heritage - one (new!)

"No one bothers to take the streets these days because they're so crowded."

Haraan almost let go of the cable. His friend hadn't delivered one of his funnier lines; he had delivered a weirder one, and Haraan couldn't make sense of his words and remain suspended fifty feet above the vulgar crowd at the same time. He alternated between pulling with his arms and bringing his legs in until he had shimmied to the other end of the cable. Once his feet were planted on that higher rooftop, he was safe to call back to his friend on the roof below.

"Jasti, where did you get that from?"

The addressed slung himself under the cable and grinned, his wild corn-muffin hair bobbing in the breeze. "A book," he replied.

"Which one?"

"Quotes to Mess with Haraan's Concentration While He's Striding, naturally."

The mast anchoring the cable to the second roof twanged in distress. It bowed under the load of Jasti's large frame, but, like countless others before it, would not give. Naturally, Haraan made sure his friend noticed the noise.

"How sad would it be if this mast broke off?" he asked, putting a hand on it. "Then I'd have no one to sing me Beliaggi's finest corruptions of the Corthian language."

"Hand off the mast, Haraan," Jasti growled back.

The fourteen-year-old indulged him. He thought, what were friends for, after all? You could do stupid things to anyone, but friends let you do those things without the threat of jail time. Mostly.

Having traversed Digio Prospect, Jasti dismounted next to his friend and signaled below to the third member of their group to climb up the cable. While she made her way up, he and Haraan squatted at the edge of the roof to examine the crowd below.

They saw the young and ambitious dressed in crisp wools and top hats. They saw aviators walk side by side with longshoremen and cobblers and deacons. They saw the wrinkled skepticals, impelled to the spectacle to herald its failure. Roving vendors hawked flapping and whizzing metallic baubles at the tops of their lungs. Fathers tucked wayward children at their sides in perpetual games of catch-and-escape.

"This is just as bad as when we had Helium Smack performing at the Ampha," said Jasti.

Haraan laughed. "Oh, Lady, that was fun. Watching that concert for free after finding the right roof to listen from?"

"Priceless."

"No better word for it!" Haraan's eye caught something down the road. He reached around his back for the bag strapped snugly over his shoulder and unbuckled one of its compartments. A hand-sized sketchbook and pencil slid out of the leather orifice.

"What is it?" Jasti asked.

Haraan pointed at the crowd in the direction they were coming from. A three-tiered fountain rose from the intersection of Digio and Meridia Prospects. On this fountain was a girl in a rippling dress who was leaning out to search something ahead of the throng.

"Real quick," Haraan muttered, putting pencil to paper. He scratched in a series of constructive outlines for the fountain and the girl (her hand level with her forehead as a visor). Next, quick indications of curves — the dress this way, same with her hair, the fountain curving away. He scrutinized her face for the shape of her nose, the vertex of her chin, hinting at form with shadows and blank space.

"Nice."

"I'm not done yet."

In her free hand, he crafted a small vortex of power, a projectile waiting for form and propulsion. He gave her a halo and two thin curves behind her shoulders, then extended their breadth with perpendicular, hooked lines — feathered wings. The fountain transformed into a beacon, light radiating from its apex.

Haraan offered up the sketch. "What do you think?"

Jasti paused in the manner of an appraiser, but wasn't convincing for a second. Failing this, he said, "Really, Haraan? To you, a cute girl is automatically an angel? Don't you think that's been done before? Come, man, be a little more original with your work."

"Fine," Haraan grunted, taking back his drawing. He scribbled in a couple more lines just as his other friend made it to the rooftop, and gave the new sketch to Jasti.

The cringe on his face suggested he was looking at that night's nightmare. "Haraan? Why does she have three faces?"

Haraan shrugged. "I thought you wanted originality."

"Give me that."

A hand snatched the sketchbook out of Jasti's grasp. Its owner studied the page for a second, then gave a snort of approval.

"She's gorgeous," she declared.

"Why thank you, Amina," said Haraan as she handed his sketchbook back. He put it back in its pocket and buckled it shut. "Come on. Let's keep going."

