The clouds thickened all around Saia as she ascended toward the sky. The mist that was condensing on the surface of her statue was frozen in place by the dozens of winds that hit the ladder from every direction, making it swing. She realized she couldn’t feel the cold, even with the light clothes she was wearing, but her sea snakes could. She sent a bit of her viss their way, moving it in the pattern that produced heat.

The grayness all around her was completely empty, so she deactivated her vision and focused on her domain instead. The first thing she noticed was that it had shrunk considerably: if she didn’t put effort into expanding it, it only included her body and a span in every direction, to the point she would need to touch something to read its viss. If she willed it to expand beyond those limitations, a small quantity of viss left her body, becoming increasingly bigger the larger her domain was. She decided to keep it small, since there was something else preying on her energies.

Her connection to the mountain hadn’t severed nor faded: it was draining her viss away at a speed she hadn’t experienced even while confronting Rabam. She tried to hold it back, remembering Zeles’s words: sending viss to the mountain was instinctual like breathing. So she could resist, at least in theory, by metaphorically holding her breath.

It worked for an instant, stopping the drainage of viss. Then, she felt pressure building up from inside the sphere, as if all of the energies it contained were trying to escape at once, as if it was about to explode. Her dark vision filled with fragments of light.

The connection to the mountain returned, not because she had wanted to, but because she wasn’t strong enough to avoid it.

She felt something graze the edge of her domain and reactivated her senses: it was a gray surface of shining metal, curved and hollow. It disappeared inside the clouds while she was hoisted higher. Another one descended from above, or rather, she ascended to meet it. She expanded her domain just enough to understand what it was: part of a tunnel, the diameter taller than her, traversed by a perpetual trembling even if it was empty on the inside.

She retreated. There were more pieces of tunnels swimming in the clouds, but she ignored them; the sky above her was becoming darker with an enormous shadow. She couldn't see what was casting it, because the curtain of clouds was still thick enough to hide what waited behind it. She hugged the ladder with both arms, bracing herself for the impact.

She pierced the cover of clouds and found herself in a vertical tunnel of rock. It was completely dark, except for a dot of light at the far end, small like a star. The rock was perfectly levigated, shining with small minerals but otherwise unremarkable.

Saia looked up at the slowly approaching light. It took an hour for it to get to the size of a melon. At that point, she could get a glimpse of a wooden roof and see the metallic structure that was attached to it. It was pulling the ladder up with a constant rumbling.

A shadow shaped like a human head appeared on top of the hole, making her viss buzz so violently she could feel it escaping onto the metal bar she was holding. The head retreated immediately, then a shout followed in a language she didn't know. She wanted to scout ahead by expanding her domain, but she couldn’t reach that far without expending too much energy.

She set out to wait, her focus on both ends of the tunnels. Nothing happened except for the constant rumbling of the mechanism, until finally the hole was two armlengths above her head. She still couldn’t see, but sounds reached her perfectly: whispers in the unknown language, the mechanism slowing down, the walls of wood and metal that encased the room creaking softly.

As soon as the top of her head was over the border, she could finally look around, taking the whole room in at once.

The hole was on a round wooden platform at the bottom of the room. A circular staircase ran along the border, leading to a second, bigger platform. Desks were set on top of it at regular intervals: some were empty, some occupied by stacks of documents pressed down by stones or carved statuettes.

There was a final ring of stairs that led to the third and narrower platform. Everything was surmounted by a dome divided into four parts, with the mechanism at its center. The whole structure was supported by arching beams of metal.

There were people on all three levels. The most striking feature was their completely gray skin, of all the possible shades between the deep gray of the clouds during a storm to a faint pearly gray. They were just as varied as the humans of the ten villages in that, and even when taking into account their faces she could see all kinds of noses, mouths and eye shapes, without a pattern of common characteristics. The hair formed loose curls, rarely straight or tightly curled as her own. Most of them kept it tied into a bun at the top of the head, only two or three people had cut it short. The color was usually a shade of gray darker than the skin, but when hit by the light it shone with azure, blue, pink or orange hues. Of the ten people who surrounded her, only one had completely white hair despite looking fairly young, while other two had midnight black hair, which made their respectively blue and orange hues even more striking. Their irises were all onyx black, pointed at her like the weapons they were holding.

