Queen of Candesce

18

There was still a splinter in the ball of her foot, but Venera had no time to find it and dig it out. She and Bryce raced up the stairs to the roof as shouts and thundering feet began to sound on the steps below.

They reached the roof, and Bryce immediately ran off somewhere to the right. “I need to get to the semaphore!” he shouted before disappearing into the gloom. All the lanterns had been put out, Venera realized; she could just see the silhouettes of the tents where her people had been meeting. The black cut-out shapes of men roved to and fro, and she made out the gleam of a rifle barrel here and there. It was strangely quiet, though.

She found the flap to the main tent more by instinct than anything else, and stepped in. Lanterns were still lit here, and Thinblood, Pamela Anseratte, Principe Guinevera, Moss, and the other leaders were all standing around a map table. They all looked over as she entered.

“Ah, there you are,” said Guinevera in a strangely jovial tone. “We think we know what they’re up to.”

She moved over to the table to look at the map. Little counters representing Sacrus’s forces were scattered around the unrolled rectangle of Greater Spyre. A big handful of tokens was clustered at the very edge of the sheet, where Liris had its land.

“It’s an insane amount of men,” said Thinblood. He appeared strangely nervous. “We think over a thousand. Never seen anything like it in Spyre.”

Guinevera snorted. “Obviously they hope to capture our entire command all at once and end the war before it begins. And it looks like they stand a good chance of succeeding. What do you think, Venera?”

“Well, I—” She froze.

They were all staring at her. All silent.

Guinevera reached into his brocaded coat and drew out a sheet of paper. With shocking violence he slammed it down on the table in front of her. Venera found herself looking at a poor likeness of herself—with her former hairstyle—on a poster that said, Wanted for Extradition to Gehellen, VENERA FANNING.

“So it’s true,” said Guinevera. His voice was husky with anger, and his hand, still flattening the poster, was shaking.

She chewed her lip and tried to stare him down. “This is hardly the time—”

“This is the time!” he bellowed. “You have started a war!”

“Sacrus started it,” she said. “They started it when they—”

But he’d struck her full across the face, and she spun to the floor.

She tasted blood in her mouth. Where was Bryce? Why wasn’t Moss rushing to her defense?

Why wasn’t Chaison here?

Guinevera reared over her, his dense mass making her flinch back. “Don’t try to blame others for what you’ve done! You brought this catastrophe on us, imposter! I say we hang her over the battlement and let Sacrus use her for target practice.” He reached down to take her arm as Venera scrambled to get her feet under her.

Light knifed through the tent’s entrance flap and then miraculously the whole tent lifted up as though tugged off the roof by a giant. The giant’s cough was still echoing in Venera’s ears as the tent sailed into the permanent maelstrom at the edge of the world, and was snatched away like a torn kerchief.

Another bright explosion, and everyone ducked. Then everyone was running and shouting at once and soldiers were popping up to fire their blunderbusses, then squatting to refill them as trails of smoke and fire corkscrewed overhead. Venera’s ears were still ringing, everything strangely aloof as she stood up and watched the big map on the table lift in the sudden breeze and slide horizontally into the night.

Who had it been? she wondered dimly. Had Moss turned on her? Or had Odess said something injudicious? Probably some soldier or servant of Liris had spoken out of turn… But then, maybe Jacoby Sarto had become bored of his confinement and decided to liven things up a bit.

Venera was half aware that the squat cube of Liris was surrounded on three sides by an arcing constellation of torches. The red light served to illuminate the grim faces of the soldiers rushing past her. She raised her hand to stop one of them, then thought better of it. What if Guinevera had remembered to order her arrest?—Or death? As she thought about her new situation, Venera began to be afraid.

Maybe she should go inside. Liris had stout walls, and she still had friends there—she was almost sure of that. She could, what—go chat with Jacoby Sarto in his cell?

And where was Bryce? Semaphore, that was it; he’d gone to send a semaphore. She forced herself to think: the semaphore station was over there… Where a big gap now yawned in the side of the battlement. Some soldiers were laying planks across it.

“Oh no.” No no no.

Deep inside Venera a quiet snide voice that had always been there was saying, ‘Of course, of course. They all abandon you in the end.’ She shouldn’t be surprised at this turn of events; she had even planned for it, in the days following her confirmation. It shouldn’t come as a shock to her. So it seemed strange to watch herself, as if from outside, as she hunkered down next to the elevator mechanism at the center of the roof, and wrapped her arms around herself and cried.

