Queen of Candesce

19

As sometimes happened at the worst of moments, Venera lost her sense of gravity just before she hit the ground. The upthrusting spears of brush and stunted trees flipped around and became abstract decorations on a vast wall she was approaching. Her feet dangled over sideways buildings and the pikes of soldiers. Then the wall hit her, and she bounced and tumbled like a rag doll. Strangely, it didn’t hurt at all—perhaps not so strangely, granted that she was swaddled in armor.

She unscrewed her helmet and looked up into a couple of dozen gun barrels. They were all different, like a museum display taken down and offered to her; in her dazed state she almost reached to grab one. But there were hands holding them tightly and grim men behind the hands.

When she and Sarto had reached the rooftop of Liris, they found a theatrical jumble of bodies, torn tenting, and brazier fires surrounded by huddling men in outlandish armor. At the center of it all, the thick metal cable that rose up and out of sight into the turbulent mists; that cable glowed gold now as distant Candesce awoke.

She had spotted Moss and headed over, keeping her head down in case there were snipers. He looked up, lines of exhaustion apparent around his eyes. Glancing past her, he spotted Sarto. “What’s this?”

“We need to break this siege. I’m going over the wall, and Sarto is coming with me.”

Moss blinked, but his permanently shocked expression revealed none of his thoughts. “What for?”

“I don’t know whether the commanders of our encircling force have been told that I’m an imposter and traitor. I need to bring Jacoby Sarto in case I need a… ticket, I suppose you could call it… into their good graces.”

He nodded reluctantly. “And how do you p-propose to reach our force? S-Sacrus is between us and them.”

Now she grinned. “Well, you couldn’t do this with all of us, but I propose that we jump.”

Of course they’d had help from an ancient catapult that Liris had once used to fire mail and parcels over an enemy nation to an ally some three miles away. Venera had seen it on her second day here; with a little effort, it had been refitted to seat two people. But nobody, least of all her, knew whether it would still work. Her only consolation had been the low gravity in Spyre.

Now Venera had two possible scripts she could follow, one if these were soldiers of the Council Alliance, one if they owed their allegiance to Sacrus. But which were they? The fall had been so disorienting that she couldn’t tell where they’d ended up. So she merely put up her hands and smiled and said, “Hello.”

Beside her Jacoby Sarto groaned and rolled over. Instantly another dozen guns aimed at him. “I think we’re not that much of a threat,” Venera said mildly. She received a kick in the back (which she barely felt through the metal) for her humor.

A throb of pain shot through her jaw—and an odd thing happened. Such spasms of pain had plagued her for years, ever since the day she woke up in Rush’s military infirmary, her head bandaged like a delicate vase about to be shipped via the postal system. Each stab of pain had come with its own little thought, whose content varied somewhat but always translated roughly to either I’m all alone or I’m going to kill them. Fear and fury, they stabbed her repeatedly throughout each day. The fierce headaches that often built over the hours just added to her meanness.

But she’d taken the bullet that struck her jaw and blown it back out the very same gun that had shot her. So, when her jaw cramped this time, instead of her usual misery, Venera had a flash of memory: the morning gun going off with a tremendous explosion in her hands, bucking and kicking and sending her flying backward into the Lirisians. She had no idea what the feeling accompanying that had been, but she liked it.

So she grinned crookedly and stood up. Dusting herself off, she said with dignity, “I am Amandera Thrace-Guiles, and this is Jacoby Sarto of the Spyre Council. We need to talk to your commanders.”

“You have a reputation for being foolhardy,” said the army commander, his gray mustaches waggling. “But that was ridiculous.”

It turned out that they’d nearly overshot both Sacrus and Council Alliance positions. Luckily, several hundred pairs of eyes had tracked their progress across the rolled-up sky of Spyre and it was her army that had gotten to Venera and Jacoby first. Sarto didn’t seem too upset about the outcome, which was telling. What was even more significant was that everyone was calling her “Lady Thrace-Guiles,” which meant that word of her deceptions hadn’t made it out of Liris. Here, Venera was still a respected leader.

