The sleek motorcraft arrows neatly through the green water. The pontoons that loom on either side are painted with fading slogans and the images of dead Keremaths. Our family is your family—the slogan arches above dead, flaking faces. Aiah finds herself looking for dolphins—she had met one once, and spoken with him, and she knows they inhabit these waters. But no pale dolphins break the surface of the water.

Aiah is startled to see a large tram car float overhead along a set of cables. The green car, with its rounded, aerodynamic corners, is big as a bus, and obviously serves the same purpose.

Practical, Aiah thinks. It avoids congestion on the bridges, or building expensive tunnels underwater for pneuma and trackline transport.

Images of the Blue Titan and the Lynxoid Brothers brighten the sky, a plasm advert for the new chromoplay…

The buildings grow nicer as the boat approaches the Aerial Palace: expensive apartments, tinted glass and jutting balconies with fancy gingerbread scrollwork on the rails, and broad-shouldered office buildings crouching on their pontoons like animals ready to spring. Buildings don’t reach as high here as in Jaspeer, because it would make the pontoons top-heavy.

And then the boat passes through a battlefield, and the contrast is shocking: a series of squat blackened buildings, roofs fallen in, piles of rubble spilled in the street. Barges rock silently at the quayside, filled with slick plastic body bags. Priests with surgical gauze over their lower faces process the dead as they are brought from the rubble.

Come to mourn! a sound truck cries. Come to mourn the dead!

The Burning Man had appeared here, a firestorm of plasm in human shape. He had been fighting for Constantine, trying to stop a government counterattack; but the mage had been inexperienced and everything had gone out of control.