Queen of Candesce

14

“This is the window she was signaling from,” said Bryce. He had his arms folded tightly to his chest and a muscle jumped in his jaw. Long tonguelike curls of wallpaper trembled over his shoulder in the constantly moving air. “I watched her send the whole message, clicking the little door of her lantern like she’d been doing light codes her whole life. She didn’t even bother to encrypt the message.”

Venera had gotten the story out of him in fits and starts, as memory and anger distracted him in turn. Cassia had been one of Bryce’s first recruits. They had argued with their foreheads together in the dark bars that peppered Lesser Spyre’s red-light district, and defaced buildings and thrown rocks at council parades. It was her urging that had led him down the path to terrorism, he admitted. “And all along, I was a project of hers—some kind of entrance exam to the academy of traitors in Sacrus!” He slammed his fist against the wall.

“Well.” Venera shaded her eyes with her hand and peered through the freshly-installed glass. “In the end, you were the one who fooled her. And she’s the one pent up in a locker downstairs.”

He didn’t look mollified. The false attack plan had been Venera’s idea, after all; all Bryce had done was bring his lieutenants together to reveal the target of their next bombing, a Sacrus warehouse in Lesser Spyre. All three of the lieutenants had expressed enthusiasm, Cassia perhaps most of all. But as soon as the planning meeting broke up she had come down to this disused pantry midway up the side of Buridan Tower—and had started signaling.

Venera could see why she would have favored this room for more than its writhing, peeled wallpaper. From here you had a clear line of sight to the walls of Sacrus, which ran in uneven maze-like lines just past a hedge of trees and a preservationist siding. From the center of the vast estate, a single monolithic building rose hundreds of feet into the afternoon air. Venera imagined a tiny flicker of light appearing somewhere on the side of that edifice—the rapid blink blink of a message or instruction for Cassia. Bryce was having the place watched round the clock, but so far Sacrus had not responded to Cassia’s warning.

“‘Target is Coaver Street warehouse in two days,’ she told them.” Bryce shook his head in disgust. “‘Urge evac of assets unless I can change target.’”

“You’ve done well,” said Venera. She turned and sat hip-wise on the window casement. “Listen, I know you’re upset—you feel unmanned. Fair enough, it’s a humiliation. No more so than this, though.” She held out a sheet of paper—a letter that had arrived for her this morning. She watched Bryce unfold it sullenly.

“‘Vote for Proposition forty-four at Council tomorrow,’” he read. “What’s that mean?”

She grimaced. “Proposition forty-four gives Sacrus control of the docks at Upper Spyre. Supposedly it’s a demotion, since the docks aren’t used much. Sacrus has modestly agreed to take that job and give up a plum post in the exchequer that they’ve held for decades. Nobody’s likely to object.”

Bryce managed a grim smile. “So they’re ordering you around like a lackey now?”

“At least they respected you enough to manipulate you instead,” she said. “And don’t forget, Bryce: your people follow you. Cassia recognized the leader in you, otherwise she wouldn’t have singled you out for her attention. She may have been manipulating you all this time—but she was also training you.”

He grumbled, but she could see her words had pleased him. At that moment, though, they heard rapid footsteps in the hall outside. Gray-haired Pasternak, one of Bryce’s remaining two lieutenants, stuck his head in the doorway and said, “They’re here.”

Venera spared a last glance out the window. From up here the airfall was an insubstantial mesh of fabric where ground should be. Rushing clouds spun by beneath that faint skein, which she knew was really a gridwork of I-beams and stout cable—the tough inner skeleton of Spyre, visible now that the skin was stripped away. A small jumble of gantries and cranes perched timidly at the edge of the ruined land. The official story was that Amandera Thrace-Guiles was trying to build a bridge across the airfall to rejoin Buridan Tower to the rest of Spyre.

She followed Bryce out of the room. The truth was that the bridge site was a ruse, a distraction to cover up the real link between Buridan and the rest of the world. In the few days that had passed since Venera’s conversation with Moss, a great deal of activity had taken place in the pipeworks that Venera and Garth had used to reach Buridan Tower the first time. A camouflaged entrance had been built near the railway siding a few hundred yards back from the airfall’s edge. A man, or even a large group of men, could jump off a slow-moving train and after a sprint under some trees be in a hidden tunnel that led all the way to the tower. True, there were still long sections where men had to walk separated by thirty feet or more lest the pipe give way… but that would be fixed.

