Mécaniques infernales, Tome 0.5 : Night Flights

Airhaven hung on the evening wind. The huge gasbags of the flying town were touched with golden light like sunset clouds, but the land below it was already in shadow, except where water reflected the sky in the flooded track marks that scarred the plains and hills. Here and there, a cluster of moving lights showed where a town or a small Traction City was making its way through the deepening twilight. A slow, old trading town was moving south through a gap in the mountains, and a pack of predator villages was milling after it, waiting for their chance to attack. It was hunt or be hunted down there.

But no one in Airhaven had to worry about such things. Nothing hunted Airhaven, where aviators and air traders from the Traction Cities mingled on almost-friendly terms with flyers from the static strongholds of the Anti-Traction League. In the low-roofed, lamplit public rooms of the Gasbag and Gondola, Airhaven’s finest pub, traders from London did deals with merchants from Lahore, and travellers from the Traktiongrads learned the latest songs from Nuevo Maya. There was good food and good drink, and soft beds for aviators who wanted a change from the narrow bunks aboard their airships. And best of all, there were stories to be heard, for no one had such good stories as the men and women who made their lives upon the Bird Roads, and no one took such pleasure in the telling of them.