The motor launch pulls into a slip alongside other, equally flamboyant craft. The soldier/steward jumps onto the floating pier and holds out a hand.

“This way, miss.”

There are soldiers patrolling up and down the quay in dark gray uniforms and helmets—Constantine’s Cheloki again. Constantine isn’t trusting the local troops that had actually captured the place: they’d changed sides once, and could again.

There are probably telepresent mages scoping the place as well. It would be the safe thing to do.

The door leading into the pontoon, Aiah sees, is an airlock, but it doesn’t look as if the heavy steel portal has been shut in a long time. Inside is a gold-rimmed desk where Aiah is checked in and given a badge.

“Someone is coming down to escort you,” Aiah is told.

The someone appears a moment later, and she recognizes him and smiles. He doesn’t smile back: he looks as if she’s a problem he doesn’t want.

“Mr. Martinus,” she says.

“Miss Aiah.”

He is a huge man, one of Constantine’s bodyguards, not only trained for war but bred for it. His genes are twisted to produce a massive, muscled body and catlike reflexes. His face looks like a helmet, eyes sunk beneath protective plates of bone. Heavy slabs of callus ridge his knuckles.

“Welcome to Caraqui,” he says.

“Thank you, sir.”

Martinus escorts Aiah into the elevator and presses the lever. There is a smell of burning that lodges in the back of Aiah’s throat, a souvenir of the fighting. The elevator doesn’t go straight up, but swoops as it rises to match the building’s architecture: the Aerial Palace, for all its extravagance, is a generator of plasm, built to distill the essence of mage-power. Its alloy structure is a maze of careful, intricate alignments, intended to take advantage of geomantic relationships that increase plasm generation.