I don’t do this. She wiped at her face. I don’t.

Maybe she did, though; she couldn’t clearly remember those minutes in Candesce after she had killed Aubri Mahallan and she had been alone. Hayden Griffin had pulled Mahallan’s body out of sight, leaving a few bright drops of blood to twirl in the weightless air. Griffin was her only way out of Candesce, and Venera had just killed his lover. It hardly mattered that she’d done it to save the world from Mahallan and her allies. No one would ever know, and she was certain she would die there; she had only to wait for Candesce to open its fusion eyes and bring morning to the world.

Griffin had asked her to come with him. He had said he wouldn’t kill her; Venera hadn’t believed him. It was too big a risk. In the end she had snuck after him and ridden out of Candesce on the cargo net he was towing. Now the thought of running to the stairs and throwing herself on the mercy of her former compatriots filled her with a similar dread. Better to make herself very small here and risk being found by Guinevera or his men than to find out that even Liris now rejected her.

“There they are!” someone pointed excitedly. Staccato runs of gunfire sounded in the distance—they were oddly distant, in fact. If Venera had cared about anything at that moment she might have stood up to look.

“We’re gonna outflank them!”

Something blew up on the outskirts of Liris’s territory. The orange mushroom lit the whole world for a moment, a flicker of estates and ornamental ponds overhead. Her ground forces must have made it here just after Sacrus’s.

Well. Not her forces, she thought bitterly. Not anymore.

“There she is!” Venera jerked and tried to back up, but she was already pressed against the elevator platform. A squat silhouette reared up in front of her and something whipped toward her.

She cringed. Nothing happened; after a moment she looked up.

An open hand hovered a few inches above her. A distant flicker of red lit the extended hand and behind it, the toadish features of Samson Odess. His broad face wore an expression of concern. “Venera, are you hurt?”

“N-no…” Suspiciously, she reached to take his hand. He drew her to her feet and draped an arm across her shoulder.

“Quickly now,” he said as he drew her toward the stairs. “While everyone’s busy.”

“What—” She was having trouble finding words. “What are you doing?”

He stopped, reared back, and stared at her. “I’m taking you home.”

“Home? Whose home?”

“Yours, you silly woman. Liris.”

“But why are you helping me?”

Now he looked annoyed. “You never ceased to be a citizen of Liris, Venera. And technically, I never stopped being your boss. You’re still my responsibility, you know. Come on.”

She paused at the top of the steps and looked around. The soldiers who had crowded the roof all seemed to be leaping off one side, in momentary silhouetted flashes showing an arm brandishing a blunderbuss, another waving a sword. There was fighting down in the bramble-choked lot that surrounded Liris. Farther out, she glimpsed squads of men running back and forth, some piling up debris to form barricades, others raising archaic weapons.

“Venera! Get off the roof!” She blinked and turned to follow Odess.

They descended several levels and Venera found herself entering, of all places, the apartments of the former botanist. The furniture and art that had borne the stamp of Margit of Sacrus was gone, and there were still burn marks on the walls and ceiling. Someone had moved in new couches and chairs, and one particularly charred wall was covered with a crepuscular tapestry depicting cherry trees shooting beams of light all over an idealized tableau of dryads and fairies.

Venera sat down under a dryad and looked around. Eilen was there, and the rest of the diplomatic corps. “Bring a blanket,” said Odess, “and a stiff drink. She’s in shock.” Eilen ran to fetch a comforter, and somebody else shoved a tumbler of amber liquid into Venera’s hand. She stared at it for a moment, then drank.

For a few minutes she listened without comprehension to their conversation; then, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere inside her, she realized where she must be and she understood something. She looked at Odess. “This is your new office,” she said.

They all stopped talking. Odess came to sit next to her. “That’s right,” he said. “The diplomatic corps has been exalted since you left.”

Eilen laughed. “We’re the new stars of Liris! Not that the cherry trees are any less important, but—”

“Moss understands that we need to open up to the outside world,” interrupted Odess. “It could never have happened under Margit.”

Venera half smiled. “I suppose I can take some credit for making that possible.”

