Queen of Candesce

7

Venera didn’t really notice the passage of the next few days. She stayed with Diamandis in a clapboard hut near the edge of the world and did little but eat and sleep. He came and went, discreet as always; his forays were usually nocturnal and he slept when she was awake.

Periodically she stepped to the doorway of the flimsy hideout and listened to the wind. It tore and gabbled, moaned and hissed incessantly, and in it she learned to hear voices. They were of people she’d known—her father, her sisters, sometimes random members of the crew of the Rook, whom she had not really gotten to know but had heard all about her during her adventures with that ship.

She strained to hear her husband’s voice in the rush, but his was the only voice she could not summon.

One dawn she was fixing breakfast (with little success, having never learned to cook) when Garth poked his head around the doorjamb and said, “You’ve disturbed a whole nest of hornets, did you know that?” He strolled in, looking pleased with himself. “More like a nest of whales—or capital bugs, even. There’s covert patrols crawling all over the place.”

She glared at him. “What makes you think they’re after me?”

“You’re the only piece out of place on this particular board,” said Diamandis. He let gravity settle him into one of the hut’s two chairs. “A queen in motion, judging by the furor. I’m just a pawn, so they don’t see me—and as long as they don’t, they can’t catch you either.”

“Try this.” She slammed a plate down in front of him. He eyed it dubiously.

“Mind telling me what you did?”

“Did?” She gnawed her lip, ignoring the stabbing pain in her jaw. “Not very much. I may have assassinated someone.”

“Mayhave?” He chortled. “You’re not sure?” She simply shrugged. Diamandis’s expression softened. “Why am I not surprised,” he said under his breath.

They ate in silence. If this day were to follow the pattern of the last few, Diamandis would now have fallen onto the cot Venera had just vacated, and would immediately commence to snore in competition with the wind. Instead, he looked at her seriously and said, “It’s time for you to make a decision.”

“Oh?” She folded her hands in her lap listlessly. “About what?”

He scowled. “Venera, I utterly adore you. Were I twenty years younger you wouldn’t be safe around me. As it is, you’re eating me out of house and home and having an extra mouth to feed is, well, tiring.”

“Ah.” Venera brightened just a little. “The conversation my father and I never had.”

Hiding his grin, Diamandis ticked points off on his fingers. “One: you can give yourself up to the men in armor who are looking for you. Two: you can make yourself useful by going with me on my nightly sorties. Three: you can leave Spyre. Or, four—”

“I thought you said I could never leave,” she said, frowning.

“I lied.” Seeing her expression, he rubbed at his chin and looked away. “Well, I had a beautiful young woman in my bed, even if I wasn’t in there with her, so why would I let her go so easily? Yes, there is a way out of Spyre—potentially. But it would be dangerous.”

“I don’t care. Show me.” She stood up.

“Sit down, sit down. It’s daytime, and I’m tired. I need to sleep first. It’s a long trek to the bomb bays. And anyway… don’t you want to hear about the fourth option?”

“There is no other option.”

He sighed in obvious disappointment. “All right. Let me sleep, then. We’ll visit the site tonight and you can decide whether it’s truly what you want to do.”

They picked their way through a field of weeds. Lesser Spyre twirled far above. The dark houses of the great families surrounded them, curving upward in two directions to form a blotted sky. Venera had examined those estates as they walked; she’d hardly had the leisure time to do so on her disastrous run to the edge of the world. Now, as the rust-eaten iron gates and crumbling battlements eased by, she had time to realize just how strange a place Spyre was.

On the steep roof of a building half-hidden by century oaks, she had seen a golden boy singing. At first she had taken him for some automaton, but then he slipped and caught himself. The boy was centered in bright spotlights and he held a golden olive branch over his head. Whether there was an audience for his performance in the gardens or balconies below; whether he did this every night or if it were some rare ceremony she had chanced to see—these things she would never know. She had touched Garth’s shoulder and pointed. He merely shrugged.

Other estates were resolutely dark, their buildings choked in vines and their grounds overgrown with brambles. She had walked up to the gate of one such to peer between the leaves. Garth had pulled her back. “They’ll shoot you,” he’d said.

In some places the very architecture had turned inward, becoming incomprehensible, even impossible for humans to inhabit. Strange cancerous additions were flocked onto the sides of stately manors, mazes drawn in stone over entire grounds. Strange piping echoed from one dark entranceway, the rushing sound of wings from another. At one point Venera and Garth crossed a line of strange footprints, all the toes pointed inward and the indentations heavy on the outside as if the dozens of people who had made them were all terribly bow-legged.

