"What are those empty places?" Tarrin asked Sarraya.
"Looks like marketplaces," Sarraya replied. "I see alot of Aeradalla in them. I can only guess they're buying things." There was a pause. "I wonder how they keep from running into each other in the air," she mused. "There are alot of them, and only so much airspace overhead."
"Who knows?" he asked, turning around. The magical object was up, and from the sense of it, it was in the Conduit at the heart of the spire. That would place it more or less in the exact center of the city itself. "We have to go that way," he told her, looking back towards the wall of the next tier up, which was about half a longspan away. As far as he could judge. "We'll have to move at night. I'll have to change to get up the tier walls, and I can't do that in the daytime without getting spotted."
"Good plan," Sarraya agreed. "Let's go find some dark, quiet place that can't be seen from above, and we'll rest."
"Why so it can't be seen?"
"Aeradalla are probably related to hunting birds, Tarrin, and if you didn't know, raptors have eyesight that rivals Allia's. They can see a mouse in high grass from a longspan away."
"You have a point," he acceded. "Alright, but I'm not going to spend the rest of the day hiding in that tunnel. We'll just have to find some other place."
"I think we can find something," she assured him. "If worse comes to worst, I'll just conjure up something to hide us until nightfall."
"Good enough," he said calmly as he padded back into the alley.
To: Title EoF
Chapter 15
The night was a different time of day, to be certain, but it was also an entirely different state of mind. It was a time of mystery, a time for things to occur that had no place under the light of the sun, a dark time for dark creatures, carrying out dark deeds.
But just as many things were, the dark was often misunderstood by those who were not governed by it. Tarrin stood on the edge of the selfsame ledge he had occupied during the daytime, standing between those same two buildings with a surprisingly warm, gentle wind pulling at his braid and tail. He was wearing his body for the dark, his natural form, standing on that ledge and looking out on the city with eyes much better suited for taking in the landscape. To any Aeradalla that may happen to see him, he looked a mysterious, ominous figure, a creature out of bedtime stories-or nightmares, as the case may be-a decidedly unnatural being that was clearly invading the home territory of that avian race. But such conclusions were incorrect, for the Were-cat had not come as a baby-stealer or an inciter of chaos, but merely as a curious tourist of sorts, who was there for one reason and one reason only.
Now that he could see the city, he better understood how it probably operated. What he had seen as empty holes in the regularity of the landscape were indeed open patches on the tiers, but what he hadn't seen before was that they weren't the last tiers in the vast rings. There were many more past them, and they all glowed greenish in the soft light of the Skybands and the full White Moon, Domammon. They were farm fields, and they occupied the outside rings of the city's land. The Aeradalla weren't just hunters and gatherers, they had found a way to farm up on this skyborne city. The effort required to haul dirt suitable for farming up to this city was quite staggering to consider, and it increased his respect for the winged race by many degrees. Especially when considering that the open land devoted to farming took up over a third, but not quite nearly half of the available land that existed up on the city's platform. On a platform that ran about ten longspans from center to outside edge, three or four longspans of that radius was given over to farmland.
Since they did farm, that meant that water had to be plentiful here. He hadn't seen any indications of it yet, but he had a ways to go, and he was pretty sure he'd find the answer to that question on his way up.
The buildings immediately inside the ring bordering the farms was filled with large buildings of open construction. Odds were that they were buildings supporting the farming efforts, holding harvests, tools, and other implements required to farm the land brought up here. Instead of building their barns and sheds on the precious land, they had moved them up to the next tier, so every available inch of farming land was made available. That was a very smart move, he recognized.
The buildings inside the barn tier were somewhat large, and those few tiers were where the openings in the skyline were located. Those had to be shops and taverns; a merchant district of sorts. The buildings above those tiers were occupied by a slew of smallish buildings that had to be homes, and he saw as he looked that the further up one looked, the larger and more ornate the houses became. Altitude was a measure of wealth and influence in this strange city, he reasoned. The higher one lived, the higher one's station. He had come out on a tier that had relatively nice homes-something of a middle class of sorts-and he realized that he was just inside that tenuous border. Smaller, cruder houses were on the tier just below the one on which he stood. At the edge of each tier, located symmetrically, were block-and-tackle platforms built off the tier's edge. Loading platforms, he realized, to move items too heavy to carry in flight from one tier to the next.
That seemed all well and good, but it made him curious as to how they got all those goods up here in the first place. If they were too heavy to carry up the tiers, how did they get them up into the city? It was a puzzle, a curiosity, and he would probably skulk around for an answer while travelling to his destination. There were too many things about this city that didn't add up, and his curiosity as to how things worked was starting to override his duty to simply take a look at the object and leave. He'd probably never get another chance to find out, and those things would nag at him for the rest of his life if he didn't find the answers.
He concluded that the platform had not been magically created. The lava tube had brought him out here, and by doing a little surveying, he realized that he was outside of the perimiter of the Rock Spire. The tube had sloped up and out, all the way across the spire. He had entered on the eastern side, and he could tell that he was now on the western side of the city. It had spiralled a little at first, then settled into a long, straight angle that obviously went west. That meant that the platform had to be part of the original stone, and the rest of it had been either worn away by weather or removed. The magic had made it in a sense that it only protected so much stone, and then the rest of it was removed.
That staggered his imagination. This had to have been a mountain at some time, but magic had somehow removed the rest of the mountain, leaving only this behind.
They had always joked that magic could move mountains. Now he was sure that it was no jestful exaggeration.
He couldn't see too much of the buildings above, since the tiers were rather deep, and other buildings got in the way, but he could see all the way to the center of the city. It was on a raised tower of natural rock that was elevated over the highest tier by several hundred spans, and atop it stood a curious black obelisk of sorts, a very large one. His inner senses told him that that was the exact center of the city, and the exact center of the Rock Spire. It was also where the Conduit ran through the spire, and his sense of that object told him that it was located within that curious obelisk.
Of course. They couldn't have made it easy and put it somewhere where he could get to it. No, they had to go and stick it on a pinnacle in the very center of a city designed for creatures with the ability to fly. What would take an Aeradalla about five minutes of flight would take him nearly half the night in gruelling ascent of tier after tier, then a murderous climb up that towering rock tower to the obelisk at its peak.
"What do you see?" Sarraya asked. She knew that in the night and in humanoid form, Tarrin's sight far outstripped hers. He enjoyed the best of both worlds in that regard, gaining both the cat's night vision and the human's clarity of vision.