“My dear lady!” Odess patted her hand. “The credit is all yours! Liris has come alive again because of you. You don’t think we would abandon you in your hour of need, do you?”

“You will always have a place here,” said Eilen.

Venera started to cry.

“We would never have told,” Odess said a few minutes later. “None of us.”

Venera grimaced. She stood at a mirror where she was dabbing at her eyes, trying to erase the evidence of tears. She didn’t know what had come over her. A momentary madness; at least it was only the Lirisians who had witnessed her little breakdown. “I suppose it was Sarto,” she said. “It hardly matters now. I can’t show my face up there without Guinevera putting a bullet in me.”

Odess hmmphed, wrapping his arms around his barrel chest and pacing. “Guinevera has impressed no one since he arrived. Why should any of your other allies listen to him?”

She turned, raising an eyebrow. “Because he’s the ruler of a council nation?”

Odess made a flicking motion. “Aside from that.”

With a shake of her head Venera returned to the divan. She could hear gunfire and shouting through the opened window, but it was filtered through the roar of the world-edge winds that tumbled above the courtyard shaft. You could almost ignore it.

In similar fashion, Venera could almost ignore the emotions overflowing her. She’d always survived through keeping a cool head, and this was no time to have that desert her. It was inconvenient that she felt so abandoned and lost. Inconvenient to feel so grateful for the simple company of her former coworkers. She needed to recover her poise, and then act in her own interests as she always had before.

There was a commotion in the corridor, then someone burst through the doors. He was covered in soot and dust, his hair a shock, the left arm of his jacket in tatters.

Venera leaped to her feet. “Garth!”

“There you are!” He rushed over and hugged her fiercely. “You’re alive!”

“I’m—oof! Fine. But what happened to you?”

He stepped back, keeping his hands on her arms. Garth had a crazed look in his eye she’d never seen before. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I was looking for you,” he said. “Outside. The rest of them, they’re all out there, fighting around the foot of the building. Sacrus has ringed us, they want something here very badly, and our relief force is trying to break through from the outside. So Anseratte and Thinblood are leading the Liris squads in an attempt to break out—make a corridor…”

Venera nodded. The irony was that this fight was almost certainly about her, but Anseratte and the others wouldn’t know it. Sacrus wanted the key, and they knew Venera was here. Naturally, they would throw whatever they had at Liris to get it.

If Guinevera had tossed her off the roof half an hour ago, the battle would already be over.

Garth toyed with the ripped fringe of his coat for a moment, then burst out with, “Venera, I am so, so sorry!”

“What?” She shook her head, uncomprehending. “Things aren’t so bad. Or do you mean…?” She thought of Bryce, who might be lying twisted and broken at the foot of the wall. “Oh,” she said, a twisting feeling running through her.

He had just opened his mouth—doubtless to tell her that Bryce was dead—when the noises outside changed. The gunfire, which had been muffled with distance and indirection, suddenly sounded loud and close. Shouts and screams rang through the open windows.

Venera ran over, and with Odess and Eilen craned her neck to look up the shaft of the courtyard. There were people on the roof.

She and Odess exchanged a look. “Are those our…?” she started to say, but the answer was clear.

“Sacrus is inside the walls!” The cry was taken up by the others and suddenly everyone was running for the doors, streaming past Garth Diamandis who was speaking but inaudible through the jumble of shouts.

Venera paused long enough to shrug at him, then grabbed his arm and hauled him after her into the corridor.

The whole population of Liris was running up the stairs. They carried pikes, kitchen knives, makeshift shields, and clubs. None had on more than the clothing they normally wore, but that meant they were formidably armored. There were one or two soldiers in the mix—probably the men who had been guarding Jacoby Sarto. They were frantically trying to keep order in the pushing mass of people.

Garth stared at the crowd and shook his head. “We’ll never get through that.”

Venera eyed the window. “I have an idea.”

As she slung her leg over the lintel Garth poked his head out next to her and looked up. “It’s risky,” he said. “Somebody could just kick us off before we can get to our feet.”

“In this gravity, you’re looking at a sprained ankle. Come on.” She climbed rapidly, emerging into the light of flares and the sound of gunfire. Half the country was struggling with something at the far end of the roof. Venera blinked and squinted, and realized what it was: they were trying to dislodge a stout ladder that had been swung against the battlements. Even as that came clear to her, she saw the gray crosshatch of another emerge from the darkness to thud against the stonework.

