Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

11

"YOU'RE TELLING ME that this terrible news is not true?" Antonin Kestrel, the unlikely prime minister of Slipstream's new government, glared up and down the table. "That it's a lie?"

Leal Maspeth nodded at the prime minister, who sat at the head of the table in Chaison Fanning's surprisingly small dining room. "He was alive when I left him," she said. "The stories out of Abyss are simply untrue."

"But why should we believe you, and not the government of Abyss?"

"Because," she said with a winning smile, "I know where he is. We can pick him up and you can ask him yourself whether he's alive."

From its position ringed by empty dishes, water jugs, and bottles in the center of the table, Leal's now-inert doll watched Kestrel curse and rub his lean chin.

Leal kept glancing at the doll while she talked--whether in embarrassment, or in hope that it might rise and speak, Keir couldn't tell. It faced Kestrel as a strange kind of centerpiece; flanking Kestrel down the sides of the table were Leal, the Fannings, Antaea, and Keir, who felt as out of place as the doll.

Part of that was feeling underdressed; they'd had only a day to prepare for this meeting, and so he wore the livery of a junior naval officer, minus any badge of rank or affiliation. The admiral himself was in a white dress uniform that looked carved rather than sewn. Antaea Argyre, whom Keir had seen before only in leather and trousers, was displaying her cleavage in a gold gown. The dress was gorgeous, but she obviously wasn't comfortable in it; here, Venera had her outclassed. The admiral's wife had squeezed into a long slinky black number made of a material so thin that Keir found his eyes drifting despite himself to trace every muscle and curve of her glorious body. She awoke something buried in him, a startling excitement; but he had no time to think about it right now.

Compared with the other women, Leal Maspeth looked dowdy in brown slacks and a white top. Dresses and skirts were admittedly rare in Virga (in some countries, he'd heard, only prostitutes would wear an article of clothing that was so revealing in freefall). While Slipstream clearly allowed them, Maspeth was just as clearly not used to seeing them, much less wearing one. She, too, kept surreptitiously goggling at Venera and Antaea.

Chaison Fanning half-rose. "Mr. Prime Minister, I know this is a lot to take in, and my apologies again for dragging you away from the opera. We've only just learned many of these details ourselves; in fact, we're not done yet, but the conversation had gotten to a point where I thought it best to bring you in." The delay had cost them an hour, but Fanning had been insistent that they wait. With no safe topics of conversation, the time had dragged as they sipped their coffees and stared at one another--but Chaison had kept them in line, glaring around the table like a disciplinary father.

"Here's where we stand," he said now. "Item one: We have learned that foreigners have made the offer of an alliance to all the humans in Virga."

It was Leal Maspeth's tale that had convinced Fanning to call in the prime minister. Granted, her story alone would have been enough to bring the house down in any decent theater, especially the revelation about the existence of other spheres like Virga. It had been hard for her to drag the Fannings past that realization, and now the admiral demanded that she do it again for Kestrel. When she finished, Kestrel steepled his hands, scowled at her, and said only, "You're telling me that they brought this to us first, instead of taking it to the Guard?"

Maspeth raised her chin defiantly--an admirable posture she was clearly unused to. "Good," said Kestrel. "Go on."

Venera Fanning was nodding. "If you'd gone to the Guard you would have been placing yourself at their mercy. I wouldn't have done it."

"Item two," Fanning said now; he looked every inch the bureaucrat as he ticked off another finger. "The Guard seem to be divided about what to do. Even worse, they seem to have been caught napping by the offer."

Now it was Antaea's turn to throw in what she knew about Jacoby Sarto's serpentine cousin Inshiri, and her apparent alliance with forces from outside Virga. Kestrel looked skeptical, but surprisingly, Venera sprang to Antaea's assistance. "I can vouch for this," she said. "My own people have seen increasing civilian traffic to the tourist center at the walls of Virga, and also to the place where the Gates of Virga are supposed to be. Some kind of high-level governmental liaison is going on between certain key governments in Virga and the Home Guard."

