Queen of Candesce

15

Everything in the Gray Infirmary seemed designed to promote a feeling of paranoia. The corridors were hung with huge black felt drapes that swayed and twitched slightly in the moving air, giving the constant impression that there was someone hiding behind them. The halls were lit by lanterns fixed on metal posts; you could swivel the post and aim the light here and there, but there was no way to illuminate your entire surroundings at any point. The floors were muffled under deep crimson carpet. You could sneak up on anybody here. There were no signs, doors were hidden behind the drapery, and all the corridors looked alike.

It reminded Venera unpleasantly of the palace at Hale. Her father’s own madness had been deepening in the days before she succeeded in escaping to a life with Chaison. The king had all the paintings in the palace covered, the mirrors likewise. He took to walking the hallways at night, a sword in his hand, convinced as he was that conspirators waited around every corner. These nocturnal strolls were great for the actual conspirators, who knew exactly where he was and so could avoid him easily. Those conspirators—almost entirely comprising members of his own family—would bring him down one day soon. Venera had not received any letters bragging of his downfall while she lived in Rush; but there could well be one waiting when or if she ever returned to Slipstream.

That was the madness of one man. Sacrus, though, had done more than generalize such paranoia: it had institutionalized it. The Gray Infirmary was a monument to suspicion and a testament to the idea that distrust was to be encouraged. “Don’t pull on the curtains to look for doors,” Venera cautioned the men as they rounded a corner and lost sight of the stairs to the basement. “They may be rigged to an alarm.”

Thinblood scoffed. “Why do something like that?”

“So only the people who know where the doors are can find them,” she said. “People trying to escape—or interlopers like us—set off the bells. Luckily, there’s another way to find them.” She pointed at the carpet. “Look for worn patches. They signify higher traffic.”

The corridor they were in seemed to circle some large inner area. Opposite the basement stairs they found the broad steps of an exit, and next to it stairs going up. It wasn’t until they had nearly circled back to the basement stairs that they found a door letting into the interior. Next to a patch of slightly worn carpet, Venera eased the curtains to the side and laid her hand on a cold iron door with a simple latch. She eased the door open a crack—it made no sound—and peered in.

The room was as big as an auditorium, but there was no stage. Instead, dozens of long glass tanks stood on tables under small electric lights. The lights flickered slightly, their power no doubt influenced by the jamming signal that emanated from Candesce.

Each tank was filled with water, and lying prone in them were men—handcuffed, blindfolded, and with their noses and mouths just poking out of the water. Next to each tank was a stool, and perched on several of these were women who appeared to be reading books.

“What is it?” Thinblood was asking. Venera waved at him impatiently and tried to get a better sense of what was going on here. After a moment she realized that the women’s lips were moving. They were reading to the men in the tanks.

“…I am the angel that fills your sky. Can you see me? I come to you naked, my breasts are full and straining for your touch.”

Bryce put a hand on her shoulder and his head above hers. “What are they doing?”

“They seem to be reading pornography,” she whispered, shaking her head.

“…Touch me, oh touch me exalted one. I need you. You are my only hope.

“Yet who am I, this trembling bird in your hand. I am more than one woman, I am a multitude, all dependent on you… I am Falcon Formation, and I need you in all ways that a man can be needed…”

Venera fell back, landing on her elbows on the deep carpet. “Shut it!” Bryce raised an eyebrow at her reaction, but eased the door closed. He twitched the curtain back into place.

“What was that all about?” asked Thinblood.

Venera got to her feet. “I just found out who one of Sacrus’s clients is,” she said. She felt nauseated.

“Can we seal off this door?” she asked. “Prevent anyone getting out and coming at us from behind?”

Bryce frowned. “That presents its own dangers. We could as easily trap ourselves.”

She shrugged. “But we have grenades, and we’re not afraid to use them.” She squinted at him. “Are we?”

Thinblood laughed. “Would a welding torch applied to the hinges do the trick? We’ll have to leave a tiny team behind to do that.”

“Two men, then.”

They went back to the upward-leading stairs. The second level presented a corridor identical to the one below. The same muffled silence hung over everything here. “Ah,” said Venera, “such delicate decorative instincts they have.”

Thinblood was pacing along bent over, hands behind his back. He stared at the floor mumbling “hmmm, hmmm.” After a few seconds he pointed. “Door here.”

Venera twitched back the curtain to reveal an iron-bound door with a barred window. She had to stand on her tip-toes to see through it to the long corridor full of similar doors beyond. “This looks like a cell block.” She rattled the door handle. “Locked.”

“Hello?” The voice had come from the other side of the door. Venera motioned for the others to get out of sight, then summoned a laconic, sugary voice and said, “Is this where I can find my little captain?” She giggled.