She focused on them to evaluate the risk they could actually pose: they were long metal sticks with three points, the middle one considerably longer than the other two, flattened to form two blades on either side and a sharp point. The two smaller ones had a mechanism at the base that, she guessed, could eject them. Without knowing how fast they were, she couldn’t gauge whether she could stop them in time if they were fired at her glass heart. She considered messing with the mechanisms, but a quick exploration revealed they were too complicated and she risked obtaining the opposite effect.

The cloud people only stared at her. She wanted to say something, but she didn’t want to startle them into firing their weapons. She examined the rest of the room, instead. On the second platform there were only three people, two standing and one sitting on a chair with two wide wheels and a handle on the back. The third platform was once again filled with at least twenty people, holding a different kind of weapon that looked like a smaller version of the ballistae in the monks’ village. They all contained one dart, aimed at her, but each person carried more of them in a tubular bag behind their backs.

The ladder stopped moving once she had completely emerged from the tunnel. One of the people around her lowered their weapon and made two steps back, toward a thick wooden board on the floor. They kicked it forward until it covered the hole partially, leaving the rest of the ladder to hang down to the side.

“You can come down,” someone said.

Saia was startled by the sound and chilled by the fact she recognized the words. She looked at the three people on the middle platform: the one to the right raised their hand a bit to signal they'd been the one speaking.

Saia put a foot down onto the board to test whether that makeshift bridge could hold her weight. She left the ladder, the people around her stepping back at the same time. Someone lowered a lever in the wall of the third platform, and the mechanism on the ceiling started moving again. The ladder retreated completely inside of it.

“Come forward,” the person who had spoken first said. “Don't mind them, they're only here to prevent you from hurting us.”

Saia made a hesitant step toward the stairs. The guards moved with her without breaking the circle. She went on, amazed at how they didn't even stumble as they climbed the steps backwards. Then she realized a fall might mean firing a weapon by mistake and slowed down.

She stopped at the top of the stairs, two armlengths away from the three people waiting there. Two guards stood between her and them, but she could still admire their clothes. They weren't impressive by themselves, brown or black or beige tunics held in place by a tall leather belt. But the front was all decorated with feathers, in parallel lines of one to three, each of them of one or more alternating colors. The guards were wearing them too, black feathers on brown cloth. And a lot of them seemed to be wearing a necklace made of small plumes.

No, she realized: the feathers weren't placed around their necks, they were part of them. At least half of the people in the room had them, white, brown or a mix of the two. She wondered whether they were animal people or something else entirely.

“I’m Serit,” the person to the right said. “Welcome to Iriméze.”

Their dark hair shone of steel blue when they turned to address the people at their side.

“She’s representative Héshe,” they nodded to the one on the chair. “And she’s representative Enanit.”

This time, the nod was a bit stiffer.

The first representative, whatever the word meant for these people, raised a cupped hand with the palm toward the ceiling.

“Welcome. We'll have a chance to acquaintance ourselves soon, I think.”

She looked a bit older than the person at her left, but a lot younger than the second representative. Her hair was free on the shoulders, a rare sight inside the room, and it shone of blue like the line of feathers on her chest.

The second representative just looked at her. She kept herself half-hidden behind a guard, even if she didn't look scared as much as angry. Differently from everyone else in the room, the plumes sticking out from the base of her neck were a dark, earthy red.

She said a sentence in the language they were all speaking before Saia's arrival. It seemed directed at Serit, but they didn't answer, even if any trace of joviality disappeared from their face.