"I've heard nothing of this," said Kestrel, clearly disturbed.

"Slipstream would be the last place they'd include in their consultations," Antaea pointed out. "Sarto was quite clear about it, though; he told me they're visiting pilots and kings and presidents and making them some sort of proposal. I don't think it's the same as the one Leal's beasts are suggesting."

"What my people are seeing," ventured Venera, "is consistent with the view that the Guard's traditional allies outside Virga are putting political pressure on both the Guard and the ruling class of Virga itself."

"Pressure about what?" asked the prime minister.

"This is where we'd gotten to when I decided to bring you into the conversation," said Fanning. "Keir Chen? Can you show our guest what you showed us?"

He hopped up from his chair, nearly knocking it over. Damn--he still wasn't used to the gravity in Rush. Stepping around the main table, he went to a side table under a window, where a white tablecloth draped Exhibit A. "On our way into Virga," he said to Kestrel, "we ran into some of these." With what he hoped was an appropriate flourish, he pulled the tablecloth away, revealing the inert knife-ball that had fixed itself to Sarto's ship. Kestrel swore and did knock his own chair over as he stood up.

"What the hell is that?" He came around to look at it, and as he did, Keir described the gigantic invasion fleet waiting in the frigid blackness just beyond the world's skin. "These are the tiniest motes compared to those vessels," he pointed out.

"You found these in an abandoned city, you say?" Kestrel ran his fingertip along one of the thing's blades. "I know that traditionally, monsters hang around empty places for no apparent reason--and I've always assumed that the lack of a decent food supply in crypt clouds and abandoned town wheels explained why said monsters are not more plentiful. But you say they guarded a door. If these things were scouts--pickets waiting for a signal..."

Antaea was nodding. "After the outage, my sister and I fought beasts a lot like those ones," she said. "There's all sorts of eggs and seeds and dormant dragons slumbering among the icebergs of the world's wall. The Guard and their precipice moths patrol the wall, rooting them out where we find them. Where they find them ... Candesce keeps them at bay, so when the outage happened, thousands of them woke up, and they came in. The dagger-balls at the city aren't just aimlessly hanging around there; they're waiting for an opportunity ... waiting for another outage."

"And that," said Fanning, "means we have an item four: Some enemy of our world is waiting to pounce if we let our guard down." He glanced at his wife and said, "In large part, this current crisis is my fault. In order to win a local war, I sent Venera and Hayden Griffin into Candesce. They caused the outage, which allowed me to win an important battle. But what we didn't know was that it also opened the door for the monsters Antaea and her people had to fight. And it seems to have encouraged those monsters. They've started trying different tactics to get in. This latest one seems to be diplomatic."

"--Backed up by an invasion force," Venera pointed out.

"Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "That's how diplomacy works."

"And anyway," Venera went on, "it wasn't our fault. We were manipulated by that bitch, Aubrey Mahallan. It was her idea to shut down the sun of suns--and she came from outside Virga."

"So." Chaison Fanning stood with his arms crossed; except for Kestrel, who was still examining the knife-ball, the rest of the dinner party was still seated.

"Item five," said Fanning, "and it's the most significant. We have little proof of any of these things. Worse, although there's rumors and wide-eyed legends galore about recent events, almost nobody in Virga has heard anything like the stories we've just traded. Most people still don't even know there's a universe beyond our own walls."

"My people don't believe it," agreed Maspeth. "They think Virga is the universe, and that it's always existed just as it is. They'd never believe in a threat to the whole world, especially one from outside."

"Yes," said Kestrel as he returned to his seat, "and while your story is interesting, Ms. Maspeth, I'm not compelled to believe it, either, on the strength of your word and this--" He leaned forward and plucked up her doll from the table. "--this figurine that you claim talks, but only to you, and only when you're conveniently outside of the world..."