She preened at the commander’s backhanded compliment. He stood with his back to a brick wall, a swaying lamp nodding shadows across the buttons of his jacket. Aides and colonels bustled about, some shoving little counters across the map board, others reading or writing dispatches.

Venera smelled engine oil and wet cement. The alliance army had set up its headquarters in a preservationist roundhouse about a mile from Liris; these walls were thick enough to stop anything Sacrus had so far fired. For the first time in days, Venera felt a little safe.

“I wouldn’t have had to be foolhardy if the situation weren’t so dire,” she said. It was tempting to upbraid this man for hesitating to send his forces to relieve Liris; but Venera found herself uninterested anymore in taking such familiar pleasures. She merely said, “Tell me what’s been happening out here.”

The commander leaned over the board and began pointing at the little wooden counters. “There’ve been engagements all across Greater Spyre,” he said. “Sacrus has won most of them.”

“So what are they doing? Conquering countries?”

“In one or two cases, yes. Mostly they’ve been cutting the preservationist’s railway lines. And they’ve taken or severed all the elevator cables.”

“Severed?” Even to an outsider like her this was a startling development.

One of the aides shrugged. “Easy enough to do. They just use them for target practice—except for the ones at the edge of the world, like Liris. The winds around those lines deflect the bullets.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Why don’t they just use more high-powered guns on them?” The aide shook his head.

“Ancient treaty. Places limits on muzzle velocities. It’s to prevent accidental punctures of the world’s skin.”

“—Not significant, anyway,” said the commander with an impatient gesture. “The war will be decided here on Greater Spyre. The city will just have to wait it out.”

“No, it can’t wait,” she said. “That’s what this is all about. Not the city, but the docks.”

“The docks?” The commander stared at her. “That’s the last thing we’re going to worry about.”

“I know, and Sacrus is counting on that.” She glared at him. “Everything that’s happening down here is a diversion from their real target. Everything except…” She nodded at Liris.

Now they were looking at each other with faintly embarrassed unease. “Lady Thrace-Guiles,” said the commander, “war is a very particular art. Perhaps you should leave such details to those who’ve made it their careers.”

Venera opened her mouth to yell at him, thought better, and took a deep breath instead. “Can we at least be agreed that we need to break Sacrus’s hold on Liris?”

“Yes,” he said with a vigorous nod. “We need to ensure the safety of our leadership. For that purpose,” he pointed at the table, “I am advocating a direct assault along the innermost wall.”

A moment of great temptation made Venera hesitate. The commander was proposing to go straight for the walls and leave the group trapped at the world’s edge to its fate. He didn’t know that his objective was actually there. They’d made themselves her enemies and Venera could just… forget to tell him. Leave Guinevera and the others to Sacrus’s mercy now that she had the army.

She couldn’t claim not to have known, though, unless the Lirisians went along with it. And she was tired of deceptions. She sighed and said, “Liris is a critical objective, yes, but the rest of our leadership is actually trapped with the Lirisian army at the edge of the world.” There were startled looks up and down the table. “Yes—Master Thinblood, Principe Guinevera, and Pamela Anseratte, among others, are among those pinned down in the hurricane zone.”

The commander frowned down at the map. On it, Liris was a square encircled by red wooden tokens representing Sacrus’s army. This circle squashed a knot of blue tokens against the bottom edge of the map: the Lirisian army, trapped at the edge of the world. Left of the encirclement was a no-man’s land of tough brush that had so far resisted burning. Left of that, the preservationist siding and army encampment where they now stood.

“This is a problem,” said the commander. He thought for a moment, then said, “There are certain snakes that coil around their victims and choke them to death.” She raised an eyebrow, but he continued, “One of their characteristics, so I’ve been told, is that if you try to remove them they tighten their grip. Right now Sacrus has both Liris and our leaders in its coils, and if we try to break through to one they will simply strangle the other.”

To relieve the Lirisian army, they would have to force a wedge under Liris, with the edge of the world at their right side. To do this they would trade off their ability to threaten Sacrus along the inner sides of Liris—freeing those troops up to assault the walls of Liris. Conversely, the best way to relieve Liris would be to come at it from the top, which meant swinging the army away from the world’s edge—thus giving Sacrus a free hand against the trapped force.

