Queen of Candesce

8

Gunner Twelve-Fifteen wrapped his fingers around the dusty emergency switch and pulled as hard as he could. With a loud snap, the red stirrup-shaped handle came off in his hand.

The gunner cursed and half-stood to try and retrieve the end of the emergency cord that was now poking out of a hole in his canopy. He banged his head on the glass and the whole gun emplacement wobbled causing the cord to flip out into the bright air. Meanwhile, the impossible continued to happen outside; the thing was now a quarter mile above him and almost out of range.

Gunner Twelve-Fifteen had sat here for sixteen years now. In that time he had turned the oval gun emplacement from a cold and drafty purgatory into a kind of nest. He’d stopped up the gaps in the metal armor with cloth and, later, pitch. He’d snuck down blankets and pillows and eventually even took out the original metal seat, dropping it with supreme satisfaction onto Greater Spyre two miles below. He’d replaced the seat with a kind of reclining divan, built sun-shades to block the harsher rays of Candesce, and removed layers of side armor to make way for a bookshelf and drinks cabinet. The only thing he hadn’t touched was the butt of the machine gun itself.

Nobody would know. The emplacement, a metal pod suspended above the clouds by cables strung across Greater Spyre, was his alone. Once upon a time there had been three shifts of sentries here, a dozen eyes at a time watching the elevator cable that ran between the town wheels of Lesser Spyre and the abandoned and forlorn Buridan Tower. With cutbacks and rescheduling, the number had eventually gone down to one: one twelve-hour shift for each of the six pods that surrounded the cable. Gunner Twelve-Fifteen had no doubt that the other gunners had similarly renovated their stations; the fact that none were now responding to the emergency meant that they were not paying any attention to the object they were here to watch.

Nor had he been; if not for a random flash of sunlight against the beveled glass of a wrought-iron elevator car he might never have known that Buridan had come back to life—not until he and the other active sentries were hauled up for court-martial.

He pushed back the bulletproof canopy and made another grab at the frayed emergency cord. It dangled three inches beyond his outstretched fingers. Cursing, he lunged at it and nearly fell to his death. Heart hammering, he sat down again.

Now what? He could fire a few rounds at the other pods to get their attention—but then he might kill somebody. Anyway, he wasn’t supposed to fire on rising elevators, only objects coming down the cable.

The gunner watched in frozen indecision until the elevator car pierced another layer of cloud and disappeared. He was doomed if he didn’t do something right now—and there was only one thing to do.

He reached for the other red handle and pulled it.

In the original design of the gun emplacements, the ejection rocket had been built into the base of the gunner’s seat. If he was injured or the pod was about to explode, he could pull the handle and the rocket would send him, chair and all, straight up the long cable to the infirmary at Lesser Spyre. Of course, the original chair no longer existed.

The other gunners were startled out of their dozing and reading by the sudden vision of a pillowed divan rising into the sky on a pillar of flame. Blankets, books and bottles of gin twirled in its wake as it vanished into the gray.

The daywatch liaison officer shrieked in surprise when Gunner Twelve-Fifteen burst in on her. The canvas she had been carefully daubing paint onto now had a broad blue slash across it.

She glared at the apparition in the doorway. “What are you doing here?”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said the trembling soldier. “But Buridan has reactivated.”

For a moment she dithered—the painting was ruined unless she got that paint off it right now—then was struck by the image of the man standing before her. Yes, it really was one of the sentries. His face was pale and his hair looked like he’d stuck it in a fan. She would have sworn that the seat of his leather flight suit was smoking. He was trembling.

“What’s this about, man?” she demanded. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“B-Buridan,” he stammered. “The elevator. It’s rising. It may already be here!”

She blinked, then opened the door fully and glanced at the rank of bellpulls ranked in the hallway. The bells were ancient and black with tarnish and clearly none had moved recently. “There was no alarm,” she said accusingly.

“The emergency cord broke,” said the gunner. “I had to eject, ma’am,” he continued. “There was, uh, cloud, I don’t think the other sentries saw the elevator.”