Maspeth glared at him. "Proof is easy to get! Just send a ship to Serenity. The rest of our men should have been rescued by Keir Chen's people by now. And with them is Hayden Griffin--"

Kestrel held up a hand. "I'd be a fool not to at least try to verify your story. So the admiral will be sending the ship--although the logical thing to do would be tell the Guard about the situation at Serenity and go in there together."

"Ah," said Venera. "But how do we contact the Guard? They stay in the shadows. Antaea is the one and only Guardsman we've ever met, and even she's a pariah to them now. Mr. Prime Minister: Since you've been in power, has the Guard contacted you in any way?"

With obvious reluctance, he shook his head.

The admiral smiled slightly. "They might sit up and notice if we were to rescue not just Griffin, but their own men from Aethyr."

"A public handover would humiliate them," Kestrel pointed out. "I wouldn't do that--"

"--but we might threaten to," finished Venera with a smile.

Antaea shook her head. "They won't respond well to threats. You try to blackmail them and they'll make you disappear. They have the forces to do it and mop up the witnesses afterward. How do you think they've remained a legend all these centuries? Few people who've seen them ever tell."

"This isn't their problem anyway," Maspeth burst out. "The offer I'm carrying isn't for them, it's for the people of Virga!"

Antaea nodded. "Hear, hear!"

"We need to approach them, so we will," said Fanning. "But at the same time it's risky to keep what we've learned secret.

"So I say we don't."

Kestrel frowned.

Fanning seemed lost in thought; but after swirling his coffee for a moment he shot a rakish grin at his dinner guests.

"If Sarto's cousin Inshiri is doing diplomacy on the sly, and the Guard know no other way of doing it, then what we need to do is turn all this civilized backroom dealing into a public fight--and as nasty a one as we can manage. We hold a grand colloquy, to which we will invite all the heads of state, ambassadors, newspaper reporters, and gossips of Virga. We will accuse the Guard of outrageous things to draw them out. And at this colloquy, we will reveal all that we know.

"Twice in five years, some force within Artificial Nature has tried to gain entrance to Candesce. We're already at war. Let's bring that war to the doorsteps of every man, woman, and child in Virga--or at least, threaten to."

Kestrel's eyebrows had shot up, and he looked around the table in bemusement. Antaea was grinning openly, but that came as no surprise; but Venera Fanning was also nodding, as was Leal Maspeth. It seemed, for the moment, like Fanning's idea would carry the day.

"There's just one problem," Kestrel said loudly, "even assuming we find the proof you claim is out there. The problem is you can't control what people will do when they find out. What you're proposing is to let go completely of any control of the situation we might have had!"

Fanning shrugged. "And how much is that?" he said. "Next to none, right now."

Kestrel growled, but then nodded slowly. "Your plan has an interesting edge to it, anyway. So as our chief strategist, what do you propose we do next?"

The admiral clearly had a love for ticking things off his fingers, as he did it again now: "One, we gather our proof, which means recovering Hayden Griffin from Aethyr and establishing better contact with Leal's new friends; two, we gather Slipstream's allies, call in favors, and make outrageous promises." He turned to Venera. "Dear, that will be your job. And three, we shake the Guard out of its den and demand a public accounting of what they're up to, to be given at a time and place of our choosing.

"We have two advantages right now," he went on, "that we can't afford to go to waste. Firstly, we have a secret door into Aethyr, and contact already made with allies there. And secondly, we have a way to prove that the Guard is lying, if we can return Hayden Griffin. He's a hero to the people, and the story out of Abyss that he's dead has taken all the wind out of the celebrations here."

Kestrel shrugged. "The backlash will be so much stronger when they find out they've been lied to."

