Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

5

MAYBE THIS INSTITUTIONAL mint-green paint had once made the offices of the Abyss Ministry of the Interior inviting. Now, cracked and begrimed by the ages and lit only by flickering gaslight, it was merely depressing.

"It's an honor, truly an honor," the midlevel official behind the desk was saying. (Was he a subminister? An attache? After so many referrals and re-referrals, she couldn't recall.) "Always an honor to meet a member of the legendary Virga Home Guard, Ms.--?"

"Argyre. Antaea Argyre." She had promised Crase--not to mention herself--that she wouldn't use that name, or this uniform, again. It was a measure of Antaea's desperation that she was here today, smiling and shaking the hand the subminister (or attache) held out. She'd skulked here through alleys and understreet tunnels, and changed into the uniform in a downstairs washroom; still, Crase might yet discover that she was continuing to impersonate a member of the Home Guard. For that reason, and because this was her last lead, she would have to leave Sere after today.

The subminister gestured for her to sit, and for a moment there was silence punctuated by the clatter of typewriter keys in the outer office, and the rumble of a passing trolley in the street below. Then he held up the forms Antaea had filled out in the other room.

"Let me tell you, it's always a delight to meet a member of your race, Ms. Argyre." She did not return his smile this time.

"I'm just a little surprised," he went on.

"Oh?" She kept her expression neutral, and leaned forward indulgently.

"Well, I only mean," he said with a shrug, "that when your compatriots, ah, visited us a few months back, they demanded--I mean, requested--all our records pertaining to the incident you're referring to. The one in which the fugitive, this 'Leal Maspeth,' was centrally involved. You already know everything we know," he finished. Then he steepled his hands and smiled at her again.

"Maybe," she said to buy time. "But our copies have flown halfway around the world by now. It would take me months to lay my hands on them, and, well, I'm here, aren't I?"

He sighed. "I'd like to help, really I would. But it's not up to me. Your request is unusual enough, and, frankly, sensitive enough that it will have to be vetted at the highest levels. I can send it on--" He paused at a knock on the door. "Pardon me." He stood and went to open an inside door a crack. Gaslight shone off his bald spot as he bent to say, "What is it?"

Someone started to explain something through the narrow opening, but the subminister interrupted with a scoffing sound.

"What do you mean, Loll's back?"

There were more mumbled words; then, with sudden energy, the subminister turned and said, "I'm sorry, Officer Argyre, I'm going to have to cut this meeting short. Something's come up. If you will--?" He indicated the other door.

"Ah," she said. "Of course. Thank you for your time."

He ducked through the interior door and Antaea heard him talking to someone on the other side. She leaped out of her chair and put her ear to the door. Loll. That name had come up again and again in connection with Leal's case. He was an important man, by all accounts, and he'd disappeared at the same time as she had.

The thick imported wood of the door muffled the voices; she couldn't hear what was being said. They seemed to be moving away. There was no keyhole through which to peek; she couldn't just risk following them.

She eyed the window. It was narrow, there more for ventilation than the view, which meant it opened. She pushed it up and verified that there was a ledge outside. With only a glance back, she climbed out onto it and edged along to the next window.

Antaea didn't glance down, but even if she had the view wouldn't have daunted her. She was used to the yawning vistas of gravity-free air. Even if a fall from this ledge would be fatal, she had long ago become conditioned against a fear of heights.

She knelt carefully, holding the slick bricks with her fingertips. Now she could hear the voices better.

"--a city, he says." That was the voice of the man who'd interrupted the subminister. "Two hundred miles from the Site."

"And he was alone? What about the ships--and the Home Guard escort?"

"Something's not right," continued the subminister. "That was a Home Guard inspector in my office just now! Asking about Maspeth. Haven't they debriefed Loll themselves?"

"He slipped by them! Got himself smuggled through the Site on one of our regular supply ships. He was flying some little one-person aircraft, seems he was able to sneak on to one of our cruisers without the Guard noticing."

"Well, obviously the Guard suspects something. And all of these resources he's asking for?" scoffed the subminister. "TC-34s? And he's fast-tracking the gravity ships? How are we going to pay for all this?"

There was a pause. Then the other man said, "Would you rather ignore the request? See what happens?"

The subminister cursed, and then Antaea heard the scraping of chairs against the floor. The voices continued but were moving away again.

A glance through the glass showed that this smaller office was now empty. Antaea climbed back through the window she'd come out of, and left the subminister's office by the correct door. She was thinking hard, and ignored the gaze of the secretaries in the outer office as she stalked past them. No doubt there would be whispers once she'd left, or maybe even loud conversation: a winter wraith had visited them! Who cared; she had more important things to think about.

She didn't forget to change out of her uniform in the main-floor washroom. People in the lobby stared, but no one accosted her as she passed them. She kept her eyes forward and acknowledged no one.

