From Ambition:

The boy from earlier walked up the stairs and glanced at Lyra, wide eyed.

"You, they, wow! I… I gotta go tell everyone!" he disappeared.

Lyra walked down the tunnel, retracing the path that she'd taken from the infirmary and getting lost.

Eventually she simply knocked one of the wooden doors set into the wall.

It was answered barely a moment later, by a man with spectacles and a long white beard.

"What is it mmm? Why are you bothering me?"

"I'm afraid I'm lost sir, um, I'm Lyra, I arrived here with Epsilon the Red. I'm looking for the infirmary."

"Fine, follow this corridor all the way to the end."

He slammed the door in her face.

Lyra drew back, looked along the gently curving corridor and kept on walking.

After several minutes, she'd begun to suspect that she'd been duped, when another message runner found her. This one was different, a little younger and hopping from foot to foot with excitement and undisguised glee.

"I've found you, I've found you, you have to come along!" he pulled on her hand "They want you up on the bridge to talk to you miss!"

She was led along the winding rock corridors once again, this time going deeper, towards the center and upwards, here the air was still and the glow-stones shone with a dull red instead of the normal greenish yellow.

The boy led her straight up the stairs, hopping them two at a time until the corridor leveled out and Lyra found herself walking out into an open space. Still beneath the ground, the space was a great limestone cave, dotted with stalactites and stalagmites as thick as tree-trunks.

At the far end, a deep pool of dark blue, almost black water sat and directly before her, a narrow stone spar bridged the space between the opening high on the chamber wall and a circle of round, flat stone that hung, apparently unsupported, from the spar.

The circle was covered by people and equipment, of unfathomable purpose and dubious meaning.

What exactly did a lump of rock need a bridge for?

That made very little sense.

One man stepped up to her, hands clasped behind his back. He bowed a measured half-bow and leaned down to kiss Lyra's hand.

"Ah'd suggest that you stop that. Why'd you go calling me up here?"

The man straightened out and gestured to the rest of the people on the stone circle.

"I'm captain-mayor of this town and this is the bridge and also my office in this town-ship."

There was something strange about the way he said 'Township'. It took Lyra a moment to figure it out.

"Bridge, Captain, Town Ship, this place is more than an island?"

The mayor smiled sadly.

"One day, perhaps. Take a look at the far wall." Lyra turned and saw that by a lower-level entrance to the cave, two large tubes had been set into the wall.

"The donation jar on the right is for mobility, the one on the left, weapons. One day, we will mount Vi-Crystal Drives on our island and Magna Turrets around it. Then we can finally roam free, throughout the realm of the sky, without the need for bridges or anything. Exploring and taking what we wish, when we wish it."

Lyra thought it over for a moment.

"Okay, the fact that sounds awfully suspect aside, how long have you been saving up for this and how much cash do you have in reserve?"

A lanky woman answered from her seat at the back, leafing through a notepad and reading the numbers out.

"75 links, 403 sovereigns, 1300 Daks and 63729 bits."

Lyra began to work that out in her head; 63729, eight bits to the Dak equals 7966 Daks plus 1300, and sixteen Daks to the sovereign equals 579 sovereigns, plus the 403 equals 982, divided by thirty two equals thirty links, plus seventy five, places them with 105 links worth of currency. Or 430080 bits. Phew. That, Is an awful lot of copper. Well, one link is worth 4096 bits.

Which means epsilon is worth… 10240000…0 that's an awful lot of copper.

Are there even that many coins around?

"So how long have you been saving?"

"Ever since this town was founded, seventy years ago. The gems from the mountain Epsilon cleared out for us are the source of our reserves of Sovereigns and Links.

In fact, we've already refurbished the town hall to act as out command center. The bridge will be operational when the master artificers and enchanters arrive in three days time."

He gestured to the circle "We've had this all planned out since the beginning. Weapons panels there, engine controls there, knock out the far wall of the cave to act as a forward viewport, a communications net and voice box system that will allow us to connect every home in our town together and finally, the shields. Full three hundred and sixty degree super-spatial charged crystalline barriers."

Lyra listened to the list, eyes widening by the moment.

"How, exactly, are you going to pay for all this?"

The mayor motioned for her to follow him, leading her to the center of the circle. A small podium stood there, with a small artifact on top.

"This, is what we're trading for those systems. It was at the heart of the mountain, guarded by a lightning elemental. We couldn't defeat the elemental, but we did manage to steal it. When we sent a crystagram to the guild, they immediately agreed to the trade."

Lyra really, really didn't like the sound of that and leaned in close to the tiny, mahogany handled hand-bell that sat on the podium.