As she and Bryce strode down the long ramp that coiled from the tower’s top to its bottom, they passed numerous work sites, each comprising half a dozen or more men and women. It was much like the controlled chaos of her estate’s renovation, except that these people weren’t fixing the plaster. They were assembling weapons, inventorying armor and supplies, and fencing in the ballrooms. Bryce’s entire organization was here, as well as gray-eyed soldiers from Liris and exotics from allies of that country. They had started arriving last night, after Bryce gave the all-clear that he’d found his traitor.

Bryce’s people were still in shock. They watched the newcomers with mixed loathing and suspicion; but the trauma of Cassia’s betrayal had been effective, and their loyalty to him still held. Venera knew they would need something to do—and soon—or their natural hatred of the status quo would assert itself. They were born agitators, cutthroats and bomb-builders, but that was why they would be useful.

A new group was just tromping up from the stairs to the pipeworks as Venera and Bryce reached the main hall. They wore oil-stained leathers and outlandish fur hats. Venera had seen these uniforms at a distance, usually wreathed in steam from some engine they were working on. These burly men were from the Preservation Society of Spyre, and they were sworn enemies of Sacrus.

For the moment they were acting more like overawed boys, though, staring around at the inside of Buridan Tower like they’d been transported into a storybook. In a sense, they had; the preservationists were indoctrinated in the history of the airfall, which remained the greatest threat to Spyre’s structural integrity and which all now knew had been caused partly by Sacrus. Buridan Tower had probably been a symbol to them for centuries of defiance against decay and treachery. To stand inside it now was clearly a shock.

Good. She could use that fact.

“Gentlemen.” She curtsied to the group. “I am Amandera Thrace-Guiles. If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you where you can freshen up, and then we can get started.”

They murmured amongst themselves as they walked behind her. Venera exchanged a glance with Bryce, who seemed amused at her formality.

The preservationists headed off to the washrooms and Venera and Bryce turned the other way, entering the tower’s now familiar library. Venera had ordered some of the emptied armor of the tower’s long-ago attackers mounted here. The holed and burned crests of Sacrus and its allies were quite visible on breastplate and shoulder. As a pointed message, Venera’d had the suits posed like sentries around the long map table in the middle of the room. One even held a lantern.

Bryce’s lieutenants were already at the table, pointing to things and talking in low tones with the commander of the Liris detachment. As the preservationists trouped back in, the other generals and colonels entered from a door opposite. Moss had exceeded Venera’s wildest expectations: at the head of this group were generals from Carasthant and Scoman, old allies of Liris in its war with Vatoris—and they had brought friends of their own. Most prominent was the towering, frizzy-haired Corinne, Princess of Fin. Normally, Venera didn’t like women who were social equals—in Hale they always represented a threat—but she’d taken an instant liking to Corinne.

Venera nodded around at them all. “Welcome,” she said. “This is an extraordinary meeting. Circumstances are dire. I’m sure you all know by now that Sacrus has recruited an army, plundering its neighbors of manpower in the process. So far the council at Lesser Spyre is acting like it never happened. I think they’re in a tailspin. Does anyone here believe that the council should be the ones to deal with the situation?”

There were grins round the table. One of the preservationists held up a hand. He would have been handsome were it not for the beard—Venera hated beards—that obscured the lower half of his face. “You’re on the council,” he said. “Can’t you bring a motion for them to act?”

“I can, but the next morning I’ll receive the head of my man Flance in the mail,” she said. “Sacrus has him. So I’m highly motivated, though not in the ways that Sacrus probably expect. Still… I won’t act through the council.”

“Sacrus blocked one of our main lines,” said the preservationist. “All of Spyre is in danger unless we can get a counterbalance running through their land. Beyond that, we don’t give a damn who they conquer.”

It was Venera’s turn to nod. The preservationists were dedicated to keeping the giant wheel together. Most of their decisions were therefore pragmatic and dealt with engineering issues.

“Are you saying they could buy your loyalty by just giving you a siding?” she asked.

“They could,” said the bearded man. There were protests up and down the table, but Venera smiled.

“I applaud your honesty,” she said. “Your problem is that you’d need to give them a reason before they did that. They’ve never had any use for you and you’ve never been a threat to them. So you’ve come here to buy that leverage?”

He shrugged. “Or see them destroyed. It’s all the same to us.”

Bryce leaned out to look at the man. “And the fact that they used poison gas to kill twenty-five of your workers a generation ago ..?”

“…Gives us a certain bias in the destroy direction. Who are you?” added the bearded man, who had been briefed on the identities of the other players.

With obvious distaste, Bryce said what they’d decided he would say: “Bryce. Chief of Intelligence for Buridan,” and he nodded at Venera.

