Queen of Candesce

21

All across Spyre, metal that had been without voice for a thousand years was groaning. The distant moan seemed half real to Venera, here at the world’s edge where the roar of the wind was perpetual, but it was there. Spyre was waking, trembling, and dying. Everybody knew it.

She put one hand over the other and tried to focus on the rungs above her. She could see the peaked helmets of some of Guinevera’s men up there and was pathetically glad that she wouldn’t have to face this alone.

Sarto was climbing a ladder next to hers. Even a month ago, the very idea of trusting him would have seemed insane to her. And anyway, if she were some romantic heroine and this were the sort of story that would turn out well, it would be her lover Bryce offering to go into danger at her side—not a man who until recently she would have been perfectly happy to see skewered on a pike.

“Pfah,” she said, and climbed out onto the roof.

Thick smoke crawled out of the broad square opening in the center of the roof. Ominous, it billowed up twenty feet and then was torn to ribbons by the world’s-edge hurricanes. The smoke made an undulating tapestry behind Margit, her soldiers, and their hostages.

The elevator platform had been raised six feet. It was closely ringed by council troops whose weapons were aimed at Margit and her people. Venera recognized Garth Diamandis, Moss, and little Samson Odess among the captives. All had gun muzzles pressed against their cheeks.

A young woman in a uniform stood next to Margit. With Garth’s face hovering just behind her own, Venera could be in no doubt as to who she was; she had the same high cheekbones and gray eyes as her father.

Her gaze was fixed on Margit, her face expressionless.

“Come closer, Venera,” called Margit. She held a pistol and had propped her elbow on her hip, aiming it casually upward. “Don’t be shy.”

Venera cursed under her breath. Margit had managed to corral all of her friends—no, not all. Where was Eilen? She glanced around the roof, not seeing her among the other newly freed Lirisians. Maybe she was downstairs fighting the fires; that was probably it…

Her eye was drawn despite herself to a huddled figure lying on the roof. Freed of life, Eilen was difficult to recognize; her clothes were no longer clothes but some odd drapes of cloth covering a shape whose limbs weren’t bent in any human pose. She stared straight up, her face a blank under the burnt wound in her forehead.

“Oh no…” Venera ran to her and knelt. She reached out, hesitated, then looked up at Margit.

Smoke roiled behind the former botanist of Liris. She smiled triumphantly. “Always wanted an excuse to do that,” she said. “And I’d love an excuse to do the same to these.” Her pistol waved at the prisoners behind her. “But that’s not going to happen, is it? Because you’re going to…” She seemed to lose the thread of what she was saying, staring off into the distance for a few seconds. Then, starting, she looked at Venera again and said, “Going to give me the key to Candesce.”

Venera glanced behind her. None of the army staff who knew about the key were here. Neither was Guinevera nor Pamela Anseratte. There was no one to prevent her from making such a deal.

Margit barked a surprised laugh. “Is this your solution? You thought to do a trade, did you?” Jacoby Sarto had stepped into view, paces behind Venera. Margit was sneering at him with undisguised contempt.

“That man-shaped thing might have been valuable once, but not anymore. It’s not worth the least of these fools.” She flipped up the pistol and fired; instantly hundreds of weapons rose across the roof, hammers cocking, men straining. Venera’s heart was thudding painfully in her chest; she raised a hand, lowered it slowly. Gratefully, she saw the council soldiers obey her gesture and relax slightly.

She ventured a look behind her. Jacoby Sarto was staring down at a hole in the rooftop, right between his feet. His face was dark with anger, but his shoulders were slumped in defeat. He had nothing now, and he knew it.

“Your choice is clear, oh would-be queen of Candesce,” shouted Margit over the shuddering of the wind. “You can keep your trophy, and maybe even use it again if you can evade us. Maybe these soldiers will follow you all the way to Candesce, though I doubt it. But go ahead: all you have to do is give the order and they’ll fire. I’ll be dead—and so will your friends. But you can walk away with your trinket.

“Or,” she said with relish, “you can hand it to me now. Then I’ll let your friends go—well, all save one, maybe. I need some guarantee that you won’t have us shot on our way up to the docks. But I promise I’ll let the last one go when we get there. Sacrus keeps its promises.”

Venera played for time. “And who’s going to use the key when you get to Candesce? Not you.”