It did no good to look away from these sights. Venera occasionally glanced at the sky, but the sky was paved with yet more estates. After each glance she would hunch unconsciously away, and each time, a pulse of anger would shoot through her and she would straighten her shoulders and scowl.

Venera couldn’t hide her nervousness. “Is it much further?”

“You whine like a child. This way. Mind the nails.”

“Garth, you remind me of someone but I can’t figure out who.”

“Ah! A treasured lover, no doubt. The one that got away, perhaps?—Wait, don’t tell me, I prefer to wallow in my fantasies.”

“…A particularly annoying footman my mother had?”

“Madam, you wound me. Besides, I don’t believe you.”

“If there really is a way off of Spyre, why haven’t you ever taken it?”

He stopped and looked back at her. Little more than a silhouette in the dim light, Diamandis still conveyed disappointment in the tilt of his shoulders and head. “Are you deliberately provoking me?”

Venera caught up to him. “No,” she said, putting her fists on her hips. “If this exit is so dangerous that you chose not to use it, I want to know.”

“Oh. Yes, it’s dangerous—but not that dangerous. I could have used it. But we’ve been over this. Where would I go? One of the other principalities? What use would an old gigolo be there?”

“—Let the ladies judge that.”

“Ha! Good point. But no. Besides, if I circled around and came back to Lesser Spyre, I’d eventually be caught. Have you been up there? It’s even more paranoid and tightly controlled than this place. The city is… impossible. No, it would never work.”

As was typical of her, Venera had been ignoring what Garth was saying and focusing instead on how he said it. “I’ve got it!” she said. “I know why you stayed.”

He turned toward her, a black cut-out against distant lights—and for once Venera didn’t simply blurt out what was on her mind. She could be perfectly tactful when her life depended on it but in other circumstances had never known why one should bother. Normally she would have just said it: You’re still in love with someone. But she hesitated.

“In there,” said Diamandis, pointing to a long, low building whose roof was being overtaken by lopsided trees. He waited, but when she didn’t say anything he turned slowly and walked in the direction of the building.

“A wise woman wouldn’t be entering such a place unescorted,” said Venera lightly as she took his arm. Diamandis laughed.

“I am your escort.”

“You, Mr. Diamandis, are why escorts were invented.”

Pleased, he developed a bit of a bounce to his step. Venera, though, wanted to slow down—not because she was afraid of him or what waited inside the dark. At this moment, she could not have said what made her hesitate.

The concrete lot was patched with grass and young trees and they scuttled across it quickly, both wary of any watchers on high. They soon reached a peeled-out loading door in the side of the metal building. There was no breeze outside, but wind was whistling around the edges of the door.

“It puzzles me why there isn’t a small army of squatters living in places like this,” said Venera as the blackness swallowed Diamandis. She reluctantly stepped after him into it. “The pressures of life in these pocket states must be intolerable. Why don’t more people simply leave?”

“Oh, they do.” Diamandis took her hand and led her along a flat floor. “Just a bit further, I have to find the door… through here.” Wind buffeted her from behind now. “Reach forward… here’s the railing. Now, follow that to the left.”

They were on some sort of catwalk, its metal grating ringing faintly under her feet.

“Many people leave,” said Diamandis. “Most don’t know how to survive outside of the chambers where they were born and bred. They return, cowed; or they die. Many are shot by the sentries, by border guards, or by the preservationists. I’ve buried a number of friends since I came to live here.”

Her eyes were starting to adjust to the dark. Venera could tell that they were in a very large room of some sort, its ceiling ribbed with girders. Holes let in faint light in places, just enough to sketch the dimensions of the place. The floor…

There was no floor, only subdivided metal boxes with winches hanging over them. Some of those boxes were capped by fierce vortices of wind that collectively must have scoured every grain of grit out of the place. Looking down at the nearest box, Venera saw that it was really a square metal pit with clamshell doors at its bottom. Those doors vibrated faintly.

“Behold the bomb bays,” said Diamandis, sweeping his arm in a dramatic arc. “Designed to rain unholy fire on any fleet stupid enough to line itself up with Spyre’s rotation. This one chamber held enough firepower to carpet a square mile of air with bombs. And there were once two dozen such bays.”

The small hurricane chattered like a crowd of madmen; the bomb bay doors rattled and buzzed in sympathy. “Was it ever used?” asked Venera.

“Supposedly,” said Diamandis. “The story goes that we wiped out an entire armada in seconds. Though that could all be propaganda—if true, I can see why people outside Spyre would despise us. After all, there would have been hundreds of bombs that passed through the armada and simply kept going. Who knows what unsuspecting nations we strafed?”

