Queen of Candesce

12

Spyre was awe-inspiring even at a distance of ten miles. Venera held onto netting in a rear-facing doorway of the passenger liner Glorious Dawn and watched the vast blued circle recede in the distance. First one cloud shot by to obscure a quadrant of her view, then another, then a small team of them that whirled slowly in the ship’s wake. They chopped Spyre up into fragmented images: a curve of green trees here, a glint of window in some tower (Liris?). Then, instead of clouds, it was blockhouses and barbed wire flicking by. They were passing the perimeter. She was free.

She turned, facing into the interior of the ship. The velvet-walled galleries were crowded with passengers, mostly visiting delegations returning from the Fair. But a few of the men and women were dressed in the iron and leather of a major nation: Buridan. Her retainers, maids, the Buridan trade delegation… she wasn’t free yet, not until she had found a way to evade all of them.

Now that she was undisputed head of the Nation of Buridan, Venera had new rights. The right to travel freely, for example; it had only taken a simple request and a travel visa had been delivered to her the next day. Of course she couldn’t simply wave goodbye and leave. Nobody was fully convinced that she was who she said she was. So, it had been necessary for her to invent a pointless trade tour of the principalities to justify this trip. And that in turn meant that she could not be traveling alone.

Still—after weeks of running, of being captured by Liris and made chattel; after run-ins with bombers and bombs, hostile nobility and mad botanists—after all of that, she had simply boarded a ship and left. Life was never like you imagined it would be.

And she could just keep going, she knew—all the way back to her home in Rush. The idea was tempting, but it wasn’t why she had undertaken this expedition. It was too soon to return home. She didn’t yet have enough power to undertake the revenge she planned against the Pilot of Slipstream. If she left now it would be as a thief, with only what she could carry to see her home. No, when she finally did leave Spyre, it must be with power at her back.

The only way to get that power was to increase her holdings here, as well as the faith of the people in her. So, like Liris and all the other nations of Spyre, Buridan would visit the outer world to find customers.

Her smile faltered as the last of the barbed wire and mines swept by to vanish among the clouds. True, if she just kept going she wouldn’t miss anything of Spyre, she mused. Yet even as she thought this Venera experienced a little flash of memory: of Garth Diamandis laughing in sunlight; then of Eilen leaning on a wall after drinking too much at the party.

Last night Venera too had drunk too much wine, with Garth Diamandis. Sitting in a lounge that smelled of fresh paint and plaster, they had listened to the night noises of the house and talked.

“You’re not kidding either of us,” he’d said. “You’re leaving for good. I know that. So let me tell you now, while I can, that you’ve stripped many years off my shoulders, Lady Venera Fanning. I hope you find your home intact and waiting for you.” He toasted her then.

“I’ll prove you wrong about me yet,” she’d said. “But what about you?” she asked. “When all of this really is finished with, what are you going to do? Fade into the alleys of the town wheels? Return to your life as a gigolo?”

He shook his head with a smile. “The past is the past. I’m interested in the future. Venera… I found her.”

Venera had smiled, genuinely happy for him. “Ah. Your mysterious woman. Your prime mover. Well, I’m glad.”

He’d nodded vigorously. “She’s sent me a letter, telling where and when we can meet. In the morning, you’ll head for the docks and your destiny, and I’ll be off to the city and mine. So you see, we’ve both won.”

They toasted one another, and Spyre, and eventually the whole world before the night became a happy blur.

She kicked off from the ship’s netting, almost colliding with one of the crew, and began hauling her way up the corridor to the bow of the ship. One of her new maids fell into formation next to her.

“Is there something wrong, lady?” The maid, Brydda, wrung her hands. Her normally sour face looked even more prudish as she frowned. “Is it leaving Spyre that’s upset you so?”

Venera barked a laugh. “It couldn’t happen soon enough. No.” She kept hand-walking up the rope that led to the bow.

“Can I do anything for you?”

She shot Brydda an appraising look. “You’ve traveled before, haven’t you? You were put onto my staff by the council, I’ll bet. To watch me.”

“Madam!”

“Oh, don’t deny it. Just come with. I need a… distraction. You can point out the sights as we go.”

“Yes, madam.”

