City in the Sky by Glynn Stewart Page A

off the hull and scattering across the waves, and then the thump of water rushing together as the bottom of the keel lifted out of the water.
    “All right you slackers,” the bosun announced, “we're skyborne. Which means you lot can get to cleaning the decks and hull. I want this ship to shine when we reach port!”
    Erik slowly walked over to the edge of the ship and looked over it. The ship was now easily a hundred feet into the air, and still rapidly rising, leaving the water far beneath. It was both stunning and terrifying.
    “Impressive, isn't it?” Ikeras said from behind him. “I asked the crew not to warn you – I wanted to see your face the first time we went skyborne. Tells you a lot about a man, how he reacts to being a thousand feet in the air.”
    “It's incredible,” Erik said softly. “How is it done?”
    “The most complex piece of air magic anyone not a Melder is likely to see,” Ikeras replied. “If you wander down into the hull, there's a long room in the center containing the primary lift crystals. There's about six relay crystals positioned around the hull, and those three,” he pointed out the glowing crystals above their heads, “in the masts.”
    “How high can we go?” Erik asked.
    “Higher than you can breathe,” Ikeras replied dryly. “There's a few specialized ships with crystals to provide some kind of air supply and pressure, but they're few and far between, and, honestly, there isn't much use for them.” He shrugged. “The crystals only last so long until they need to be replaced. That's why we sailed most of the way.”
    “Why aren't we sailing now then?”
    Ikeras snorted. “How exactly do you think you enter a sky city without flying, son?” he answered with a grin.
    Erik had no answer.
     
     
     
    As the hours drew by, Erik watched the sky city of Newport slowly grow into visibility. The main portion of what he'd thought was a cloud turned out to be the massive floating island on which the Aeradi had built most of their city.
    Erik had no inclination to even try and guess the diameter of the island, but the city built on its back was substantial. Eerily tall crystal spires marked the center of the city, the only structures visible over the heavy, tower-studded, stone walls that encircled the edge of the island.
    Beneath the crystal- and stone-adorned floating island, three immense pillars of crystal and stone descended in majestically imposing grace to a second city below. Each of the pillars had to be at least a thousand feet across, and as they drew closer, Erik saw the lights of some sort of buildings inside the pillars.
    The second city, the lower one, was built on massive floating wooden platforms. Where the structures above were made of stone and crystal, and surrounded by heavy walls to boot, these were built mostly of wood, with only a handful of crystal and almost no stone or brick structures.
    The sun was already dimming towards sunset, and in the fading light, the city glowed in its own lights. Erik could see almost all of the lower city, and even there streetlights marked broad avenues where the wood appeared to be covered by some stone-like material. The higher city was mostly hidden by its walls, but even before the skyship rose high enough to see over them, Erik could see a corona of glowing lights glittering over the city and tracing paths up the sides of the crystal spires.
    The Blue Ascendance swept above and around the city, to where Erik saw a huge set of docks, glittering in crystal and sky steel, extending out nearly a mile from the western edge of the island.
    The ship slowly flew in towards the docks, and the crew turned out on deck once more, coiling ropes and preparing to anchor the ship. As they approached an empty dock, the Blue Ascendance slowed even more and gently slid up between the doubled pier of the Aeradi-style dock. The crew immediately got to work, slinging ropes out around heavy pylons and securing the ship as strongly as