Talan moves on four tiers, and each has its own craft and its own technology. Where the craft is Magitech, the kind matters: Arcanotech is formula-built, reproducible, and industrial, the thing a merchant means when he says "Magitech", and the chaos country of the Basogur, the Blackened Lands, and the Darklands scrambles its precision. Occultech runs on the story wound into its making; every piece is partly its own, it resists being built by the hundred, and it holds where Arcanotech fails. See Magic for the schools behind both.

The Magitrain is the public face of Magitech: scheduled passengers and freight, and most mortals of Talan have ridden one. The Elden built rail-bound acceleration first, the Lost-Era kingdoms and the Golden Empire knew it could be done, and the Order of Steam built the working engine and the long lines at the end of the Dark Era, out of its own Elden excavation in the volcanic belt. The engine is steam-and-rune: boiler and rune-array working as one machine, the Order's Arcanotech in its plainest form. The Order still makes most of the rolling stock on the continent. The long lines follow older ground: in the north the Elden corridors, in the south the Golden Empire's roads.

The rail runs as two networks that do not link, split by the Basogur Jungle. The northern is confederated and many-handed, the Order's licensed lines foremost among the local ones, and its traffic gathers at a single hub that grew by trade-gravity at one of the flatter, cheaper rail cities. Lurrath is the famous exception: the magirail runs a spur to the railhead at Harrate, Lurrath's gate, and the stone-oxen carry everything the last miles in. The southern network centres on Merkavar, where the lines converge.

The Order itself sits outside the network it supplies. Its country is ringed by mountains and opens only onto its own bay, and whatever rail it runs inside the ring stays there; its rolling stock ships out through Rika Tikur and the Dreaming Cape, crosses by Lautara water and road, and joins the lines at Merkavar. Eldara, west of the ring on the Midarra shore, keeps its own single line to Merkavar through one narrow valley.

The Order licenses the lines and sets freight terms, and its autumn reduced-fare freight window has held the same two weeks for forty years. Consortia build and run lines, like the one bending the Northern line toward Veidrath's edge a clan's consent at a time; chartered companies run trunks, like the Everbright Line across Harro Distiratsua; landed houses hold stretches of road and rail; and the rails are worked by the HRA, the Halfling Railworkers' Association, with a branch at every major junction and its headquarters at Bellhalt in Itsasalda.

The oldest roads still in use are the Golden Empire's: paved, milestone-marked, and the skeleton the southern rail later followed. The Dark Era made every road deadly, and Uthra coalesced from the prayers of those who walked them anyway; his worship is still wayside, a cairn at the trailhead, a coin where the road forks. Harro's Lamphold houses came out of the dark owning the roads they had kept lit, and still spend the way-tolls on the ways.

The long road goes through the Basogur once: eleven days from Greenmouth, the Kaosadaemi gate, to the Oihandar Red Tusks' gate by Veidrath, kept on schedule by the Roadwards. Freight goes on sledges, the nights are spent in the web-holds, the Vanara guide, and the road carries what no airship can lift. On the northern side the sea offers no way around: port towns on Villtur's coasts are few, most freeze in winter, and Fenurra's warm port on the Hafra is the exception.

The routes split by destination. For Veidrath and eastern Villtur the road is the short line, eleven or twelve days straight north from Greenmouth. A stillship lands on the wrong side of Villtur: a traveller would go west to Nashavel's Midarra shore by Vernua, cross the inner sea's eastern arm to a coast with hardly a port on it, and ride some nine hundred miles east through clan country, a Handing at every circuit; seven to ten weeks in all. A saltkeel up the Hafra's east coast would make the distance in a week and find no harbour near Veidrath to unload at. For western Villtur, Baratalda, and the trade between the two rail networks, the Midarra is the road.