“Do you mean to say that it was cloudy? That you’re not sure you saw an elevator?”

He turned even more pale; but his jaw was set. As the liaison officer wound up to really let loose on him, however, one of the bellpulls moved. She stared at it, forgetting entirely what she had been about to say.

“…Did you just see…?” The cord moved again and the bell jiggled slightly. Then the cord whipped taut suddenly and the bell shattered in a puff of verdigris and dust. In doing so it managed to make only the faintest tinking sound.

She goggled at it. “That—that’s the Buridan elevator!”

“That’s what I was trying to—” But the liaison officer had burst past him and was running for the stairs that led up to the elevator stations.

Elevators couldn’t be fixed to the moving outer rim of a town-wheel; so the gathered strands of cable that rose up from the various estates met in knotlike collections of buildings in freefall. Ropes led from these to the axes of the towns themselves. The officer had to run up a yin-yang staircase to get to the top of the town (the same stairway that the gunner had just run down); as her weight dropped the steps steepened and the rise became more and more vertical. Puffing and nearly weightless, she achieved the top in under a minute. She glanced out one of the blockhouse’s gun slits in time to see an ornate cage pull into the elevator station a hundred yards away.

The gunner was gasping his way back up the steps. “Wait,” he called feebly. The liaison officer didn’t wait for him, but stepped to the round open doorway and launched herself across the empty air.

Two people were waiting by the opened door to the Buridan elevator. The liaison officer felt an uncanny prickling in her scalp as she saw them, for they looked every bit as exotic as she’d imagined someone from Buridan would be. Her first inclination (drummed into her by her predecessor) that any visitation from the lost nation must be a hoax, faded as one of the pair spoke. Her accent wasn’t like that of anyone from Upper Spyre.

“They sent only you?” The woman’s voice dripped scorn. She was of medium height, with well-defined brows that emphasized her piercing eyes. A shock of pale hair stood up from her head.

The liaison officer made a mid-air bow and caught a nearby girder to halt herself. She struggled to slow her breathing and appear calm as she said, “I am the designated liaison officer for Buridan-Spyre relations. To whom do I have the honor of addressing myself?”

The woman’s nostrils flared. “I am Amandera Thrace-Guiles, heir of Buridan. And you? You’re nobody in particular, are you… but I suppose you’ll have to do,” she said. “Kindly direct us to our apartments.”

“Your…” The Buridan apartments existed, the officer knew that much. No one was allowed to enter, alter or destroy Buridan property until the nation’s status was determined. “This way, please.”

She thought quickly. It was years ago, but one day she had met one of the oldest of the watch officers in an open gallery on Wheel Seven. They had been passing a broad stretch of crumbling wall and came to a bricked-up archway. “Know what that is?” he’d asked playfully. When she shook her head he smiled and said, “Almost nobody does, nowadays. It’s the entrance to the Buridan estate. It’s all still there—towers, granaries, bedrooms and armories—but the other nations have been building and renovating around and over it for so long that there’s no way in anymore. It’s like a scar, or a callous maybe, in the middle of the city.

“Anyway, this was the main entrance. Used to have a sweeping flight of steps up to it, until they took that out and made the courtyard yonder. This entrance is the official one, the one that only opens to the state key. If you ever get any visitors from Buridan, they can prove that they are who they say they are if they can open the door behind that wall.”

“Come with me,” said the officer now. As she escorted her visitors along the rope that stretched toward Wheel Seven, she wondered where she was going to get a gang of navvies with sledgehammers on such short notice.

The demolition of the brick wall made just enough of a delay to allow Lesser Spyre’s first ministers to show up. Venera cursed under her breath as she watched them padding up the gallery walk: five men and three women in bright silks, with serious expressions. Secretaries and hangers-on fluttered around them like moths. In the courtyard below, a crowd of curious citizens was growing.

“This had better work,” she muttered to Diamandis.

He adjusted his mask. It was impossible to read his expression behind it. “They’re as scared as we are,” he said. “Who knows if there’s anything left on the other side of that?” He nodded to the rapidly falling stones in the archway.