“You’ve a spy network?” The preservationist grinned at her ironically.

“I do, Mister…?”

“Thinblood.” It could have been a name or a title.

“I do, Mister Thinblood—and you’ve got a secret warehouse full of artillery at junction sixteen,” she said with a return smile. Thinblood turned red; out of the corner of her eye Venera saw Princess Corinne stifle a laugh.

“We are all to be taken seriously,” Venera went on. “As is Sacrus. Let’s return to discussing them.”

“Hang on,” said Thinblood. “What are we discussing? War?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. But clearly, Sacrus needs its wings clipped.”

The lean, cadaverous general from Carasthant made a violent shushing gesture that made everyone turn to stare at him. “What can little guppies like us do?” he said in a buzzing voice that seemed to emanate from his bobbing Adam’s apple. “Begging your pardon, Madam Buridan, Mister Preservationist sir. Do you propose we take down a shark by worrying at its gills?”

His compatriot from Scoman waggled his head in agreement. The thousand and one tiny clocks built into his armor all clicked ahead a second. “Sacrus is bounded by high walls and barbed wire,” he said over the quiet snicking of his clothing, “and they have sniper towers and machine-gun positions. Even if we fought our way in, what would we do? Piss on their lawn?”

That was an expression Venera had never heard before.

Venera had thought long and hard about what to say when this question came up. These men and women were gathered here because their homes had all been injured or insulted by Sacrus—but were they here merely to vent their indignation? Would they back down in the face of actual action?

She didn’t want to tell them that she knew what Sacrus was up to. The key to Candesce was a prize worth betraying old friends for. If they knew Sacrus had it, half these people would defect to Sacrus’s side immediately, and the other half would proceed to plan how to get it themselves. It might turn into a night of long knives inside Buridan Tower.

“Sacrus’s primary assets lie inside the Gray Infirmary,” she said. “Whatever it is that they manufacture and sell, that is its origin. At the very least, we need to know what we’re up against, what they’re planning to do. I propose that we invade the Gray Infirmary.”

There was a momentary, stunned silence from the new arrivals. Princess Corinne’s broad sunburnt face was squinched up in a failed attempt to hide a smile. Then Thinblood, the Carasthant general, and two of the minor house representatives all started talking at once.

“Impossible!” she heard, and “suicide!” through the general babble. Venera let it run on for a minute or so, then held up her hand.

“Consider the benefits if it could be done,” she said. “We could rescue my man Flance, assuming he’s there. We could find out what Sacrus trades in—though I think we all know—but in any case find out what its tools and devices are. We might be able to seize their records. Certainly we can find out what it is they’re doing.

“If we want, we can blow up the tower.

“And it can be done,” she said. “I admit I was pretty hopeless myself until last night. We’d talked through all sorts of plans, from sneaking over the walls to shimmying down ropes from Lesser Spyre. All our scenarios ended up with us being machine-gunned, either on the way in or on the way out. Then I had a long talk with Princess Corinne, here.”

Corinne nodded violently; her hair followed her head’s motion a fraction of a second late. “We can get into the Gray Infirmary,” she brayed. “And out again safely.”

There was another chorus of protests and again Venera held up her hand. “I could tell you,” she said, “but it might be more convincing to show you. Come.” And she headed for the doors.

The roar from the airfall was more visceral than audible here in the lowest of Buridan’s pipes. Bryce’s people had lowered ladders down here when they came to cut away the maddening random organ that had been accidentally created in Buridan’s destruction. The corroded metal surface gleamed wetly and as Venera stepped off the ladder, she slipped and almost fell. She stared up at the ring of faces twenty feet above her.

“Well, come on,” she said. “If I’m brave enough to come down here, you can be too.”

Thinblood ignored the ladder and vaulted down, landing beside her with a smug thump. Instantly, the surface under their feet began swaying, and little flakes of rust showered down. “The ladder’s here to save the pipe, not your feet,” Venera said loudly. Thinblood looked abashed; the others clambered down the ladder meekly.

The ladder descended the vertical part of the pipe and they now stood where it bent into a horizontal direction. This tunnel was ten feet wide and who knew what it might originally have carried? Horse manure, Venera suspected. Whatever the case, it now ended twenty feet away. Late afternoon sunlight hurried shadows across the jagged circle of torn metal. It was from there that the roar originated.

“Come.” Without hesitation Venera walked to within five feet of the opening, then went down on one knee. She pointed. “There! Sacrus!”