He stood up, then sighed. He had come this way with his friends several times before to watch the Aerial Guild stage exhibitions. Normal people took the Opal Line steamer along the North Arm to Aucus Battery Station, then hiked up zig-zagging Digio Prospect for two miles until they reached Airfield Caelius, seven hundred feet above sea level.

Striders cut straight up by crossing roofs.

From this roof alone, Talery Bay spread before Haraan like a colossal bowl: him on the slopes of the North Arm, the South Arm rising to his level across the water, and the eight Islands of concentrated civilization sitting at the bottom. To the east lay the Homestead Range and Karnadine's Access, the main artery linking the city to the rest of the mainland; to the west, the Ourobis Ocean waited, inscrutable and unassuming, and all the deadlier for it.

No wonder the Guild chose such an exposed place for their facilities, thought Haraan. For the other ten months of the year, when the feyfloods retreated to the ocean, the explorers had an incredible view of the city.

It was time to concentrate on getting to the Airfield. On the other side of the roof was a wall leading up to a second level, and the builders had been kind enough to anchor a brass pipe in the wall for climbing. Haraan checked his bag to make sure nothing would spill out. Satisfied, he took off at the pipe, preparing vertical momentum with large swings of his arms, and leaped.

Some pipes acted as condensers, and made for poor choices in handholds. This one, about as big around as Haraan's leg, was not — it did not scald his hands as he grabbed on. Just as before. He surmounted the pipe in seconds and waved his friends to come join him.

Still a quarter mile away and twenty stories above Haraan's head, the Guild's latest ornithopter waited to take off into the low afternoon sun.

***

The first manned flight on Sosara occurred on this autumn day in 917, a mere seventy-one years removed from the present day, when Geogo Hellers of Lents installed himself in a lightweight self-propelling frame and pedaled off a cliff. He was found a full mile distant from his starting point with his legs bent at unnatural angles, but he went on to make a full recovery.

The second man to fly, Aimes Caelius, a Corthenman, replicated Heller's feat a year later, minus the physical trauma.

The City Council of Talery Bay saw to it that Airfield Caelius could never be mistaken as second rate. Their first idea, passed by municipal referendum, was the construction of a spectator's embankment on the side of the airfield closest to the city. Those wishing to observe a Guild exhibition paid the price of admission to do so, or settled for a truncated view from behind the towering stands.

Airfield Caelius was the only one in the country that doubled as an entertainment venue.

With the Council's blessing, luxury hotels and boutiques sprung from the ground circling the Airfield, though none of them came close to matching its altitude. This district, the Golden Tenth, attracted the wealthy and the curious from all over Corth and its neighboring countries. The Golden Tenth's mission was simple: distract the tourists enough so the coin flowed from their hands to the city, and please them enough to warrant a return visit.

For his part, Haraan had his reservations against striding through the Golden Tenth.

"Let's take a left at Suzinnet," he said, gaining the next roof. "There's Iron prowling the roofs past here."

Amina came up behind him and arm-tackled him at shoulder height, using him as a post to hang off of while she looked ahead. She didn't have to do that on a flat surface, but attacking others was her way of showing she liked them. Haraan had learned to keep his balance around the likes of her.

"What's with them?" she demanded. "All we want to do is pass quickly through private property and watch something we're supposed to pay to see for free. Right?"

Haraan removed himself from her hold. "I don't think I could have put it any better," he said.

"This is a total steamkill," she joked. "Providence knows it's not like we'd get a better view from the west, what with the Guild shooting off that way and everything."

"Absolutely not."

"We'll have to settle. Come on, tons o'fun," said Amina, beckoning Jasti along.

Poor him, Haraan thought as he took off after his friends. Every time, it's a new nickname for him and his weight. This, he decided, was a definite upside to forgoing a girlfriend.

