The Mothers of the Sky. These progenitors of Aerokin were politically moderate, and utterly unfathomable. Their impact upon history negligible.
THE AEROKIN ROSLYN DAWN, THE OPEN SKY
“You will do this. He is to be treated as one of us, unless or until we tell you otherwise.”
“No,” Kara Jade had said. “This is madness, absolute folly, and besides there are plenty enough Aerokin in Chapman. I will not risk the Dawn.”
Of course, she hadn’t actually. If you wanted to fly, if you wanted to serve your Aerokin, then you did what the Mothers told you, even if it meant danger, even if it meant doing things that you would rather not, like coming down out of the air, like having to deal with people. All she wanted was the air and her Roslyn Dawn. There were plenty of Aerokin in Chapman too, for the Festival, but none of them were like hers.
Kara Jade did not like flying this close to the Roil. The Roslyn Dawn liked it even less. It hadn’t stopped complaining in its slow deep tongue since they’d left Drift.
Mirrlees-on-Weep dominated her mirrors. The river metropolis was not as wondrous as the pilot’s city of Drift, but impressive in its way, with its monstrous bridges and its crooked towering skyline. Though now it languished beneath masses of dark storm cloud like a beaten dog.
The river Weep had swollen. Suburbs north and west of the central boroughs, right up to the old forest known as the Margin, were stained with it. Cranes, another mighty and genuflecting forest, worked ceaselessly along the levees, extending them, repairing damage, thickening the levees bases, but it was ultimately a pointless industry, for the rain fell not just around the city, but further west, in the catchments. And there seemed no end in sight to its fall.
Mirrlees she could deal with, corrupt government or not, there was money to be made there. But the Mothers of the Sky had directed her south, and on this ridiculous and dangerous mission, and there would be a man, on board, an Old Man no less, and that was enough to make her sick.
Away from one darkness and too soon into another.
A hundred and fifty mile wide ribbon of dry air stretched between Mirrlees and Chapmen, broken on the Chapman end by Roil.
From up here it was easy to see everything, and that was why she preferred the north. The weather had been crazy that way for some years, but there was no darkness rising, no obsidian curtain, you could almost believe it wasn’t happening. Here though there was no doubt.
If the mothers hadn’t commanded her, there was no way she would have flown this way. But they had.
“We wait a week,” she said to the Roslyn Dawn. “Until the beginning of the Festival, no more, and if he hasn’t come, we go.”
The Roslyn Dawn accepted that, but barely, she was as stubborn as her pilot.