Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

20

LEAL HAD GONE looking for Keir. She found Antaea instead. The wraith was walking slowly through the twilit flower beds behind the tables, her head down, her arms crossed. She looked up when Leal approached, but did not smile.

"Have you seen Keir?"

Antaea shook her head in a distracted way. Leal hesitated, but she was acutely aware of the Abyssal soldiers discreetly trailing her. She decided to leave Antaea alone. As she turned away, though, Antaea suddenly said, "What if it was a mistake?"

"What?" Leal took another look at her. Antaea's eyes were red and she stood now in a crestfallen posture. "What mistake?"

"The emissary. Did you ever think ... it might be lying?"

Impatience flared in Leal. "Antaea, I saw the urgency, the way it was trying to communicate. I went to its home world--"

"I've seen other worlds, too!" Antaea stepped closer in sudden, unexpected anger. "Lots of us have! The Guard travel outside Virga all the time and we never met your 'emissary.' Were we lied to so well, all of us, century after century? Tell me, Leal, which is harder to believe? That we were lied to? Or that you, who'd never even left that little provincial city before, might be duped by the same enemy that fooled...?" She closed her lips tightly and looked down.

"I know this is important to you--" Leal began, but Antaea shook her head violently.

"No, you don't. You think this is about Telen. It was never about Telen. It's about the reason she and I joined the Guard to begin with." Antaea's hand rose to clutch a locket around her neck as she turned to look at the city, an arch of sparkling lights cupping green foliage, that swept above them. "It's because we knew how vulnerable all this really is; and we were willing to give our lives to keep it safe. Telen did. So would I, in a second."

She stopped, having finally noticed the commotion swirling around Chaison Fanning. The admiral was now at the podium, giving orders to an assembled body of officers while pages and couriers ran in and out the greenhouse's giant doorway. A puzzled look crossed Antaea's face and she began to walk that way. Leal fell into step beside her.

"I made your mistake once," Antaea continued. "I mean, of following someone because they were a friend, rather than because of my principles. I trusted them, and made the mistake of thinking that somebody else was my enemy because, well, I didn't know them. Leal, I learned my lesson. We need better reasons than loyalty and love to choose which side we're on. If you choose loyalty and love--or hate and revenge--over what's good for Virga, then no matter how noble and right you may feel you are, you've put yourself on the side of the devils."

The ball was dissolving into knots of people: the delegations, all finding their countrymen to talk urgently with them. Antaea's head turned from side to side as she strode through the arguing, gesticulating mob. "What the--"

"If you'd believed me earlier," said Leal bitterly, "if they'd all listened earlier, maybe it wouldn't have come to this."

Antaea broke into a run, arriving moments later at the foot of the main stage. She grabbed a Slipstream officer by the arm and shouted, "What's going on?"

"A fleet!" He shook his head in amazement. "A giant bloody fleet, and it's on the move!"

Leal came up to her. "Venera's escort just made it back from some place called Fracas. Jacoby Sarto betrayed us. Maybe he was working for Inshiri Ferance all along; why not? She's his countryman. Venera's been taken by them, and her guards barely made it back here. They were chased by warships from the armada that Ferance's apparently been building now for months."

Antaea looked thunderstruck, and Leal felt a savage satisfaction at seeing her that way. "This armada," said Antaea. "Where's it going?"

Leal sneered at her. "Oh, where do you think? They're on their way to Candesce. They couldn't take it by guile, so now they'll do it by force."

Antaea stepped back. "But--but that's--" Whatever else she said was lost to Leal as a sudden, violently bright light spiked upward, drawing the distant glass canopy in black and white and erasing the city outside. Then noise poured over them, knocking many to their knees as others put their hands to their heads in sudden shock.

It was like a bellowing crowd, many voices thundering some overlapping refrain almost like music, almost a chant. The light was welling from the grove beside the palace, shafts and pinions of it dancing across the building's walls. Around Leal, men were drawing their swords, nobles waving to their squires to bring their gun cases. Some men and women were hunkering down under the tables.

Abruptly the volume of the shouting cut in half, then half again. The light dropped back, its beams hesitating, then drooping to be replaced by a white glow that turned the tops of the trees into silver filigree.

"What was that?" shouted Antaea in alarm. But Leal laughed wildly, for she recognized that great voice and it did not frighten her. --Though it was the last thing she had expected to hear in this place.

"Come on!" And she was running now, careless of the Abyssal soldiers on her heels, through the stunned mob, over flower beds and under trees, to where the emissary had awakened.

* * *

SHE WOULDN'T HAVE expected Leal to be a good runner, but the former educator was almost to the trees before Antaea caught up to her. "Stop! You don't know what's in there!"

"Yes I do!" Leal kept on going. Many others were converging on the grove now, mostly soldiers. The courtiers and diplomats hung back, talking and pointing.