For several blocks, the gaps between the roofs along Suzinnet Road were manageable leaps, except for one: a small plot containing a local open-air market. This part always made Haraan's stomach do flips. The only way across the divide were three parallel pipes spaced far enough from each other to rule out a two-pipe crossing. Six inches was a generous estimate for the pipes' diameters, and though he had seen enough lumocines of burglars falling into awnings without injury, he doubted the stalls would support a hundred and twenty pounds if dropped from several stories up.

As Jasti hustled across, the pipe under his feet quaked a little more than before. Even though he'd choose a different pipe, Haraan couldn't expel those unpleasant flashes of anchors failing, and metal warping under his falling body.

Crossing quickly was always the best choice. It took him as long to get his first foot on the pipe as it took for him to traverse, stepstepstepstepstep. He lunged and tucked into a roll off the final step, felt the roof's reassuring solidity cradle his back, and tumbled upright in one motion.

Grinning, he dusted his clothes off and turned to admire his work -- and then he spotted pursuers.

He didn't know who any of the five were, personally, but no person took to the roofs if they weren't striders. As a community, striders respected each other and helped when they could -- luring Iron away from the younger ones to keep their records clean, or constructing rooftop ramps and bridges -- but it also had this fundamental creed.

Get to your destination.

With the exhibition drawing hundreds of spectators from outside Talery Bay, its residents surged to the North Arm in greater numbers. Striders were subject to this rush, too.

"Come on," Amina barked, grabbing his wrist. "Do you want to watch the aerobats or do you want to watch them take our spots?"

Of course! Haraan had gotten everyone to meet at Aucus Battery an hour before the exhibition started because there would be competition to nab the best views. He gave the other striders no more thoughts as he charged the next wall, grabbed Jasti's hand, and pulled himself to the top.

"Are we taking the windows?" he asked, referring to the thin ledges spanning the next building over. Even if they jmped across the gap between the buildings, crossing the ledges took precious upper body strength.

Jasti vetoed the idea as he pulled Amina up. "My fingers would kill me hanging on like that."

"All right, all right, boost me and Amina onto that roof, then we'll pull you up together."

The benefit of friends like Jasti, in addition to the threat his height and rugged longcoat provided (and looking scary worked for him when he needed to be), was that he was a ladder on feet. Cupping his hands together, he provided Haraan a step up, then launched him off.

He had enough momentum at the top to vault over the raised edge of the roof and land on his feet.

Seconds later, Amina was up there with him. They braced against the edge and reached down in unison as Jasti made his leap into space.

Haraan didn't even blink. His hand found Jasti's wrist and closed around it.

"We got you, we got you." It was a focusing mantra of sorts to Haraan -- though he cut Jasti's downward momentum,
gravity continued to pull against them.

Unfortunately for gravity, Haraan had Amina tugging with him. And he knew no fundamental force could hope to separate her from her beau.

Amina sucked in a fortifying breath, and expelled it in a blood-quickening "Raaaaah!"

A few seconds later, Haraan heard a woman screaming down below. He burst into laughter. Amina was never afraid of being loud, even if she drew attention to the six-foot-six hulk dangling from her arm fifty feet above the ground.

Now they had an audience. Though his artistic expertise covered mostly sketchbooks, and maybe a canvas now and then, Haraan knew enough about acting to know audiences deserved a show.

"Rrrrrr!" And just because he felt like it, he crossed his eyes as he pulled. Maybe someone down there would notice.

Inch by inch, Jasti rose through the air like a heavy spirit approaching a heaven with a two-person welcoming choir. Haraan wasn't completely pleased with the song selection, but he felt it hit the right notes of suspense for the crowd below. He hauled until Jasti's chest saddled the edge of the roof, and with a final tug, rolled him to safety.

When playing tug-of-war against gravity, a strider always won.

"Lady," huffed Haraan, helping his friend to his feet. "Listen to that applause." Intercepted by the corner of the building, the sound of clapping and whistles reached their ears like a coda.

"We'd better get moving, huh?"

"If we don't want Iron on our tails, yeah." This time, Haraan let the other two go on ahead. He peeked over his shoulder.

The five pursuers had disappeared.

***

"Auugh! We're too late!"

