Beneath the Same Sky

Morning reached Accalon by degrees. On one coast, harbour crews lowered lamps while fishing boats returned through a tide gate older than the language painted above it. Far inland, families opened the channels between their fields. Beyond another ocean, cities were lighting their streets for the night. Trillions of people lived beneath that turning sky. Few travelled far enough to hear their own country called distant.

They inherited a world crowded with the work of the dead. Roads bent around ruins whose builders had quarrelled over other borders. New districts rose upon old foundations. A river might pass through three kingdoms and bear a different name in each, although the barges carried the same grain downstream. There were people still working who remembered laying the first stones of buildings their grandchildren called ancient. Many Accalonians lived beyond a hundred and forty years; a sound bridge might keep its engineer beside it through several generations of repairs. Crowns outlasted the treaties made to restrain them. A grievance could return to court with the person who had first brought it.

Children grew quickly enough. They learned the difference between the adults who remembered and the adults who would let them finish a sentence. Beneath breath and muscle, every living body carried the current. A labourer found a little of it beneath a slipping load. Soldiers spent years learning to reach it without exhausting themselves. In Feenix, a few trained hands could kindle an edge along embersteel; elsewhere, shield ranks drew upon it to hold their footing when a charge struck home. It had never kept a granary full by itself.

Across the connected kingdoms of one continent, the summer’s worries travelled on familiar roads. Caldrin officers inspected the mountain crossings. Sorethi barges carried grain north. In Valanor, observers climbed above the copper roofs to measure lights that had returned to their appointed places since long before the oldest surviving records.

People watched the sky for rain, seasons and the hours remaining before a journey. Some watched for gods. Whatever they believed waited above them, the dangers for which they built walls came from the ground: a river in flood, a failed harvest, an army at the next crossing.

Asehria had built against all three.

Its capital spread along canals and fortified roads, swallowing old towns without quite erasing their names. From the western hills, the palace towers rose white above the haze of cooking fires. The barges approaching its districts seemed to move without interruption. Behind the gates, market bells sounded through the afternoon.

Inside the palace, summer light lay across a nursery floor. The room had been prepared eight years earlier. Its shutters were opened every morning. An attendant aired the blankets, dusted the carved bed and closed the door again.

Two floors below, a clerk carried the day’s civil petitions into the council chamber. At the top lay a proposal for the removal of twelve thousand people from the southern frontier.

It occupied three lines.