The men who'd been posted at the entrance to the grove's pathways were staring in and so Leal burst past them before they could react. "Stop!" one of them yelled. "Something's crashing around!"

"I'll catch her," Antaea said on the way by. The guards started to follow Leal, but then noticed the crowd converging behind Antaea. They turned to deal with that.

She almost ran into her. Leal had stopped, was staring at something on the path. It was the body of a man, crumpled as though he'd fallen from a great height. Broken branches were scattered around him. Cautiously, Antaea knelt and turned his head to look at the face. She heard Leal gasp.

"That's the man from Brink--Keir's teacher, Gallard's his name."

They both looked down the path. Something very tall and very wide glowed brightly there, and something else, small and noticeable only as silvery flashes, was moving at its base. "Oh," said Leal. "But why--"

Antaea felt a terrible prickle of fear as she recognized the kind of light she was looking at. "It's them," she murmured, mouth dry. Memories of Telen, of her being forced to kidnap Chaison Fanning; of the moment when she saw her sister and realized she was dead--they stopped her just long enough that Leal ran on into the clearing before Antaea could stop her.

Antaea reached for her gun--but of course they hadn't let her carry it here. She hunched down, as if preparing for a blow. Her eyes were on Leal's leaf-cloaked shape, which slowed and moved toward the source of the light at a walk. Any second now she would be struck down. They all would be.

Footsteps pounded on the path behind her and Antaea snapped out of her paralysis. Fervently wishing she was armed, she crept to the end of the path and looked out. An involuntary moan escaped her lips.

Leal stood, feet planted wide, in front of a monstrous tree whose limbs shone with brilliant lines of white light. Some of the younger branches were wrapped in silvery pneumatic frameworks, like mechanical muscles, and those arms were now spreading wide as if to embrace the tiny woman below them.

Leal's own arms rose and spread wide. Antaea was astonished to hear her laughing--a long peal of unbridled joy, and what sounded strangely like relief.

Then something else moved. As armed men thundered up behind her, Antaea stood and instinctively put out her arm to keep them from passing. But she didn't take her eyes off of Leal and the four-legged thing now prowling in front of her.

It was beautiful, she had to give it that: a lithe, low-slung body with a long flicking tail behind it, and a diamond-shaped head with huge triangular ears and equally giant, glowing green eyes. It paced one way, cocking its head to look at Leal from the left, then fluidly turned and went to look at her from the right. Then it sat on its haunches in front of her, and curled its tail around its paws.

"How have you been?" Leal asked it.

Antaea remembered the name for this kind of creature: cat. Yet this was not a living being. Its body was made of metal, and its eyes were glass. Antaea should have expected what happened next, but she jerked back when it formed its mobile mouth into human speech: "A lot has happened," it said.

Its voice was as fluid as its body, startlingly mellow, in fact. It was a voice you'd be inclined to trust, but Antaea would do no such thing. She could hear the path behind her filling up with whispering people, but she still held her arm out to bar them.

The iron cat craned its neck to look at the galaxy of city lights above them. "You built a city outside Virga's walls? I think that was not wise."

"THAT IS NOT WHERE WE ARE."

The men around Antaea gave a collective shout and she herself went down on one knee. It was the tree that had spoken, but not from any single mouth. Rather, the sound poured from every part of it, trunk, branch, and leaf, an encompassing cloud.

Antaea remembered Leal's description of the being she'd called the emissary. It had manifested as a great voice speaking from the dark skies beyond the lights of the city of Sere. Leal had first heard the voice when returning to Sere from her hometown wheel. Later, that voice would become associated with disappearances, first of men and ships, then of entire villages. The whole Abyssal navy had gone in search of it and been destroyed. Yet Leal had sought it out, learned its intent--or so she claimed--and befriended it.

Antaea looked back to see Chaison moving up the path. Ashamed of her cowardly stance, she straightened and stepped out into the light. Leal glanced at her and smiled.

"Antaea. I'd like to introduce the emissaries. This one I've met before in other bodies," she indicated the cat, "and this is the seneschal of the oaks."

Antaea swallowed and stepped closer. "Do they have names?"

Leal shook her head. "They have addresses. I suppose we could name them ourselves, but it never seemed ... appropriate."

Antaea came to stand next to Leal, and the cat bobbed its head as it looked at her. Chaison appeared at her elbow, and since he was brave enough to, his men followed. Soon a great throng of whispering people had gathered, all keeping a respectful distance from the strange beings.

The emissaries had remained silent as the crowd gathered. Now the oak said, "HOW HAVE YOU DONE THIS?"

Leal blinked and glanced at Chaison, who looked puzzled. "Done what?" she asked.

"Awakened us here," said the cat. "You have lifted Candesce's influence from this spot."

"N-not us," Leal began, but Antaea kicked her in the shin. She sent Leal a glare that she hoped said Don't say anything.

"IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO?"

Chaison waved one of his men forward. "Where are Ferance and the Home Guard people?" he murmured.

"We can't find them," murmured the officer.

Yes, it might have been them, thought Antaea. Waking the emissaries would be a highly effective display of power, if you had discovered Candesce's secret. And yet, you would want to be there for the unveiling of that capability; and would you really choose to inaugurate it by giving your enemies a chance to speak?

"This is strange," Chaison said. "We have no explanation. I suggest we worry about the how later, and seize the opportunity while we have it."

"WHO ARE YOU?" thundered the oak. Chaison bowed.

"Admiral Chaison Fanning of the navy of Slipstream," he said. To his aide he added, "Where is Shambles? Aerie's got to be represented here."

"DO YOU SPEAK FOR VIRGA?"

"No one speaks for Virga." He walked up to stand under the broad branches of the oak. "We here speak for some of the human nations in Virga. We came here to discuss how to protect ourselves and all the rest who are not here."

"THEN YOU WILL DO."

Chaison looked around, a pained expression on his face. The nobles, ministers, and diplomats of the other nations ringed him and the tree; all appeared awestruck and, clearly, at a loss for words. Antaea knew politicians, however. That silence would not last.

Chaison turned his attention to the iron cat. "You're the being that came to Abyss with a message? The one that Leal Maspeth knows?"

"I am part of that," said the cat with a duck of its head. Antaea twitched at those words. Part of that. It was admitting that it wasn't a conscious soul like herself. "We came to you with news of your danger," it continued. "It is our danger, too; and so, we propose an alliance."

Now the crowd began talking animatedly. Antaea crossed her arms and shook her head.

Chaison held up his hand for silence. "What kind of alliance?"

"It should not be possible for us to speak here," said the cat. "Obviously you have learned the secret of how Candesce is able to keep Artificial Nature at bay, even if you will not admit it to us. We want that secret for our own protection. In return, we will give you military and technological assistance."

Antaea couldn't help herself. "But you're part of Artificial Nature," she blurted. "You were frozen until just now because you're part of it. How would Candesce's field protect you? It would just turn you off."

"We would use it as a weapon, not a shield. And as to us being a part of the Artificial Nature, you are part of biology," said the cat. "Do you therefore ally yourself with plagues and parasites? Your operating system is DNA. Do you therefore think of yourself only as that? It gives you life, but it also gives you cancer, and diseases, and decrees that you must die." The creature paced away a little, then spun around impatiently. "We do not wish to be at the mercy of consciousness. We simply wish to remain what we are."

"You wish? You 'wish'?" Antaea shook her head with a cynical laugh. "You just admitted you're not even aware. How can you want anything? You're a robot," she said to the cat, "and you," she shouted at the oak, "you're nothing but a plant!"

She turned to the crowd. "They may be despicable people, but at least Ferance and her allies are like us."

"Oh, but they're not."

Antaea turned to look at Leal. The former history tutor had crossed her arms and had an annoyingly impatient look on her face.

"They're conscious beings like us," said Antaea. "They," she pointed at the emissaries, "are not."

Leal frowned at the path under her feet for a moment. Then she raised her head and said, "Consciousness is a passenger.

"--Or, at best, a crewman. Our values are the pilot.

"You and I are aware, Antaea, because that is what our bodies and our ways of life need from us. Sometimes we forget ourselves, and come to think that we are our minds--but that's a piece of foolishness. You must never forget what you really are."

"Which is?" Antaea felt light-headed. Her hands were shaking.

Leal smiled. "Love, and hunger, and aches and pains and family and all the things you want, and hate, and desire with your whole being. They are what you are, and your mind, too, in its own place.

"But even those creatures who don't have minds have values; they are their values, embodied in their form and function. So the oak," she nodded to the tree, "and so the multi-bodied morphont.

"Ask yourself," she said to Antaea, "what world does the oak want? The same that you want: a world of sunlight and clear air, rain, whispering branches and humming insects. The oaks want what we want. But what do Ferance's allies want? Not a garden. At best ... a palace, for them; a prison, for the rest of us."

"You're wrong!" Yet she couldn't think. Leal was a practiced speaker, and Antaea had never mastered rhetoric, nor ever relied on argument to save her. In her frustration she wanted to cut Leal down where she stood; she wanted to make these idiots see the madness in front of them.

"It's suicide!" she shouted, turning to appeal to the crowd surrounding them. "Can't you see? It wasn't the virtuals who tried to take Candesce. Not them who hollowed out my--my sister..." Horror began to well up in her, for they were staring at her as if she were insane. She pushed it down one last time and cried, "If you make a pact with these dead things, then you're making a pact with death itself!"

"Antaea," Leal said gently--and Antaea knew she had to run, because if she stayed for another second she would kill Leal.