Amina's hands flew to her blue hair and squeezed. She, Haraan, and Jasti had arrived at the entrance to West Gharade Park and the spectators' blankets already began to overlap the others. What was once a verdant lawn was now a tapestry of bright colors smothered with people and picnic baskets.

Haraan's face set, and he strolled through the park's filigreed gates with grim determination. The park, a natural protrusion raised several stories above the rest of the North Arm on three sides, was about a mile long from tip to base and half that as wide. There had to be a spot somewhere in there no one had claimed yet.

Instead of continuing west toward the middle of the park, Haraan made his way toward the south cliff, the one opposite from Airfield Caelius. As he expected, the spectators had bunched heavily toward the north side. The ones closest to the edge were packed in so tightly they stretched the restraining chains running the perimeter of the park to their limits.

Hardly anyone would glance his way if he slipped under the south chains, dropping down to the ledge below. Most people didn't know about the secret tunnel connecting the north and south faces of the park.

When Haraan reached the granite slab hiding the tunnel's entrace, he said, "Jasti, a little help here?"

"Move." Jasti half-spoke to Haraan, and half to the rock. They both complied.

Back when the Guild first began hosting exhibitions, Talery Bay's striders had predicted the Guild's success and made preparations for the airfield they knew was coming. Working by lantern, they dug down through the guts of the earth, shoring up the tunnel with whatever happened to be nearby and unguarded: bits of scaffolding, stones, excess planks. Mercifully, a chain of electric lights drew power from a secret tap on the city's power lines, providing light down the tunnel's entire length.

Furthermore, it was quiet.

"You'd think you'd hear the people above walking around, or talking," Haraan whispered. "Or else you'd hear a steamer, or machinery. This is the quietest place in town."

"Why are you talking?" demanded Amina.

Haraan whirled on her, eyes bulging.

"Can it." Amina walked on, apparently undisturbed by self-contradiction.

Haraan ignored the barbs in her taunting. He knew she was more than happy to switch up her game if it meant getting into his head, and he wouldn't give her the satisfaction. He had had one time at the Archive when she snuck behind him and jumped on his back, all so he cried out and got in trouble with the librarian.

He still had to find a way to repay her for getting his pass revoked for a week.

The tunnel ended with the same way it had started: a concealed exit. Haraan heard muffled chatter on the other side. Of course there would be people down here, too. Hopefully, by the difficulty of finding and getting to such a secret place, there wouldn't be many. Jasti gripped the stone and heaved it aside.

Despite the lights in the tunnel, Haraan had to throw a hand across his eyes before the bright afternoon could claw them out. While his vision swirled with oiled darks and blinding flashes, he heard conversations going on all around him, and, far off, a swelling cheer.

"They're about to start!" a girl's voice said.

"Progit, I can't see anything from down here," some man said.

"Did anyone bring binoculars?" asked a third voice.

Haraan's sight adjusted, placing him within a small and crowded alcove in West Gharade Park's northern face. Most of the people here were older than him, but very few looked beyond thirty. Body fat struggled to make a tenth of their combined weight — in the world of striding, one couldn't waste energy transporting extra weight.

Haraan picked his way through the crowd as if he were stepping through a rose garden. offering apologies to the tag ends of leather overshirts and shoe tips. He expected the occasional glare that came his way for cutting in front, but there was a understanding among everyone present that no one would be cut off from their view.

Reaching the edge of the alcove, he consulted with his friends on which way to go.

"Left," said Amina, taking to the rocky slope before Haraan could voice agreement. He followed her as she climbed across; here and there on the north face were boulders doubling as benches, provided that one wanted to get to them. Most of the rocks sticking out from the grassy slope were already taken, but Haraan's eyes found the same unoccupied perch Amina was going after.

"Hey!"

The hail came from on high by a group of three, two girls, and one boy. Were they waving at him? Haraan recognized them from the Academy, but he hadn't spent much time with them.

"Oh, shbyk! Kaileen!" Amina's words broke through his confusion like a brick hurled at a flock of pigeons, complete with a fluttery feeling in his stomach. It wasn't an issue of height, or the effort it'd take to climb up there. He moved aside so Jasti went up behind his girlfriend.