Withering fire from below prevented the Lirisians from getting near the things. They were forced to crouch a few feet back and poke at them with their pikes.

A third ladder appeared, and suddenly men were swarming onto the roof. The Lirisians stood up. Venera saw Eilen raise a rusted old sword as a figure in red-painted iron armor reared above her.

Venera raised her pistol and fired. She walked toward Eilen, firing steadily until the man who’d threatened her friend fell. He wasn’t dead—his armor was so thick that the bullets probably hadn’t penetrated—but she’d rattled his skull for sure.

She was five feet away when her pistol clicked empty. This was the gun Corinne had given her; she had no idea whether it took the same caliber of bullets as anything the Lirisians used. Examining it quickly, she decided she didn’t even know how to breach it to check. At that moment two men like metal beetles surmounted the battlement, firelight glistening off their carapaces.

She tripped Eilen, and when the woman had fallen behind her, Venera stepped between her and the two men. She drop-kicked the leader and he windmilled his arms for a moment before falling back. The force of her kick had propelled Venera back ten feet. She landed badly, located Eilen, and shouted, “Come on!”

Moss straight-armed a pike into the helmet of the other man. Beside him Odess shoved a lighted torch at a third who was stepping off the ladder. Gunfire sounded and somebody fell, but she couldn’t see who through the press of bodies.

She grabbed Eilen’s arm. “We need guns! Are there more in the lockers?”

Eilen shook her head. “We barely had enough for the soldiers. There’s that.” She pointed.

Around the corner of the courtyard shaft, the ancient, filigreed morning gun still sat on a tripod under its little canopy. Venera started to laugh, but the sound died in her throat. “Come on!”

The two women wrestled the weapon off its stand. It was a massive thing, and though it weighed little in this gravity, it was difficult to maneuver. “Do we have shells?” Venera asked.

“Bullets, no shells,” said Eilen. “There’s black powder in that bin.”

Venera opened the gun’s breach. It was of a pointlessly primitive design. You poured black powder into it and then inserted the bullet and closed the breach. It had a spark wheel instead of a percussion trigger. “Well, then, come on.” Eilen grabbed up the box of bullets and a sack of powder, and they ran along the inner edge of the roof. In the darkness and confusion Eilen stumbled, and Venera watched as the bullets spilled out into the air over the courtyard. Eilen screamed in frustration.

One bullet spun on the flagstones at Venera’s feet. Cradling the gun, she bent to pick up the metal slug. A wave of cold prickles swept over her shoulders and up her neck.

This bullet was identical to the one that nestled inside her jacket—identical save for the fact that it had never been fired.

She couldn’t believe it. The bullet she carried—that had sailed a thousand miles through the airs and clouds of Virga, avoiding cities and farms, adeptly swerving to avoid fish and rocks and oceanic balls of water, this bullet that had lined up on Slipstream and the city of Rush and the window in the admiralty where Venera stood so innocently; had smashed the glass in a split-second and buried itself in her jaw, spinning her around and nailing a sense of injured outrage to Venera forever—it had come from here. It had not been fired in combat. Not in spite. Not for any murderous purpose, but for tradition, and to celebrate the calmness of a morning like any other.

Venera had fantasized about this moment many times. She had rehearsed what she would say to the owner of the gun when she finally found him. It was a high, grand, and glorious speech that, in her imagination, always ended with her putting a bullet in the villain. Cradling this picture of revenge to herself had gotten her through many nights, many cocktail parties where out of the corner of her eye she could see the ladies of the admiralty pointing to her scar and murmuring to one another behind their fans.

“Huh,” she said.

“Venera? Are you all right?”

Venera shook her head violently. “Powder. Quick!” She held out the gun, and Eilen filled it. Then she jammed the clean new bullet into the breach and closed it. She lofted the gun and spun the wheel.

“Everybody down!” Nobody heard her, but luckily a gap opened in the line at the last second. The gun made a huge noise and nearly blew Venera off the roof. When the vast plume of smoke cleared she saw nearly everybody in sight recovering from having ducked.

It might not be powerful or accurate, but the thing was loud. That fact might just save them.

