waters, the obscene mountains of different fish pulled up, and they knew the ways of going big. They needed bigger trawlers and bigger nets to make up for what was now seen as a shortfall.”

“And the oceans emptied,” said Perry. He let out a little sigh. “But that’s not how it is now? The oceans are … restricted?” He hoped that was a question he wouldn’t be expected to know the answer to. He hadn’t overhead any conversations about it, or read about it in the papers. He’d eaten many meals, but not much fish, and had never really thought about why.

“The oceans are a commons,” said the dwarf. “We understand commons better now, how to manage them, but the biggest difference is that people don’t feel the need to go out and take as much as they can. They know they’ll be taken care of.”

“And that was all it took?” asked Perry.

The dwarf looked out over the ocean. They had risen slightly, but weren’t much higher than a skyscraper. Perry thought that it was almost a survivable fall for a regular person. He, of course, would have no problem with it if it came to that, though he didn’t know what kind of creatures might be lurking down in the oceans. This was a world with dragons, or at least with historical dragons, and Perry took dragons seriously.

For many days, Perry had thought of effluence as just being generic ‘pollution’, the kind of thing that would make people cough, dirty the walls and windows, and cause some sickness or tumors. He’d thought that it was like in Teaguewater, essentially, industrialism run amok with the result being dingy, dirty sickness. And it was like that, most of the time, but effluence wasn’t particulates released into the air, it was a sort of heightened magic, wild magic, and the effects, especially when concentrated, could be unpredictable. A man would crack an egg and find that it was filled with blood. A wooden beam that had been in place for a decade would come to life, growing a new branch that would burst out from beneath a layer of lacquer. There were mutations, especially in children, feathers along one arm or a toe that curled into a claw. Mostly, it was cancer and smog, but there were other effects, and Perry had spent most of the last day understanding the ins and outs of it.

The effluence had created monsters that had stalked the city streets. Some of them had once been children, while others seemed to come from nowhere, possibly being birds or rats that had transformed. The kingdoms of the world had a solution to the problem, which was a guild of monster hunters, and as the problem grew, it was clear what needed to be done: more money for the monster hunters, better equipment, better training, all that sort of thing. And of course they were slowly realizing that it was the effluence that was choking out every major city of the world, and even spreading into the countryside where great machines were harvesting the crops, but it didn’t seem like there was any way to stop it.

There were monsters in the deep oceans, the product of effluence getting in the water and the water going down the rivers, spilling magic into the deeps. Some fish had died, along with corals and kelp beds, but others had been transformed, growing extra fins or sharp spines, and others had become the stuff of nightmares. They weren’t kaiju, he didn’t think, but it did sound suspiciously like the sort of thing that might create a Godzilla. It was apparently one of the after-effects of the Effluence Revolution that the world was still dealing with, though it was a distant problem for most, even those that lived in a coastal city.

“It took struggle,” said the dwarf. He spoke so long after Perry’s question that Perry had forgotten that there was a question. The dwarf turned to Perry. “You’re from Berus, returning to your home.”

“Yes,” said Perry. He had a whole backstory worked out, along with a lot of specific details that would be hard for anyone to call him on.

“The people of Kerry Coast City have forgotten,” said the dwarf. “They’ve only just now gotten a grim reminder after two decades without any kind of opposition. But people knowing that they’ll be taken care of? That’s not all it takes, no. It takes militant struggle, aching effort every day with barely a rest. It takes vigilance and education. That’s what we’re going to Berus for.”

“There’s a symboulion in control now,” said Perry. “That’s what the news reports say.”

“That’s where the struggle begins, not where it ends,” said the dwarf. “Even once those with money and power have been brought down to the same level as everyone else, there will be old loyalties, old ideas, insidious promises and pernicious systems that will need to be destroyed. People will resist that, because those systems are what they know. They’ll try to find some way to incorporate the old ways into the new, to water down the culture.”

“And … what’s your role going to be?” asked Perry.

“Oh, I’m only an engineer,” said the dwarf. He turned and stuck out a hand toward Perry. “Moss Grumhill.”

“Perry Holzmann,” said Perry as he shook the hand. The dwarf’s hands were fat and hairy, a workman’s hands. “I’m not an engineer, not anything really. Just trying to do what I can.”