"You should've told me you were coming here!" Kaileen exhorted once Amina had climbed close enough. She motioned her friends to move over for the three arrivals.

"I know," said Amina, taking her place next to the group. "If I'd known you were off for the weekend, I would've asked to go with you."

"I only found out after school, dewa shimalu o terisasen kaji..."

And then the rest of the conversation was lost to Haraan as the two girls switched into rapid-fire Kamanese. The most he understood about it didn't have anything to do with the language — having blue hair was some kind of custom for unmarried girls, apparently.

"Been doing all right, Jasti?" the boy in the other group asked, reaching around the girls with an extended fist.

"I'm hanging in there," he said, bumping the fist. "You?"

The other boy, Shasil, put his arm around the second girl, on the opposite end of where Haraan sat. "Kestrel and I are celebrating our six-months today."

"That's awesome."

"I know, right?"

"Yeah. You taking her out to dinner someplace?"

Shasil rubbed a finger across his upper lip in conspiration. "I was thinking about Hanni's."

"What?" Jasti rubbed the back of his head. "Sorry, but that's something you save for an anniversary, man. I'm sorry, Kestrel. I mean, it's a special occasion and you deserve a good place and all, but your boyfriend'll boil himself out thinking of a better place to go in half a year."

"It's fine," said the other girl, smiling. "We get along by not demanding too much of each other."

"Are you serious?" Jasti shoved Amina, getting her attention. "Stop demanding so much of me."

"You get what you signed up for, muscle-butt," she fired back before resuming her conversation with Kaileen.

A round of laughter.

"So," said Haraan, speaking for the first time since joining the other three, "did you guys have a good time getting here?"

"It was all right," said Shasil. "We decided to come here after seeing the Iron, you know?"

"Yeah. Going through the Golden Tenth would've been like... um." Haraan cringed. His metaphors had abandoned him, but he was in too deep to back out. "It would've been like going through a pasta machine, right? 'Cause they'd both be hard to squeeze through. And then you'd end up all noodly... and... stuff." The fluttering in his stomach grew worse.

Shasil smiled at him weakly. "No kidding." He turned back to Jasti. "So we passed by this one store on the way here — you like swords, right?"

"That's what they say."

"There was this huge blade in the window of some shop by Coverly Ridge Station, almost as tall as you."

"Get out."

While his friends chatted the minutes away, Haraan sat there, stuck between pulling out a sketchbook or not. He loved talking about drawing with other people, but those other people were discouragingly far and few in between. When passed some of his drawings, most people gave him sincere compliments, and a few had even cottoned onto his dream of joining the Phoenix Enclave, but deep down, he knew their words wouldn't affect the quality of his art in any significant way.

He wanted to spend more time out of his room, and though striding helped him with that a great deal, he went either with Jasti and Amina or by himself. Connecting with other people required having an interesting story to tell, and having interesting stories required knowing and being with other people.

Where did he come into that loop? He wasn't the type to get frustrated, but it seemed an answer to that question didn't arrive by thinking about it, which bothered him a little.

They weren't ignoring him on purpose. They just had more to talk about.

At least the view was a lot better from up here. They sat level with the airfield, which was about a mile and a half away. A curtained scaffold rose from the middle of the tarmac, hiding the Guild's feature attraction from view. Between the scaffolding and the spectator stands (a luxurious bank of seats for ten thousand, decked out in streamers, flags, and carved heraldic birds about to take wing) was a modest platform with red and gold trim, on top of which sat a group of important-looking people waiting for their turn at the podium.

One stood up and took his first.

"Laaadiees and geeentlemeeen! Weeelcome to Aiirrrfieeeld Caaaelius!"

Spectators across the North Arm responded with a heart-stopping cheer. Some of the strider groups on the park face whooped and hollered.

