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at a time without ever seeing a single snail slither through. The empty rooms beneath his cell were thick with them, but those rooms were permanently dark and there wasn’t a brand or taper bright enough to make him want to venture far inside them. Not that those snails down there ever seemed to move either. Snails, being snails, only moved when no one was watching them.
    A sudden roar rattled the windowpanes. An explosion? Dill wheeled, confused, expecting to see the walls topple, and he almost knocked over the snail-bucket. But everything remained solid. The noise outside died away.
    The door to his balcony had jammed shut, as though its arched frame had shifted during the night, but he finally got it open with a kick and squeezed his wings through.
    Crisp morning air: the flagstones chilled his bare feet; the parapet felt cool when he leaned against it. Deepgate spread below, bright in the sunshine. Had a chain snapped somewhere, some part of the city collapsed into the abyss? He leaned out further to get a better view.
    Heavy with balconies, the townhouses of Bridgeview slumped at odd angles around their dappled courtyards, walled gardens, and fountains that glittered like smashed glass. Beyond that, neatly pitched roofs crowded the chains in Lilley and Ivygarths. Further out, smoke rose from a thousand chimneys in the Warrens. And, out on the fringes, the League of Rope clumped around the chain anchors, under the Deadsands, like driftwood on the shores of a lake. There was no sign of disaster.
    Another deep roar. Rooks burst past his tower with cries of alarm. Dill raced around his balcony to investigate.
    Fat black lettering on the tail-fin proclaimed the warship to be the
Adraki
. She was turning slowly, edging closer to the temple. Propellers twice the size of a man thrummed on either side of the brass-etched gondola suspended beneath the envelope. Four aeronauts in white uniforms stood on the aft deck, peering over the sterncastle rail between the aether-lights and docking harpoons. The signalman spotted him and waved his flag in a clipped semaphore message that Dill doubted was civil.
    Dill gave a hesitant wave back. He’d never seen one of these ships so close. Its silver envelope filled half the sky; and it was getting closer, descending past him to where a dock jutted out from the temple’s sheer walls. In his lifetime, no airship had used that mooring. Not even churchships were allowed this close, and this, the
Adraki,
was a warship, her deck-cages packed with drums of lime-gas and incendiaries. Clearly someone important was arriving. Abruptly Dill’s nerves were on edge and his eyes itching all the more.
    White as a coward’s flag,
as the captain of the temple guard would have said. At least the aeronauts were too distant to see his fright. He closed his eyes and thought about Callis’s sword,
his
sword, but felt the white in his irises now edge towards purple. He shook his head and gripped the parapet tightly until their colour faded to a comfortable, respectable grey.
    “Leaders,” cried an aeronaut, tossing down a first coil of rope. Evidently, they were not prepared to use the harpoons this close to so much ancient stonework and glass. A dockhand snatched up the rope, fed it through a pulley on the docking gantries, and ran with it over to a winch. More ropes followed, and men scrambled after them.
    A call came up from the dock. “Leaders fixed. Ready to winch.”
    “Bring her in.”
    Ropes stretched and twanged as dockhands began to wind cables down from spools mounted on the airship deck. The warship’s engines roared again. It trembled, eased closer to the dock.
    “Hey, archon,” the signalman shouted, “want a race?”
    The other aeronauts laughed. “Leave the poor bugger alone,” one of them said. “Not his fault.”
    “I was only asking.”
    Dill lowered his head so that they couldn’t see his eyes become pink, then he followed his own wet footprints back the way he had come. The