Venera examined the map. “We have to fool them into making the wrong choice,” she said.

“Yes, but how are we going to do that?” He shook his head. “Even if we did, they can maneuver just as fast as we can. They have less ground to cover than we do to redeploy their forces.”

“As to how we’ll fool the snake into uncoiling,” she said, “it helps to have your own snake to consult with.” She turned and waved to some figures standing a few yards away. Jacoby Sarto emerged from the shadows; he was a silhouette against Klieg lights that pinioned a pair of hulking locomotives in the center of the roundhouse. He was accompanied by two armed soldiers and a member of Bryce’s underground.

The commander bowed to Sarto, but then said, “I’m afraid we cannot trust this man. He is of the enemy.”

“Lord Sarto has seen the light,” said Venera. “He has agreed to help us.”

“Pah!” The commander sneered. “Sacrus are masters of deception. How can we trust him?”

“The politics are complex,” she said. “But we have very good reasons to trust him. I do. That is why I brought him.”

There were more glances thrown between the colonels and the aides. The commander twitched a frown for just a moment, then said, “No—I understand the dilemma we’re in, but my sovereign and commanding officer is Principe Guinevera, and he’s in danger. Politically, saving our leadership has to be the priority. I’ll not countenance any plan that weakens our chance of doing that.”

Jacoby Sarto laughed. It was an ugly, contemptuous sound, delivered by a man who had spent decades using his voice to wither other men’s courage. The commander glared at him. “I fail to see the humor in any of this, Lord Sarto.”

“Forgivable,” said Sarto dryly, “as you’re not aware of Sacrus’s objectives. They want Liris, not your management. They haven’t crushed the soldiers pinned down at the world’s edge because they’re dangling them as bait.”

“What could they possibly want with Liris?”

“Me,” said Venera, “because they surely think I’m still there—and the elevator cable. They need to cut it. All they have to do is capture me or make it impossible for me to leave Greater Spyre. Then they’ve won. It will just be a matter of time.”

Now it was the commander’s turn to laugh. “I think you vastly overrate your own value, and underrate the potential of this army,” he said, sweeping his arm to indicate the paltry hundreds gathered in the cavernous shed. “You alone can’t hold this alliance together, Lady Thrace-Guiles. And I said it before, the elevator cables are of little strategic interest.”

Venera was furious. She wanted to tell him that she’d seen more men gathered at circuses in Rush than he had in his vaunted army. But, remembering how she had thrown a lighted lamp at Garth in anger and his gentle chiding after, she bit back on what she wanted to say, and instead said, “You’ll change your mind once you know the true strategic situation. Sacrus wants—” She stopped as Sarto touched her arm.

He was shaking his head. “This is not the right audience,” he said quietly.

“Um.” In an instant her understanding of the situation flipped around. When she had walked in here she had seen this knot of officers in one corner of the roundhouse and assumed that they were debating their plan of attack. But that wasn’t what they were doing at all. They had been huddling here, as far as possible from the men they must command. They weren’t planning; they were hesitating.

“Hmmm…” She quirked a transparently false smile at the commander. “If you men will excuse me for a few minutes?” He looked puzzled, then annoyed, then amused. Venera took Sarto’s arm and led him away from the table.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She stopped in an area of blank floor stained over the decades by engine oil and grease. At first Venera didn’t meet Sarto’s eyes. She was looking around at the towering wrought-iron pillars, the tessellated windows in the ceiling, the smoky beams of light that intersected on the black backs of the locomotives. A deep knot of some kind, loosened when she cried in Eilen’s arms, was unraveling.

“They talk about places as being our homes,” she mused. “It’s not the place, really, but the people.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said. His dry irony had no effect on Venera. She merely shrugged.

