The South Road

The skytraders call the way they fly the southern route; we call it the South Road, though no road lies along it and nothing travels it but their airships. The first to moor beneath our ice came looking for a curiosity and found a country. By Captain Maro Teha's third southern season the dock was no longer a discovery but an appointment — named captains, fixed windows, bonded cargo, and translators who had grown old in the work.

We do not trade as equals in what we have; they hold metal and broad daylight and open-air craft we will never match. But we trade as equals in worth. They bring brass and fine wire, lenses and resins, oils and dyes, instruments and seed-stock. We send back cold-glass and sealed medicine, insulation and waterproof bindings, surgical bonework, and the copied pages of things they have no other way to learn.

The most valuable things we sell are not things at all. How to keep a wound closed in freezing damp. How to build a door that fails warm. How to write a contract that still holds after every witness to it is dead. These are answers to questions no country in the sun has had to ask for as long as we have, and that is the whole reason the road is worth the flying.