“Lady Thrace-Guiles!” One of the ministers swept forward, lifting his silk robes delicately over the mortar dust. He was bejowled and balding, with a fan of red skin across his nose and liver spots on his lumpish hands. “You look just like your great-great-great grandmother, Lady Bertitia,” he said generously. “Her portrait hangs in my outer office.”

Venera looked down her nose at him. “And you are…?”

“Aldous Aday, acting chairman of the Lesser Spyre Committee for Public Works and Infrastructure,” he said. “Elected by the Upper House of the Great Families—a body that retains a seat for you, kept draped in velvet in absentia all these years. I must say, this is an exciting and if I do say so, surprising, day in the history of Upper—”

“I want to make sure our estate is still in one piece,” she said. She turned to Diamandis. “Mister Flance, the hole is big enough for you to squeeze through. Pray go ahead and tell me that our door is undamaged.” He bowed and edged his way past the workmen.

He and Venera wore clothing they had found preserved in wax paper in the lockers of Buridan Tower. The styles were ancient, but for all that they were more practical than the contraptions favored by Spyre’s present generation. Venera had on supple leather breeches and a black jacket over a bodice tooled and inscribed in silver. A simple belt held two pistols. On her brow rested a silver circlet they had found in an upstairs bedchamber. Diamandis was similarly dressed, but his leathers were all a deep forest green.

“It’s a great honor to see your nation again after so many years,” continued Aday. If he was suspicious of her identity, he wasn’t letting on. She exchanged pleasantries with him through clenched teeth, striving to stay in profile so that he and the others could not see her jaw. Venera had done her best to hide the scar and had bleached her hair with some unpleasant chemicals they’d found in the tower; but someone who had heard about Venera Fanning might recognize her. Did Aday and his people keep up with news from the outside world? Diamandis didn’t think they did, but she had no idea at this point how far her fame had spread.

To her advantage was the fact that the paranoid societies of Spyre rarely communicated. “Sacrus won’t want anyone to know they had you,” Diamandis had pointed out one evening as they sat huddled in the tower, an ornate chair burning merrily in the fireplace. “If they choose to unmask you, it’s at the expense of admitting they have connections with the outside world—and more importantly, they won’t want to hint that they have the Key to Candesce. I don’t think we’ll hear a peep out of them, at least not overtly.”

The workmen finished knocking down the last bricks and stepped aside just as Diamandis stuck his head around the corner of the archway. “The door is there, ma’am. And the lock.”

“Ah, good.” Venera stalked past the workers, trying to keep from nervously twisting the ring on her finger. This was the proverbial moment of truth. If the key didn’t work…

The brick wall had been built across an entryway that extended fifteen feet and ended in a large iron-bound door similar to the one at Buridan Tower. The ministers crowded in behind Venera, watching like hawks as she dusted off the lockbox with her glove. “Gentlemen,” she said acidly, “there is only so much air in here—though I suppose you have some natural skepticism about my authenticity. Put that out of your minds.” She held up the signet ring. “I am my own proof—but if you need crass symbols, perhaps this one will do.” She jammed the key against the inset impression in the lockbox.

Nothing happened.

“Pardon.” Diamandis was looking alarmed and Venera quashed the urge to make some sort of joke. She must not lose her air of confidence, not even for a second. Bending to examine the lock, she saw that it had been overgrown with grit over the years. “Brush, please,” she said in a bored tone, holding out one hand. After a long minute someone placed a hairbrush in her palm. She scrubbed the lock industriously for a while, then blew on it and tried the ring again.

This time there was a deep click and then a set of ratcheting thumps from behind the wall. The door ground open slowly.

“You are the council for… infrastructure, was it not?” she asked, fixing the ministers with a cold eye. Aday nodded. “Hmm,” she said. “Well.” She turned, preparing to sweep like the spoiled princess she had once been, through the opened door into blackness.

A loud bang and fall of dust from the ceiling made her stumble. There was sudden pandemonium in the gallery. The ministers were milling in confusion while screams and shouts followed the echoes of the explosion into the air. Past Aday’s shoulder Venera saw a curling pillar of smoke or dust that hadn’t been there a second ago.