Venera touched the scar on her chin.

“Anyway, it was generations ago,” said Diamandis. “No one seems to care that much about us since the other great wheels disintegrated. We’re the last, and ignored the way you pass by the aged. Come this way.”

They went up a short flight of metal steps to a catwalk that extended out over the bays. Diamandis led Venera halfway down the long room; his footfalls were steady, hers slowing as they approached a solitary finned shape hanging from chains above one of the bays.

“That’s a bomb!” It was a good eight feet long, almost three in diameter, a great metal torpedo with a button nose. Diamandis leaned out over the railing and slapped it.

“A bomb, indeed,” he said over the whistling gale. “At least, it’s a bomb casing. See? The hatch there is unscrewed. I scooped out the explosives years ago; there’s room for one person if you wriggle your way in. All I have to do is throw a lever and it will drop and bang through those doors. Nothing’s going to stop you once you’re outside, you can go a few hundred miles and then light out on your own.”

She too leaned out to touch the cylinder’s flank.

“So you’ll go home, will you?” he asked, with seeming innocence.

Venera snatched her fingers back. She crossed her arms and looked away.

“The people who ran this place,” she said after a while. “It was one of the great nations, wasn’t it? One of the ones that specialize in building weapons. Like Sacrus?”

He laughed. “Not Sacrus. Their export is leverage. Means of political control, ranging from blackmail to torture and extortion. They have advisors in the throne rooms of half the principalities.”

“They sell torturers?”

“That’s one of the skills they export, yes. Almost nobody in Spyre deals with them anymore—they’re too dangerous. Keep pulling coups, trying to dominate the Council. The preservationists are still hurting from their own run-in with them. You met one of theirs in Liris?” She nodded.

Diamandis sighed. “Yet one more reason for you to leave, then. Once you’re marked in their ledgers, you’re never safe again. Come on, I’ll give you a boost up.”

“Wait.” She stared at the black opening in the metal thing. The thought came to her: this won’t work. She could not return to Slipstream and pretend that things that had been done had not been done. She could not in silence retire as the shunned wife of a disgraced admiral. Not when the man responsible for Chaison’s death—the Pilot of Slipstream—still sat like a spider at the center of Slipstream affairs.

Thinking this made her fury catch like dry tinder. A spasm of pain shot up her jaw, and she shook her head. Venera turned and walked back along the catwalk.

Diamandis hurried after her. “What are you doing?”

Venera struggled to catch her breath. She would need resources. If she was to avenge Chaison, she would need power. “Yesterday you said something about a fourth choice, Garth.” She rattled down the steps and headed for the door.

“Tell me about that choice.”

You must be ready for this,Garth had said. It is like no place you have ever been or ever imagined. Near dawn, as they approached the region of Spyre known as the airfall, she began to understand what he meant.

The great estates dwindled as they threaded their way through Diamandis’s secret ways; even the preservationists avoided this sector of the great wheel. Ruins dotted the landscape and strange trees lay nearly prone like supplicants.

The ground shook, a constant wavering shudder. The motion reminded her with every step that she stood on thin metal sheeting above an abyss of air. She began to see patches of speed ivy atop broken cornices and walls. And the loose soil thinned until they walked atop the metal of the wheel itself.

Wind pushed at her from behind; Venera had to consciously set her feet down, grinding them into the grit to prevent herself starting to run. Giving into that run would be fatal, Diamandis assured her. The reason why emerged slowly, horribly, from around the collapsed walls and tangled groves of once-great estates.

She clapped Diamandis on the shoulder and pointed. “How long ago?”

He nodded and leaned in so that she could hear him over the roar. “A question important to our enterprise. It happened generations ago, in a time of great unrest in the principalities. Back when the great nations of Spyre still traveled—before they began to hide in their fortresses.”

A hundred yards or so of slick decking extended past the last broken stones, then the first tears and gaps appeared. Long sheets of humming metal extended out, following the lines of the girders that underlay Spyre’s upper skin. Soon even they disappeared, leaving only bright shreds and the girders themselves. A latticework of metal beams was all the ground there was for the next mile.

Below the plain of girders dark clouds shot past with dizzying speed. Propelled by Spyre’s centrifugal force, a ceaseless hurricane roared in and down and through the empty windows of the broken ruins and leaped off the edges of the world.

“Behold the airfall!” Diamandis gestured dramatically; but there was no need. Venera stood awestruck at the sheer savagery of the permanent storm that warred about her. If she lifted one foot or straightened her back she might be caught and yanked out and then down, and shot out of Spyre through this screaming, gouting wound.

