Andrea Höst: The Towers, the Moon

The river and the Island of Balance were at the very centre of the three domes, but the taxis stopped short of it, not far inside the innermost dome. A great, circular parkland took up most of the space around the island, interrupted only by a scattering of buildings and a few bridges crossing the Seine to the Hall of Balance. Everything else at the very centre had been cleared away long ago.

Hopping out of the taxi at the very edge of the park, Griff craned his head back to consider the sky, very pale and crossed and criss-crossed by three layers of velvety black.

The structure wasn’t even narrow: the filigree only looked delicate because of the enormous space it covered. Every arm and twist and loop of the snowflakes was at least as thick around as a house, and the five central towers much wider still. Why it didn’t all come crashing down under its own weight was one of the greatest puzzles of engineering.

Absorbed in looking, Griff allowed himself to be chivvied over to one particular spot in the enormous ring of buildings that surrounded the park. These were almost all hotels and restaurants with outdoor tables. Some of these had façades worth looking at, and so Griff divided his time between domes and towers and hotels until a plate was put in front of him.

His stomach was quite settled by then, so he dug in, gleefully listening to Tante Sabet refusing to respond to Ned and Eleri’s Latin, talking to them only in French, and correcting their pronunciation. He was lucky to be sitting further down the table.

"What time of the day should I switch from saying bonjour to saying bonsoir ?" he asked Josette eventually. "Does it change between winter and summer?"

"When the sun is no longer above, whatever the season," Josette said. "Why is it that you speak French when your sisters do not?"

"My father had a book of maps of cities all over the world. I took French at school so I could read it. Aunt Arianne has been talking to us a lot in French the last few days as well, trying to catch Ned and Eleri up."

"Ar-ent?"

He’d used the Prytennian word. "Tante. Tante Arianne feels strange to say."

"She does not look it, certainly! You would think her the same age as Milo instead of Martine! I have been waiting and waiting for you all to arrive and tell me everything that happened to make her so."

This girl probably knew Aunt Arianne better than they did, since Griff had first met his aunt only a few months ago. But a lot had happened between then and now, beginning with a hunt for their parents' murderers, and ending with the return of the eternal Pharaoh Hatshepsu to Egypt. Aunt Arianne looked younger because she had been tangled up with a vampire, between all the conspiracies.

This took a while to tell, and before he was done the occupants of the nearby tables had openly turned to listen, and even the waiters were lingering and making unnecessary visits. Griff made sure to talk as clearly as he could manage, while pretending not to notice. Prytennia sat at one of the edges of the world: not very interesting to most people, but everyone knew of Hatshepsu’s return.

"Your accent is really quite good for someone who has never visited before," was all Aunt Arianne said, after he’d finished describing Hatshepsu’s departure for Egypt in the form of an automaton his own parents had built.

Ned was frowning at him, but Griff didn’t care. A friend of Aunt Arianne’s had died before Hatshepsu had been revealed, and he knew their aunt didn’t really like talking about it, just as Ned didn’t like talking about how she’d lost one of her arms.

Tante Sabet started to ask something, but then the sky exploded with birds – mostly pigeons and starlings – and Griff ducked his head, even though they were well above him, and didn’t sweep lower before flying away.

"The Shift is coming," Josette explained. "They always leave. It is the first sign."

Griff approved. Anything that made pigeons go away was a right and proper thing. He hadn’t begun to guess so many were up there, perched on top of the filigree. Were the Towers of the Moon covered in pigeon droppings? And how did plumbing and water and waste, all the practical concerns he was learning to take into consideration when planning buildings, how did that work?

Josette, when pressed, said, "The Towers take care of that, like a tree."

"It is starting," she added. "You notice my voice, it sounds deeper? The air is thickening. Now the colour will change."

All along the curving stretch of restaurants, people were falling silent, turning in their chairs, heads tilting back. The sky above looked darker than it should so early in the evening: a bruised blue that seemed to swallow the filigree, and then to contrast against it as the Towers of the Moon began to flush white.

Griff’s stomach shifted. He swallowed, and his ears popped, but it wasn’t too bad. He had worried that it would be like cars and trains and all the things that made his insides want to come out. Good. He had wanted, above all things, to see the Towers of the Moon, but it was better still that he could properly enjoy why this place was more than just an incredible building, why half the world wanted to travel to France, because there was nothing so fun as night beneath the Towers of the Moon.

"I’m floating!" a boy cried out, and fell over in a strange exaggerated wallow.

It wasn’t true, not quite. Griff carefully lifted and let go of a salt cellar, and it dropped directly back down to the table, but it did so with a lazy lack of haste. It was very like being underwater, without the need to hold your breath. Griff felt immensely strong, like he’d become a giant.

"May we get up, Aunt Arianne?" Ned asked and, when their aunt nodded, Ned moved like an old lady, holding on to Eleri for support.

Griff was not such a namby, surging to his feet and laughing when his chair sluggishly leaped away and bounced like a ball, while the table shifted ominously before cousin Martine stopped it. She was smiling, though, so he just grinned and picked the chair up carefully and then turned and put all his effort into one giant leap, all the way over the little row of potted greenery, and the path beyond.

He didn’t land very neatly, and tumbled and wallowed, and then lay on the grass and laughed until Ned and Eleri came and got him up. He and Ned and Eleri had a lot of trouble learning to stay on their feet, and the best of times throwing each other into the air, those launching falling over each time they did so, but the one flung into the air dropping down like a flailing snowflake. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of other people were doing the same, all across the enormous park, beneath the Towers of the Moon.

Above, people were flying.

Some were people-people, just like Griff, but wearing strange clothing with silk panels from wrist to ankle. They came spiralling down after leaping off the top of the smallest filigree dome. That looked tremendous fun.

Others were maybe-people. If you died in France, you would be reborn in the Court’s Otherworld as some sort of winged thing. Most were la clochettes , tiny people who spoke in bell voices. Others were larger, like a cross between a snake, a dog and a bat, and were called gargouille. And there were rarer, different shapes, and Griff did not know whether to consider them animals or people, since any of them might theoretically have been people-people once.

He was glad those stayed mostly overhead, anyway.

Only a single time did he see any of the Cour de Lune, the rulers of France. A little cluster of them passed at great speed, and went on to circle the whole of the dome. People with wings, not feathery or furry, but instead leathery like a bat’s, with a membrane made up of little circles and ovals, layered and almost see-through, and coloured depending on what Tower they belonged to. The ones who flew overhead were part of the current ruling Tower, the Gilded, and their wings were all golden circles, like a shower of coins, or sunlight reflecting off rippling water.