With her foot hovering over the threshold of the estate, Venera found herself momentarily forgotten. Sirens were sounding throughout the wheel and she heard the clatter of soldiers’ boots on the flagstones. In the courtyard, someone was crying; somebody else was screaming for help.

Expressionless, she walked back to the gallery and peered over Aday’s shoulder. “Somebody bombed the crowd,” she said.

“It’s terrible, terrible,” moaned Aday, wringing his hands.

“This can’t have been planned,” she said reasonably. “So who would be walking around on a morning like this just carrying a bomb?”

“It’s the rebels,” said Aday furiously. “Bombers, assassins… This is terrible!”

Someone burst into the courtyard below and ran toward the most injured people. With a start Venera realized it was Garth Diamandis. He shouted commands to some stunned but otherwise intact victims; slowly they moved to obey, fanning out to examine the fallen.

It hadn’t occurred to Venera until this moment that she could also be helping. She felt a momentary stab of surprise, then… was it anger? She must be angry at Diamandis, that was it. But she remembered the mayhem of battle aboard the Rook when the pirates attacked, and the aftermath. Such fear and anguish, and in those moments the smallest gesture meant so much to men who were in pain. The airmen had given of themselves without a moment’s thought—given aid, bandages, and blood.

She turned to look for the stairs, but it was too late: the medics had arrived. Frowning, Venera watched their white uniforms fan out through the blackened rubble. Then she lit her lantern and stalked back to the archway.

“When my manservant is done, send him to me,” she said quietly. She strode alone into the long-sealed estate of Buridan.

In an abandoned bedchamber of the windswept tower, while the floor swayed and sighs moaned through the huge pipes that underlay the place, Diamandis had told Venera histories of Buridan, and more.

“They were the horse masters,” he said. “Theirs was the ultimate in impractical products—a being that required buckets of food and endless space to run, that couldn’t live a day in freefall. But a creature so beautiful that visitors to Spyre routinely fell in love with them. To have a horse was the ultimate sign of power, because it meant you had gravity to waste.”

“But that must have been centuries ago,” she’d said. Venera was having trouble hearing Diamandis, even though the room’s door was tightly closed and there were no windows in this chamber. The tower was awash with sound, from the creaking of the beams and the roaring of the wind to the basso-profundo chorus of drones that reverberated through every surface. Even before her eyes had adjusted to the darkness inside the building, before she could take in the clean-stripped smell of chambers and corridors scoured by centuries of wind, the full-throated scream of Buridan had nearly driven her outside again.

It had taken them an hour to discover the source of that basso cry: the nest of huge pipes that jutted from the bottom of Buridan Tower acted like a giant wind instrument. It hummed and keened, moaned and ululated unceasingly.

Diamandis slapped the wall. This octagonal chamber was filled with jumbled pots, pans and other kitchen utensils; but it was quiet compared to the bedchambers and lounges of the former inhabitants. “Buridan’s heyday was very long ago,” he said. He looked almost apologetic, his features lit from below by the oil lamp they’d brought. “But the people of Spyre have long memories. Our records go all the way back to the creation of the world.”

He told her stories about Spyre’s ancient glories that night as they bedded down, and the next day as they prowled the jumbled chaos of the tower. Later, Venera would always find those memories entwined within her: the tales he told her accompanied by images of the empty, forlorn chambers of the tower. Grandeur, age, and despair were the setting for his voice; grandeur, age and despair henceforth defined her impressions of ancient Virga.

He told her tales of vast machines, bigger than cities, that had once built the very walls of Virga itself. Those engines were alive and conscious, according to Diamandis, and their offspring included both machines and humans. They had settled the cold black spaces of a star’s outskirts, having sailed for centuries from their home.

“Preposterous!” Venera had exclaimed. “Tell me more.”

So he told her of the first generations of men and women who had lived in Virga. The world was their toy, but they shared it with beings far more powerful and wiser than themselves. It was simple for them to build places like Spyre—but in doing so, they used up much of Virga’s raw materials. The machines objected. There was a war of inconceivable ferocity; Virga rang like a bell, its skin glowed with heat, and the precarious life forms the humans had seeded inside it were annihilated.