“Mmm,” said Moss. “I might have use of you then. They have dirty lanterns all over Berus, the biggest of them being out in the countryside, and those will need to be torn down as soon as possible, but it’s not enough to tear it all down, it needs to be replaced.” He clucked his tongue and looked out over the blue water. It was getting deeper the further they got from the city, a richer blue with hidden depths. “Prosperity is the name of the game, and we can only get so much of that by taking from those who had once been at the top.”

“I don’t know anything about engineering,” said Perry. “My wife is an engineer, but she’s a novice when it comes to lanterns.” Mette being his wife was something they had kept, mostly because it meant that they would have the privilege of privacy. This was the sort of opportunity that she would be looking for, the ground floor, access to materials, all that sort of thing.

“What did she work with?” asked Moss.

“Motive systems, structural integrity, making sure that one gear connected to the other,” said Perry. “She tells me I should just tell people that I don’t really know, but she also complains from time to time, and that’s the kind of thing she complains about.” Mette wasn’t an engineer by the standards of her own people, but she had grown up with an expectation that she would spend some time doing at least a bit of that work. Perry had come away convinced that engineering was some kind of inborn speciality of the people of Esperide, and even if it wasn’t innate, it sure as hell got hammered into them by their circumstances.

Moss nodded. “And you?”

Perry pursed his lips and Moss turned his head slightly to read the expression. “When I lived in Berus, I was in the military. After that, I had some years on the oceans as a sailor. It’s not a life that I’d want to go back to.”

“There will be a need for soldiers though,” said Moss with a slight nod. “Especially with how it’s gone there so far.”

“The assassination?” asked Perry.

“It makes it more difficult to accept,” said Moss. He sighed. “This isn’t my first time. I’ve been all over the world: Myrhold, Gwyndolir, Isenland … all the same, all different. I don’t know that Berus was ready for this. The public can be won over, but winning over the public isn’t enough, not without sweeping cultural change. If they think we’ve killed ‘their’ king, if we’re seen as invaders, it could take a decade or more for it all to shake out.”

“And there’s Thirlwell, sitting close by,” said Perry. “Within sight, I’ve heard, at least on a good day when the weather is clear.”

“The Last Kingdom,” said Moss. He shivered. “It’s the beginning of the end.”

An elf woman came walking down the exterior walkway. Perry was really trying not to think of them as slutty elves, but this one was wearing almost nothing, going barefoot and with a swimsuit-style bottom whose strings were high up on her hips. She had a vest on, and only a vest, which wasn’t even buttoned, and stopped a few inches above her shallow belly button. She had her hair up in a messy bun and large earrings. She was toned, with perfect skin, what Perry was coming to know as ‘the elven way’.

She settled down next to Moss, familiarly close, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Will you be spending the whole trip out here?”

“No,” he said. His hand went up to his shoulder and rested on top of hers. “I’m just taking in the view and making friends.”

“Friends?” asked the elf. She looked over at Perry. “And you haven’t introduced me?”

“Perry, this is my wife, Velli. Velli, this is Perry, a young man from Berus returning home to help with getting the country settled.” He looked up at her. “I was thinking that he might provide us with security.”

“Mmm,” said Velli. She looked at Perry. “Seems as though that’s a lot of trust to put on the shoulders of someone you’ve just met.”

“We have the whole trip to get to know each other,” said Moss. He scratched his chin. “Perry, there’s a strategy meeting in the dining room tonight, you and your wife should come.”

“Sure,” said Perry. “Mix and mingle? Or … actual strategy?”

“Both,” said Moss. “It’s nothing exclusive, nothing sensitive, none of the skullduggery of a Command Authority meeting, but if you’re not just returning home to salvage what you can, if you want to put in the work, it would be for the best. It’s not a symboulion per se, but better that we get to talking here than be running around with no clue when we get to our destination.”

Perry hadn’t stopped looking between the two of them since Velli had shown up. In theory, dating and marrying across species was a part of the culture, people were allowed to do what they liked, love was love, you were supposed to support and validate other people when they made a decision on a partner … but in practice there were a lot of questions, really so many questions. There was debate over whether dwarven ‘pigwives’ were capable of simple thoughts, let alone complex ones, and dwarven marriage was a radically different thing than human marriage, which raised all kinds of questions in Perry’s mind about what this relationship was like, how it had bent and twisted itself when it crashed into old cultural expectations and older evolutionary imperatives.

