So whither the beast, and whence its roughness? Insects keep their skeletons on the outside; human beings only display their structure under force. The doom that neared Alt Coulumb, the twilight of the gods sung by street-corner Criers, pressed down with grand weight. But not all that’s wounded breaks.

Not, at least, at first.

*   *   *

Dragon-borne, westward bound, Tara woke in need of a walk.

Shale slept like a stone, which she supposed was reasonable. He did not even lie down: he sat on his bench-bed in their cabin, hands on knees. The creases of his slacks fell like plumb lines to his shined shoes, swayed by the wingbeats that rocked the gondola.

“You awake?”

No response.

“If you’re ignoring me, I’ll do something horrible to you.”

Nothing.

“With chisels.”

Hollow circles in crimson and cloth-of-gold patterned the ceiling, and these stared down at her, judging. She stood in her pajamas, slid into her slippers, and walked the empty, dim hall, hair clouded around and above her head. False flames glimmered behind smoked glass along the dark baseboards, illuminating the maze-patterned rug. A light blinked green over the door to the observation deck, indicating the platform was mostly safe.

She emerged into the chill of great height. She shivered from the breeze, but she soon adjusted. It was not so cold as it should have been. Craftwork managed wind and pressure, and oven warmth radiated from the dragon’s scales. Broken clouds scudded below, and beneath those lay puzzle piece fields. They were east, yet, of Edgemont, but the country looked similar from so far up. She’d crossed these fields a year before in the opposite direction, with a job offer and an uncertain destiny.

Wings claimed the sky in huge slow sweeps. Her stomach lurched when she watched those spreading bones and the taut scaled skin between. Raz had told her about a time when a hurricane caught him at sea, and walls of water rose higher than the Bounty’s topmast. We’re plains apes at root, he explained. Loping strides and a regular horizon, that’s what we like. Our body thinks nothing large enough to be landscape should move.

Tara needed stars. She gripped the observation deck’s railing and vaulted over.

Glyph-lines woke on her skin and whispered moonlit arguments. Old deals the first Craftsmen struck with the sky arrested her fall. She stood on a platform of air and walked uphill beneath and around the wide neck.

The double drumbeat of the dragon’s heart faded as Tara walked. Another sound replaced it as she climbed past the shoulders’ shelf and along the four-story neck: a deep mellow drone on the low edge of hearing, accompanied by creeping dread in her gut. The sound she heard was only an overtone. The dread was the note the dragon hummed.

The dragon’s head was twice the Bounty’s size, its crest taller than the ship’s mainmast.