“You were right,” she said. He cocked his head to one side, crossing his arms, and waited. “After the confirmation, when you said I was still Sacrus’s,” she went on. “And in the council chamber, even when we talked in your cell earlier tonight. Even now. As long as I wanted to leave Spyre, I was theirs. As long as they’ve known what to dangle in front of me, there was nothing I could do but what they wanted me to do.”

“Haven’t I said that repeatedly?” He sounded annoyed.

“All along, there’s been a way to break their hold on me,” she said. “I just haven’t had the courage to do it.”

He grumbled, “I’d like to think I made the right choice by throwing in with you. Takes you long enough to come to a decision, though.”

Venera laughed. “All right. Let’s do this.” She started to walk toward the locomotives.

“There you are!” Venera stumbled, cursed, and then flung out her arms.

“Bryce!” He hugged her, but hesitantly—and she knew not to display too much enthusiasm herself. No one knew they were lovers; that knowledge would be one more piece of leverage against them. So she disengaged from him quickly and stepped back. “What happened? I saw the semaphore station blown up. We all assumed you were…”

He shook his head. In the second-hand light he did look a bit disheveled and soot stained. “A bunch of us got knocked off the roof, but none of us were hurt.” He laughed. “We landed in the brambles and then had to claw our way through with Sacrus’s boys firing at our arses all the way. Damn near got shot by our own side as well, before we convinced them who we were.”

Now she did hug him and damn the consequences. “Have you been able to contact any of our—your people?”

He nodded. “There’s a semaphore station on the roof. The whole Buridan network’s in contact. Do you have orders?”

As Venera realized what was possible, she grinned. “Yes!” She took Bryce by one arm and Sarto by the other and dragged them across the floor. “I think I know a way to break the siege and save the other commanders. You need to get up there and get Buridan to send us something. Jacoby, you get up there too. You need to convince Sacrus that I’m ready to double-cross my people.” She pushed them both away.

“And what are you going to do?” asked Bryce.

She smiled past the throbbing in her jaw. “What I do best,” she said. “I’ll set the ball rolling.”

Venera stalked over to the black, bedewed snout of a locomotive and pulled herself up to stand in front of its headlamp. She was drenched in light from it and the overhead spots, aware that her pale face and hands must be as bright as lantern flames against the dark metal surrounding her. She raised her arms.

“It is tüüüme!”

She screamed it with all her might, squeezed all the anger and the pain from her twisted family and poisonous intrigues of her youth, the indifferent bullet and her loss of her husband Chaison, the blood on her hands after she stabbed Aubri Mahallan, the smoke from her pistols as she shot men and women alike, all of it into that one word. As the echoes subsided everyone in the roundhouse came to their feet. All eyes were on her and that was exactly right, exactly how it should be.

“Today the old debts will be settled! Two hundred years and more the truth has waited in Buridan tower—the truth of what Sacrus is and what they have done! Nearly too late, but not too late, because you, here today, will be the ones to settle those debts and at the same time, prevent Sacrus from ever committing such atrocities again!

“Let me describe my home. Let me describe Buridan tower!” Out of the corner of her eye she saw the army commanders running from their map table, but they had to shoulder their way through hundreds of soldiers to reach her, and the soldiers were raptly attentive to her alone. “Like a vast musical instrument, a flute thrust into the sky and played on by the ceaseless hurricane winds of the airfall. Cold, its corridors decorated with grit and wavering, torn ribbons that once were tapestries. Wet, with nothing to burn except the feathers of birds. Never silent, never still as the beams it stands on sway under the onslaught of air. A roaring tomb, that is Buridan tower! That is what Sacrus made. It is what they promise to make of your homes as well, make no mistake.

“That’s right,” she nodded. “You’re fighting for far more than you may know. This isn’t just a matter of historical grudges, nor is it a skirmish over Sacrus’s kidnapping and torture of your women and children. This is about your future. Do you want all of Spyre to become like Buridan, an empty tomb, a capricious playground for the winds? Because that is what Sacrus has planned for Spyre.”