Fanning fixed Antaea, Keir, and Leal in turn with a fierce look. "You've each undergone terrible experiences," he said, "in the course of bringing what you know to us on this day, in this place, and for this decision. I want you to understand that everything that's happened prior to tonight--the outage and the battles around it, the betrayals and deaths, our loss of loved ones and the ruin of Spyre and the fall of civilized life in Abyss--all these were just scene-setting. They merely laid the groundwork for what is to follow, and when history looks back on these years they will be footnotes; because what's really important is what's about to happen. --What we are about to do.

"If you're right about the scale of the threat we face, then what we thought were the adventures of our lives have merely been training, if you will, for our real tasks. Therefore, we will go forth from here, each in our own directions, to gather what we need in order to keep our whole world from vanishing the way that our comfortable lives, our illusions, our families and cities have already gone. We've lost so much, but can we even imagine what it will be like if we lose Virga itself?

"We'll go our ways, and gather information, proof, power, allies, and weapons. We will rendezvous back here in two months, and the grand colloquy will be called. And then, everyone who has been conspiring behind the backs of the people of Virga will be exposed. Then, the real history of our time will be made."

He folded his napkin neatly on the table and stood up. "I think that's it for dinner, then."

* * *

THIS CLOSE TO Slipstream's sun, nights were warm and evenings always sultry. As the sun's eight-hour maintenance shift approached, the sky dimmed through purple and mauve to pink and peach, and the vast cloudscapes became a mandala of shifting colors--endless tunnels of hue and sheen receding in any direction you looked.

There were various places around the Fanning estate where one could pause to watch this fabulous display unfold; one was a tall recessed window, half-curtained, at the end of the attic corridor containing the guest apartments. Keir sat in the window box, his arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees. Fireworks were starting now that the light was dim enough. The crowds--thousands of black dots on the air--had not lessened, and in fact as night came they were turning into stars: each person or family group had brought its lantern and they were now lighting them.

Keir had sat down here because it was a private spot and the view was pretty (he had no comparable view from his guest apartment). As he watched the festivities, however, he caught himself musing that Slipstream's government had somehow managed to turn the return of freedom to an unjustly conquered vassal state into some sort of national triumph. The thought was intrusive--alien--and somehow disturbing. He shifted uncomfortably, as if his own body was a puppet, and he'd suddenly felt someone else tug on the strings. That thought about the cunning of Slipstream's government ... it was as if somebody else had thought it, using his own brain to do so.

He buried his face in his knees for a moment. It must be some effect of the de-indexing, or just shock from losing his dragonflies and his scry. Ever since he'd entered Virga he'd been having these strange flashes--thoughts that were somehow louder than his own thoughts; memories that felt like his but could not be. For instance, these skies felt familiar, as if he'd been in Virga before.

Maybe he had been.

It was hard to remember things without the help of scry, but he clearly recalled Maerta, at the door to Virga, telling him that he'd de-indexed himself. The term had a familiar ring to it, and normally he would simply query scry and the answer would pop into his head, as naturally as if it were his own thought. Scry was gone; so what did his primitive biological memory tell him about de-indexing?

He was racking his mind for clues when he heard voices. Cautiously, he drew himself farther into the window well. The sounds came from down the short flight of stairs that led off the attic; it was Chaison and Venera Fanning speaking.

He: "With all the excitement today I neglected to sign the papers commissioning some new officers. It's important for them, so I'm just going to walk up to the office and do it."

She: "All right, dear. I need to brief my agents on their new assignments, so I'll be in the lounge if you need me."

He: "Bye!"

She: "Bye."

There was a very long pause, during which Keir's thoughts drifted. The clouds outside reminded him of other sunset skies, mauve and pale green, of streaked clouds and a band of orange spanning half the horizon ... some planet's dusk sometime.

What was there, locked in his mind?

Quiet footsteps padded up the stairs, paused at the top, then moved down the hall. Keir peeked around the curtain and saw that it was Chaison Fanning, in his dress uniform, skulking.