It was etched and gilded in gold and red, with symbols that shimmered and warped in her sight, as though straining to be free of material bounds.

"You have a large amount of money. You have a magical artifact of unknown power, which is worth outfitting an entire island with top of the line enchantments. Didn't you even think for a moment that someone might decide to take them from you?"

"I called you here to thank you. You defended us, risked your life with absolutely nothing in it for you nor any ability to defend yourself. I assure you that when our town takes to the air, we will not forget you. You can call upon us at any time to help and we will be there as fast as the winds and our engines can carry us."

Lyra resisted the compulsion to mock captain mayor.

Instead she bowed, "It is an honor and one I will not surely forget. Now, I must be on my way to the infirmary, will someone show me the way?"

The lanky woman who called out the towns monetary reserves got up and volunteered.

As they descended the stairway together, Lyra's new guide spoke up.

"Please, don't think that the captain is naïve. Every other town in the sky or on the ground is just a bunch of houses, close together by necessity. But we, we've had a dream, a thing to keep us going.

The children here all work running messages, pretending that we're crashing through pirate fleet's or discovering new cloud atolls. Our strongest men and women hew new corridors and rooms every day, our most agile used to leave at first light to forage on nearby lands and our best minds work out everything from designs to battle tactics, repair methods and trade routes.

Most island towns simply draw on the island's near them, they exhaust them and then the people have to move on… but we, we want to take our homes with us. It's what keeps us working when we're tired, what makes us get up in the morning. What gives us the strength to keep moving."

Lyra listened in silence. They continued to walk together for a time, until the lanky woman paused and pulled her long black hair from her face, blue eyes studying Lyra in detail.

"I could see you working out the numbers. It's nice to meet a kindred spirit."

Lyra hesitated, unsure of where the conversation was going.

"Actually, about that. You've got approximately one oh five links, eighteen sovereigns, so what exactly, ah, is the price of what you're planning?"

The woman flicked her hair back before answering "By yesterday's Crystagram figures, around two hundred and thirteen links. We'll be doing the work ourselves wherever possible, so that cuts expenses by a full thirty percent, unfortunately, the call-out fee for enchanters is extremely high and may run to around four links."

Lyra managed to pick up her jaw long enough to ask;

"Has this ever been done before?"

"Not by a town-stead. We will be the first town-ship. The United Mages Council owns no less than seven converted island vessels, of a smaller volume and tonnage than our own though.

It's suspected that the black market sky-hub, the Hive, is outfitted with obfuscation and propulsion systems, as ongoing New-Cosmopolisbergshiretown expeditions have been unsuccessful in locating it,"

Lyra rolled the overlong name around in her mind and interrupted.

"Wait, you mean Laputa, the Sky-hub, right?"

"… Oh, right, you're from the stone-road aren't you. Well, Laputa, as you know it, is itself mobile and collects other islands as it moves throughout the realm of clouds. Apart from it, the only other known mobile landmasses are those of the three pirate lords. Of those, one is missing, presumed destroyed," She blinked, as though remembering something, but unsure of its use.

"Um, I don't know your name," Lyra began, "Kaede." "Well, Kaede, I'm new to this, so I really appreciate you telling me all this. If there's anything you'd like to add, then I'd be grateful."

Kaede motioned for Lyra to follow her along. After several minutes of walking, she paused in front of a door which looked like any other.

"This is my home, it's also the Crystagram receiving station, but I should show you something."

Kaede opened the door and Lyra followed.

It wasn't grand. But it was amazing. The wall facing the door had been removed and replaced with glass, giving an unobstructed view of the sky.

The Crystagram array took up the left side of the room, the gigantic dish with the focus stone embedded at its center protruded beyond the walls of the room at the end of the array focusing chamber.

Instead of the floor being cut rock, the original limestone came had simply been coverd by metal gratings, with a stairwell going from the upper gantry down to the wide rectangular space of the lower floor.

The bed was in the far right corner, right up against the window. That and a low table with some cushions' strewn haphazardly about it, were the only evidence that there was someone living here. Instead the rest of the space was dotted with stacks of books, scrolls, reams of crystagram records.

Lyra descended the stairs, taking it all in. In the lower left corner of the room, pair of workbenches with hand-tools jutted against the metal railings. In the center of the lower rectangle, offset to the left, a large round map-table stood, covered in tiny figures, blocks and flags.

Kaede was standing in front of a pair of wide message boards mounted on the left cave wall.

"I think, I might have figured out where another moving island is. But I'm not certain."

Lyra looked at the two boards. The door side one held trade figures, wind and weather patterns, the window side one was covered in 'wanted' notices.