Margit shrugged. “They are wise, those that made me and healed me after you…” Her brows knit as though she were trying to remember something. “You… Those that made me—yes, those ones, not this one and his former cronies,” she nodded to Sarto. “No, Sacrus underwent a… change of government… some weeks ago. People with a far better understanding of what the key represents, and who we might bargain with using it are in charge now. Their glory shall extend beyond merely cowing the principalities with some show of force from the Sun of Suns. The bargain they’ve struck… the forces they’ve struck it with… well, suffice it to say, Virga itself will be our toy when they’re done.”

An ugly suspicion was forming in Venera’s mind. “Do these forces have a name? Maybe—Artificial Nature?”

Margit shrugged again, looking pleased. “A lady doesn’t tell.” Then her expression hardened. She extended her hand. “Hand it over. Now. We have a lot to do, and you’re wasting my time.”

The rooftop trembled under Venera’s feet. Past the pall of smoke, Spyre itself shimmered like a dissolving dream.

She’d almost had the power she needed, power to take revenge against the Pilot of Slipstream for the death of her husband. Enough wealth to set herself up somewhere in independence. Maybe she was even growing past the need for vengeance. It was possible she could have stayed here with her newfound friends, maybe in the mansion of Buridan in Lesser Spyre. Such possibilities had trembled just out of reach ever since her arrival among these baroque, ancient, and inward-turned people. It had all been within her grasp.

And Margit was right: she could still turn away. The key was hers and with it, untold power and riches if she chose to exercise it. True, she would have to move immediately to secure her own safety, else the council would try to take it from her. But she was sure she could do that, with Sarto’s help and Bryce’s. Maybe Spyre would survive, if they spun its rotation down in time and repaired it under lesser gravity. She could still have Buridan, her place on the council, and power. All she had to do was give up the prisoners who stood watching her now.

The Venera Fanning who had woken in Garth Diamandis’s bed those scant weeks ago could have done that.

She reached slowly into her jacket and brought out the slim white wand that had caused so much grief—and doubtless would be the cause of much more. Step by step she closed the distance between herself and Margit’s outstretched hand. Venera raised her hand and Margit leaned forward, but Venera would not look her in the eye.

Selene Diamandis put her foot in Margit’s lower back and pushed.

As the former botanist sprawled onto Venera, bringing them both down, Selene pulled her own pistol and aimed it at the face of the man whose gun was touching Garth’s ear. “Father, jump!” she cried.

Margit snarled and punched Venera in the chin. The explosion of pain was nothing compared to the spasms she usually got there so Venera didn’t even blink. She grabbed Margit’s wrist and the two rolled over and away from the platform.

“Lower your guns,” Selene was shouting. Venera caught a confused glimpse of men and women stepping out of the way as she and Margit tumbled to the edge of the roof by the courtyard. Nobody moved to help her—if anyone laid a hand on either her or Margit, everyone would start shooting.

Margit elbowed Venera in the face and her head snapped back. She had an upside-down view of the courtyard below; it was an inferno.

“That red looks good on the trees, don’t you think?” Margit muttered. She struck Venera again. Dazed, Venera couldn’t recover fast enough and suddenly found Margit standing over her, pistol aimed at her.

“The key,” she said, “or you die.”

A shadow flickered from overhead. Margit glanced up, said, “What—” and then Moss collided with her and the two of them sailed off the roof. In the blink of an eye they were gone, disappearing silently into the smoke.

No one spoke. On her knees, gazing into the fire, Venera realized that she was waiting like everyone else for the end: a scream, a crash, or some other evidence that Margit and Moss had landed. It didn’t come. There was only the dry crackle of the flames. Someone coughed and the spell was broken. Venera took a proffered arm and stood up.

It was Samson Odess who had helped her to her feet. A short distance away Garth Diamandis was hugging his daughter fiercely as the remaining Sacrus troops climbed down from the platform. The building was swaying, its stones cracking and grinding now. The whole landscape of Spyre was transforming as trees fell and buildings quivered on the verge of collapse. Soldiers and officers of both sides looked at one another in wonder and terror. Their alliances suddenly didn’t matter.

Odess pointed to the grandly spinning town-wheels miles overhead. “Come on,” he said. “Lesser Spyre will survive when the world comes apart. It’ll all fall away from the town-wheels.”

Venera followed his gaze, then looked around. The little elevator platform might hold twelve or fifteen people; she could save her friends. Then what? Repeat the stand-off she’d just undergone, this time at the docks? Sacrus’s leaders were there. They probably held the entire city by now.