Fanning paused at one of the doors, raised his hand, hesitated, then cursed under his breath and knocked. In the pause that followed he put his hands behind his back and leaned back to glance up and down the hallway. Keir ducked back and so did not see who answered the door, but he heard her gasp, and it was Antaea Argyre's voice.

The door thudded softly shut. Keir frowned out the window, but the frown kept twitching into a smile. His feelings hovered between embarrassment and an alien--but very dry--feeling of amusement. He thought about what would happen if Venera Fanning were to come up here now, and found that alien mind intruding again. This time, it clearly held one idea:

This is not a good place to be right now.

At the far end of the hallway, a small set of steps led up to another door; he'd presumed when he saw it earlier that it led to the roof. Keir unwound himself from the window well and moved to it. As quietly as he could, he tried the latch. It opened.

Warm night air coiled around him; to his surprise, as he stepped onto the roof, he found himself among trees and flower beds. Though Slipstream's admiralty wheel was a pretty utilitarian place, the Fannings had managed to find space for a garden between two sloping roofs. Keir was grateful now for the night air and relative silence, and the feel of a warm breeze on his face.

The garden was lit by window and city light--the sky was a glittering tapestry of pinpricks and glowing squares. The air felt wonderful, so like that of a planet ... were it not for the subtle tug in his inner ear that told him he was slowly turning over and over with the whole admiralty wheel. He strolled through the garden, letting his fingers trail through the fronds of living things. He closed his eyes, and flashes of imagery came to him of things he could not remember ever having remembered: plains and forests; sun on his face; and the water of lakes and streams swirling around his ankles, his waist ...

"Stop." He opened his eyes and saw that he'd strayed close to the edge of the roof. City lights and dove-gray scraps of cloud raced by below him.

He turned to find Leal Maspeth looking up at him. She was sitting on a verdigrisy copper box that jutted up out of the carefully tended flowers. She frowned at him. "It looked like you were about to walk off the roof."

"Maybe I was, Ms. Maspeth," he said ruefully. "I don't have a very good sense of where I am--without my dragonflies, you know..."

"Call me Leal."

"Leal ... I was just enjoying the feel of grass."

"Yes, you're from beyond the world," she said. "I guess you wouldn't have touched grass before."

Surprised, he laughed. "Of course we have grass. On planets..." He paused, troubled, then said, "But we make worlds, little ones, you know, and spin them for gravity. Ten kilometers across, a hundred ... lots of room for trees and forests."

She smiled. "Of course."

There was a quiet pause. He looked around for someplace to sit, but Maspeth had the only available perch. Noticing what he was doing, she bumped over a bit and patted the surface next to her. "There's room."

Keir flushed, hoping she couldn't tell in the darkness. Sure he'd hesitated too long, he sat down and found the only way to stay on the box was to be thigh-to-thigh with her. She didn't seem to notice their hips touching, but leaned back, putting her hands behind her. He turned so he could continue to see her, and found her invitingly close.

She'd seemed old when he'd first met her, but maybe what he'd been seeing had been the weight of responsibility burdening her at the time. She was definitely older than he--maybe by ten years--but at dinner he'd caught himself exchanging glances with her that, at times, had the feel of youthful conspiracy to them.

Pinioned by her frank gaze--and acutely feeling the lack of helpful suggestions from his scry--he struggled for something clever to say. Finally he noticed that she was holding a thick, old-fashioned book made of the flat leaves they called "pages." A quill pen jutted out of it. "What's that?" he blurted.

She waggled the heavy volume. "A navigator's log book. I'm writing down my story, at last! I wasn't sure I would ever get to."

She sat up and he took it from her gingerly. The thing was floppier than he'd expected, and he nearly dropped it. The pages were all blank, except for the first few that were covered with fine, looping handwriting in black ink.

Keir had seen such things in sims and other virtual entertainments, but he'd never held an actual book in his hand, nor traced actual handwriting with his fingers. He did so now and found that his touch was reverent. This object had awoken some deep feeling inside him, a surprising respect.