Other roads carry their own names. Sugeiturri's northern road, where "you'll never sleep cold", runs from hot-spring town to hot-spring town. At Crossroads three roads broaden into one sprawl of caravanserai. Lurrath's masons cut roads meant to outlast the kingdoms that use them, and raise the roads of half the continent. In Villtur, a road is whatever a clan agrees to, and a traveller crosses by the Handing, clan to clan on the strings. Haraour's road runs about 150 miles west across No Man's Land from a halt on Eldara's line to Pukawai, four to six days, guests in and garden goods out; beyond Pukawai, the Alaloa runs as a road of tunnel beside the river through the mountain ring, walked in and floated out.

The Itsasalda river-trade is the working spine of the southern network's water side: stillships land at the Midarra coast, and goods go on to Merkavar by river-craft or caravan-train, where the lake is the street. Brauogi's old houses and Lioaru's River Duchies hold the river-trade of their countries; Vernua's Maors own the quays, the ferries, and the roads over the Hegandi; Sombral's wine-barges come down both rivers all night. Most of Talan's overland trade passes through Lautara's caravan network at some point.

The beasts are regional. Haldmark's Kholo breed the stone-oxen for Lurrath's portage and the continent's heavy work; Villtur's clans ride the Etxaber, which carries a household; the hunting peoples keep their bond-beasts; Fenurra rides direwolves; Lioaru keeps its Stokkul mounts; Valreka travels on its sand-whales; and in Haraour's tunnel the blind huki tow the empty boats upstream.

The sand has its own craft. Galdua Jendea crosses its dune sea by night on sandsails, sail-sledges that run rock to rock on the night wind, Stokkul-drawn where it fails, each rock a night's run from the next; only Valreka crosses by day.

The Hafra is the saltwater sea around Talan, ending at a clean line against the Cloud Sea; nothing lies on its far shore. The Midarra is the freshwater inner sea, rarely violent and occasionally strange: in a Villveder, magic turns unreliable across a stretch of open water and crews steer by eye until it lifts. At the Midarra's mouth the salt and the sweet meet along the Gazmuga, the Line, and do not mix.

Hulls divide by the water they are built for. A saltkeel is brine-sealed and deep-keeled for the open Hafra; a stillship is lighter and shallower, for the calm inner sea. Each sails the other water badly, so cargo between the seas changes hulls at Gesalkai on Balatur Erui, across the Weighhouse scales. Wood-and-sail makes up most of both fleets; Magitech hulls are the wealthy upgrade; Occultech ships work the cursed waters, and the Adventurers' Guild keeps a small fleet of them. The Order of Steam's boiler-hulls, iron ships that need no forest, are Arcanotech in its newest form, and Three Pines hears the promise in them. The Red Dominion's carriers hold the hold that keeps, the imperial-pattern hold of the Golden Empire's ships, which makes fresh water from salt, keeps food, and lands a cargo as it was loaded; Saegate's yard copies it by rote into isiler hulls from Ontzola, and the Dominion's coast and short hauls go in home-built hulls.

The northern Hafra is worked by arc ships, saltkeels built for the ice: a sheathed bow and a rounded hull that rides up onto the pack when it closes, sailing the loose ice in season with an ice-route guide aboard. A true icebreaker is Arcanotech, since sail cannot push a hull through solid ice and a boiler can: a heavy saltkeel with an iron-shod bow, costly and rare. Too few exist to hold the northern ports open through the winter, and a winter passage north is a charter for the rich or the desperate.

The standard Midarra crossing runs from Solkai in Tvisol to Rika Tikur and the Dreaming Cape, passing Frae City and the Twin Cities, some 1,900 miles: bulk cargo's road between north and south. Ferries run from Solkai to the Soul Tree, from Ferryhithe to Zuzental's Northern Isle, from Lua Lasai's coast to Jadrey, from Vernua to Nahaskel every morning, and from Ljosarn's hospice-quays every evening, each one part pilgrimage.

