In the third of the five great Teleportation Squares of the Inner City of the great metropolis called Ir, there was a ladder.

That’s how Zidanya starts her story, and already we’re asking her for clarification. She glares us down, and we settle and listen; she’ll tell her story, she says, and then if we have questions afterwards, we can ask. Were we mewling children, unable to restrain our curiosities for a moment, unable to put together the information she shares with us into one cohesive whole without her putting the pieces in place for us? Chastened, smiling, we settle onto a bench and she starts over.

In the nation of Shamyim, called the Sky Kingdom, there is a great metropolis called Ir. It is a great metropolis mostly relative to its competition; there are no teeming millions here, no great towers reaching to the sky, no Academies of mages building spires to challenge the heavens. Or perhaps there are Academies of mages, because Ir itself challenges the heavens; it is the great metropolis that is itself the nation of Shamyim, and it is called the Sky Kingdom because the city flies.

When Zidanya tells us that, I don’t know whether I want more to sprint to find the next ladder so that we can climb up and I can see, or if I want to swear off ever leaving the courtyard so I don’t ever have to look down and see the ground below us. She sees how flustered I am and laughs, and moves on with her story, and I get a grip.

The land below the city, those few miles below us - few miles! I boggle at the thought - is shrouded not in mist or anything physical but in the same sort of metaphor-brought-into-reality attribute of being unimportant. Probably there’s farmland down there or something, and other cities, at least notionally; a world, sketched out in support of the Sky Kingdom’s existence, wouldn’t be unreasonable. But the scenario is clear that it’s not relevant to us, and that’s an interesting tidbit in its own right.

Wherever the challenge is we’re supposed to surmount, it’s here, and so are we.

The ladder, some three buildings down at a shop whose three stories rose slightly above the rest, brought her to a flat roof that extended back away from the square. She’d climbed another ladder from there, and then another, rapidly winding up eight stories up in a sprawling-yet-towering tenement, making conversation with someone who was leaning out a window, singing softly to the sky while laying out candles on a contraption of some sort that jutted out past the windowsill. It was a shrine to the Three Gods of Creation, and the stranger, though startled by Zidanya’s appearance, was kind enough to lay out their identities for a traveling Ranger who had clearly been out in the woods for too long.

Rish, God of the air; Shen, God of water; Lishi, God of earth. They all had their domains, which Zidanya covers for us and which seem vaguely in line with what one might expect, enough so that I don’t really remember them; the important part is that they’re all bullshit. Zidanya and Amber are emphatic about that; while we are, currently, in a Temple where the Gods don’t tread and can’t see within, their power still flows to their worshippers - Amber is proof positive of that, channeling Kazir every time she uses Healing Touch - and their existence is still noticeable to their faithful. Rish, Shen, and Lishi, by contrast, are nothing. The power in the woman’s prayers, incanted over the candles and cast into the air, goes nowhere.

We pause for that, and they bring me up to speed on a few things that they hadn’t even thought about my needing to be informed of. Prayer is a ritual of intervention to them, or an exchange; you perform the steps of a prayer as a deal, in a way. I’ll grant you this cow because last week you saved me from a mudslide wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, though a cow would be a wildly profligate gift normally. I grant you this prayer and this tithe of mana, please keep me healthy is a totally anodyne daily ritual, both on a personal and a civic level; the standard tithe is a tenth-pool or an hour’s regeneration, whichever is smaller, to the divine patron of the city in return for a whole host of interventions.

Keep the water clean, the city might ask the God. Stop the food from spoiling. Grant wisdom to our leaders. Grant success to the merchants from our city who depart for their ventures. Safeguard the women in childbirth, bring swift healing without infection to the sick, aid with growth and vigor those who seek to grow strong. Amber and Zidanya reel them off one after another with ease, and I wave at them to stop, because I get it, and it makes sense; if Gods are real and Gods can intercede, intervene, why shouldn’t you ask them to? Why shouldn’t you pay them to? And not just one God; you might find it convenient to direct all of your prayers, all of your mana, to the one patron who’s taken your city under its wings, but you could also pray for healing to the God of healing, pray for prosperity to the God of same, beseech the God of fertility for a pregnancy to take hold or the fetus to present cephalic.

And even if you do the ritual wrong, even if the God in question rejects your prayer, your mana is still there. Your mana is still offered, and it’s free and clear. Even if the God in question doesn’t want it - and there’s a few who won’t take it up if you do it wrong, whether because they’re finicky or because it will weaken them in some way, Zidanya’s a little unclear and Amber isn’t sure - there’ll be something that wants it. A demon, worst case; another God who takes you under their wing, best case. So what did it mean that the mana just sort of dissipated?

No Gods, no demons, nothing of a nature sufficiently transcendent as to be able to reach out and collect that spoilt offering. So no Rish, no Shen, and no Lishi. They’re nothing; they don’t exist, nothing exists here, they don’t call it the Temple of Godsforsaken Wanderers for nothing.

That’s a familiar mood. The Gods of my people, and here I’m not talking about the Spirit but of the whole wide Fleet? Those Gods don’t exist, not in any form other than as a useful locus for community ritual. Some of us - some of them, now - say otherwise, but let’s be realistic here: that’s a load of horseshit and pharmacologically-altered dreams, and even on the Old Faith ships, on the most orthodox of them like the Spirit, actual believers are a minority.

We do still have continuity of practice. We’ve - they’ve had continuity of practice for something like four and a half or five thousand years, which is an amount of time that kind of boggles my mind. It’s almost but not quite the longest-known continuous religious practice. I don’t really know that much about the details, though, because it’s not my faith; I’m a believer in the Starless Void, which is to say I’m not a believer in anything other than entropy and the material world. You know: there is no soul, the continuity of the Self doesn’t persist after death, and the universe is one arc from Big Bang to the informational-death of the universe, where no usable energy exists anymore and the last gleam of light fades; that kind of Starless Void believer.

That’s the thing about the Old Faith. To them, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re a believer or not, if you swear by the Earth we left behind or by the churning cycle of the stars, by a God whether or not you think it exists or by nothing at all. Show up to services and hug your friends, that’s what’s important. Support the community, do an interval in the meal hall or creche every now and then, and keep the ‘ship flying.

As unperturbed as I am by Zidanya’s revelations, she and Amber seem … concerned. It explains, apparently, why Zidanya’s soul was taken up by the dungeon that is the Temple in such wholeness; ordinarily an imprint is made out of a tithe, this time not one given to a God but one that is the leavings of the soul after the God has taken the soul to … wherever it goes, and you can bet I’m curious about that, more than curious, but it’s not the time to ask about it. Zidanya’s soul was never touched, so she’s everything she ever was, memories and attitudes and skills and all; Skills, too, if she weren’t constrained down to my tier, and she’ll regain hers as I grow.

I guess we should try not to die here, we tell each other, smirking a little in something between gallows and ill humor.

We’re moving, anyway, moving almost before we realize that we’re feeling a little bit of that pressure just to leave the square. There isn’t the feeling of pointlessness and unimportance here, but there’s a feeling like we need to be elsewhere. That’s fine. Zidanya found us our next move, and we’re heading there now.

Three wagons - they look like they’re supposed to have horses, and just happen not to, like it’s perfectly normal for them to move without any external propulsion hitched to their stick-out-y bits - full of people in uniforms just showed up in front of a shop a few streets down, so it sounds like we’re about to find out a question that we couldn’t sufficiently answer earlier.

Is it just paranoia, or is someone actually out to undermine the Sky Kingdom?