"You learned all you know," he said, "from these."

"Oh, don't put it that way!" She laughed. "I'm already intimidated enough at the thought of writing my own."

He returned it, and smiled at the glittering night. "You must be glad to be back."

"Well." Now she frowned. "I'm not exactly 'back.' This place isn't my home."

"But it's Virga."

"If I threw you to some star across the universe, could you say you felt at home because it wasn't Virga?"

"No, but--" He saw her point, but continued, anyway. "If Artificial Nature was there, it would feel much the same as anywhere else I've lived."

"Why? Is it really all the same everywhere?"

He shrugged. "Seems so ... The admiral wants me to go back. Says I should 'liaise' with the Renaissance when they pick up the rest of your men."

"Oh, that's good. So are you happy to be going home?"

"I told him no." Her eyes widened, but she said nothing. At this moment his lack of scry was a powerful ache, because he really didn't know how much or how little to tell her. "I can't go back," he heard himself say. "Something was happening to me there--something awful ... I, I don't feel right, like this isn't my skin..." He pulled at the flesh of his forearm. "I think I lost my memory, but I seem to think I was once older..."

She looked startled. "Older?" she asked. There was surprise in her voice, but concern as well, and he relaxed a bit. "Was it during what we call the outage?"

"No, we came here after that." He realized he shouldn't have said that, but it was too late.

"That's not very long ago." She leaned back again, her lips pursed and brow furrowed. "You've only spent the last couple of years of your life in Aethyr. Which means you spent most of it somewhere else. Are you telling me you don't remember any of that?"

"N-no ... the memories are there. They're just not in ... what do you call it? Chronological order. They're jumbled up, like those spy's photos Venera threw on the table." And there were far too many of them, too; but he didn't say that.

"Keir--you said you were once older. How old do you think you really are?"

He shook his head.

"You look somewhere between sixteen and nineteen," she said. "When I met you I thought you were younger. You look like you've put on a year or two since then."

"I was getting shorter!" He'd jumped to his feet and started to walk, but there was nowhere to walk to in this tiny garden. He paced to the stairwell, then back to the edge of the roof. "The day I met you, I'd proved it. I was getting shorter." He raised a shaking hand to wipe at his eyes. "What was that? What's going on?"

"Did you tell the admiral about this?"

Her voice was quiet and steady. He turned to find she was still seated, but leaning forward, book on knees, all her attention on him. Keir shook his head.

"Did he insist you should go back?"

"Y-yes. But I can't." He scowled at the pretty night. "I'll run away first."

She stood up. "I'll speak to him. He wants me to go, too--to bring his diplomats to the emissary's people. I told him he didn't need me and that anyway I'd done my part. He insisted until I pointed out that if he lost me, he'd lose his only connection to them." She held up the book and grinned. "I said, better that I stay here and write down everything that happened, so at least there's a record. The emissary's perfectly capable of guiding its people to their home without me. So that's what's happening."

Leal walked to his side and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "You see, all things are possible."

Keir took a deep breath, and let it out. He smiled at her. "Thanks." She nodded, half-smiling.

"I'm still a stranger here, though." He looked down, past ledge and shingle, down the sheer walls of the admiralty to where on any world-bound building, grass or stone or soil would begin. There was only air, and soaring clouds half-lit by the city glow. "I can't even read your letters."

"How lucky for you, then," said Leal, "that I'm a teacher currently lacking a student. I can teach you to read."

"I don't want to be a burden."

"Hmm." She tapped her chin with a fingertip. "Well, then, why don't you tell me everything you know about Artificial Nature? And the Renaissance? I'll add it to my book. You may know more than you think; and what you know could be more useful to us than you realize."

The first rule of the Renaissance was to keep what they were doing secret. --Then again, he'd already given most of it away before they'd even left Aethyr.

He smiled wryly. "It's a deal."