He steps forward to turn it on again. She keeps her hand over the button. “Start the engine first,” she says. “Then you can start the meter.”

The driver shrugs. With showy, large gestures, he tinkers with the engine again. Puts the cover on. Starts it without so much as a cough.

Aiah is entertained. She’s a Barkazil, one of the Cunning People. Her ancestors have rigged chonahs for thousands of years. This sort of thing is in her blood.

The pontoons and barges are old in this district, layered with barnacles beneath the waterline. The buildings on the pontoons are old as well, and as layered, new structures barnacled atop the old, until the form and shape and function of the original building has been completely obscured.

When she arrives at her hotel, she tries to calculate exchange rates, and gives the driver what she thinks is the correct amount in Gunalaht dalders. She knows, from the driver’s sudden bright grin, that she’s overpaid. Suddenly he’s pressing a plastic business card into her hand.

“My name is Callaq, miss! Please call at any time! I will show you the sights, the Aerial Palace, the place where all the battles were fought, anything!”

“Maybe.”

“Please call! I’ll take you anywhere!” “Thank you, Callaq.”

She carries her bag up corroded marble steps slippery with sea slime. Beggars hold out cupped hands on the stairs. From the top she turns to look back at this strange metropolis, sees the taxi churning away, an old moored tugboat that probably hasn’t moved in years and is flying a string of laundry, a flock of scabrous waterfowl staring at her with agate eyes.

And then, in the air above the canal, there forms a pattern, lines and colors interlinking, the pattern flowing like water… It bursts so swiftly in the sky, like a flower opening in time-lapse photography, that she can only catch a fragment of the wholeness, a curve, a maze, a wonderment. Aiah stares openmouthed.