Kaede pulled a notice off the board.

"This is master invoker Tourmaline Falx. He's missing. Went out on an easy guild assignment and never came back. But… I think that he simply decided to leave the guild."

She brought the poster over to the map.

"See here, this cluster of islands? Well, his vessel was on a preset course to Roublestown here, from Laputa here," She drew the line with her finger "He never arrived, but that isn't the interesting part. His course would have almost intersected with the buccaneer bay archipelagos here- but all attempts at divining his position there failed.

What I found, is that while guild ships are unmanned and direct flight, someone of his power could have easily disabled the wind–nullification systems without raising an alarm. Which means that if he was being blown off-course all the way from Laputa, he would have ended around here." She stabbed the center of the island group she'd pointed out earlier.

"Now, I remembered a photoport in an old book of navigational charts of those, the Monte' Bello's islands." Kaede dashed over to her bed and hauled an old atlas from underneath. Lyra helped her to pick the heavy tome up and shift it over to the low table, where Kaede flipped it open straight to the right page.

"Here it is. See this? See that island grove in the center of the group? That's an unexplored group, so it was the only picture I had… until recently." She ran over to one of the stacks and pulled out a folder, bringing it back to the table and flipping it open.

"See the difference?"

It was easy to see when it was pointed out to you.

The difference in photoport angle made it difficult to tell, unless your knew what you were looking for.

The center island was missing from the new picture.

Kaede kneeled by the table, panting, but flushed with triumph.

Lyra really wasn't sure what to say to all this. What had been an innocent and polite comment had ended up getting her side-tracked to some strange woman's room to learn about a missing landmass.

"I'm amazed at your accuracy Kaede, you must have quite a memory to have pieced all this together by yourself. Um, you seem to know a lot about…" Lyra found words failing her and grasped for a way to regain control of the conversation.

"Well, everything," A sudden flash of inspiration illuminated the way out of the awkward hole she'd fallen into.

"Actually, I was wondering Kaede, since me and Epsilon are flying blind, so to speak," Kaede had begun to look almost pathetically eager to help and Lyra felt her accent thicken in self defense

"so uh, would you happen to know someplace where ah could get an apprentice contract done?"

Kaede jumped up and leafed through a stack of crystagram folders.

"I really wish I could have all of this placed on an amber matrix automated search and retrieval system, but the cost of installing it aside, I haven't the time to rework my filing system into a metric archive compatible format, ah, here it is!"

Lyra glanced around the room at the haphazardly placed stacks of books, folders and loose-leaf cystagram sheets.

"What is your filing system, exactly?"

Kaede kneeled at the low table and opened up the manila folder, before turning to Lyra and replying.

"Floorpiles, the do-we messimall system." Lyra smiled, at least until she realized that Kaede was being serious.

"Floorchive? Groundbook, you remember where everything is?" Lyra looked at the mess in a new light.

"Yep, anyway, here you are. The fellow mages guide to licensed contract writers, with names, fees locations and C-Mail addresses. Will that be all?"

Lyra picked up the folder and realized that she was still holding Epsilons staff.

"Here, hold this please."

She handed the stick to Kaede so she could better examine the sheets.

They were run offs from the crystagram array, so the words had been scorched onto the page by a precision burning-glass rather than printed or written with ink.

After shuffling through the list she looked up at Kaede "Can I keep… these…"

Lyra trailed off.

Kaede was holding the staff, looking like she was about to cry.

"Is something wrong?"

"No! I'm just so happy! You've let me hold his staff, I mean, I don't think I'll ever be able to touch something this valuable ever again!"

Lyra really wasn't sure how to respond to that one, since she'd never seen nor heard of a girl being moved to tears over a stick before.

"Uh, okay, Um, if you like it that much, then you can hold it while you lead me to the infirmary, okay?"

"Of Course! Right this way!"

Kaede clutched the stave like she wanted to hold it close, but at the same time deathly afraid that she'd damage it.

When they eventually did get to the infirmary, it was to find an awake and alert epsilon sitting up in bed.

"Ah, my student. You seem to have picked up a squire, did you complete a quest?"

"Epsilon, be nice, this is Kaede, she seems to be the person keeping this towns finances and communications sorted. Kaede, Epsilon."

Kaede reverentially handed Epsilon his stave and then retreated to the door.

"I thank you for helping my student, now go on, scat."

The archivist fled.

"Now, I'd like to hear firsthand what's been happening while I've been incapacitated."

"I frightened away a party of pirates by telling them that you were eating."

"No, tell me in detail, from the start."

Lyra sighed. This was going to take a while.