“Wha—?” Two eyes appeared at the door, blinking in surprise at her. Just in time, Venera had yanked off her black jacket and shirt, revealing the strategic strappery that maximized her figure. “Who the hell are you?” said the man on the other side of the door.

“I’m your present,” whispered Venera. “That is, if you’re Captain Sendriks… I’d like it if you were,” she added petulantly. “I’m tired of tromping around these stupid corridors in nothing but my assets. I could catch a cold.”

A moment later the latch clicked and seconds after that Venera was inside with a pistol under the chin of the surprised guard. Her men flowed around her like water filling a pipe; as she gestured for her new prisoner to kneel Thinblood said, “It’s clear on this end, but there’s another man around the corner yonder.”

“Level a pistol at him and he’ll fall into line.” She watched one of the soldiers from Liris tying up her man, then said, “It is cold in here. Bryce, where’s my jacket?”

“Haven’t seen it,” he said innocently. Venera glared at him, then went to collect it herself.

The new corridor held a faint undertone of coughing and quizzical voices, which came from behind the other doors. This was indeed a cell block. Venera raced from door to door. “Up! Yes, you! Who are you? How long have you been here?”

There were men and women here. There were children as well. They wore a wide mix of clothing, some familiar from her days in Spyre, some foreign, perhaps of the principalities. Their accents, when they answered her hesitantly, were similarly diverse. All seemed well fed, but they were haggard with fear and lack of sleep.

Garth Diamandis was not among them.

Venera didn’t hide her disappointment. “Tell me where the rest of the prisoners are or I’ll blow your head off,” she told the guard. She had him on his knees with his face pressed against the wall, her pistol at the back of his head. “Bear in mind,” she added, “that we’ll find them ourselves if we have to, it’ll just take longer. What do you say?”

He proceeded to give a detailed account of the layout of the tower, including where the night watch was stationed and when their rounds were. So far Venera hadn’t seen any sign of watchmen; for a nation gearing up for war, Sacrus seemed extremely lax. She said so and her prisoner laughed, a tad hysterically.

“Nobody’s ever gotten in or out of here,” he mumbled against the plaster. “Who would break in? And from where?” He tried unsuccessfully to shake his head. “You people are insane.”

“A common enough trait in Spyre,” she sniffed. “Your mistake, then.”

“You don’t understand,” he croaked. “But you will.”

She had already noted that he wore armor that was light and utilitarian, and his holstered weapons had been similarly simple. This functionalism, which contrasted dramatically with the outlandish costumes of most of her people, made her more uneasy about Sacrus’s abilities than anything he’d said.

They spent some time trying to get more out of him and his companion. Neither they nor the prisoners they spoke to knew what Sacrus’s plan was—only that a general mobilization was underway. The prisoners themselves were from all over the principalities; some had recently gone missing within Spyre itself.

“They’re enough evidence to haul Sacrus before the high court on crimes against the polity,” crowed Bryce. “If we can just get some of these people out of here.”

Venera shook her head. “They may be enough to get the rest of Spyre up in arms. But until we can come up with a decent plan for getting them out alive, they’re safer where they are. Let them loose now and they’ll give us away, and probably try to run the gauntlet of machine guns and barbed wire on their way to the outer walls. At least let’s find them some weapons and a direction to run in.”

Bryce and Thinblood exchanged glances. Then Bryce quirked his irritating smile. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s strike a compromise…”

There were plenty of cells in the block, but Garth was in none of them. While Venera searched for him, Thinblood took the bulk of the team to look for the night watch. Nearly fifteen minutes had passed before he reappeared.

Thinblood was jubilant. “Both floors are secure,” he said. “We left the watchmen in a closet we found. And my welder has sealed off the main doors and a side entrance. He’s a model of efficiency, that one.”

Bryce put a hand on Venera’s arm. “Your man doesn’t seem to be here. We have to look to our other objectives.”

She shrugged him off, gritting her teeth so as not to snap some withering retort. “All right, then,” she said. “There’s more to this tower upstairs. Let’s find out what Sacrus is up to.”

The next floor was different. Here the velvet-covered walls and darkness gave way to marble and bright, annoyingly uneven electric light. Venera heard the sound of voices and chatter of a mechanical typewriter coming from an open door about thirty feet to the left. Crouching under the lee of the steps with the others, she scowled and said, “The time for subtlety may be past.”

“Wait.” Thinblood pointed the other way. Venera craned her neck and saw the heavy vault-style door even as Thinblood said, “Sacrus is reputed to keep their most secret weapons in this place. Do you think…?”