“Aw, I think we shocked him,” said Velli. “Never seen an elf and a dwarf together, have you?”

“Sorry,” said Perry. “No.”

“Don’t antagonize the boy,” said Moss with a sigh. “Or do, and get it all out of your system before we land.” He glanced at Perry. “Do you mind if she gets it out of her system?”

“I really didn’t mean any offense,” said Perry. “There’s nothing that you need to explain to me, it’s not your job to educate curious onlookers, if I really cared or thought that I had some questions that had interesting answers, I could just go find a book or a newspaper article or something. I really don’t need to get into it.” These were old words, a de-escalation of the sort he’d occasionally used on Earth.

“Ah, so he’s a gentleman,” said Velli with a small laugh. “Well that’s less fun, and I’ll save my ire for elsewhere.”

“Don’t make me cage you,” said Moss. Perry couldn’t tell whether that was a joke, or what level of joke it was. “We need to be on our best behavior. As much as you despise who and what they are, we won’t make things better by poking, prodding, or yelling. Do the casual air thing, the pleasant reveal, if you’re going to do it at all.”

“We did the casual reveal with him,” said Velli, pointing at Perry. “And he’s very gracious, but I saw the look in his eyes. It wasn’t a look of ‘oh, this fine dwarf is married to an elf, I suppose it makes sense that’s a normal thing, this is the culture, I am enlightened’.”

“It’s old, well-trod ground,” said Moss with an apologetic look toward Perry.

“It’s not a problem,” said Perry. “Old for the two of you, or old in general?”

“Both, I suppose,” said Moss. He rubbed his chin, then smoothed his wind-blown beard. “Berus is the second-to-last stronghold of monarchical thinking and all that comes with it. There are few dwarves and few elves, and I would wager we’ll have enough of a problem with them understanding the mere fact of our existence before getting into the admittedly unusual nature of our relationship.”

“Thinking that it’s unusual is part of the problem,” said Velli. She folded her arms across her chest. “Ranking relationships on their ‘usualness’ isn’t the culture.”

“What do you think?” Moss asked Perry. “How much trouble will this be?”

“Oh,” said Perry. “I have no idea.” He desperately wanted to argue with Velli, but he would be doing it from a position of ignorance, which he never really enjoyed. He wanted to object that surely some pairings were rare if you were looking at the races of those involved, and it wasn’t as though the races were fundamentally interchangeable, since there were huge material differences between them. “I’m not typical of those who come from Berus. The questions that I’m content to keep to myself are just idle curiosity, nothing more, and there’s a lot that I could adjust to given time, so long as I’m given a chance to understand it. But as for the others … I think the fact that elves and dwarves are both rare might actually work in your favor.”

“How so?” asked Moss.

“Uh,” said Perry. “Just a theory, I guess. There’s a process of othering that people do, which is an extension of ingroup and outgroup thinking … but there are near outgroups and far outgroups, and people tend to put their thought and emotion to the near outgroup. So I’d suspect that they have lots of opinions on Thirlwell, which is as close to them as possible, but if the average person has never so much as seen a dwarf, then they won’t have too much solidified in their minds. Maybe they’ll have been taught to hate dwarves, maybe they’ll have ideas, but you can come in and be obviously different, and that’s an asset. If they hated dwarves that they saw every day, that they lived beside? That would be a higher hurdle.”

They were both giving Perry a look, and Perry knew why, but Moss was the one to say it.

“You said you were a soldier and a sailor,” Moss said. “But you must be a very curious sort of soldier.”

“True,” said Perry with a nod.

“I’m more convinced than ever that it might do me well to keep you close,” said Moss. “We’ll talk more, but are you interested?”

“What would I be doing?” asked Perry. “Just guard work?” He didn’t think that really appealed to him, given that the whole reason he was going over to Berus was to do some independent investigation and information gathering. On the other hand, being connected with an engineer would have its benefits. It would mean keeping this cover for longer than planned.

“Something like that,” said Moss. He looked up to Velli. “Did you want to tell him what you do?”

“He didn’t ask,” said Velli with a toothy smile.

Perry was taking a dislike to her. She seemed to want to fight, and Perry wanted to fight her, but not in a way that would inspire camaraderie in either of them. “You’ll let me guess?”