“Obviously,” they started, looking at Saia, “if you hurt or damage anything, we'll just deactivate you. Even if you should have realized by now that it requires a lot of énu, or as you call it, viss, to do anything up here.”

Their eyes glinted with amusement, and Saia realized they knew what was happening to her.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“We'll need your collaboration,” Serit continued a bit too quickly, as if they were anxious to leave that particular topic behind. “But first, allow me to show you your new home.”

They turned toward the representatives, raised both cupped hand, then started ascending the stairs toward one of the five doors of the room, all of them on the third platform. Two guards followed them, half-turned toward Saia, while two more positioned themselves right behind her. The rest crowded around the representatives.

Two of the guards on the top platform pulled a second lever. The bottom floor of the room vibrated as two half-moons of iron started closing the hole, jutting out straight from the pavement. They were blocking Saia’s only way out. Only her shard kept her there, so she examined each person in the room to find who had taken it, but it wasn't anywhere. After all, if they knew how much it cost her to expand her domain and what its limits were, it made sense for them to have brought the shard as far away as possible. They certainly had the time to hide it well.

She followed Serit out in the low light of the evening, not knowing what to expect but with the hollow certainty that it wouldn’t be the mountain, nor the sea.

The first thing she noticed was the buildings, identical to the ones she’d seen in the vision destined to Rabam: they were built on a plain of barren earth, fairly distant from each other and made of light wood, the kind that was easy to carry but also easy to break. Thick carpets in various colors hung from the walls.

“We can't afford too much weight,” Serit commented. “Our city might very well collapse if we start building with bricks or stone or tough wood like humans do.”

Saia focused on the horizon. She stared in disbelief, wondering how she could ever describe that view to Aili and her family, once she was back. The city was vaguely similar to the mountain, if someone had eradicated it from the ground, hollowed it out, flattened its top, turned it upside down and put the buildings inside as if it was just a big bowl of earth. Except the walls of the bowl weren’t curved and levigated, but cut off at regular intervals, forming five huge rings similar to the steps of a giant staircase, or the terraces that some farmers dug at the base of the mountain to house their fields.

Each step was several towerlengths high and the surface at the top had enough space for hundreds of houses, all pressed together to the point she could believe they were all the same building. Every terrace was connected to the next by smaller staircases, still huge by human standards but utterly unimpressive compared to the walls of yellowish earth that surrounded them. Each terrace had three staircases leading to the next level, placed at regular distances from each other. The people climbing them were little lines of ants.

She focused her gaze up. The sky was a circle at the top of everything, interrupted by moving branches full of leaves. The vegetation was sparse at the bottom, where she was standing, and became thicker the closest it grew to the top, up to the fifth and last level, mostly empty of buildings as far as she could tell, but covered by a ring of trees that looked just like a forest.

Looking at the walls of earth and rock, she understood why the buildings needed to be so light.

“How is this city flying?” she asked.

Since she couldn't talk in Serit's ear without wasting energy to expand her domain, she made the air near her mouth vibrate as if she was actually talking. She still didn't move her lips, preserving her viss.

They turned, openly smiling.

“I’m glad you're curious about us. Problem is, I can't tell you anything about it until I know I can trust you. But I'll be happy to answer other questions.”

“Why am I here? What do you want from me?”

“All in due time, I’ll explain when we arrive.”

Saia’s viss buzzed with frustration.

“What is a representative?” she asked.

This time, Serit made a short laugh.

“You really don't know anything about us! It's incredible how isolated your people are.” They returned more or less serious, even if there was still a twinkle of amusement in their eyes. “They're our governors. They take all of the major decisions. A bit like the gods in your villages, but without the powers.”

Saia thought they seemed more similar to the abbot, but didn't say it out loud.

They had reached the nearest staircase that led to the top of the first terrace. Even if the mountain was higher, Saia would have preferred climbing it to the top than facing that neverending pile of steps.

“There are actually three representatives,” Serit continued, stepping onto the staircase as if the ascent was little more than routine to them. “But one is away right now.”