“This—this is insane!” She hunkered down, clutching a boulder. Her leathers flapped up around her ears. “Am I expected to run into that?”

“No, not run! Crawl. Because up there—do you see it? There is your fourth alternative!” She squinted where he pointed and at first didn’t see anything. Then she blinked and looked again.

The skin of Spyre had been stripped away for at least a mile in every direction. The hole must have unbalanced the whole wheel—towers, farms, factories, and even perhaps whole towns being sucked out and flung into the depths of Virga in a catastrophe that threatened to destroy the entire wheel. For some reason the peeling and collapse had propagated only so far and then stopped—but the standing cyclone of exiting air must have shaken Spyre so much as to threaten its immediate destruction.

This, if anything, explained the preservationists and the fierce war they had fought to lay their tracks around Spyre. The unstable wobble of the wheel could only be fixed by moving massive weights around the rim to balance it. There was no patching this hole.

Everything above had been sucked out as the skin peeled away—except in one place. One solitary tower still stood a quarter mile into the plain of girders. It had the great fortune to have been built overtop a main intersection point for Spyre’s skeletal system. Also, the place might once have been a factory with its own reinforced foundation, for Venera could see huge pipes and tanks splayed like the roots of a tree below the girders. The tower itself was dark as the clouds that framed it, and it slowly swayed under the force of the winds. The girders bounced it like an acrobat in a net.

Just looking at it made her nauseated. “What is that?”

“Buridan Tower,” said Diamandis. “It’s our destination.”

“Why? And how are we going to get there through… through that?”

“Using our courage, Lady Fanning—and my knowledge. I know a way, if you’ll trust me. As to why—that is a secret that you will reveal, to both of us.”

She shook her head, but Venera had no intention of backing out now. To do anything else but go forward in this mad adventure would be to invite relaxation—and thought. Grief drove her on, an active refusal to think. She waited, eyes tearing from the wind, and eventually Diamandis nodded sharply and gestured come on.

They crept across the last acre of intact skin, grabbing onto every rock and jammed tree branch that might offer purchase. As they approached a great split in the metal sheeting, Venera saw where Diamandis was going, and she began to think that this passage might be possible after all.

Here, a huge pipe ran under Spyre’s topsoil and skin. It was anchored to the girders by rusting metal straps and had broken in places, but extended out below the skinless plain. It seemed to head straight for swaying Buridan Tower.

Diamandis had found a hole in the pipe that was sheltered by a tortured dune. He let himself down into the black mouth and she followed; instantly the wind subsided to a tolerable scream.

“I’m not even going to ask how you found this,” she said after dusting herself off. He grinned.

The pipe was about eight feet across. Sighting down it she beheld, in perspective, a frozen vortex of discolored metal and sedimented rime. Behind her it was ominously dark; ahead, hundreds of gaps and holes let in the welling light of Candesce. In this new illumination, Venera eyed their route critically. “There’s whole sections missing,” she pointed out. “How do we cross those?”

“Trust me.” He set off at a confident pace.

What was there to do but follow?

The pipe writhed in sympathy with the twisting of the beams. The motion was uncomfortable, but not terrifying to one who had ridden warships through battle, walked in gravities great and small throughout Virga, and even penetrated the mysteries of Candesce—or so Venera told herself, up until the tenth time her hand darted out of its own accord to grip white knuckled some peel of rust or broken valve-rim. Rhythmic blasts of pain shot up her clenched jaw. An old anger, born of helplessness, began to take hold of her.

The first gaps in the pipe were small, and thankfully overhead. The ceiling opened out in these places, allowing Venera to see where she was—which made her duck her head down and continue on with a shudder.

But then they came to a place where most of the pipe was simply gone, for a distance of nearly sixty feet. Runnels of it ran like reminders above and to the sides, but there was no bottom anymore. “Now what?”

Diamandis reached up and tugged a cable she hadn’t noticed before. It was bright and strong, anchored here and somewhere inside the black cave where the pipe picked up again. Near its anchor point the line was gathered up and pinched by a huge spring, allowing it to stretch and slacken with the twisting of the girders.

“You did this?” He nodded; she was impressed and said so. Diamandis sighed. “Since I’ve had no audience to brag to, I’ve done many feats of daring,” he said. “I did none in all the years when I was trying to impress the ladies—and none of them will ever know I was this brave.”

“So how do we… Oh.” Despite her pounding headache, she had to laugh. This was a zip line; Diamandis proposed to clip rollers to it and glide across. Well, at least the great girder provided a wall to one side and partial shelter above. The wind was not quite so punishing here.