“Who are you going to save, Samson?” she asked him. “These are your people now. You’re the senior official in Liris—you’re the new botanist now, do you understand? These people are your responsibility.”

She saw the realization hit him, but the result wasn’t what she might have expected. Samson seemed to stand a little taller. His eyes, which had always darted around nervously, were now steady. He walked over to where Eilen lay crumpled. Kneeling, he arranged her limbs and closed her eyes, so that it looked like she was sleeping with her cheek and the palm of one hand pressed against the stones of Liris. Then he looked up at Venera. “We have to save them all,” he said.

It seemed hopeless, if the very fabric of Spyre was about to come apart around them. Even burying the dead in the thin earth of their ancestral home seemed pointless. In hours or minutes they would be emptied into the airs of Virga. The alternative for the living was to rise to the city, to probably become prisoners in Lesser Spyre.

The air…

“I know what to do,” Venera said. “Gather all your people. We might just make it if we go now.”

“Where?” he asked. “If the whole world’s coming apart—”

“Fin,” she shouted as she ran to the edge of the roof. “We have to get to Fin!”

She mounted her horse and led them at a walk. At first only a trickle of people followed, just those who had been on the rooftop, but soon soldiers of Liris and Sacrus threw down their weapons and joined the crowd. Their officers trailed them. Guinevera and Anseratte appeared, but they were silent when anyone asked them what to do.

As they passed the roundhouse Bryce emerged with some of his own followers. They fell into step next to Venera’s horse but, while their eyes met, they exchanged no words. Both knew that their time together had ended, as certainly as Spyre’s.

In the clear daylight, Venera was able to behold the intricacies of Greater Spyre’s estates for the first and last time. Always before she had skulked past them at night or raced along the few awning-covered roads that were tolerated by this paranoid civilization. Now, astride a ten-foot-tall beast walking the narrow strip of no-man’s land running between the walls, she could see it all. She was glad she had never known before what lay here.

The work of untold ages, of countless lives, had gone into the making of Spyre. There was not a square inch of it that was untouched by some lifetime of contemplation and planning. Any garden corner or low stone wall could tell a thousand tales of lovers who’d met there, children who built forts or cried alone, of petty disputes with neighbors settled there with blood or marriage. Time had never stopped in Spyre, but it had slowed like the sluggish blood of some fantastically old beast, and now for generations the people had lived nearly identical lives. Their hopes and dreams were channeled by the walls under which they walked—influenced by the same storybooks, paintings, and music as their ancestors—until they had become gray copies of their parents or grandparents. Each had added perhaps one small item to Spyre’s vast stockpile of bric-a-brac, unknowingly placing one more barrier before any thoughts of flight their own children might nurture. Strange languages never spoken by more than a dozen people thrived. Venera had been told how the lightless inner rooms of some estates had become bizarre shrines as beloved patriarchs died and because of tradition or fear no one could touch the body. More than one nation had died, too, as its own mausoleum ate it from the inside, its last inhabitants living out their lives in an ivy-strangled gatehouse without once stepping beyond the walls.

Now the staggered rows of hedge and wall were toppling. From the half-hidden buildings lurking beyond came the sound of glass shattering as pillars shifted. Doors unopened for centuries suddenly gaped revealing blackness or sights that seared themselves into memory but not the understanding—glimpses, as they were, of cultures and rituals gone so insular and self-referential as to be forever opaque to outsiders.

And now the people were visible, running outside as the ground quaked and the metal skin of Spyre groaned beneath them. They were like grubs ejected from a wasp’s nest split by some indifferent boy; many lay thrashing on the ground, unable to cope with the strangeness of the greater world they had been thrown into. Others ran screaming, or tore at themselves or one another, or stood mutely, or laughed.

As a many-verandaed manor collapsed in on itself Venera caught a glimpse of the people still inside: the very old, parchment hands crossed over their laps as they sat unmoved beneath their collapsing ceilings; and the panicked who stood staring wide eyed at open fields where walls had been. The building’s floors came down one atop the other, pancaking in a wallop of dust, and they were all gone.

“Liris’s cable has snapped,” someone said. Venera didn’t look around. She felt strangely calm; after all, what lay ahead of them all but a return to the skies of Virga? She knew those skies, had flown in them many times. There, of course, lay the irony: for those who fell into the air with the cascading pieces of the great wheel, this would not be the end, but a beginning. Few, if any, could comprehend that. So she said nothing.