Every airship is Magitech, because flight is a Magitech property from the first plank. Most lift on Arcanotech rune-arrays and run on engines, the Order of Steam's standard line. The rarer Occultech airships carry a bound air elemental as lift and co-pilot, a working partnership; they are slower in fair weather and steadier where chaos scrambles the runes. Vindul builds the best hulls of both kinds and supplies the elementals, the Order builds most of the engines, House Eisenhart builds the armoured Ironwings and the Leviathan-class, the heavy capital airship that carries Ironwings in its hangar, and the Strix are the natural pilots.

Airships are rare over most of Talan and common over a few great cities, the god-cities above all. Frae City, the largest city on the continent, is the great airship port, its berths along the Rim on the tower-tops and dear to rent. Airships fly low, well below the high ranges, and route around the mountain groups, so a sky-route follows the passes and the open water much as a road does; the Order's own ships leave its mountain ring through the bay and fly out over the Midarra.

Over the Basogur, airships are the premium route for passengers and urgent freight: Arcanotech ships shake and drift in the jungle's uplift, Occultech ships fly it clean and charge for it, and a millstone is too heavy for any airship that will take one. Over Argia Esfera, ordinary ships cross in the morning or the dusk, and only the Occultech noonships fly through the killing noon.

Masts and moorings stand at Frae City, at Merkavar's several ports, on Sombral's highest roof with the week's reading chalked beside it, at Lurrath's gate-towers, where nothing fast crosses the threshold, at Veidrath's docking-tower, at Lograth, and under Skysail's islets, where the airships hang on lines. Within cities the sky carries its own traffic: Haizava's svifs and windrifts on the wind canals, and Lograth's Arteries, gondolas on glyph-routed lines.

Wings are Galdua Jendea's gliders, launched off the rocks' high ledges by magic and carried on the noon thermals over the sand: the one craft on Talan that rides the killing noon instead of avoiding it. They carry light loads only: letters, the urgent, and adventurers in a hurry.

Flying mounts exist, and they are rare, regional, and very elite: each kind belongs to the place and people that breed or bond it, a king or a prince may keep one where a common noble does not, and anywhere else one overhead is a marvel.

The Cloud Sea bears no weight. An ordinary hull that crosses the line sinks fast, and nothing flies over the white: an airship's lift fails above it and the ship goes down into the vapour. A cloudship rides it. Its hull is built from two schools of Magitech at once, most often Arcanotech with Occultech, whose binding lets the ship remember the way across a sea with no landmarks, its routes kept as song. A cloudship sits on the white, sails it, and anchors in it, and the same hull sails water, which is why the very wealthy keep them as pleasure vessels. Cloudships are an Adventurer-Era craft, the first built in a Vindul yard around 2300 MR, and every cloudship built on Talan carries silver from Auran in its binding: the Cloud Sea's own light, which lets the white bear a hull.

A cloud-quay is a berth where the Cloud Sea meets rock, and only two islands of Talan have such a shore. The Bridgelands of the Emerald Isles, off Villtur's east coast, are the landing: every cloud-quay on the continent stands there, and Arcanotech bridges carry caravans across the gaps. Jadrey, Lua Lasai's exclave off Egulon's south-east coast, keeps no quay and no mast by island law, and a quay there would make it the second landing on Talan.

Beyond lie Sortalde, east across the Cloud Sea, which builds no cloudships of its own and receives Talan's at its outer petals, and the Red Empire's home continent to the west, whose Iron Tide crosses in warship-cloudships and comes down onto the Hafra as a navy. Over Balatur Erui runs the Riseway, the lane every chart marks and no keel uses, where the skywhales climb.

Talan is about 3,500 miles across in either direction and some 4,000 from its north-west coast to its south-east; the Midarra alone runs about 2,650 miles end to end. The working figures below are the ones factors, pilots, and guides plan by.

In practice: an airship from Merkavar to Sombral spends about thirty hours aloft, leaving at noon and landing at the next dusk; the Thekkavar express runs from Thekkavar to Ljosarn, some 800 miles, in about a day; a stillship takes thirteen to nineteen days across the Midarra, and an Arcanotech hull eight to ten.

The Basogur splits the rail at the continent's waist, and Talan crosses it four ways.