She ran toward the Lirisians. “The cannons! Start shouting stuff about cannons!” She breached the smoking weapon and handed it to Eilen. “Reload.”

“But we lost the rest of the bullets.”

“We’ve got one.” She reached into her jacket pocket. There it was, its contours familiar from years of touching. She brought out her bullet. Her fingers trembled now as she held it up to the red flare light.

“Damn you anyway,” she whispered to it.

Eilen glanced up, said, “Oh,” and held up the gun. There was no time for ceremony; Venera slid the hated slug into the breach and it fit perfectly. She clicked it shut.

“Out of my way!” She crossed the roof in great bounding steps, dodging between fighting men to reach the battlement where the ladders jutted up. The gunfire from below had stopped; the snipers didn’t want to hit their own men as they topped the wall. Venera hopped up onto a crenel and sighted nearly straight down. She saw the startled eyes of a Sacrus soldier between her feet, and half a dozen heads below his. She spun the spark wheel.

The explosion lifted her off her feet. Everything disappeared behind a ball of smoke. When she staggered to her feet some yards away, Venera found herself surrounded by cheering people. Several of Sacrus’s soldiers were being thrown off the roof, and for the moment no more were appearing. As the smoke cleared she saw that the top of the ladder she’d fired down was missing.

“Keep filling it,” she said, thrusting the gun at Eilen. “Bullets don’t matter—as long as it’s bright and loud.”

Moss’s grinning face emerged from the gloom. “They’re hesitating!”

She nodded. Sacrus didn’t have so many people that they could afford to sacrifice them in wave attacks. The darkness and confusion would help; and though they had probably heard it every day of their lives, the thunderous sound of the morning gun at this close range would give pause to the men holding the ladders.

“It’s not going to keep them at bay for long, though,” she said. “Where are the rest of our people?”

Now Moss frowned. “T-trapped, I fear. Guinevera l-led them into an ambush. Now they have their backs to the open air.” He pointed toward the edge of the world and the night skies beyond.

Venera hopped up on the edge of the elevator platform and took a quick look around. Sacrus’s people were spread in a thin line around two of the approaches to Liris. On their third side, ragged girders and scoured metal jutted off the end of the world. And on the fourth—behind her—a jumble of brambles, thorn-bushes, and broken masonry formed a natural barrier that Sacrus wasn’t bothering to police.

In the darkness beyond, hundreds of torches lit the contours of an army small by Venera’s standards, but huge for Spyre. There might be no more than a thousand men there, but that was all the forces that opposed Sacrus on this world.

Spreading away behind that army was the maze of estates that made up Greater Spyre. Somewhere out there was the long low building where the hollowed bomb hung, with its promise of escape.

She turned to Moss. “You need to break through Sacrus’s lines. Otherwise, they’ll overwhelm us, and then they can turn and face our army with a secure fortress behind them.”

He nodded. “But all our leaders are't-trapped.”

“Well, not all.” She strode across the roof to the battlements that overlooked the bramble-choked acres. He came to stand at her side. Together they gazed out at the army that lay tantalizingly out of reach.

“If the semaphore were working—” She stopped, remembering Bryce. Moss shook his head anyway.

“S-Sacrus has encircled the't-tower. They would read every letter.”

“But we need to coordinate an attack—from outside and inside at the same time. To break through…”

He shrugged. “Simple matter. If we c-can get one p-person through the lines.”

She speculated. If she showed up there among the brambles, would the generals of that army have her arrested? How far had news of her deceptions spread?

“Get them ready,” she said. “Everyone into armor, everyone armed. I’ll be back in two minutes.” She headed for the stairs.

“Where are you g-going?”

She shot him a grim smile. “To check in on our bargaining chip.”

Venera ran through empty halls to the old prison on the main floor.

As she’d suspected, the guards had deserted their posts when the roof was attacked. The main door was ajar; Venera slowed when she saw this. Warily, she toed it open and aimed her pistol through. There was nobody in the antechamber. She sidled in.

“Hello?” That was Jacoby Sarto’s voice. Venera had never heard him sound worried, but he was clearly rattled by what was happening. He’s never been in a battle before, she realized—nor had any of these people. It was shocking to think that she was the veteran here.