The officers had stopped at the head of the crowd. She could see that the commander was about to order her to be taken off her perch, so Venera hurried on to her main point. “You have not been told the truth about this war! Before we leave this place you need to know why Sacrus has moved against us all. It is because they believe they have outgrown Spyre the way a wasp outgrows its cocoon. Centuries ago they attacked and destroyed Buridan to gain a treasure from us. They failed to capture it, but never gave up their ambition. Ever since Buridan’s fall they have bided their time, awaiting the chance to get their hands on something Buridan has guarded for the sake of Spyre, since the very beginning of time.” She was really winding herself up now, and for the moment the officers had stopped, curious no doubt about what she was about to say.

“Since the creation of Spyre, my family has guarded one of the most powerful relics in the world! It was for the sake of this trust that we kept to Buridan tower for generations, not venturing out because we feared Sacrus would learn that the tower is not the empty shell they believed—afraid they would learn that it can be entered. The thing we guarded is so dangerous that my brothers and sisters, my parents, grandparents, and their grandparents, all sacrificed their lives to prevent even a hint of its existence from escaping our walls.

“Time came when we could no longer sustain ourselves,” she said more softly, “and I had to venture forth.” Dimly, Venera wondered at this grand fib she was making up on the spot; it was a rousing story, and if it proved rousing enough, then nobody would believe Guinevera if he survived to accuse her of being an imposter.

“As soon as I came forth,” she said, “Sacrus knew that Buridan had survived, and they knew why we had stayed hidden. They knew that I carried with me the last key to Candesce!”

She stopped, letting the echoes reverberate. Crossing her arms, she gazed out at the army, waiting. Two seconds, five, ten, and then they were muttering, talking, turning to one another with frowns and nods. Some who prided themselves on knowing old legends told the men standing next to them about the keys; word began to spread through the ranks. In the front row, the officers were looking at one another in consternation.

Venera raised a hand for silence. “That is what this war is about,” she said. “Sacrus has known of the existence of this key for centuries. They tried to take it once, and Buridan and its allies resisted. Now they are after it again. If they get it, they will no longer need Spyre. To them it is like the hated chrysalis that has confined them for generations. They will shed it, and they don’t care if it unravels in pieces as they fly toward the light. At best, Spyre will prove a good capital for the world-spanning empire they plan—once they’ve scoured it clean of all the old estates, that is. Yes, this cylinder will make a fine park for the palace of Virga’s new rulers. They’ll need room for the governors of their new provinces, for prisoners, slaves, treasure houses, and barracks. They might not knock down all the buildings. But you and yours… well, I hope you have relatives in one of the principalities, because rabble like us won’t be allowed to live here anymore.”

The soldiers were starting to argue and shout. Belatedly the officers had realized that they weren’t in control any more; several darted at the locomotive, but Venera crouched and glared at them, as if she was ready to pounce. They backed away.

She stood up onto her tip-toes as she flung one fist high over her head. “We have to stop them! The key must be protected, for without it, Spyre itself is doomed. You fight for more than your lives—more than your homes. You are all that stands between Sacrus and the slow strangulation of the very world!

“Will you stop them?” They shouted yes. “Will you?” They screamed it.

Venera had never seen anyone give a speech like this, but she’d heard Chaison work a crowd and had read about such moments in books. It all took her back to those romantic stories she’d devoured as a little girl in her pink bedroom. Outrageous theatricality, but none of these men had ever seen its like either; few had probably ever been in a theater. For most, this roundhouse was the farthest they had ever been from home, and the looming locomotive was something they had only ever glimpsed in the far distance. They stood among peers, who before today had been dots seen through telescopes, and they were learning that however strange and foreign they were, all were united in their loyalty to Spyre itself. Of course the moment made them mad.

Fist still raised, Venera smiled down at the commander who shook his head in defeat.

Bryce and Jacoby Sarto clambered along the side of the locomotive to join her. “What’s the news?” she asked over the roar of the army at her feet.

Bryce blinked at the scene. “Uh… they’re on their way.”

Sarto nodded. “I semaphored the Sacrus army commander. Told him you realize your situation is hopeless, that you’re going to lead your army into a trap.”

She grinned. “Good.” She turned back to the crowd and raised her fist again.

“It—is—tüüüüüme!”