She grew most excited when we passed one of the Engineering teams responsible for maintaining the road, and demanded I stick my head out and study the cart of bricks, and the way the dusty, muddy workers dislodged the cracking ones from the road and replaced them.
“That’s the real Empire right there, Din,” she said, grinning. “The boys and girls who fix the roads.”
“Being as we’re headed to the sea walls, ma’am,” I said, “I might disagree.”
“Oh, people love the Legion, with their swords and their walls and their bombards. But though they receive no worship, it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.”
I shook my head and focused on the maps Ana had gotten for me to engrave in my mind: maps of the city of Talagray, of the Tala canton, of the sea walls, and so on and so on. She’d also procured lists of all senior Engineering officers in Talagray, and asked me to memorize them, hundreds and thousands of names—which I did, haltingly whispering each name as I read them.
Finally we turned a sharp corner in the road. I leaned out the window and tasted the air. A hint of salt on the wind, perhaps, acrid and tangy. I glimpsed a hill to the west, its southern cliff flat and stark. My eyes fluttered, and I summoned the map of the canton in my mind, searching the memory for these landmarks—a kink in the road, and a cliff-carved hill—and calculated where we were.
“Think we’re close to the sea walls now, ma’am,” I said.
“Already?”
“Yes, ma’am. I should be able to see them out the eastern-facing window soon enough.”
“Describe them to me the second you do. I would much like to have them in my mind to puzzle over.”
The carriage rattled along. The jungle fell back like a curtain, revealing a wide green plain swimming with mist; and there, far in the distance, the shore.
I pulled out a spyglass I’d brought, pressed it to my eye, and peered east.
A towering, slate-gray cliff, running underneath the red-stained sky like a frame below a painting, its stone wet and gleaming and crawling with vines and growth; and there, in one long, vertical seam in the cliff, a hint of movement: some insect, I thought, crawling from base to top in a slow, labored procession.
My eye trembled as I focused on it. I realized it was not an insect but instead a tiny box, wrought of wood, being hauled up on a set of strings. As it reached another notch in the gray cliffs, the box stopped, and even tinier figures emerged.
Horses. Four of them, all hauling a shining steel bombard from the box.
I blinked, staring into the spyglass. The tiny box was not tiny at all: it was a lift, made for hauling troops and armaments up the vast expanse of the sea walls.
I lowered the spyglass and stared at the walls in the distance, dumbfounded.
“Well?” said Ana. “Do you see them? What are they like?”
“The walls,” I said slowly, “are very, very big, ma’am.”
I described it to her as best I could. I was no spatiast, so I ran out of words for big very quickly, trying to express this tremendous spine of stone and earthworks running along the seas. I glassed their tops and spied at least two dozen mammoth bombards arranged there, most pointed out to sea—but some pointed in. Just in case something broke through, I supposed.
“Some of the bombards can be wheeled about by horses,” Ana explained. “For the truly giant ones, some segments of walls have rails running along their tops, to make it easier for horses to haul them about.”
“How big are those, ma’am?”
“Five to six times as long as you are tall, Din, if you were to stand beside them. The forging of such bombards is immensely difficult. Like so much of what the Empire does, they are achievements of complexity—imagine the systems, the management, the coordination it takes not only to marshal resources and knowledge and facilities to make these remarkable things, but to make them by the hundreds, and ship them to the walls every wet season!”
“And…how tall are the leviathans, again?”
“Some are as tall as the walls. Most are slightly taller.”
I tried to conceive of it, to project an image of such a thing onto the landscape beyond. I began to feel slightly ill at the thought.
“Have you ever seen one, Din?” asked Ana. “Or a piece of one, a bone or a segment of chitin?”
I shook my head.
“Din,” she said tersely, “I am blindfolded, so if you’ve nodded your head, I’ve no fucking idea.”