They arrived at a forward observation lounge in time for the ship to exit the cloud banks. The Glorious Dawn was a typical passenger vessel: a spindle-shaped wooden shell one hundred fifty feet long and forty wide, its surface punctuated with rows of windows and open wicker-work galleries. Big jet nacelles were mounted on short arms at the stern, their whine subdued right now as the ship made a scant fifteen miles per hour through the thinning clouds. The ship’s interior was subdivided into staterooms and common areas and contained two big exercise centrifuges. With the engine sound a constant undertone, Venera could easily hear the clink of glassware in the kitchens, muted conversations, and somewhere, a string quartet tuning up. The lounge smelled of coffee and fresh air.

Such a contrast to the Rook, the last ship she had flown on. When she’d left it the Slipstream cruiser had stunk of unwashed men, stale air, and rocket exhaust. Its hull had been peppered with bullet holes and scorched by explosions. The engines’ roar would pierce your dreams as you slept and the only voices were those of arguing, cursing airmen.

The Glorious Dawn was just like every vessel she had ever traveled on prior to the Rook. Its luxuries and details were appropriate to one of Venera’s station in life; she should be able to put the ship on like a favorite glove. In the normal course of affairs she would never have set foot on a ship like the Rook, much less would she have seen it through battle and boarding, pursuit and silent running.

Yet the quiet comforts of the Glorious Dawn annoyed her. Venera went right up to the main window of the lounge and peered out. “Tell me where we are,” she commanded the maid.

There was distraction to be found in this view. Candesce lay directly ahead, its brilliance too intense to be looked at directly. Venera well knew that light, it had burned her as she’d fled from its embrace. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked past it.

She saw the principalities of Candesce. Although she had spent a week in a charcoal-harvester’s cabin perched on a burnt arm of the sargasso of Leaf’s Choir, that place had been too close to Candesce; the white air cradling the sun of suns washed out any details that lay past it. Here, for the first time, she had a clear view of the nations that surrounded that biggest of Virga’s artificial lights. And the sight was breathtaking.

Candesce lay at the center of the world, a beacon and a heart to Virga. Anything within a hundred miles of the sun of suns simply vanished in flame, a fact that the principalities exploited to dispose of trash, industrial wastes, and the bodies of their dead. This forbidden zone was completely empty, so Venera could see the whole inner surface of the two-hundred-mile-diameter bubble formed by it. On the far side of Candesce that surface was just a smooth speckled blue-green; in the middle distances Venera could make out dots and glitter, and individual beads of leaf color. As she turned to follow the curve of the material toward her the dots became buildings and the glints became the mirrored surfaces of house-sized spheres of water. The beads of green grew filigreed detail and became forests—dozens or hundreds of trees at a time, with their roots intertwined around some buried ball of dirt and rocks.

Candesce presided at the center of a cloud of city whose inner extent was two hundred miles in diameter—and whose outer reaches could only be guessed at. The fog of habitations and farms receded into blue dimness, behind lattices of white cloud. Back in the darkening airs a hundred or two hundred miles away, smaller suns glowed.

“These are the principalities,” said Brydda, sweeping her arm to take in the sight. “Sixty-four nations, countless millions of people moving at the mercy of Candesce’s heat.”

Venera glanced at her. “What do you mean by that? ‘At the mercy of?’”

The maid looked chagrined. “Well, they can’t keep station where they please, the way Spyre does. Spyre is fixed in the air, madam, always has been. But these—” she dismissed the principalities with a wave—”they go where the breezes send them. All that keeps them together as nations is the stability of the circulation patterns.”

Venera nodded. The cluster of nations she’d grown up in, Meridian, worked the same way. Candesce’s prodigious heat had to go somewhere, and beyond the exclusion zone it must form the air into Hadley cells: semi-stable up- and down-drafts. You could enter such a cell at the bottom, near Candesce, and be lofted a hundred miles up, then swept horizontally for another hundred miles, then down again until you reached your starting point. The Meridian Hadley cell was huge—a thousand miles across and twice that in depth—and nearly permanent. Down here in the principalities the heat would make the cells less stable, but quicker and stronger.

“So there’s one nation per Hadley cell?” she asked. “That seems altogether too well organized.”

The maid laughed. “It’s not that simple. The cells break up and merge, but it takes time. Every time Candesce goes into its night cycle the heat stops going out, and the cells falter. Candesce always comes back on in time to start them up again but not without consequence.”

Venera understood what she meant by consequence. Without predictable airflow, whole nations could break apart, their provinces drifting away from one another, mixing with neighbors and enemies. It had happened often enough in Meridian, where the population was light and obstacles few. Down here, such an event would be catastrophic.