“Oh, I would love that,” said Velli. She gestured to herself, and Perry thought it was impossible she didn’t know what kind of impression the barely-dressed body had made on him. Elves preferred to be barely clothed, but there was something provocative about her clothes, and it felt like a cultural assault rather than a deliberate fashion choice — or maybe like the cultural assault was the fashion choice.

Perry extended the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, then gave them a slight twist, which was his signal to Marchand thanks to some nanites that were disguising themselves as freckles.

“She’s a librarian, sir,” said Marchand. “She currently has no formal role, but in the past, and in past lives, she’s worked as Head of Divestment under various Command Authorities, charged with redistribution of material wealth from the nobility and upper classes. It is likely that she will assume that title by dint of experience once we arrive in Berus.”

Perry listened to this while pretending to be making a decision. Velli was still smiling at him. Forgetting for a moment the question of how a dwarf and elf of these varieties got together, they seemed rather different in terms of personality, and he wondered what had made them work in the long term.

“You’re a housewife,” said Perry.

She laughed. “Oof, try again.”

“Dancer then,” said Perry.

“You do dance,” said Moss.

“Yes, but that’s not my vocation, my calling,” said Velli.

“You’ve said that you’re called to the dance floor on many occasions,” said Moss.

“Fine,” said Perry, holding up a hand. “Then forgive me, because I can’t guess just from looking at you.”

“I’m a librarian,” said Velli. She placed a hand on her chest as she said it, on the bare skin where the unbuttoned vest naturally parted.

“Don’t tease,” said Moss.

“It’s true,” said Velli. “It is what I am.”

“You’re in charge of Divestment,” said Perry. “Redistribution of goods and properties back into the commons.”

“Aw, you knew the whole time?” asked Velli. “That’s no fun.”

“Would you believe that it was just a very good guess?” asked Perry.

“He knows more than he lets on,” said Velli.

“That’s been obvious to me,” said Moss. He gave Perry a skeptical eye. “You’re not with a Command Authority, are you? You would have to tell us if you were.”

“Just a normal guy going about my normal guy business,” said Perry. “I’ll see you at the meeting tonight, if you’ll be there.”

“It’s going to get cold as we pick up speed over the ocean,” said Moss. “I should be heading in too. It was a pleasure.”

Perry took his leave and went down to the airship’s cafeteria. It was the largest space in the airship, aside from maybe the hold that had the hammocks in it, and there was plenty of food set out, along with large lanterns set on a table that were apparently for food. Perry went over to them and spent a moment looking at them. Each was large and metal, like the big jugs that dispensed coffee at cafeterias, and the whole thing had the vibe of a continental breakfast at a hotel. There were hand-written instructions on each of them along with some pictures of the process, but it took him a moment, because he wasn’t entirely sure what the end result was supposed to be.

“It’s not very good,” said a woman just behind Perry. He turned to look, and was mildly surprised to see that it was Nima. He had caught her scent, but not made the connection.

“It’s not?” he asked.

“Lantern-made food has exactly one benefit, which is that it’s compact,” she said. She was dressed in a more conservative outfit, though not quite as severe as she’d worn on her second meeting. The shirt was blue and form-fitting, with long sleeves and an exposed midriff, and the skirt was gauzy white fabric that seemed more like a wrap than a proper garment.

“Show me?” asked Perry.

Nima took a plate from the stack and went to one of the metal lanterns, pulling down a lever which caused it to start clicking. After twenty clicks, each about a second long, the lever shot back up and Nima pulled down a second lever, which opened up a compartment that let a white puck of what looked like tofu to slide out. She handed the plate to Perry.

“Huh,” he said. He looked at the other lanterns. “This is what they all do?”

“There are different variants,” said Nima. She pointed at them one by one. “Egg, meat, fruit, grains, vegetables.”

“But … not,” said Perry. He prodded the egg puck with a finger, and it jiggled like jello.

“The specific field is called lantern accumulation,” said Nima. “Base things are easy, except for metals, but organics are very difficult. It’s a marvel of engineering that it can even make something like this from such a compact form factor, and relatively ‘clean’. All the effluence gets crystallized on a strip of metal, which then has to be buried.”

“Better to have fresh food,” said Perry. “Also, the five of these lanterns are feeding a hundred people for a week?”