She was out of options. All her money was gone, and her only possessions in the world were the clothes on her back, and the jet bike currently parked at Rowan Wheel's dock a mile overhead. All manner of revelatory conversations and events might be taking place in the offices above, but she had no access to any of them. There was only so much ledge-balancing and skulduggery a girl could do on her own.

She stopped at the taxi stand to think. The ragged remains of protest posters hung in strips from the lamppost next to it. The secret service had been by again, evidently, but the poster-printers kept just a step ahead of them. Although the crudely printed papers were gone, she--and everybody else in the city--knew what they said. In big bold letters, they asked, "WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT LYING TO US?"

There was no proof that the Crier in the Dark had been destroyed, the broadsheets went on. No proof at all. If the government remained incompetent to deal with the clearly still-existent threat, then it should be replaced.

That made her smile, and then, after a glance around, she walked away from the taxi stand. Two blocks up the curve of the wheel she paused again, under the velvet-draped entrance of a grand hotel she could never have afforded to stay in, even when she did work for the Guard. The doorman scowled at her as she brought out the card she'd been thumbing in her pocket for days. As she made up her mind and walked up to the door, he put his arm out to block her.

"Are you sure you have business here?" he asked in an all-too-familiar tone.

"Is this the Stormburl Hotel?" she asked sweetly.

"It is, but--"

"Then I have business here." She pushed past him and into the building.

"I'm sorry, miss, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to--"

"It's all right," said a voice behind them. "She's expected."

The clerk ducked his head; and Antaea turned, and there stood the man she'd met on the airship.

Jacoby Sarto smiled and put out his hand for her to shake. "I was just on my way to dinner. Would you like to join me?"

* * *

THE RESTAURANT WAS located about a mile from Sere's biggest town wheel. It was an ornately carved wooden centrifuge about a hundred feet across. It rotated slowly to produce just enough gravity to make dining pleasant in the gaslit gardens that paved its inner surface. You could watch the kitchen workers pick and clean your fabulously expensive vegetables and herbs; if the duck Jacoby ordered was killed on the spot, too, they did it somewhere out of sight. It was the greens that mattered, because in a sunless country like Abyss, most vegetables were imported.

He watched Antaea watch the city. She was beautiful in a striking and unsettling way; he'd been unable to keep himself from glancing surreptitiously at her as they flew here. Her ears, nose, and chin were tiny, but her eyes were huge. Jacoby had heard of winter wraiths, those members of a genetically engineered offshoot of humanity whose features were designed to mesmerize ordinary humans. Antaea Argyre was certainly mesmerizing, but he had done his research since their meeting at the capital bug; he knew she was a capable and ruthless killer.

Now she turned back to him. "I'm not really sure why I'm here," she admitted.

"You're here because you think I may know things," he said with a mild shrug. "Maybe I do, and maybe I'm willing to share. How's that for a start?"

She eyed him warily. "But what's the price?"

"Well, there may not be one," he admitted, "if your interests are as aligned with mine as I think they are."

"Explain."

He suppressed a smile at her imperious tone. He was used to dealing with people who assumed command the way she was attempting to. His reply was to lean forward and spill a sheaf of photographs and reports onto the tabletop.

"I was born, raised, and spent almost my entire life in the nation of Sacrus, on Spyre," he said as he slid the pictures around with one finger. Argyre showed no sign of recognizing the name, so he tamped down on his irritated pride and explained: "Spyre was one of the ancient places, a metal cylinder twelve kilometers across and twenty long. Open at the ends, of course; it flew in the airs near Candesce, at the center of the world. Its inner surface was sown with countries like Sacrus--some small as a building, some miles in extent. All of them thousands of years old. Older than any of these places." He waved contemptuously at the rust- and verdigris-rimmed wheels of Sere.

"One day," he continued, "a woman from this outside world drifted in and miraculously survived her fall onto Spyre's inner surface." His fingers continued to move the pictures, but he was no longer looking at them. "Shortly after Venera Fanning's arrival--" He pretended not to notice as Argyre started at the name, nearly spilling her drink. "--Spyre fell apart. Literally. Sacrus, its ancient neighbors and rivals, all of them were ripped asunder and scattered to the six winds."

Antaea Argyre leaned back, obviously considering what to say. "From what I've heard of Venera Fanning, that doesn't surprise me in the least."

"I lost my home--my whole nation," Jacoby went on. "I'm an exile now, forced to make my living by means that are, frankly, sordid compared to what I once was."

"If it's revenge you're after," said Argyre, "all I can say is that I have no way of getting you close to Fanning."

Sarto crossed his arms and glowered at the photos. "I was born and raised to believe in the sanctity, not to mention the necessity, of revenge," he admitted. "But revenge against whom? Or, in this case, what?"

"Ah."