Brydda continued her monologue, pointing out border beacons and other sights of interest. Venera half listened, musing at something she’d known intellectually but not grasped until this moment. She had been inside—had for one night been in control of—the most powerful device in the world. Whole cities rose and fell in a slow majestic dance driven by Candesce—as did forests, mists of green food-crops, and isolated buildings, clouds and ships and factories, supply nets a mile across, whale and bird paddocks. Ships and dolphins and ropeways and flapping, foot-finned humans threaded through it all.

She’d had ultimate power in her hands, and had let it go without a thought. Strange.

Venera turned her attention back to Brydda. As the Glorious Dawn turned, however, she saw that Spyre lay in a kind of dimple in the surface of the bubble. The giant cylinder disrupted the smooth winds of the cells that surrounded it. Wrapped in its own weather, Spyre was an irritant, a mote in the gargantuan orb of the principalities.

“How they must hate you,” she murmured.

Slipstream had an ambassador at the Fitzmann States, an old and respected principality near Spyre. So it was that Buridan’s trade delegation made its first stop there.

For two days Venera feted the local wealthy and talked horses—horses as luxury items, horses as tourist draws, as symbols of state power and a connection to the lost origins of Virga. She convinced no one, but since she was hosting the parties, her guests went away entertained and slightly tipsy. The arrangement suited everyone.

There was nothing scheduled for the third morning, and Venera awoke early with a very strange notion in her head.

Leave now.

She could do it. Oh, it would be so simple. She imagined her marriage bed in her chambers in Rush, and a wave of sorrow came over her. She was up and dressed before her thinking caught up to her actions. She hesitated, while Candesce and the rest of the capital town of Fitzmann still slept. She paced in front of her rented apartment’s big windows, shaking her head and muttering. Every now and then she would glance out the window at the dark silhouette of the Slipstream ambassador’s residence. She need only make it there and claim asylum, and Spyre and all its machinations would lie behind her.

Slowly, as if her mind were on something else, she slipped a pistol into her bag and reached for a set of wings inside the closet. At that moment there came a knock on her door.

Venera came to herself, shocked to see what she had been doing. She leaned against the wall for a moment, debating whether to step into the closet and shut herself in it. Then she cursed and walked to the door of the suite. “Who’s there?” she asked testily.

“It’s Brydda, ma’am. I’ve a letter for you.”

“A letter?” She threw open the door and glared at the maid, who was dressed in a nightgown and clutched a white envelope in one hand. She saw Brydda’s eyes widen as she took in Venera’s fully-dressed state. Venera snatched the letter from her and said, “Lucky thing that I couldn’t sleep. But how dare you come to disturb me in the middle of the night over this!”

“I’m sorry!” Brydda curtsied miserably. “The man who delivered it was very insistent that you read it now. He says he needs a signed receipt from you saying you’ve read it—and he’s waiting in the foyer…”

Venera flipped the envelope over. The words Amandera Thrace-Guiles were written on it. There was no other seal or indication of its origin. Uneasy, Venera retreated into the room. “Wait there a moment.” She went over to the writing desk; not seeing a letter opener anywhere handy, she slit the envelope open using the knife she’d been keeping in her vest. Then she unfolded the single sheet under the green desk lamp.

TO: Venera Fanning

FROM:—

SUBJECT: Master Flance, otherwise known as Garth Diamandis

We have arrested your accomplice (above-named). As an exiled criminal, he has no rights in Greater or Lesser Spyre. If you want him to continue living, you will return immediately to Spyre and await our instructions.

She swore and knocked over the writing desk. The lamp broke and went out. “My lady!” shouted Brydda from the doorway.

“Shut up! Get out! Don’t disturb me again!” She slammed the door in the maid’s face and began pacing, the letter mangled in her fist.

How dare they! This was obviously Sacrus asserting their hold over her—but in the most clumsy and insulting manner possible. There was a message in their bluntness and it was simple: They had neither the need nor the patience to treat her carefully. She would do as they asked, or they would kill Garth.

Like Garth, they must have thought she was going to run. So why not let her do it? They didn’t appear to be concerned that she might alert Slipstream to the theft of the Key to Candesce because they had let her get this far. That was odd—or not so odd, when you considered that the leaders of Sacrus must be as insular and decadent as any of the other pocket nations on the wheel. But why not just let her go?

They must have decided that they needed Buridan’s stability. She probably shouldn’t read too much into the decision. They could just as easily change their minds and have her killed at any moment.

