“Lava serpents, like I said.” Signboard arrows suggested that three different hallways all led to GROUND TRANSPORT. Tara chose right, saw a construction bottleneck, and reversed course. Shale, turning, upended a golem, who sprang to his feet, raised scissorfingers, gnashed fangs, and chattered a clockwork challenge. Shale didn’t speak demonic, but he understood the body language and responded in kind: chin up, shoulders back, pecs tense under his shirt. Tara grabbed Shale’s bones with a slip of Craft meant to animate skeletons and jerked him after her, ignoring his glare as he recovered his footing. “The city’s bigger than what it costs.”

He frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Dresediel Lex is a symbol to the Craftwork world.” The long hall narrowed and grew brutalist, without windows or even ads to relieve the pale plaster. Glass doors opened at the hallway’s end, and past those doors she saw another pair, and after those, sun. “The God Wars lasted a hundred years give or take. Imagine fighting your own people for a century.”

“I don’t have to imagine,” Shale said.

“Fair enough.” Almost outside. Free air melted on the tongue like spun sugar. “Gods owned the earth and hated us, so we built our nations in the sky. By the time the wars crossed from the Old World to the New, both sides were exhausted, desperate, mean. Dresediel Lex was our great victory. Once these gods fell, Liberation cascaded through the continent. For the first time in history, there was a city where the dead walked, and we could fly.”

They swept through, past sign-bearing chauffeurs and waiting family. Two dark men embraced. The second layer of doors rolled back, and they emerged into Dresediel Lex.

Tara felt the city’s hot breath on her skin and its sun on her face.

She was done walking for a while.

She’d visited Dresediel Lex in her caravan days to hock wares in dusty markets and fill warded wagons with goods for sale to the farm towns of the central plains—and she visited again on spring break with friends from the Hidden Schools. So it was not surprise that made her stop.

It may have been awe.

Overhead, the sky was dry and enormous, the color of paintings on Shining Empire pottery. It did not hang or arc or curve. It rose forever.

Crystal towers hung upside down in air above the free city, breaking sunlight to a billion-prismed rainbow. To the west, juniper and manzanita matted the Drakspine hills dusk green, but at street level palm trees and clawfoot azalea grew emerald leaves that boasted of piped water in defiance of all drought.

Pyramid peaks crested above the hills.

The heat was an oven’s, and a magnifying-glass sun beat down. Her skin, long accustomed to weak Alt Coulumb light, felt its use again.

A buzzing came across the sky.