Saia started climbing behind them, the guards once again walking backwards rather than letting her out of range. She felt their fear every time they stepped too close.

There weren't many people on the staircase, and they all stared at Saia when they saw her approach from the opposite direction or walk past them.

“You don't have many humans here,” she commented.

“No, and they mostly live on the fourth level.” Serit pointed at it, the last terrace before the one with the forest. “And a lot of them aren't citizens, so they can't come down. Exception made for merchants, but they mostly sojourn at the bottom.”

“Lucky them,” Saia said bitterly.

“Sorry. We could have taken the elevators, but the guards might attract too much attention.”

“Elevator?”

“It's a bit like being pulled up like you were, but you're standing in a room instead of holding a ladder.”

Serit had started breathing heavily, so Saia refrained from asking more questions.

It took twenty more minutes of walking at a brisk pace to get to the top. The stairs stopped at the first terrace, and Saia could see another staircase in the distance that led from the first to the second level.

The houses around her were identical to the ones at the bottom, at most two floors high and with carpets hanging on the outside of their walls, but clustering to the point the alleys only allowed for two people to walk side by side. The only large streets she could see were the one running along the border of the terrace and the one immediately under the wall of the second level. The distance between them seemed to be of at most two towerlengths, which was still a lot but somewhat less than she'd expected.

“There are no winds here,” Serit said, still panting a bit. They chuckled, as if they'd said a particularly clever joke. “The whole structure was built to keep the warmth in and not allow dangerous gusts to knock us off the stairs or blow dust on our carpets.”

They walked to the left, out of the square space in front of the staircase and into an alley. Two guards stepped behind them, while the other two followed Saia.

“It's impossible to get lost, here,” Serit said. “As long as you know at which level is the place you're looking for, you just need to walk in one direction and you'll eventually find it.”

They kept walking for a bit, meeting considerably more people than the ones on the staircase. Some of them were looking out of the windows, talking with the neighbors or just staring in the distance. Or at Saia, as soon as they spotted her.

They reached a square, a sudden open space amid the cluster of houses. She had a glimpse of rough wooden tables in front of what looked like a tavern, the sign written in a vertical script and some patrons eating and laughing. Serit plunged again into the web of alleys before she could see more.

The streets were illuminated despite the sky getting darker by the hour. The lanterns fastened to the walls over the passersby’s heads spread a soft golden light. At first, Saia had thought their half-domes of glass contained a flame of some kind, but looking closely it was a luminous fog with a brighter center. It shifted and expanded slowly behind the glass, eerily similar to the viss moving inside Saia’s own sphere. She hoped they hadn't pulled her up there just to use her as a fancy streetlight.

The alley gradually became larger, then divided in two, then joined again further ahead, after a cluster of houses that was thus separated from the rest. As they approached, Saia realized that it was all part of one building: the carpets hanging from the walls had the same three colors, blue, gray and green, and the patterns were based on the intersection of multiple triangles.

“One of the first level's warehouses,” Serit explained. “Governative building. It's not used as much these days, so Izha, the third representative, allowed me to set up a laboratory on the first floor.”

The door was positioned just in front of the spot where the alley forked. Serit opened it with a key taken from a barely visible pocket. They gestured for Saia to enter, then said something to the guards in their language.

She pushed the door open. The inside was dark, with barrels and crates piled up in pyramids along the walls. The only light entered from a line of narrow windows just under the ceiling. Escaping from there didn’t look difficult, if their plan was to close her inside.

Serit stepped in shortly after and locked the door behind them.

“The guards?” Saia asked.

“They’ll return to their tasks. You won't meet them again, unless you show up alone at the bottom of the city or get too close to the representatives for some reason.”

“I could kill you,” she said, more to test the waters than for any willingness to hurt them.

“Thank you for reminding me that I still have to tell you a couple of things,” Serit said, unfazed. “But let's find a table, first.”