Anyway, the reasons didn’t matter. They had Garth—she had no reason to doubt that—and if she didn’t return to Spyre immediately, his death would be her fault.

As her initial anger wore off, Venera sat down on a divan and, reaching in her jacket, brought out the bullet that nestled there. She turned it over in her hands for half an hour and then as Candesce began to ignite in the distant sky, she made her decision.

She slid the dagger back into her vest.

She took the wings from inside the closet and stepped into the hallway. Brydda was asleep in a wing chair under a tall leaded-glass window. Venera walked past her to the servant’s stairs and headed for the roof.

Gold-touched by the awakening sun of suns, she took flight in the high winds and lower gravity of the rooftop.

Venera rose on the air, losing weight rapidly as the wind disengaged her from the spin of the town wheel. High above the buildings, among turning cables and hovering birds, she turned her back on the apartment and on the trade delegation of Buridan. She turned her back on Garth Diamandis, and flew toward the residence of the ambassador of Slipstream.

Various scenarios had played themselves out in her mind as she flew. The first was that she could pretend to be the estranged wife of one of the sailors on the Rook. Wringing her hands, she could look pathetic and demand news of the expedition.

Venera wasn’t good at looking pathetic. Besides, they could legitimately ask what she was doing here, thousands of miles away from Slipstream.

She could claim to be a traveling merchant. Then why ask after the expedition? Perhaps she should say she was from Hale, not Slipstream, a distant relative of Venera Fanning needing news of her.

These and other options ran through her mind as Venera waited next to the tall scrolled doors of the ambassador’s office. The moment the door lock clicked, she pushed her way inside and said to the surprised secretary, “My name is Venera Fanning. I need to talk to the ambassador.”

The man turned white as a sheet. He practically ran for the inner office and there was a hurried, loud conversation there. Then he stuck his head out the door and said, “You can’t be seen here.”

“Too late for that, if anyone’s watching.” She closed the outer door and walked to the inner. The secretary threw it open and stepped aside.

The ambassador of Slipstream was a middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and the kind of stern features usually reserved for suspicious aunts, school principals, and morals crusaders. She glared at Venera and gestured for her to sit in one of the red leather wing chairs that faced her dark teak desk. “So you’re alive,” she said as she lowered herself heavily on her side.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Venera was suddenly anxious to the point of panic. “What happened to the others?”

The ambassador sent her a measuring look. “You were separated from your husband’s expedition?”

“Yes! I’ve had no news. Just… rumors.”

“The expeditionary force was destroyed,” said the ambassador. She grimaced apologetically. “Your husband’s flagship apparently rammed a Falcon dreadnaught, causing a massive explosion that tore both vessels apart. All hands are presumed lost.”

“I see…” She felt sick, as though this were the first time she’d heard this news.

“I don’t think you do see,” said the ambassador. She snapped her fingers and her secretary left, returning with a silver tray and two glasses of wine.

“You’ve shown up at an awkward time,” continued the ambassador. “One of your husband’s ships did make it back to Rush. The Severance limped back into port a couple of weeks ago, and her hull was full of holes. Naturally, the people assumed she was the vanguard of a return from the battle with Mavery. But no—the airmen disembarked and they were laughing, crying, claiming a great victory, and waving away all talk of Mavery. ‘No,’ they say, ‘we’ve beaten Falcon! By the genius of the Pilot and Admiral Fanning, we’ve forestalled an invasion and saved Slipstream!’

“Can the Pilot deny it? If Fanning himself had returned, with the other ships… maybe not. If the airmen of the Severance hadn’t started throwing around impossible amounts of money, displaying rich jewels and gold chains and talking wildly about a pirate’s hoard… Well, you see the problem. Falcon is supposed to be an ally. And the Pilot’s been caught with his pants below his knees, completely unaware of a threat to his nation until after his most popular admiral has extinguished that threat.

“He ordered the crew rounded up, on charges of treason. The official story is that Fanning took some ships on a raid into Falcon and busted open one of their treasuries. He’s being court-martialed in absentia, as a traitor and pirate.”

“Therefore,” said Venera, “if I were to return now…”

“You’d be tried as an accessory, at the very least.” The ambassador steepled her hands and leaned forward minutely in her chair. “Legally, I’m bound to turn you over for extradition. Except that, should I do so, you’d likely become a lightning rod for dissent. After the riots…”

“What riots?”

