A Web of Air Read Online Free Page A

She did not want to have to tell them that she came from London, and then go again through all the weary stories about the new Lord Mayor and his strange plans to set the city moving. She did not want to hear people tell her that she had the most remarkable eyes and bone structure, and to have to explain that her mother was a Scriven mutant.
    The worst thing about the parties were the young men, who would watch her across the crowd and then come sidling up to ask her if she wanted to dance with them, or go out for a walk, or a meal. She was getting tired of explaining that she was an Engineer and had no interest in their foolish mating rituals.
    That night she waited until the moon was well past its zenith before she called Ruan and Fern away and took them, complaining, to their bunks. All the way to the tiny cabin which they shared they kept telling her that they were not tired, no, not the least bit tired at all, and might they not stay up for just five minutes more? But they could barely fit the words into the spaces between their yawns, and their eyelids were already drooping while they brushed their teeth. Still protesting, they scrambled into their narrow bunks. Ruan curled up on his side, Fern snuggled down with Noodle Poodle, and within a few minutes they were both asleep, quite untroubled by the din of voices and a skreeling fiddle which Fever knew she could not hope to sleep through.
    She went softly out of the children’s cabin and slid the door shut. She felt no qualms about leaving them alone. They were theatre children, and the whole company was their family. If they woke and needed anything while she was gone they could go to Mistress Persimmon, or Lillibet, or Dymphna, or Alisoun Froy. Meanwhile, what Fever needed was fresh air, and silence.
    She went into her own cabin to fetch her coat; the white Engineer’s coat which Alisoun Froy, the Lyceum’s costumier, had made to replace the mud-stained, bloodstained, ripped and sodden red one Fever had been wearing two years before when she first came aboard. Then she climbed out of the barge and set off into the streets behind the harbour, climbing steadily up long stairs and steep, cobbled alleyways. It was never really very dark, not at this time of year, in these latitudes. The stars were out, but beyond the harbour mouth the western sky was cobalt and indigo, the sea a milky blue. Fever did not mind darkness anyway. She had better night vision than most people. To her, this was a good time for sightseeing.
    The city of Mayda was bowl-shaped, built on the inside of a gigantic impact crater which rose from shallow water a few miles off the bleak coast of World’s End. Fever had had plenty of opportunity to look at the outside of it as the Lyceum and the other barges came down the coast road and crossed the causeway, but once they had passed through the fortified cleft in its eastern wall and entered the city itself she had been too busy preparing for the show to look around, and had only a confused impression of rows and rows of houses stretching up all around her towards the ragged crags that crowned the crater. Now, as she climbed alone through its steep streets, she kept stopping to look back at the fresh views of the city that revealed themselves at each level.
    From a few levels up she could see that the harbour which the barges had parked beside filled most of the crater floor. Fishing boats and pleasure yachts clustered thickly in the inner part, while big, ocean-going galleys and caravels were moored in a deep-water basin near the harbour mouth, which was a natural cleft in the crater’s western wall. The buildings that lined the harbourside were old and shabby and crammed close together; warehouses, chandlers’ stores, the pinched homes of the Maydan poor. Higher up the crater walls the buildings were bigger; spaced well apart in their steep gardens. Bridges spanned the goyles and gulleys of the cliffs, and some of these had houses built on them too,