She knocked the watchers aside, cursed and kicked, and wept wildly as she ran for the tall glass gates and fresh air.

* * *

IN TIME, THE crowd began to relax again. The cat and oak talked of their homes and how their people lived. Leal told her own story again, and Chaison's officer, Travis, related his journeys with the emissaries as well.

Then Leal sat on one of the oak's iron-clad roots and watched Chaison Fanning relay the bad news about the existence of a vast armada, gathered from the many nations that had believed in Ferance's and Remoran's stories rather than the emissary's. This fleet, he told them, was mobilizing at that moment, on its way to Candesce with one clear objective in mind: to let Artificial Nature into Virga.

"But why?" demanded a senator from one of the principalities. "And how could they get into Candesce in the first place? There was only one key, and it was lost."

"Ah," said Chaison. "As to that..." Leal looked up in surprise, because she'd wondered about that very thing. The sun of suns was impregnable; the technology to batter down its defenses simply couldn't exist in its presence. What did Ferance think she could do?

Niels Lacerta, the Home Guard officer who'd been stranded in Aethyr with Griffin, came to stand next to Chaison. "The Guard recovered the key last year," he said. "It was given back to us by the precipice moth that had been keeping it. The moth had been holed up inside Candesce, but someone actually went there and told it that we needed the key. We don't know who that was, it wasn't a Guardsman, but they died bringing it the message."

Leal was stunned. "So the Guard can actually get into Candesce?" Lacerta nodded.

"Remoran's story makes more sense," protested the senator. "Why should they conquer us when they have the whole universe? And what's so bad about 'dialing down' Candesce's defense, like he said?"

"Antaea Argyre could explain," said Chaison, "if she were here. During the mutiny she was a part of, the outsiders they worked with claimed that Candesce's field is infinitely malleable: they said it could be dialed up, turned down, or adjusted to frame new physical laws. The Guard weren't willing to listen at the time--which is why Gonlin and his people went behind their backs. Clearly, Remoran's changed their minds."

"THIS 'DIALING' IS IMPOSSIBLE," bellowed the oak.

"Possible," countered the cat, "but only to someone who understood how Candesce works."

"Which Ferance and Holon do not," said Leal. "Any more than the Guard itself does. The best they can do is take a hammer to the mechanism."

This was her last contribution to the conversation. Exhausted, she sat on the root, watching Chaison Fanning, Hayden Griffin, and other legendary figures pace back and forth in the light of the tree, and debate and plan. She knew she should be here to witness and later record this night for history's sake; yet all she wanted to do was sleep.

And as the talk turned to the raising of a fleet to counter Ferance's, and while Chaison loudly refused to be its commander and was overruled by the majority--while all this and more went on, Leal scanned the crowd for one face. Keir was nowhere to be seen, and as it became clear that this clearing was the center of attention for everyone in the palace, her worry grew to fear.

Eventually she pushed herself up from the root and slipped away into the underbrush. For the next half-hour she walked all the garden paths and trailed under the branches of the groves on both sides of the palace. She called out his name. She asked servants and guardsmen if they'd seen him. She visited their chambers, which were tidy but empty. Finally she returned to the grove where the bizarre and historic meeting was happening, and went to stand over the now-shrouded body of Keir's tutor, Gallard.

"What happened?" she asked it, but no answer came back.

At that moment the light that had poured steadily from the meeting area went out. Cries of alarm went up from the delegations, and she ran back to the clearing, dodging the black silhouettes of gowned ladies and broad-shouldered officers. There was pandemonium under the oak, with lamps being brought in and everybody talking and running at once.

Leal walked up to the iron cat. The emissary had frozen in mid-gesture, one paw raised, palm out, in a curiously human stance. The lines of light on the branches of the oak had been extinguished, and its limbs no longer moved.

"Hold it together!" Chaison shouted, his voice cutting across the bedlam. "Whatever gave them speech is finished, but our work is not. We need paper, pens! We need to draft this alliance and then mobilize our people. Come on!"

After more shouting and cajoling, he got his wish. Palace workmen set up a table and chairs, and paper lanterns were strung over it. The whole thing looked bizarrely festive, but no one was smiling. As the details of an alliance began to take shape on paper, Leal wandered within the soft perimeter cast by the lanterns, watching, yet wishing she was anywhere else.

Something small glittered in the grass just in front of the oak. Leal blinked at it. This spot was right in the center of the area where the cat-shaped emissary had been able to prowl. During their conversation it had sometimes paced away to probe at the paths. She'd seen it stagger and jump back twice, as it apparently hit some invisible wall beyond which it couldn't go.

Leal knelt, forgetting the babble of the officials. She gently pried the crushed dragonfly out of the soil, and cupped it in the palm of her hand.

She knelt there with it for a very long time, and when she finally raised her head, it was to find that a war had begun.