“Ridiculous!” she said. “You can do better than that.”

Spyre was the fortress of the human faction, he told her. From here, the campaign was launched that defeated the machines. Sulking, they left to create their own settlement on the farside of the sun—but some remained. In faraway, frozen, and sunless corners of the world, forgotten soldiers slept. Having accumulated dust and fungus over the centuries, they could easily be mistaken for asteroids. Some hung like frozen bats from the skin of the world, icebergs with sightless eyes. If you could waken them, you might receive powers and gifts beyond mortal desire; or you could unleash death and ruin on the whole world.

The humans slowly rebuilt Virga’s ecology, but they were diminished from their original, godlike power. The sons and daughters of those who had built Virga forgot their history, and wove their own myths to explain the world. Nations were spawned by the dozen, hot new suns springing into life in the black abyss. They turned their backs on the past.

Then, rumors began of something strange approaching across the cold interstellar wastes… a new force, spreading outwards like ripples in a pond. It came from their ancient home. It had many names, but the best description of it was artificial nature.

“Ah,” said Venera. “I see.”

They made their rounds as Diamandis talked. Each foray they made began and ended in the central atrium of the old building. Here, upward sweeping arches formed an eight-sided atrium that rose fifteen stories to the glittering stained-glass cupola surmounting the edifice. Lozenges of amber and lime, rose and indigo light outlined the dizzying succession of galleries that rose to all sides.

On the second day, as they were exploring the upper chambers, they came across traces of a story Garth Diamandis did not know. As Venera was poking her head in a closet she heard him shout in alarm. Running to his side she found him kneeling next to the armored figure of a man. The corpse was ancient, wizened and dried by the wind. A sword lay next to it. And in the next chamber were more bodies.

Some dire and dramatic end had come to the people here. They found a dozen mummified soldiers, all lying where they had fallen in fierce combat. Guns and blades were strewn among long-dried pools of black liquid. The disposition of the bodies suggested attackers and defenders; curious now, Venera followed the path the interlopers must have taken.

High in the tower, behind a barricaded door, a blackened human shape lay on the moldering covers of a vast four-poster bed. The white lace dress the mummy wore still moved in the wind, causing Venera to jump in startlement whenever she glanced at it.

She systematically ransacked the room while Diamandis stood contemplating the body. Here, in desk drawers and cabinets, were all the documents and letters of marque Venera needed to establish her identity. She even found a genealogy and photos. The best of the clothes were stored here as well, and that evening, rather than listening to a story, Venera began to make up her own—the story of a generations-long siege, a self-imposed exile broken finally by the last member of the nation of Buridan, Amandera Thrace-Guiles.

The darkness yielded detail slowly. Venera stood in what had once been a cobblestoned courtyard overlooked by the pillared facade of the Buridan estate. Black windows looked down from the edifice; once, sunlight would have streamed through them into whatever grand halls lay beyond. At some point in the past dark buttresses had been leaned onto the smooth white flanks of the building to support neighboring buildings—walls and arches that had swathed and overgrown it in layers, like the accumulating scales of some vast beast. For a while the estate would have still had access to the sky, for windows looked out from many of the encircling walls. All were now bricked up. Stone and wrought-iron arches had ultimately been lofted over the roofs of the estate, and at some point a last chink must have let distant sunlight in to light a forlorn cornice or the eye of a gargoyle. Then that too had been sealed and Buridan encysted, to wait.

It was understandable. There was only a finite amount of space on a town-wheel like this; if the living residents couldn’t demolish the Buridan estate, they’d been determined to reach other accommodations with it.

Two glittering pallasite staircases swept up from where Venera stood, one to the left, one right. She frowned, then headed for the dark archway that opened like a mouth between them. Her feet made no sound in the deep dust.

Certainly the upstairs chambers would be the luxurious ones; they had probably been stripped. In any case she was certain she would learn more about the habits and history of the nation by examining the servants’ quarters.

