Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

She had never seen its like in all of her travels through the Land Beyond. Its base was as wide as a mountain, and its walls rose sheer and straight into the clouds. Galactic clouds of lights shone from its myriad windows. It was guarded by mighty stockades, each of them a great castle unto itself, but built not on stony foundations, but upon the very clouds themselves; for King Coyote, in his cleverness, had devised a way to make buildings that floated on the air. Princess Nell spurred her horse forward, for even in her numbness she sensed that someone might be watching the high road from a window high in one of the castle's glittering oriels. As she galloped toward the castle, she was torn between a sense of her own foolishness in daring to assault such a mighty fortress and admiration for King Coyote's work. Faint clouds of diaphanous black oozed between the towers and stockades, and as Princess Nell drew closer, she saw that they were actually regiments of ravens going through their military drills. They were the closest thing King Coyote had to an army; for as one of the ravens had told her, after he had stolen the eleven keys from around her neck,

Castles, gardens, gold, and jewels

Contentment signify, for fools

Like Princess Nell; but those

Who cultivate their wit

Like King Coyote and his crows

Compile their power bit by bit

And hide it places no one knows.

King Coyote did not preserve his power by armed might but by cleverness, and sentinels were the only army he needed, information his only weapon.

As she galloped the final miles to the gate, wondering whether her legs and back would hold out, a thin steam of black issued from a narrow portal high in one of the floating stockades, thickened into a transparent ball, and dove toward her like a plunging comet. She could not help flinching from the illusion of mass and momentum, but, a stone's throw above her head the cloud of ravens parted into several contingents that whirled around and struck from several directions, converging on her, passing around her so closely that the wind from their rattling wings blew her hair back, finally reforming into a disciplined group that returned to its stockade without a look back. Apparently she had passed the inspection. When she reached the mighty gate, it was standing open for her, and no one was guarding it. Princess Nell rode into the broad streets of King Coyote's castle.

It was the finest place she had ever seen. Here gold and crystal were not hidden away in the King's treasury but were used as building materials. Green and growing things were everywhere, for King Coyote was fascinated by the secrets of nature and had sent his agents to the farthest reaches of the world to bring back exotic seeds. The wide boulevards of King Coyote's city were lined with trees whose arching limbs closed over the ashlars to form a rustling vault. The undersides of the leaves were silver and seemed to cast a gentle light, and the branches were filled with violet and magenta bromeliads the size of kettles, making a sweet sharp smell, aswarm with ruby-throated hummingbirds and filled with water where tiny fluorescent frogs and beetles lived.

The Messenger's Route was marked with polished brass plates set among the paving-stones. Princess Nell followed it down the grand boulevard, into a park that encircled the city, and then onto a rising street that spiraled around the central promontory. As the horse took her toward the clouds, her ears popped again and again, and from each curve in the road she enjoyed a sweeping view over the lower city and into the constellation of floating stockades where the raven sentinels soared, coming and going in flights and squadrons, bringing news from every corner of the empire.

She rode by a place where King Coyote was adding on to the castle; but instead of an army of stonemasons and carpenters, the builder was a single man, a portly gray-bearded fellow puffing at a long slender pipe, carrying a leather bag on his belt. Arriving at the center of the building site, he reached into his bag and drew out a great seed the size of an apple and pitched it into the soil. By the time this man had walked back to the spiral road, a tall shaft of gleaming crystal had arisen from the soil and grown far above their heads, gleaming in the sunlight, and branched out like a tree. By the time Princess Nell lost sight of it around the corner, the builder was puffing contentedly and looking at a crystalline vault that nearly covered the lot.