Venera went on her tiptoes to look through the door’s little window into the green-walled reception room. Sarto was the sole occupant of a bench designed to seat thirty; he sat in the very center of a room that could have held a hundred. He squinted at the door, then said, “Fanning?”

She threw open the door and stepped in. “Did you tell them?”

He appeared puzzled. “Tell who what?”

She showed him her pistol; he wouldn’t know it was empty. “Don’t play games, Sarto. Someone told Guinevera who I really am. Was it you?”

He smiled with a trace of his usual arrogance. He stood up and adjusted the sleeves of the formal shirt he still wore. “Things not going your way out there?”

“Two points,” said Venera, holding up two fingers. “First: I’m holding a gun on you. Second: you’re rapidly becoming expendable.”

“All right, all right,” he said irritably. “Don’t be so prickly. After all, I came here of my own free will.”

“And that’s supposed to impress me?” She leaned on the doorjamb and crossed her arms.

“Think about it,” he said. “What do I have to gain from revealing who you are?”

“I don’t know. Suppose you tell me?”

Now he scowled at her, as if she were some common servant girl who’d had the temerity to interrupt him while he was talking. “I have spent thirty-two years learning the ins and outs of council politics. All that time, becoming an expert—maybe the expert—on Spyre, learning who is beholden to whom, who’s ambitious and who just wants to keep their heads down. I have been the public face of Sacrus for much of that time, their most important operative, because for all those years, Spyre’s politics was all that mattered. But look at what’s happening.” He waved a hand to indicate the siege and battle going on beyond Liris’s thick walls. “Everything that made me valuable is being swept away.”

This was not what Venera had been expecting to hear from him. She came into the room and sat down on a bench facing Sarto. He looked at her levelly and said, “Change is inconceivable to most people in Spyre; to them a catastrophe is a tree falling across their fence. A vast political upheaval would be somebody snubbing somebody else at a party. That’s the system I was bred and trained to work in. But my masters have always known that there’s much bigger game out there. They’ve been biding their time, lo these many centuries. Now they finally have in their grasp a tool with which to conquer the world—the real world, not just this squalid imitation we’re standing in. On the scale of Sacrus’s new ambitions, all of my accomplishments count for nothing.”

Venera nodded slowly. “Spyre is having all its borders redrawn around you. Even if they never get the key from me, Sacrus will be facing a new Spyre once the fighting stops. I’ll bet they’ve been grooming someone young and malleable to take your place in that new world.”

He grimaced. “No one likes to be discarded. I could see it coming, though. It was inevitable, really, unless…”

“Unless you could prove your continuing usefulness to your masters,” she said. “Say, by personally bringing them the key?”

He shrugged. “Yesterday’s council meeting would otherwise have been my last public performance. At least here, as your, uh, guest, I might have the opportunity to act as Sacrus’s negotiator. Think about it—you’re surrounded, outgunned, you’re approaching the point where you have to admit you’re going to lose. But I can tell you the semaphore codes to signal our commanders that we’ve reached an accommodation. As long as you had power here, you could have functioned as the perfect traitor. A few bad orders, your forces ordered into a trap, then it’s over the wall for you and I, the key safely into my master’s hands, you on your way home to wherever it is you came from.”

Venera tamped down on her anger. Sarto was used to dealing in cold political equations; so was she, for that matter. What he was proposing shouldn’t shock her. “But if I’m disgraced, I can’t betray my people.”

“Your usefulness plummets,” he said with a nod. “So, no, I didn’t tattle on you. You’re hardly of any value now, are you? All you’ve got is the key. If your own side’s turned against you, your only remaining option is to throw yourself on the mercy of Sacrus. Which might win me some points if I’m the one who brings you in, but not as much, and—”

“—And I have no reason to expect good treatment from them,” she finished. “So why should I do it?”

He stood up—slowly, mindful of her gun—and walked a little distance away. He gazed up at the room’s little windows. “What other option do you have?” he asked.

She thought at first that he’d said this rhetorically, but something about his tone… It had sounded like a genuine question.

Venera sat there for a while, thinking. She went over the incident with the council members on the roof; who could have outted her? Everything depended on that—and on when it had happened. Sarto said nothing, merely waited patiently with his arms crossed, staring idly up at the little window.

Finally she nodded and stood up. “All right,” she said. “Jacoby, I think we can still come to an… accommodation. Here’s what I’m thinking…”