“I think I saw some of those weapons being made downstairs,” she said, thinking of the fish-tank room. “But you’re right. It’s just too tempting.” The door was surrounded by big signs saying VALID PERSONNEL ONLY, and two men with rifles slouched in front of it. “How do we get past them?”

One of Corinne’s men cleared his throat quietly. He drew something from his backpack and after a moment his companions did likewise. They strung the small compound bows with quick economical movements. Seeing this, Venera and the other leaders climbed back down and out of the way.

“Count of three,” said the man at the top. “You take the one on the right, we’ll do the one on the left. One, two—”

All four of Corinne’s soldiers jumped out of the stairwell and rolled into crouches. Their shoulder muscles creased in unison as they drew back, and Venera heard an intake of breath and “What the—” from off to the right, and then they let loose.

There was a grunt, a thud, then another. The archers whirled around, looking for another target.

The sound of typing continued.

“Take out that office,” Venera instructed the archers as she stepped into the hallway. “We’ll go for the vault.”

The heavy door had a thick glass window in it. Venera shaded her eyes with her hands and stared through for a few seconds. She whistled. “I think we’ve found the mother lode.”

The chamber beyond was large—it must take up most of this level. There were no windows, and its distant walls were draped in black like the corridors downstairs. Its brick floor was crisscrossed by red carpets; in the squares they defined, pedestals large and small stood under cones of light. Each pedestal supported some device—brass canisters here, a fluted rifle-like weapon there. Large jars full of thick brown fluid gleamed near things like bushes made of knives. There was nothing in there that looked innocuous, nothing Venera would have willingly wanted to touch. But all were on display as if they were treasures.

She supposed they were that; this might be the vault that held Sacrus’s dearest assets.

The view was obscured suddenly. Venera found herself staring into the cold gray eyes of a soldier, who mouthed something she couldn’t hear through the glass.

Deception wasn’t going to work this time. “We’ve been seen,” she said even as a loud alarm bell suddenly filled the corridor with jangling echoes.

“Can we blow this?” Thinblood was asking one of his men. The soldier shook his head.

“Not without taking time to figure out the vulnerable points… maybe doing some drilling…”

Thinblood looked at Venera, who shrugged. “It’s going to be a firefight from now on,” she said. “Better get downstairs and free those prisoners. Then we can—” Something bright and sudden flashed in her peripheral vision and there was a loud clang!

She stared in dumb surprise at the metal bars that now blocked the way to the stairwell. “Blow them!” she shouted, pulling out her preservationist-built machine-pistol. “This is no time for subtlety!”

At that moment there was an eruption of noise from the far end of the corridor. Venera dove to the floor as impacting bullets sprayed marble dust and plaster at her. The others either flattened as well or staggered back against the wall. Blood spattered over the threaded stonework.

Now a smoke grenade was tumbling toward her, each end-over-end bounce sending a gout of black into the air. It stopped just outside the bars then disappeared in a growing pyramid of darkness. Past that Venera heard shouted orders, gunshots.

“You will lie facedown on the floor and put your hands behind your necks! Anyone we do not find in that position will be shot! You have five seconds and then we will shoot everything that sticks up more than a foot off the floor.”

All she could hear after that was machine-gun fire.

The commandant held the mimeographed picture of Venera next to her head and compared the two. “You look older in real life,” he said in apparent disappointment. She glared at him but said nothing.

“Really,” he continued in apparent amazement, “what did you think you were going to achieve? Invading Sacrus? We’ve forgotten more tricks of incursion and sabotage than you people ever knew.”

Twelve of Venera’s people knelt around her on the floor of a storage room that opened off the third-floor corridor. Mops and brooms loomed over her; a single flickering bulb illuminated the three men with machine guns who were standing over the prisoners. Two more soldiers had been tying their hands behind their backs, but the process had stalled out briefly as they ran out of rope. The commandant, who had at first seemed flustered and shocked, had soon recovered his poise and now appeared to be genuinely enjoying himself.

“You did a good job of sealing off the front doors, but my superiors were able to slip this through the crack.” He waggled the mimeograph at Venera. He was a beefy man with an oddly asymmetrical face; one of his eyes was markedly higher than the other, and his upper lip lifted on the left giving him a permanent look of incredulity. “They also slipped in some instructions on how we’re to proceed while they cut through your welding job. It seems we had a…” He flipped the sheet over to read the back. “…a certain Garth Diamandis in our custody, as guarantor of your good behavior. Our arrangement was very clear. Should you fail to obey our orders, we were to kill this Diamandis. I’d say that your little incursion tonight constitutes disobedience, wouldn’t you?”