And for her? She had saved herself from her scheming sisters and her father’s homicidal court by marrying a dashing admiral. In the end, he had lived up to her expectations, but he had also died. Venera had been taught exactly one way to deal with such crises, which was through vengeance. Now she patted the front of her jacket, where the key to Candesce nestled once again in its inner pocket. It was a useless trinket, she realized; nothing worthwhile had come of using it and nothing would.

For her, what was ending here was the luxury of being able to hide within herself. If she was to survive, she would have to begin to take other people’s emotions seriously. Lacking power, she must accommodate.

Glancing affectionately at Garth, who was talking intensely with his red-uniformed daughter, Venera had to admit that the prospect wasn’t so frightening as it used to be.

It became harder to walk as gravity began to vary between nearly nothing and something crushingly more than one g. Her horse balked, and Venera had to dismount; and when he ran off, she shrugged and fell into step next to Bryce and Sarto who were arguing politics to distract themselves. They paused to smile at her, then continued. Slowly, with many pauses and some panicked milling about as gaps appeared in the land ahead, they made their way to Fin.

They were nearly there when Buridan finally consigned itself to the air. The shouting and pointing made Venera lift her eyes from the splitting soil, and she was in time to see the black tower fold its spiderweb of girders around itself like a man spinning a robe over his shoulders. Then it lowered itself in stately majesty through the gaping rent in the land until only blue sky remained.

She looked at Bryce. He shrugged. “They knew it might happen. I told them to scatter all the copies of the book and currency to the winds if they fell. They’re to seed the skies of Virga with democracy. I hope that’s a good enough task to keep them sane for the next few minutes, and then, maybe, they’ll be able to see to their own safety.”

The tower would quickly disintegrate as it arrowed through the skies. Its pieces would become missiles that might do vast harm to the houses and farms of the neighboring principalities; so much more so would be the larger shreds of Spyre itself when it all finally went. That was tragic, but the new citizens of Buridan, and the men and women of Bryce’s organization, would soon find themselves gliding through a warm blue sky. They might kick their way from stone to tumbling stone and so make their way out of the wreckage. And then they would be like everyone else in the world: sunlit and free in an endless sky.

Venera smiled. Ahead she saw the doors of the low bunker that led to Fin, and broke into a run. “We’re there!”

Her logic had been simple. Fin was a wing, aerodynamic like nothing else in Spyre. Of all the parts that might come loose and fall in the next little while, it was bound to travel fastest and farthest. So, it would almost certainly outrun the rest of the wreckage. And Venera had a hunch that Fin’s inhabitants had given thought, over the centuries, about what they would do when Spyre died.

She was right. Although the guards at the door were initially reluctant to let in the mob, Corinne appeared and ordered them to stand down. As the motley collection of soldiers and citizens streamed down the steps, she turned to Venera and grinned, just a little hysterically. “We have parachutes,” she said. “And the fin can be detached and let drop. It was always our plan of last resort if we ever got invaded. Now…” She shrugged.

“But do you have boats? Bikes? Any means of traveling once we’re in the air?” Corinne grinned and nodded, and Venera let out a sigh of relief. She had led her people to the right place.

Spyre’s final death agony began as the last were stumbling inside. Venera stood with Corinne, Bryce, and Sarto at the top of the stairs and watched a bright line start at the rim of the world, high up past the sedately spinning wheels of Lesser Spyre. The line became a visible split, its edges pulling in trees and buildings, and Spyre peeled apart from that point. Its ancient fusion engines had proven incapable of slowing it safely—it might have been the stress they generated as much as centripetal force that finally did in the titanium structure. The details didn’t matter. All that Venera saw was a thousand ancient cultures ending in one stroke of burgeoning sunlight.

A trembling shockwave raced around the curve of the world. It was beautiful in the blued distance but Venera knew it was headed straight for her. She should go inside before it arrived. She didn’t move.

Other splits appeared in the peeling halves of the world, and now the land simply shredded like paper. A roar like the howl of a furious god was approaching, and a tremble went through the ground as gravity failed for good.

Just before Bryce grabbed her wrist and hauled her inside, Venera saw a herd of Dali horses gallop with grace and courage off the rim of the world.