They could barely have heard her over the roar of the thin air; it didn’t matter. It was clear what she was pointing at.

The pipe they stood in thrust forty or fifty feet into the airstream below the curve of Spyre’s hull. Luckily, this opening faced away from the headwind, though suction pulled at Venera relentlessly and the air was so thin she was starting to pant already. The pipe hung low enough to provide a vantage point from which a long stretch of Spyre’s hull was visible—miles of it, in fact. Way out there, near the little world’s upside-down horizon, a cluster of pipes much like this one—but intact—jutted into the airflow. Nestled among them was a glassed-in machine-gun blister, similar to the one Venera had first visited underneath Garth Diamandis’s hovel.

“That’s the underside of the Gray Infirmary,” she yelled at the motley collection of generals and revolutionaries crowding at her shoulder. Someone cupped hand to ear and looked quizzical. “Infirmary! In! Firm!” She jabbed her finger at the distant pipes. The quizzical person smiled and nodded.

Venera backed up cautiously, and the others scuttled ahead of her. At the pipe’s bend, where breathing was a bit easier and the noise and vibration not so mind-numbing, she braced her rump against the wall and her feet in the mulch of rust lining the bottom of the pipe. “We brought down telescopes and checked out that machine-gun post. It’s abandoned, like most of the hull positions. The entrance is probably bricked up, most likely forgotten. It’s been hundreds of years since anybody tried to assault Spyre from the outside.”

She could barely make out the buzzing words of Carasthant’s general. “You propose to get in through that? How? By jumping off the world and grabbing the pipes as they pass?”

Venera nodded. When they all stared back uncomprehending, she sighed and turned to Princess Corinne. “Show them,” she said.

Corinne was carrying a bulky backpack. She wrestled this off and plunked it down in the rust. “This,” she said with a dramatic flourish, “is how we will get to Sacrus.

“It is called a parachute.”

She had to focus on her jaw. Venera’s face was buried in the voluminous shoulder of her leather coat; her hands clutched the rope that twisted and shuddered in her grip. In the chattering roar of a four-hundred mile per hour wind there was no room for distractions, or even thought.

Her teeth were clenched around a mouthpiece of Fin design. A rubber hose led from this to a metal bottle that, Corinne had explained, held a large quantity of squashed air. It was that ingredient of the air the Rook’s engineers had called oxygen; Venera’s first breath of it had made her giddy.

Every now and then the wind flipped her over or dragged her head to the side and Venera saw where she was: wrapped in leathers, goggled and masked, and hanging from a thin rope inches below the underside of Spyre.

All she had to do was keep her body arrow-straight and keep that mouthpiece in. Venera was tied to the line, which was being let out quite rapidly from the edge of the airfall. Ten soldiers had already gone this way before her, so it must be possible.

It was night, but distant cities and even more distant suns cast enough light to silver the misty clouds that approached Spyre like curious fish. She saw how the clouds would nuzzle Spyre cautiously, only to be rebuffed by its whirling rotation. They recoiled, formed cautious spirals and danced around the great cylinder, as if trying to find a way in. Dark speckles—flocks of piranhawks and sharks—browsed among them, and there in great black formations were the barbedwire and blockhouses of the sentries.

To be among the clouds with nothing above or below seemed perfectly normal to Venera. If she fell, she only had to open her parachute and she’d come to a stop long before hitting the barbed wire. It wasn’t the prospect of falling that made her heart pound—it was the savage headwind that was trying to snatch her breath away.

The rope shuddered, and she grabbed it spasmodically. Then she felt a hand touch her ankle.

The soldiers hauled her through a curtain of speed ivy and into a narrow gun emplacement. This one was dry and empty, its tidiness somehow in keeping with Sacrus’s fastidious attention to detail. Bryce was already here, and he unceremoniously yanked the air line from Venera’s mouth—or tried; she bit down on it tenaciously for a second, glaring at him, before relenting and opening her mouth. He shot her a look of annoyance and tied it and her unopened parachute to the line. This he let out through the speed ivy, to be reeled back to Buridan for its next user.

Princess Corinne’s idea had sounded insane, but she merely shrugged, saying, “We do this sort of thing all the time.” Of course, she was from Fin, which explained much. That pocket nation inhabited one of Spyre’s gigantic ailerons, a wing hundreds of feet in length that jutted straight down into the airstream. Originally colonized by escaped criminals, Fin had grown over the centuries from a cold and dark sub-basement complex into a bright and independent—if strange—realm. The Fins didn’t really consider themselves citizens of Spyre at all. They were creatures of the air.