Venera drew back her lips in a snarl. “Someday they’re going to name a disease after you.”

The commandant sighed. “I just wanted you to know that I’ve issued the order. He’s being terminated, oh, even as we speak. And—” he laughed heartily, “I had an inspiration! The manner of his passing is quite hideous, you’ll be impressed when you see—”

A soldier clattered to a stop at the door to the office. “The lower floors are secure, sir,” he said. “They had tied up the night watch and the guards in the prison. In addition, we found ten of these in the basement.” He handed the commandant one of the charges Venera’s people had set.

Venera exchanged a glance with Bryce, whose hands were still untied.

“Well, look at this.” The commandant knelt in front of Venera. “A little clockwork bomb. Why, it’s so intricately made, I can only think of one place it might have come from.” He arched an eyebrow at the knot of prisoners. “Are any of you from Scoman, by any chance?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned the mechanism over under Venera’s nose. “How does it work? Is it a timer?”

She said nothing; he shrugged and said, “I think I can figure it out. You turn this dial to give yourself… what? Ten minutes? If you don’t reset it before it winds down to zero it explodes.”

A muffled report sounded from somewhere in the building. A gunshot? The commandant glanced at his men; one turned and left the room. “I suppose one or two of your compatriots might still be loose,” he admitted. “But we’ll round them up soon enough.”

He was just opening his mouth to add something else when the lights went out. The building rocked to a distant blast.

Instant pandemonium—somebody stepped on Venera and crumpled her to the floor while some sort of struggle erupted just to her right; one of the machine guns went off, apparently into the ceiling, lighting the space with a momentary red flicker. All she saw was people rearing up, falling down, tumbling like scattered chessmen. She strained but couldn’t get free of the ropes that bound her hands behind her.

Another explosion, then another—how many of those bombs had they said they’d found? She was sure they’d planted at least twelve.

Now somebody fell on her in a horrifyingly limp tangle and she screamed, but nobody could hear her over the shouts, screams, and shots.

More machine-gun fire, terrifyingly close but apparently directed out the door. Venera wormed out from under the wet body and found a corner to huddle in, hands jammed into the spot where walls and floor met. She cursed the dark and chaos and expected to receive a bullet in the head any second.

Silence and heavy breathing. Distant shouts. Somebody lit a match.

Bryce and Thinblood stood back to back. Each held a machine gun. Another gun lay under the body of the commandant, whose lopsided face was frozen in an expression of genuine surprise. The room was awash with men who were holding one another by the throat, or feet, or wrists, all atop the tiled bodies of the soldiers who were still tied up. Dark blood was spattered up the wall and over everybody. Venera looked down at herself and saw that her own clothes were glistening with the stuff.

“Get them untied!” Somebody flipped a knife into his hand and began bending and slashing at the ropes. When he reached Venera, she saw that it was one of the archers. Venera leaned forward knocking her forehead against the floor as he roughly grabbed her arms and cut.

“The prisoners are loose!” Bryce hauled her to her feet just as the match went out. “Somebody find a bloody lantern! We’ve got to get out of here!” They burst into the corridor just as the lights resumed a dim glow. There were bodies all over the place, bullet holes in the walls, and she heard shots and shouts coming from the stairwell.

“Good idea to leave those men in the cells,” she said to Bryce. “A command decision.”

He grinned. They had given two men some spare weapons and grenades and, out of sight of the tied-up guards, put them in a cell with a broken lock. They were to free the prisoners and arm them if the rest of the team didn’t return in good time.

The soldiers recovered their guns and armor from a pile outside the storage room and one by one loped toward the T-intersection next to the stairwell. A firefight had broken out down there. Venera had her pistol in her hand but ended up in the rear, down on all fours as bullets sprayed overhead.

For a few minutes there was shouting and shooting. When it became clear that the men in the stairwell were of Sacrus, somebody threw a grenade at them, but more shots were coming from the side—the top right arm of the 'I from Venera’s perspective. That was the direction the commandant’s men had originally come from. The stairwell was at the very top of the T, the storage room behind her.

Now it was chaos and shooting again. Venera crawled to the left, to the spot where the metal cage had descended earlier. It was gone. She raised her head slightly and saw, through smoke and dim light, that the great metal door to the treasure room was open.

Bryce and the others had made it into the now cleared stairwell, but Venera had been too slow. Soldiers of Sacrus emerged from clouds of gunsmoke, faceless in the faint light. Venera scrambled to her feet, slipped on blood, and half fell through the doorway into the treasure room. Her feet found purchase on the carpet, and she pressed her whole body against the cold door. It slowly creaked shut, ringing from bullet impacts at the last instant.

