Chapter Text
Child Of The Capital - A Story From The Empire Of Light
When the assignments had gone out, Liang had been hoping for Tienjing. Most of the other apprentices hadn’t; who would have wanted to stay at home, when the Service could have sent them anywhere else in the Empire or beyond? But Liang was used to Tienjing in a comfortable way, to its cave walls and grey sky-ceiling, to the markets and tramlines, and to sharing an apartment with her Mama and Baba and all her younger siblings.
Her second choice had been the same as most apprentices; the consular mission at Summertime Junction. Her Nai Nai had grown up in its shadow, her own mother one of the initial group who’d gone out to build it, during the War of Restitution, and she’d brought Liang up on so many stories of that wild and distant place.
But Liang wasn’t going to either of her hopes. No, she was being sent to Shan Guo.
It could have been worse; at least Shan Guo was still an Imperial city. Liang felt more than a little bad for those apprentices assigned to the truly foreign consulates, among the Freehold States or the free towns between. Kiramman Freehold would have been the absolute worst, the only place in the whole Below with an open sky; even the thought of such an uncertain ceiling made Liang squirm just a little.
But the thing about Shan Guo was it was the Imperial City; capital of the Empire of Light, heartland of Liang’s people, home to the Empress herself and all her court. The largest city not just in the Empire, but in the Below entire, with a population of over two million people and a name to match, a name that served as by-word for the Imperial court to its citizenry, and for the empire itself to those without. And to Liang, a mere Apprentice First Class in the Civil Service, it was bigger than anything she’d ever known.
She’d spent the last month reading up on it; for her nineteenth birthday, she’d been given a whole stack of books on the city, and she had been through them all. She’d reread The Rings of Shan Guo three times, Dream of the Butterfly twice, the official Service handbook just as much, and most of a tourists’ guide once before giving up on it. And even then, she didn’t feel ready.
Even in the photograms, washed-out in sepia, the city looked imposing. The name itself meant ‘Mountain Capital’ in Imperial, and it wasn't hard to see why her forebears had chosen it. The place stood in command of the largest single cave in the entire Below, atop a sandstone mesa five miles across, surrounded by huge fingers of the same rock rising up like gigantic stalagmites. To the first settlers, trekking down from some long-forgotten surface world Above, it must have seemed like a miracle.
“Attention all passengers,” came suddenly from Liang’s arm, from the personal receiver attached to her Imperial-red uniform, tuned to the train’s sending frequency, “this train is now approaching its final stop; Gongmen Station, Shan Guo. Please remember to take all personal items with you when you leave the train.”
She took a quick look around herself; her two suitcases were under her feet, her book was in her lap, and her hat, matched to her outfit and conical in the normal Imperial style, rested on her knees. Her personal electromagic devices; receiver, lantern, hat-lamp, pen-light; were all in their proper places. Her entire life, disassembled and compressed down into two trunks and a uniform, for her great voyage away from home.
Satisfied, she turned to the window. Her reflection stared back; she’d chosen to keep her dark hair loose, but neatly brushed, and picked simple metal earrings for her pointed ears. She did her best to keep her face neutral, knowing how easy nervousness showed in her cheeks, but as much as she tried, it crept up in the brown of her eyes anyway.
So she gave up. Outside, it looked like most of the Below; grey stone cave walls, speckled with mushrooms and crystals that shed dim light, flashing past as her train rattled briskly along. The only breaks were the overhead catenaries, built and maintained between all Imperial cities, and the golden lines of the rails beneath them.
Those, her people hadn’t built. The Rail predated that; it had been ancient when the first Imperial Elves had set foot down here, ancient when the Undermountain Dwarves had torn their own empire apart, and ancient when the Drow had seen their cities torn down by slave revolt. Exactly who had built it, nobody could say, but those golden rails and the geometric sleepers they sat on had powerful magic inside, and would grow back like a weed no matter how many times they were torn up.
Like all great cities in the Below, Shan Guo was built on an intersection of them. Six separate lines ran into its cave, spanning to the mesa on bridges rebuilt by Liang’s people; they all joined a great circumferential loop, a mighty roundabout around the plateau. And though the Empire didn’t know how to grow more of them, they did know how to graft in switches; these days, common iron had made that loop five or six tracks wide, meandering through the industrial outer districts, and expanded the lines in to four.
And as she watched, peering out through the same glass she’d been watching for the seven hours since Tienjing, those streets loomed distant into view. And despite all her preparation, all of her reading and readymaking, Liang still let out a soft gasp at the sight.
The tunnel ahead burst open to impossible size. With a clunk, metal wheels hit bridge check rails, and they were no longer on stone and gravel; instead, huge arches of wrought-iron carried the wooden coaches, rattling behind an electric engine. And beyond the passing spires of rock, covered in clinging noctilucent moss, loomed a city unlike anything Liang had ever seen.
It was bigger than any of the photograms had made out; it looked as if some giant had upended a box of buildings, sending red and brown, wood and brick, spilling out from under pagoda roofs tiled in sooty jade. Here and there great stacks of black smoke rose, billowing up from the factories and sparkhouses of the industrial districts. Beyond, temple-spires and sending towers rose higher still. And above, lantern-airships chugged with their burner-plumes aglow.
But through them all shone more light than Liang had yet known.
Despite their scale, those lights were a comfort, the same as the lantern that hung at her own side, or the bulb nestled in her conical hat; the smallest twinkles, moving in the winding streets, were people, just like her, while the rest were window-lights and overhead lanterns, lighthouses and moonlight towers, all working in unison to keep the uncertain darkness of the Below at bay. That was sparkcraft, writ-large, the same as it had been in Tienjing; to Liang, even in such a new and uncertain place, those lights meant home.