In the dark of the lower corridor, Venera knelt and examined the floor. She drew one of her pistols and slid the safety off. Cautiously she moved onward, listening intently.

This servants’ way ran on into obscurity, arches opening off it to both sides at regular intervals. Black squares that might once have been portraits hung on the walls, and here and there sheet-covered furniture huddled under the pillars like cowering ghosts.

Sounds reached her, distorted and uncertain. Were they coming from behind or ahead? She glanced back; silhouettes were moving across the distant square of the entranceway. But that sliding sound… She blew out the lantern and sidled along the wall, moving by touch.

Sure enough a fan of light draped across the disturbed dust of the corridor, and a shadow-play of figures moving against the opposite wall. Venera crept up to the open doorway and peered around the corner in time to meet the eye of someone coming the other way.

“Hey! They’re here already!” The woman was younger than Venera, and had prominent cheekbones and long stringy hair. She was dressed in the dark leathers of the city. Venera leaped into her path and leveled the pistol an inch from her face.

“Don’t move.”

“Shills!” somebody else yelled.

Venera didn’t know what a shill was, but yelled, “No!” anyway. “I’m the new owner of this house.”

The stringy-haired woman was staring cross-eyed at the gun barrel. Venera spared a glance past her into a long low chamber that looked like it had originally been a wine cellar. Lanterns burned at strategic points, lighting up what was obviously somebody’s hideout: there were cots, stacks of crates, even a couple of tables with maps unrolled on them. Half a dozen people were rushing about grabbing up stuff and making for an exit in the opposite wall. Several more were training guns on Venera.

“Ah.” She looked around the other side of the stringy-haired head. The men with the guns were glancing inquiringly at one of their number. Though of similar age, with his flashing eyes and ironic half-smile he stood out from the rest of these youths as a professor might stand out from his students. “Hello,” Venera said to him. She withdrew her pistol and holstered it, registering the surprise on his face with some satisfaction.

“You’d better hurry with your packing,” she said before anyone could move. “They’ll be here any minute.”

The guns were still trained on her, but the confident-looking youth stepped forward, squinting at her over his own weapon. He had a neatly trimmed mustache and what looked like a dueling scar on his cheek. “Who are you?” he demanded in an amused upper-class drawl.

She bowed. “Amandera Thrace-Guiles, at your service. Or perhaps, it’s the other way around.”

He sneered. “We’re no one’s servants. And unfortunate for you that you’ve seen us. Now we’ll have to—”

“Stow it,” she snapped. “I’m not playing your game, either for your side or for Spyre’s. I have my own agenda, and it might benefit your own goals to consider me a possible ally.”

Again the sense of amused surprise. Venera could hear voices outside in the hall now. “Be very quiet,” she said, “and snuff those lights.” Then she stepped back, grabbed the edges of the doors, and shut them.

Lanterns bobbed down the corridor. “Lady Thrace-Guiles?” It was Aday.

“Here. My lantern went out. In any case there seems to be nothing of interest this way. Shall we investigate the upper floors?”

“Perhaps.” Aday peered about himself in distaste. “This appears to be a commoner’s area. Yes, let’s retrace our steps.”

They walked in silence, and Venera strained to hear any betraying noise from the chamber behind them. There was none; finally, Aday said, “To what do we owe the honor of your visit? Is Buridan rejoining the great nations? Are you going to restart the trade in horses?”

Venera snorted. “You know perfectly well there was no room to keep such animals in the tower. We had barely enough to eat from the rooftop gardens and nets we strung under the world. No, there are no horses anymore. And I am the last of my line.”

“Ah.” They began to climb the long-disused steps to the upper chambers. “As to your being the last of the line… lines can be rejuvenated,” said Aday delicately. “And as to the horses… I am happy to say that you are in error in that case.”

She cast a sidelong glance at him. “What do you mean? Don’t toy with me.”

Aday smiled, appearing confident for the first time. “There are horses, my lady. Raised and bred at government expense in paddocks on Greater Spyre. They have always been here, all these years. They have been awaiting your return.”