She spun the wheel in the center of the portal and turned around to lean on it. A sound hangover echoed through her head for a few seconds, or was she still hearing the battle, but muffled by iron and stone?

Stepping forward she lifted her arms, saw blood all over them. Something caught her foot and she stumbled. Looking down she saw that it was another body—a soldier of Sacrus, maybe the very one with whom she’d locked eyes through the little glass window in the door. He lay on his back, arms flung about, and blood pooling behind his head.

His abdomen had been cut wide open and his entrails trailed along the floor.

A new wash of fear came over Venera. She backed against the door and brought up her pistol to check it. Wouldn’t do to have a misfire due to blood in the barrel. For a few moments she stood perfectly still, listening and, finally, looking about at the place she had come to.

The huge square room was lit better than the hallway had been, by small electric spotlights that hung over dozens of pedestals. She had glimpsed those earlier, the canisters and boxes atop them now glowing in surreal majesty. There was nobody else in sight, but she thought she could see another door opposite the one through which she’d entered.

A woman chuckled somewhere; the chuckle turned into a laugh of childish delight.

Venera made her way around the room’s perimeter in quick sprints, ducking from pedestal to pedestal. It was hard to tell where the laughter was coming from because sounds echoed off the high ceiling. Faintly through the floor she could still hear the noise of battle.

The laugh came again—this time from only a few yards away. Venera rounded a broad pedestal surmounted by some kind of cannon and stopped dead, pistol forgotten in her hand.

A big clockwork mechanism had been shoved off the next pedestal and now lay shattered on the floor. Little wisps of smoke rose from it. The pedestal itself was covered with the remains of a man.

Somebody was kneeling in the gore and viscera that dripped over the edges of the pedestal. It was a woman, completely nude, and she was bathing—no, wallowing—in the blood and slippery things she was hauling out of the man’s torso. She stroked her skin with something, squeezing it as if it were a wet sponge, and gave a little mewl of delight.

Venera raised the pistol and aimed carefully. “Margit! What have you done?”

The former botanist of Liris cocked her head at Venera. She grinned, holding up two crimson hands.

“Don’t you get it?” she said. “It’s cherries! Red, red cherries, full and ripe.”

“Wh-who—” Venera had suddenly remembered the commandant’s boast. He had found a hideous death for Garth, he’d said. She stepped forward, staring past a haze of nausea at the few scraps of clothing she could recognize. Those boots—they were Sacrus army issue.

“They trusted me,” said Margit as she lowered herself into the sticky mass she was massaging. “These two knew me—so they let me in. When the bombs went off, the wall and door parted a bit—the hinges sprung! I just pushed it open and ran right out of my little room! Nobody there to stop me. So I came here and brought him with me.”

“Brought who?”

Margit raised a hand to point at something lying in the shadows of another pedestal. “The one they’d just given to me. My present.”

“Garth!” Venera ran over to him. He was on his side, unconscious but breathing. His hands were tied behind his back. Venera knelt to undo the knots, putting her pistol down when she decided Margit was too far into her own delusions to notice.

Far gone she might be, but she’d killed at least two men in this room. “You must have ambushed them,” said Venera, making it into a question.

“Oh yes. I was dressed oh so respectably and had my prisoner with me. They were staring out the window, you people were shooting and thrashing about somewhere out of sight and I just popped up there in front of them. ‘Let me in!’ Oh, I looked so scared. As soon as their backs were to me I mowed them down.”

“There were only two?”

Margit clucked reproachfully. “How many people do you put inside a locked vault? Two was overkill, but you see the doors don’t open from the outside. That’s a precaution.” She enunciated the word cheerfully.

Venera slapped Garth lightly; he groaned and mumbled something, batting feebly at her hand.

She looked up at Margit again. “Why come here?”

Margit stood up, dripping. “You know why,” she said, suddenly serious. “For that.” She pointed, straight-armed, at something on the floor.

It was crimson now, but there was no mistaking the cylindrical shape of the key to Candesce. When Venera saw it she gasped and raised the pistol again, cocking it as she tried to haul Garth to his feet with her other hand.

Margit frowned. “Don’t deny me my destiny, Venera. Behold!” She struck one of her poses, throwing her arms out in the spotlight. “You gaze upon the Queen of Candesce!”

“V-Venera?” Garth blinked at her, then focused past her at Margit. “What the—”

“Quickly now, Garth.” She half carried him over to the blood-smeared stones where the key lay. She let go of him and reached to scoop it up, still keeping a bead on Margit.

The botanist simply stood there, awash in light and gore, and watched as Venera and Garth backed away.

She was still watching when they made it to the chamber’s other door and spun the wheel to open it.