"You guys, you guys, they're starting," said Haraan, grateful for the interruption. The others stopped talking immediately and looked out to the airfield while the emcee continued.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, opening his arms, "in conjunction with the Talery Bay City Council and the Arcit County Mechanists, the Aerial Guild is pleased and extremely humbled to present this marvelous machine to the general public!

"Consider, ladies and gentlemen, the primeval mysteries of flight! Consider, that secret art known by the majestic eagle, the elegant heron, and the common bluebird, yea, even the base sparrow and the brainless pigeon, but denied to mankind! Consider, my friends, the blatant injustice of our worldly chains!"

We do better than most people, thought Haraan, referring to the striding community. But he's right. We weren't born with wings.

"But of all the creatures put on this world, who among them can claim the title of greatest from the dominion of man? Our ingenuity unwinds daily into nature's domain, stealing from her secrets most jealously cached! We have developed technologies to outrace the horse, retain warmth superior to any furred animal, feed whenever and whereever we so choose to do so! We breed out of leisure, not necessity!"

"Hey, hey," Jasti said, taken aback by the audacity of those assertions. "The animals still have something we'll never have: a school system without homework."

"And field trips every day," Shasin added.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, we take from nature her final key to the kingdom in plain sight: the sky! The Aerial Guild is pleased to announce and present... the Cirrus!"

On the emcee's last words, the curtains behind him collapsed and revealed the machine within.

Haraan estimated half the city heard the resounding "Oh!" of delight from the Exhibition, and it'd be easy to understand why. The Guild's sentinel-moth-winged models had impressed Haraan last time, which had been half a year ago — but this time, the wings folded and tucked in like a tan and steel bird of prey. If it were up to him, he would want to fly as a raptor, not as an insect. The only detail he made out at this distance was the steel they'd used for the frame.

"And now our brave pilot walks confidently toward our machine!" said the emcee to a rising cheer. "Ladies and gentlemen! Captain! Cael! Tigacci!" He indicated a figure rising from his seat on the platform, who waved to the roaring audience as one used to the spotlight, and false modesty. Haraan recalled a poster of the pilot's face from the Bell Tower: a slender, ruddy man sporting a leather aviator's cap, goggles, and a handlebar mustache.

"If only he weren't over forty," mused Kaileen, her voice floaty.

For a moment, Haraan played with the idea of joining the Guild — guaranteed adventure with intellectual explorers, a shining reputation, setting out to broaden mankind's glowing horizon. The smallest mention of the Guild incited such optimism and conversation that the public had a term to refer to the members of that organization: heroes.

Each and every one of them, a hero. Would it be so bad to be called one?

The emcee extended his arms out to the audience, palms down, and lowered them. The only sound Haraan heard after the emcee returned to his seat was a far-off steamer, chugging over its rails indifferent to the unveiling of a flying machine. His eyes remained on the pilot inside the ornithopter, the goggles twinkling in the sun every now and then.

The first basso cough of the ornithopter's engine echoed through the airfield, followed by a second and third in quick succession. Black smoke burst from the rear exhaust.

Then the wings snapped open, and Haraan heard the impressive crack of the opened fabric moments later. As the engine settled into a low thrum, the wheels underneath the open frame began to roll.

The ornithopter moved.

The ornithopter retreated to the east end of the airfield, and turned around.

The ornithopter began to beat its wings, slowly at first, and started its takeoff.

The ornithopter beat its wings faster, halfway across the tarmac.

The ornithopter reached the end of its runway, wings blurring!

The runway ended with a one-hundred-yard drop.



"Pull out, pull out." Haraan's fists were clenched.



The ornithopter fell slowly, Haraan's conception of time dilated with adrenaline.



A moment passed before he realized the ornithopter was falling even slower every second.



He knew it -- this was -- of course! The front!

"Yes!"

The ornithopter leveled out.

The ornithopter was flying!

It shot back the way it came, corkscrewing while it gained altitude, until it broke the edge of the cliff and came once more into view of the spectator stands.

Haraan joined everyone else in the northern half of the city in leaping to his feet and hollering at the top of his lungs for the little machine writing in smoke man's triumph over the sky.