They crossed the room toward a square opening in the opposite wall, big enough to let in a whole cart of crates. The room behind it was smaller than the warehouse, with a considerably lower ceiling. There were two double doors that led to the outside, closed by a board of wood, then a large desk covered with dust and a spiral staircase behind it.

There was a lantern on the desk, half-spherical like the ones outside, except for the handle at the top and the wooden pedestal attached to the bottom. Serit picked it up and started climbing the stairs to the second floor. Saia followed them, the wood creaking under her steps.

Serit unlocked the door at the top. On the other side, there was a large room that reminded Saia of the first floor of Lausune's post office, except it was less crowded with books and notes and the right side was mostly occupied by a kitchen. The table on the left was empty, except for four bottles at the center, each in a slightly different size. The vertical labels were all different, despite them containing the same transparent liquid.

Serit set the lantern down onto the table, then took the bottles and placed them on a counter on the other side of the room.

“Sit wherever you feel comfortable,” they said, trafficking with something inside a cupboard.

Saia moved a chair back and sat down. She looked out of the large window on the wall at her left: beyond the roof of the house on the other side of the alley, she could see the lights shining in a circle throughout all of the whole first level, the luminous lines of the stairs connecting it to the terrace above and to the bottom of the city.

“Sorry, I needed to eat,” Serit said, chewing on something while they sat in front of her. “Now, on the question of why killing me is not in your best interests: I'm doing you a favor. Relatively speaking.”

“You took me away from my family, my friends and my house,” she replied.

“Relatively speaking,” they repeated. “The only reason why you're still awake is that I've spent the last month convincing the representatives that it was the right call. The original plan was to get an asleep deity, use it until the energy had ended, then discard it. We don't need you, but your énu, sorry, viss. If you misbehave in any significant way, and killing me would be a considerable misbehaviour, you'll be shut down until the day you die.”

Saia leaned back and crossed her arms on her chest.

“Thank you, then,” she spat. “I imagine this favor came out of pure generosity.”

“No, it didn't. Officially, you'll stay awake to provide us with information about mount Ohat, for reasons you don't need to know.”

“Mount Ohat?”

“Your people call it 'the mountain'. Which makes sense, considering it's the only one you know.”

There are more mountains? The question shot through Saia's mind, startling her viss into buzzing. She was very glad her face didn't move without her willing it.

“In reality,” Serit continued, “You'll be protecting me. The research I’ll be doing on you is important to the point that some of my enemies could think about stealing you away and discreetly disposing of me. I trust your ability to stop them if they ever get bold enough to try.”

“Who are your enemies?”

Serit let out a bitter laugh.

“I wish I could give you a list, but I'm not very liked. Look out for other people of science like me and representative Enanit.”

“She didn't like me.”

“She doesn't, I agree. But you're making a mistake if you assume Héshe does. She's an opportunist, not siding with any of the older representatives until she's sure about which will be the winning opinion, or the one that will consolidate her position the most. See, we vote our representatives every five years and there will be another election next year.”

She recalled the monks' voting system to choose the candidates for the trials and nodded.

“In addition to this, if you’ll collaborate with me as much as you can, I’ll be able to fix your problem. A constant drainage of viss is just a waste, after all.”

“I thought it was your fault.”

Serit looked out of the window.

“In a sense, it is. You're still sending your energies to mount Ohat, even if your viss can't reach it anymore. I guess your monks know how to prevent you deities from leaving.”

“How much time does it take to fix it?”

“If we’re lucky, not much, but your situation will get worse before it gets better. Iriméze is always moving.”

Saia tried to calm down her buzzing viss.

“You need my energies,” she said. “For what?”

“To solve the most fundamental problem of us shilvé. Or ‘cloud people’, as you call us.”

“Which is?”

Serit stared at her for an instant, clearly asking themselves whether she was joking. Then, they threw their head back and laughed.

“You really don't know anything about us. Well, tomorrow you’ll see. It's quite the show, if you don’t know what to expect.”