“You have to be fast!” Diamandis was fitting a pulley-hold onto the cable. “You can’t breathe in that wind. If you get stranded in the middle you’ll pass out.”

“Wonderful.” But he’d strapped her into the harness securely, and falling was not something that frightened people who lived in a weightless ocean of air. When the time came she simply closed her eyes and kicked off into the white flood.

They had to repeat this process six times. Now that he had someone to give up his secret to, Diamandis was eager to tell her how he had used a powerful foot-bow to shoot a line across each gap, trusting to its grip in the deep rust on the far side to allow him to scale across once. After stronger lines were affixed it was easy to get back and forth.

So, walking and gliding, they approached the black tower.

In some places its walls fell smoothly into the abyss. In others, traces of ground still clung tenaciously where sidewalks and outbuildings had once been. They clambered out of the pipe onto one such spot; here, thirty feet of gravel and plating stretched like a splayed hand up to the tower’s flank. Diamandis had strung more cables along that wall, leading toward a great dark shadow that opened halfway around the wall’s curve. “The entrance!” Battered by wind, he loped over to the nearest line.

The zip lines in the pipe had given Venera the false impression that she was up for anything. Now she found herself hanging onto a cable with both hands—small comfort to also be clipped to it—while blindly groping for purchase on the side of a sheer wall, above an infinite drop now illuminated by full daylight.

Only a man with nothing to lose could have built such a pathway. She understood, for she felt she was in the same position. Gritting her teeth and breathing in shallow sips in vortices of momentary calm caused by the jutting brickwork, she followed Diamandis around Buridan Tower’s long curve.

At last she stood, shaking, on a narrow ledge of stone. The door before her was strapped iron, fifteen feet tall, and framed with trembling speed ivy. Rusting machine guns poked their snouts out of slits in the stone walls surrounding it. A coat of arms in the ancient style capped the archway. Venera stared at it, a brief drift of puzzlement surfacing above her apprehension. She had seen that design somewhere before.

“I can’t go back that way. There has to be another way!”

Diamandis sat down with his back to the door and gestured for her to do the same. The turbulence was lessened just enough there that she could breathe. She leaned on his shoulder. “Garth, what have you done to us?”

He took some time to get his own breath back. Then he jabbed a thumb at the door. “People have been pointing their telescopes at this place for generations, all dreaming of getting inside it. Secret expeditions have been mounted to reach it, but none of them ever came via the route we just took. It’s been assumed that this way was impossible. No…” He gestured at the sky. “They always climb down the elevator cable that connects the tower to Lesser Spyre. And every time they’re spotted and shot by Spyre sentries.”

“Why?”

“Because the Nation of Buridan is not officially defunct. There are supposed to be heirs, somewhere. And the product of Buridan still exists, on farms scattered around Spyre. No one is legally allowed to sell it until the fate of the nation is determined once and for all. But the titles, the deeds, the proofs of ownership and provenance…” He thumped the iron with his fist. “They’re all in here.”

Her fear was beginning to give way to curiosity. She looked up at the door. “Do we knock?”

“The legend says that the last members of the nation live on, trapped inside. That’s nonsense, of course; but it’s a useful fiction.”

It began to dawn on her what he had in mind. “You intend to play on the legends.”

“Better than that. I intend to prove that they are true.”

She stood up and pushed on the door. It didn’t budge. Venera looked around for a lock, and after a moment she found one, a curious square block of metal embedded in the stone of the archway. “You’ve been here before. Why didn’t you go in?”

“I couldn’t. I didn’t have the key and the windows are too small.”

She glared at him. “Then why…?”

He stood up, smiling mysteriously. “Because now I do have the key. You brought it to me.”

“I…?”

Diamandis dug inside his jacket. He slid something onto his finger and held it up to gleam in the light of Candesce.

One of the pieces of jewelry Venera had taken from the hoard of Anetene had been a signet ring. She had found it in the very same box that had contained the Key to Candesce. It was one of the pieces that Diamandis had stolen from her when she first arrived here.

“That’s mine!”

He blinked at her tone, then shrugged. “As you say, Lady. I thought long and hard about playing this game myself, but I’m too old now. And anyway, you’re right. The ring is yours.” He pulled it off his finger and handed it to her.

The signet showed a fabulous ancient creature known as a “horse.” It was a gravity-bound creature and so none now lived in Virga—or were they the product that Buridan had traded in? Venera took the heavy ring and held it up, frowning. Then she strode to the lock-box and placed the ring into a like-shaped indentation there.

With a mournful grating sound, the great gate of Buridan swung open.