"Venera Fanning trampled all our traditions and values, and then blew up the world," said Jacoby as he handed some of the pictures to her. "But I'd be lying if I said those traditions and values didn't heartily deserve to be trampled. The world's a better place now that Sacrus is gone, and that's probably true for the rest of Spyre, too. --What do you see?" he said of the photos.

Jacoby watched Argyre's mounting puzzlement as she shuffled through the images. "What is this: an eye?" She held up a photo that showed nothing but a white circle surrounded by black.

"That," said Jacoby, "would be entirely visible from where you're sitting, if this godforsaken country had a sun to light it. It's a photograph of the outer skin of Virga, an area only a hundred miles or so away from this very spot. The picture was taken through a telescope by ... a friend of mine. That circle is a span of Virga's outer wall. This picture was shot in infrared, so the cold parts are black."

"Then..." She frowned in confusion. "This circle is an area of the world's skin that is warm?"

He nodded. "It's hundreds of miles across. And in the past few months, practically the entire Home Guard fleet has converged on a spot right at its center."

She blinked at him rapidly--a disconcerting sight given her huge eyes. "Really." She turned the other pictures over. "This?" Blurred and speckled with distance was an image of square blockhouses encircling a ragged black patch. "Is this ... a hole?"

"I wouldn't speculate on that," he said. "But that's what's at the very center of the circle. You can see there's ships clustering around that spot like flies on--"

"Yes, I can see that," she said. "But--" Her fabulous eyes widened even further. "The Site," she muttered. "He said he'd come from the Site..." She glanced up guiltily, but it was plain he'd heard her. Jacoby watched her struggle with a decision.

"A local cabinet minister went missing a while ago," she said. "During the monster scare. Now he's back. Back from somewhere on the other side of 'the Site.'"

"Ah..." Jacoby smiled as the waiter set down their appetizers. "I came here because I'm chasing the ones who are ultimately responsible for the destruction of Spyre. Care to tell me why you're here?"

She bit her lip, but they both knew there was no going back now--and he already thought he knew, from the research his spies had done on her.

"I'm looking for a friend of mine," she said. "Her name is Leal Maspeth; she was being groomed to become dean of the university's history department when she suddenly disappeared. The official reports say she defied the government over something to do with the monster. She supposedly stole state secrets and--this is utterly unbelievable--burned one of her coworkers to death in his own home. Then she fled into the arms of the monster itself. Well, maybe it's true. Maybe she went somewhere..." She paused, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth, and gazed at the photo lying between them. "Two hundred miles..."

Jacoby nearly dropped his own fork this time, and damn her, she noticed. "What's that?" he said irritably.

"I overheard a couple of clerks talking," she said. "One said that Loll had come from some kind of city that was two hundred miles from the Site."

Jacoby tried to act nonchalant as he dug through the papers, but he was sure his eagerness must be obvious as he brought out a different picture. "Look at this one," he said, tossing it down in front of her. Argyre snatched it up.

While she examined the picture, he scowled at the flamboyantly lit towers of Sere. "There's a certain kind of self-delusion particular to people who've lived in peace for too long," he said, half to himself. "Right up until the day that the enemy swoops in to torch their wheel, they think that their problems are the biggest problems in the world, and their power the biggest power. I've spent my whole life looking into the eyes of those people after I had taken away everything they had ... and then, quite suddenly, I lost my homeland in exactly the same way. Spyre, Sacrus, and even Virga itself ... they're just pawns in a larger conflict, aren't they? I know that now. You know. But who else really understands? It seems to me that Leal Maspeth does--or did."

Argyre held up the photo. "This is some city somewhere? What's the connection?"

He nodded. "The ancient city of Serenity. A dead place now, choked with icebergs, frozen into the outer wall of Virga like a corpse in winter ... and right at the edge of that mysterious warm circle." The image showed dark towers on a flat plain, ensnared by rivers of ice. "In fact, it's precisely two hundred miles from the Site."

"Aha! So maybe this is the real place, then--the monster's home..." She stopped as she saw Jacoby shaking his head.

"My people have cruised by the place several times. There's no ships docked there, no signs of life at all. The Guard haven't gone near Serenity. It may be that they don't even know it's there, it may be that they're just distracted by whatever it is they've found at the center of the circle."

"Maybe they're about to become interested," she said.

"You'd think. It's strange, though--my men spent much of the morning watching the rest of the Abyssal fleet set sail. Their trajectory will take them straight to what you've called the Site--the center of the circle. If this cabinet minister came from Serenity, why aren't they going there?"

"How many men do you have, anyway?" she asked with a little smile.

"Oh, a few."

She snorted, then turned her attention back to the photo. "We could speculate about this all day," she pointed out. "Or we could go to this city of Serenity, and find out."

Jacoby picked up the photos and shuffled them and the rest of the papers back into the file folder. "There, you see?" he said. "It turns out our interests align after all."