Over the years they had installed hundreds of windows in the giant metal vane, as well as hatches and winches. They were suspected of being smugglers, and Corinne had proudly confirmed that. “We alone are able to slip in and out of Spyre at will,” she’d told Venera. And, as their population expanded, they had colonized five of the other twelve fins by the same means they were using to break into Sacrus.

To reach Sacrus, one of Corinne’s men had donned a parachute and taken hold of a rope that had a big three-barbed hook on its end. He had stepped into the howling airfall and was snatched down and away like a fleck of dust.

Venera had been watching from the tower and saw his parachute balloon open a second later. Instantly, he stopped falling away from Spyre and began curving back toward the hull. Down only operated as long as you were part of the spinning structure, after all; freed of the high speed imparted by Spyre’s rotation, he’d come to a stop in the air. He could have hovered there, scant feet from the hull, for hours. The only problem was the rope he held, which was still connected to Buridan.

The big wooden spool that was unreeling it was starting to smoke. Any second now it would reach its end, and the snap would probably take his hands off. Yet he calmly stood there in the dark air, waiting for Sacrus to shoot past.

As the pipes and machine-gun nest leaped toward him he lifted the hook and, with anticlimactic ease, tossed it ahead of the rushing metal. The hook caught; the rope whipped up and into the envelope of speeding air surrounding the hull; and Corinne’s man saluted before disappearing over Spyre’s horizon. They’d recovered him when he came around again.

Now, brilliant light etched the cramped gun emplacement with the caustic sharpness of a black-and-white photograph. One of the men was employing a welding torch on the hatch at the top of the steps. “Sealed ages ago, like we thought,” shouted Bryce, jabbing a thumb at the ceiling. “Judging from the pipes, we’re under the sewage stacks. There’s probably toilets above us.”

“Perfect.” They needed a staging ground from which to assault the tower. “Do you think they’ll hear us?”

Bryce grimaced. “Well, there could be fifty guys sitting around up there taking bets on how long it’ll take us to burn the hatch open. We’ll find out soon enough.”

Suddenly, the ceiling blew out around the welder. He retreated in a shower of sparks, cursing, and a new wind filled the little space. Before anybody else could move, Thinblood leaped over to the hole and jammed some sort of contraption up it. He folded, pulled—and the wind stopped. The hole the welder had made was now blocked by something.

“Patch hatch,” said Thinblood, wiping dust off his face. “We’d better go up. They might have heard the pop or felt the pressure drop.”

Without waiting, he pressed against his temporary hatch, which gave way with a rubbery slapping sound. Thinblood pushed his way up and out of sight. Bryce was right behind him.

Both were standing with their guns drawn when Venera fought her way past the suction to sprawl on a filthy floor. She stood up, brushing herself off, and looked around. “It is indeed a men’s room.”

Or was it? In the weak light of Thinblood’s lantern, she could see that the chamber was lined in tiles that had once been white but which had long since taken on the color of rust and dirt. Long streaks ran down the wall to dark pools on the floor. Venera expected to see the usual washroom fixtures along the walls, but other than a metal sink there was nothing. She had an uneasy feeling that she knew what sort of room this was, but it didn’t come to her until Thinblood said, “Operating theater. Disused.”

Bryce was prying at a metal chute mounted in one wall. It creaked open, and he stared down into darkness for a second. “A convenient method of disposal for body parts or even whole people,” he said. “I’m thinking more like an autopsy room.”

“Vivisectionist’s lounge?” Thinblood was getting into the game.

“Shut up,” said Venera. She’d gone over to the room’s one door and was listening at it. “It seems quiet.”

“Well it is the middle of the night,” the preservationist commented. More members of their team were meanwhile popping up out of the floor like jack-in-the-boxes. Minus the wind-up music, Venera mused.

Soon there were twenty of them crowded together in the ominous little room. Venera cracked the door and peered out into a larger, dark space full of pipes, boilers, and metal tanks. This was the maintenance level for the tower, it seemed. That was logical.

“Is everyone clear on what we’re doing?” she asked.

Thinblood shook his head. “Not even remotely.”

“We are after my man Flance,” she said, “as well as information about what Sacrus is up to. If we have to fight, we cause enough mayhem to make Sacrus rethink its strategy. Hence the charges.” She nodded at the heavy canvas bag one of the Liris soldiers was toting. “Our first order of business is to secure this level, then set some of those charges. Let’s do it.”

She led the soldiers of half a dozen nations as they stepped out of their bridgehead and into the dark of enemy territory.