A ring of cold fire
A round tear in the dark above the sky, 350 kilometres across and 4,000 kilometres up, fixed over the centre of the lit world.
From beneath, it is a black disc ringed with white-gold fire, five degrees wide, the size of ten full moons. Through its centre, faintly, there are stars.
The fire is cold. It is a glow you cannot look at, like the sun through thin cloud, and it has never warmed anyone. The warmth and the daylight come from the sky it lights, from everywhere above at once, which is why almost nothing here casts a shadow. The sky is the lamp. The ring is the pilot light.
Through the Measurers' smoked glass the ring is two things: a broad band of fire, and at its very lip a hair-fine white thread, the one thing in the sky nobody can look at, and the only fire in the world hot enough to melt steel.
| Where you live | The Hole stands |
|---|---|
| The Crown, beneath it | 90°, overhead |
| 1,000 km out | 76° |
| 5,000 km out | 39° |
| 20,000 km out | 11° |
| The last lit line | 7° |
Rivers in the ceiling
The Hole does two things, and only two. It lights the sky, and it makes the roads.
Its power runs down into the charged top of the air the way an aurora is fed, and spreads outward like water from a spring: spokes radiating from the Hole and ring-roads circling it. Where the current runs thickest it makes rivers in the ceiling, the ley lines. By night they show gold against a teal sky, and night is when you can see the roads.
The whales' iron bones feel the field beneath a river the way a compass needle does, and lean on it to hold a course. The lit world calls the field the Sky's Hold. That is a name, not an explanation.
A disc of light, and the dark
The light fades with distance from the Hole, and where it ends the world ends for everyone who lives in it. The lit disc is about 64,000 kilometres across: the whole mapped world. Beyond the last lit line are the Dark Lands, which are the rest of creation. There is no elsewhere in the light.
To the people who live in it, it is a flat, endless world with a wound of fire over the middle.
A dozen great ranges rise 65 to 70 kilometres out of the deep air, seven or eight times the height of the old world's highest mountain, standing on the Floor like objects on a table. The Crown is the summits nearest the centre. A port is wherever a road passes close to a range.
There is one cloud layer in the world, the storm belt, and it wraps every range like a collar. Nobody above it has ever felt rain.
A sky 170 kilometres deep
Air piles up like sand and thickens with depth, the way the sea does. Everything that lives fits in the bottom seventy kilometres, one people to a rung. Choose a rung.
The Drift
The middle sky, where the air is easiest. The herd hangs here in layers, the biggest and oldest whales highest and the calves lowest, and a nation of a million people lives on their backs. Mornings are wet with night mist and the day dries them.
- Who
- The Flotilla, on the backs of the herd
- Ceiling
- Where an old whale's gas cells are full; above it she must spill gas she can't get back
- Floor
- Hunger: below the storm belt there is no glow to graze
The Hole breathes
Nothing in the sky moves, so nothing marks a year. The light swells and fades on two clocks, and people count their lives by the slower one.
The short breath: a day
Dawn is fast, a few hours from the night's glow to full white-gold, with no slow sunrise. The brightest hour comes soon after, and that is noon, when the Crown forges. Then the light drains through a long gold afternoon and a teal evening into an indigo night that is a third of the whole.
Night is never black. It is a deep twilight: you walk a deck without a lamp and see every lamp for kilometres. Nobody lives by a day that long. The Flotilla say a day has three sleeps; the Zenith sleep the long dim and work the bright, and call themselves sleepless.
The long breath: a dimming
About every ten years the sky exhales. Seven or eight bright years, then two or three dim ones: the sky half as bright, the ring thinner and reddened at its edge, the roads fainter, the whales hungry, and the edges of the lit world dark. Every dimming the gods come home to the middle sky, and every brightening they leave.
A person's age is counted in dimmings. A full life sees eight, and dimmings are counted in Counts of eight. No dimming in the Mural has lasted past 400 days. The Eighth began on schedule. It has not ended.
Things this world does not do
- The Hole
- It does not move, rise or set.
- Orbit
- Nothing orbits, and nothing could.
- Night
- It is never black.
- Whales
- They never fly. They swim.
- Boats
- There are none in the sky.
- Engines
- Nobody has an engine or a gun, and nobody can make one.
- Steel
- It is never secret. It is only impossible to melt anywhere but the Crown.
- Rain
- Nobody above the storm has ever felt it.
- Metal
- The sky does nothing to a made thing. Metal rusts here the way metal rusts anywhere.