They would survive, she was sure. Kicking and neighing, they would sail through the skies of Virga until they landed in the lap of someone unsuspecting. Gravity would be found for them, somewhere; they were too mythic and beautiful to be left to die.

Corinne’s men threw the levers that detached Fin from the rest of Spyre. Suddenly weightless, Venera hovered in the open doorway and watched a wall of speed-ivy recede very quickly, and disappear behind a cloud.

Nobody spoke as she drifted inside. Hollow-eyed men and women glanced at one another, all crowded together in the thin antechamber of the tiny nation. They were all refugees now; it was clear from their faces that they expected some terrible fate to befall them, perhaps within the next few minutes. None could imagine what that might be, of course, and seeing that confusion, Venera didn’t know whether to laugh or cry for them.

“Relax,” she said to a weeping woman. “This is a time to hope, not to despair. You’ll like where we’re going.”

Silence. Then somebody said, “And where is that?”

Somebody else said, “Home.”

Venera looked over, puzzled. The voice hadn’t been familiar, but the accent…

A man was looking back at her steadily. He held one of Fin’s metal stanchions with one hand but otherwise looked quite comfortable in freefall. She did recognize the rags he was wearing, though—they marked him as one of the prisoners she had liberated from the Gray Infirmary.

“You’re not from here,” she said.

He grinned. “And you’re not Amandera Thrace-Guiles,” he said. “You’re the admiral’s wife.”

A shock went through her. “What?”

“I only saw you from a distance when they rescued us,” said the man. “And then lost sight of you when we got here to Fin. Everyone was talking about the mysterious lady of Buridan. But now I see you up close, I know you.”

“Your accent,” she said. “It’s Slipstream.”

He nodded. “I was part of the expedition, ma’am—aboard the Arrest. I was there for the big battle, when we defeated Falcon Formation. When your husband defeated them. I saw him plunge the Rook into the enemy’s dreadnought like a knife into another man’s heart. Had time to watch the bastard blow up, before they netted me out of the air and threw me into prison.” He grimaced in anger.

Venera’s heart was in her throat. “You saw… Chaison die?”

“Die?” The ex-airman looked at her incredulously. “Die? He’s not dead. I spent two weeks in the same cell with him before Falcon traded me to Sacrus like a sack of grain.”

Venera’s vision grayed and she would have fallen over had she been under gravity. Oblivious, the other continued: “I might’a wished he were dead a couple times over those weeks. It’s hard sharing your space with another man, particularly one you’ve respected. You come to see all his faults.”

Venera recovered enough to croak, “Yes, I know how he can be.” Then she turned away to hide her tears.

The giant metal wing shuddered as it knifed through the air. Past the opened doorway, where Bryce and Sarto were silhouetted, the sky seemed to be boiling. Cloud and air were being torn by the shattering of a world. The sound of it finally caught up with Fin, a cacophony like a belfry being blown up that went on and on. It was a knell that should warn the principalities in time for them to mount some sort of emergency response. Nothing could be done, though, if square miles of metal skin were to plow into a town-wheel somewhere.

To Venera, the churning air and the noise of it all seemed to originate in her own heart. He was alive! Absurdly, the image came to her of how she would tell him this story—tell him about Garth rescuing her, about her first impressions of Spyre as seen from a roofless crumbling cube of stone, about Lesser Spyre and Sacrus and Buridan tower. Moments ago they had been mere facts, memories of a confused and drifting time. With the possibility that she could tell him about them, they suddenly became episodes of a great drama, a rousing tale she would laugh and cry to tell.

She turned to Garth, grinning wildly. “Did you hear that? He’s alive!”

Garth smiled weakly.

Venera shook him by the shoulders. “Don’t you understand? There is a place for you, for all of you, if you’ve the courage to get there. Come with me. Come to Slipstream, and on to Falcon, where he’s imprisoned. We’ll free him and then you’ll have a home again. I swear it.”

He didn’t move, just kept his grip on his daughter while the wind whistled through Fin and the rest of the refugees looked from him to Venera and back again.

“Well, what are you scared of?” she demanded. “Are you afraid I can’t do what I say?”

Now Garth smiled ruefully and shook his head. “No, Venera,” he said. “I’m afraid that you can.”

She laughed and went to the door. Bracing her hands and feet on the cold metal she looked out. The gray turbulence of Spyre’s destruction was fading with the distance. In its place was endless blue.

“You’ll see,” she said into the rushing air. “It’ll all work out.

“I’ll make sure of it.”