The sword had no name in tongues that speak words. The most powerful ones never do, and you never know that until you pick one up. That was, in fact, only the start of a very long list of things she hadn’t known about swords. The _real_ problem with magical swords is that they are nothing without a wielder, and they know it. Even the most inept swordsman is better than none at all – as a result they are not particularly picky. That is how girls like Annabelle end up holding swords that have levelled cities.

In her Grandfather’s basement was a large wooden box she had always thought of as a trunk, but that was in truth more of a chest. She had loved it as a child – the wood, warm and wrinkled under her touch, had reminded her of her Grandfather’s hands. She had tried to open it at least as many times as she had been warned against precisely that and, despite there being no visible catch, it had always been locked.

On the day her Grandfather died, Annabelle had been his only living family on the same continent. Her Mother and Father were in Zambia or Zamibia or one of those, on safari beyond the range of running water or SMS. She had of course been invited along again, but since graduating she had been disinclined to leave the comfort of the groove she had worn in her life and her little corner of London. When the police called, her brain had stalled the impact by asking ‘Why are you calling _me_? Surely someone else… surely my parents?’ But there had been no-one else, not even her parents right now. And besides, it was her on the forms. Not her mother, nor even her father. Just her. Next of kin: Annabelle Citrine Umberland.

So the hospital, and the funeral, and the house, and then at last the basement and the chest that had sprung open with the lightest touch of her hand. As though it remembered her. As though it had never been locked at all.

The city lights at night throw shadows deeper than black. Their wink and glare off glass and water saturates the air and leaves gaps in things – unfinished corners of architecture, as though on underexposed film. I suspect that she cannot resist such temptation – to stand in clear view of brilliance but to remain unseen. Though in truth she is not unseen. I watch for her there, where shadows cross and rooflines meet. Where girder and buttress and the deep cloak of gloaming conspire to admit her to this plane.

The sun here is stronger than I am used to. It burns the skin without tanning, the unwelcome consequence of a life lived, until now, under the glow of earthlight. I am more comfortable in the moonglow – the familiar soft amber of home spread wide over the land. In the dusk and gloaming I have stalked this city in search of that elusive aura of ‘home’ that takes root spontaneously and will not budge from that small remote corner of the mind. There is nothing here that transports me to that place – not scent nor spirit nor silhouette. I feel as though suspended over the void: a thin wire all that keeps me from that plunge into the unknown. More convincing even than that, the small pressure behind the eyes exhorting me to jump. To let go, to fall or rise into that void. To stretch an arm into that or this to live as native or alien. To make the choice once and finally between ancestry and homeland. To abandon this mission as smoke and circumstance and just live in this time, this place, as I never have in all my years.

This place, this city, is faceless and inscrutable at street level. Years walking its pavement lend an air of familiarity, but it is a mere conjurer’s fancy – a trick of the light. No-one who remains at street level ever truly knows the city. To see it from above gives context that cannot be had from the ground – gives distance without which the true whole can never be grasped. To know this city from the fifteenth floor is as knowing a friend, the face of whom brings not just familiarity, but comfort – not just memory of times past, but memory of times shared. To truly know this city, however; to know it as a lover; to know it so well as to predict its moods, to predict the topology of streets not yet walked; to _truly_ know this city, you must know it from beneath.

The two cities live their separate lives pressed together like the thin, yellowed pages of some ancient tome. In Laben, the sun never sets. In Lamal, it never rises. The true lives of the people comes in the to-ing and fro-ing from light to dark. Every door leads from one to the other, the thresholds sitting perpetually in the gloaming. In the void, the city breathes – a living, growing membrane stretched between the two frames. Time holds a different meaning there. Days turn like pages in a book, thumbed through quickly or pored and lingered over at the reader’s leisure.

The city of Laben is unremarkable to the uneducated visitor. A sprawling place of European architecture and friendly inhabitants, it spreads its two arms wide around the sparkling waters of the river Hess. It is a place of terraced housing and small corner cafes opening onto statued, cobbled plazas. The houses sit bright and inviting, occupants elsewhere busy with pleasure or palaver. It is a place perpetually steeped in the early hours of afternoon – the sleepy post-lunch haze drooping its thick fingers over all and sundry.

The city of Lamal is a place of industry and excess. A sprawling place of thumping bass echoing down trash-strewn alleyways, it spreads its two arms wide around the murky waters of the river Hess. It is a place of grinding gears underscoring the open moan of free-wheeling turbines. The houses sit dark and forbidding, occupants long gone to sleep or saturnalia. It is a place perpetually steeped in the early hours of morning – the thick post-midnight gloom spreading its cloying fingers over all and sundry.

The third entrance is not immediately recognisable as such. The wooded hollow is unremarkable by day, and difficult to find at all on a dark night. Under the light of a full moon, the pooled water seems to glow from within and the air is charged with a wildness that is difficult to shake. The faerie ring nestled in the shade of an ancient oak seems to sing — each mushroom a different note. With an ear to the ground, the sound dissipates, but to one stalking widdershins around the hollow it slides from angelic chorus to bestial growl to mechanical hum and back again.

The city of Driach was known as the City of Many Flames. It owed its fame to the strange crystalline growths dotted throughout the tar pits that bubbled downriver from its streets and spires. The bestilted men of the pits, wiry and deeply stained, harvested the crystals under the dark of every new moon, when the glinting, faceted reflections of lamplight could best indicate the choicest specimens. Once harvested the thin ropy strands burned clear and bright and smokeless, and stayed alight for many moons at a time. The tapers adorned every street and every spire, small points of light in the darkness coming together to form something brilliant and shining.

The back streets and alleys of the meat district run grey with rivers of rendered fat. The rent is cheap, though, and a bargain for one who no longer has the full faculty of smell. On arriving in the city, Freja had wandered the streets for three nights, sleeping in gutters and gulleys, feeling out the ebb and the flow of people and of energy, before settling on this place. She had paid the neighbouring abattoir’s owner three months of rent up-front, with a few pinches of gold flakes. Real, for, as they say, you do not transmute where you eat. Or, at least, as Freja could afford but one weathered table for refreshments and reactions alike, you do not mix business with pleasure.

The pits of Tinnev sing and hum in the evening winds. The spiraled funnels of the main routes and byways form a giant stone pipe organ, played at by the will and whim of the strong breezes that whistle down off the escarpments to the south. The lower classes – merchants and politicians – have their dwellings and businesses in the smaller pits, accompanied by the flighty trill of an airy whistle. The more revered – stone carvers and cloth weavers – live their lives in the deep pits, accompanied by a throaty baritone hum. It is in the in-between, the to and the fro, that the symphony of Tinnev is born.