“They’re compact,” said Nima. “A person eats five pounds of food a day, that’s almost two tons of food for the whole ship, along with all the water, which is also made by lanterns. Eight pounds of water a day, that’s another four tons. These? Maybe a pound of fuel per person for the entire trip.”

“You studied?” asked Perry.

“No, I talked to someone who knew more than me,” said Nima. She was frowning at the lanterns. “Which is studying, in a way. This was once how most people ate. The poor, anyway.”

“Ah, so it has two benefits,” said Perry. “It’s compact and cheap.”

“No,” said Nima. She looked at him with a frown. “The huge lanterns that made food for the masses spewed effluence. They have a concept here, ‘externalities’, which compare not just the costs to a person or a company, but the costs to society.”

Perry nodded as though this was a new concept for him. “And when you sit down and add everything up, the damage to the various commons means that it’s not worth it.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Nima. “It’s hard to get firm numbers. They don’t seem to like firm numbers. I think it’s some kind of scar left over from what the kingdoms had done.”

“You’d think that a king would have incentive not to poison his own kingdom,” said Perry. “But I guess the cost isn’t borne by the kingdom, it’s borne by the whole planet, by the oceans, the forests, the neighbors …” He sighed. “I think I’m done with talking about this stuff for now. Mette’s not doing well with the motion of the ship, I’m getting her some tea. There’s a meeting tonight, after dinner, where they’ll discuss strategy in Berus. We should be there. I might be able to hook you up with a dwarf who’s going to be working on getting some of the lanterns built in Berus when we get there.”

Nima leaned closer and lowered her voice slightly. “We’re going after the kingkiller though, right?”

“We are,” said Perry.

Nima looked around the room, which was mostly empty, given that it was still a few hours until lunch. “Alright,” she said. “Just be careful, okay? I’ve got a bad feeling here. And … there are people who are actually from Berus on this flight. You might want to stay away from them.”

“Why?” asked Perry. “I’m from the city of Kennis Cross, grew up in a row house by the Eber River. I was a sailor on the Laneman’s Pride, settled down in Berus with my wife after the Radial Purge. If I can’t practice the backstory now, when can I? This is the perfect time for it. And if they sniff me out, what does it matter? The reason I’m lying is that I’m a spy, that’s all they’ll think. None of this matters, not really.”

“You think that about everything?” asked Nima. “The revolution we’re landing into, the Last King, all of it?”

“No,” said Perry. “But we’re thresholders, this isn’t our fight. We can pick sides, but ultimately, we’re moving on. It matters, it’s important to these people and their lives, we do need to consider that, but in the long term, we’re here for a reason, aren’t we? And that reason isn’t interfacing with the locals or having a deep cover that stands up to scrutiny. Everything on this airship is temporary.”

“There are about thirty men from Berus down in the hold,” said Nima. “Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”

Perry frowned. “All men?”

“Two or three women,” said Nima. “Humans, mostly, with just a few of the melekee.” She put her hands up like a rat’s forepaws, in what had to be an offensive stereotype. “They have their own cluster of people. They’re who I’d watch out for. They grilled me, and I’m not claiming to be one of them.”

“They’re not of the culture?” asked Perry.

“They say they are,” said Nima. “But there’s something hard about them.”

“Understood,” said Perry. “Be at the meeting tonight. I’ll make introductions. Now can you show me how to make some tea for Mette?”

Lanterns made the water and also heated it, but the tea was shaved off of a large brick that was going to last the whole ship for the day. The mug had a little cover, and after making more ‘loafs’ and loading them onto a plate for Mette, Perry made his way back into the room.

Mette was laying on the bed, unmoving, and Perry felt a bit of pity for her until he rubbed her back a bit and discovered that she had simply fallen asleep rather than spent her time lying there miserable. She gave an appreciative sound and turned slightly to look at him.

“I’m feeling better,” she said. “As soon as we picked up speed it wasn’t making me sick anymore. I like it, actually. Feels like home.”

“I brought tea,” said Perry. “And some loaf. We have a meeting tonight, and I think it would be good to prep for it. I’ve been placing more nanites around the ship, so we can listen in on some conversations and not get blindsided.”

“You’re worried?” asked Mette as she sat up and rubbed some sleep from her eyes.

“It’s a prudent amount of worry,” said Perry. “I was hoping that we could wait until we were in Berus to have to think about things tactically, but it seems like we should have started the moment we got on the ship.”