Elsie remembered the air-burials she had heard of among northern tribes. Women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skyward through the cold air and clouds, to drift in airstreams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt-lands was a catacomb, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the aimless, frost-mummified dead.

They gave Drey an air-burial of another kind, of necessity, hauling him with tenderness to the edge of the carriage, bracing him between the ropes and letting him go.

It was as if he flew. He soared below them and his arms seemed to spread. Air pummelled him so he moved as if dancing or fighting, and he spun as he dwindled. He passed birds. His friends watched his flight with awe and a surprise elation, and turned away while he was seconds from the ground.

They went over swale and grass that grew drier as they went south. Rudewood receded. The wind was with them. Cutter heard Elsie whispering to Pomeroy, crying over Drey.

"We can’t stop now," Pomeroy murmured to her. "I know, I know… but we can’t now."

Three times they saw other balloons, miles away. Each time their pilot would look through his telescope and say whose ship it was. There were not so many of the aeronautic peddlers. They knew each other’s routes.

The man had demanded a lot of their money to take them to Myrshock, but when they had heard that the militia had come past Pigtown not long before, a hussar unit on altered mounts, they could not turn him down. "We’re coming the right way." And travelling now not quickly but with a relentless pace, for the first time they felt something like hope.

"Hard to believe," said Cutter, "that there’s a fucking war on." No one answered. He knew his bile tired them. He watched patchworked land.

On the third morning in the air, while he was rubbing water into Fejh’s wind-chapped skin, Cutter bellowed and pointed to where, miles ahead, he saw the sea, and before it in a depression of wheat-brown grass, the dirigible moorings and minarets of Myrshock.

It was an ugly port. They were wary. This was not their territory.

The architecture looked thrown together, chance materials aggregated and surprised to find themselves a town. Old but without history. Where it was designed, its aesthetic was unsure-churches with cement facades mimicking antique curlicues, banks using slate in uncommon colours, achieving only vulgarity.

Myrshock was mixed. Human women and men lived beside cactacae, the thorned and brawny vegetable race, and garuda, bird-people freebooters from the Cymek over the water, who dappled the air as well as the streets. Vodyanoi in a canal ghetto.

The travellers ate street food by the seawall. There were ranks of foreign craft and Myrshock ships, steamers with factory towers, cogs, merchant ships with great bridles for their seawyrms. Unlike the river docks of their home this was a brine harbour, so there were no vodyanoi stevedores. Lounging against walls were the mountebanks and freelance scum of any port.