“Well.” She looked uncomfortable. “The Pilot was a bit… slow, to act. He didn’t round up all of the Severance’s airmen quickly enough. And he didn’t stem the tide until a good deal of money had flowed into the streets. Apparently, these were no mere trinkets the men were showing off—and they’re not treasury items either, they’re plunder, pure and simple, and ancient to boot. And the people, the people believe the Severance, not the Pilot.

“Our last dispatch—that was two days ago—says that the bulk of the crew and officers made it back to the Severance and bottled themselves up in it. It’s out there now, floating a hundred yards off the admiralty. The Pilot ordered it blown up, and that’s when rioting started in the city.”

“If you returned now,” said the secretary, “there’d be even more bloodshed.”

“—And likely your blood would be spilled as an example to others.” The ambassador shook her head. “It gets worse, too. The navy’s refused the Pilot’s command. They won’t blow up the Severance, they want to know what happened. They’re trying to talk the crew out, and there’s a three-way standoff now between the Pilot’s soldiers, the navy, and the Severance herself. It’s a real mess.”

Venera’s pulse was pounding. She wanted to be there, in the admiralty. She knew Chaison’s peers, she could rally those men to fight back. They all hated the Pilot, after all.

She slumped back in her chair. “Thank you for telling me this.” She thought for a minute, then glanced up at the ambassador. “Are you going to have me arrested?”

The older woman shook her head, half smiling. “Not if you make a discreet enough exit from my office. I suggest the back stairs. I can’t see how sending you home in chains would do anything but fan the flames at this point.”

“Thank you.” She stood and looked toward the door the ambassador had pointed at. “I won’t forget this.”

“Just so long as you never tell anyone that you saw me,” said the ambassador with an ironic smile. “So what will you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you stay here in the capital, we might be able to help you—set you up with a job and a place to stay,” said the ambassador sympathetically. “It would be below your station, I’m afraid, at least to start…”

“Thanks, I’ll consider it—and don’t worry, if I see you again, I won’t be Venera Fanning anymore.” Dazed, she pushed through the door into a utilitarian hallway that led to gray tradesmen’s stairs. She barely heard the words “Good luck,” before the door closed behind her.

Venera went down one flight, then sat on a step and put her chin in her hands. She was trembling but dry eyed.

Now what? The news about the Severance had been electrifying. She should board the next ship she could find that was headed for the Meridian countries, and… But it might take weeks to get there. She would arrive after the crisis was resolved, if it hadn’t been already.

There was one man who could have helped her. Hayden Griffin was flying a fast racing bike, a simple jet engine with a saddle. She’d last seen him at Candesce as the sun of suns blossomed into incandescent life. He was opening the throttle—racing for home—and surely by now he was back in Slipstream. If she’d gone with him when he offered her his hand, none of her present troubles would have happened.

Yet she couldn’t do it. Venera had killed Hayden’s lover not ten minutes before and simply could not believe that he wouldn’t murder her in return if he got the chance.

She hadn’t wanted to kill Aubri Mahallan. The woman had lied about her intentions; she had joined the Fanning expedition with the intention of crippling Candesce’s defenses. She worked for the outsiders, the alien Artificial Nature that lurked somewhere beyond the skin of Virga. Had Venera not prevented it, Mahallan would have let those incomprehensible forces into Virga and nothing would now be as it was.

Once again Venera took out the bullet and turned it over in her fingers. She had killed the captain of the Rook and his bridge crew—shot them with a pistol—in order to save the lives of everyone aboard. Captain Sembry had been about to fire the Rook’s scuttling charges during their battle with the pirates. She had shot several other people in battle and killed Mahallan to save the world itself. Just like she’d shot the man who had been about to kill Chaison, on the day they’d met…

Either she had killed those people because of a higher purpose, or from naked self-interest. She could admit to being ruthless and callous, even heartless, but Venera did not see herself as fundamentally selfish. She had been bred and raised to be selfish, but she didn’t want to be like her sisters or her father. That was the whole reason why she’d escaped life in Hale at her first opportunity.

Venera cursed. If she flew away from Garth Diamandis and the key to Candesce now, she would be admitting that she had killed Aubri Mahallan not to save the world but out of pure spite. She’d be admitting that she’d shot Sembry in the forehead solely to preserve her own life. Could she even claim to have been trying to save Chaison too?

All her stratagems collapsed. Venera returned the bullet to her pocket, stood, and continued down the steps.

When she reached the street she looked around until she spotted the apartment where at this moment Brydda and the rest of the Buridan trade delegation must be frantically searching for her. Leaden with defeat and anger, she let her feet carry her in that direction.