QUEEN OF CANDESCE [Part IV of IV]
                          by KARL SCHROEDER
                                 ****




                          Illustration by George Krauter
                                       ****

“The end of the world as we know it” means the beginning of the world as we
don’t know it....
      The Story So Far
      A woman is falling from the sky. She’s taking a long time doing it, so Garth
Diamandis , aging playboy and exile on Greater Spyre, takes his time in setting
up her rescue.
       Greater Spyre is circular, a vast open-ended cylinder of metal at least twelve
miles in diameter. Spyre is thousands of years old and is slowly falling apart. Its
inner surface is paved with dirt and trees and dotted with strange, inward-turned
pocket nations. Garth’s people have always lived here, either in the paranoid
miniature kingdoms of the cylinder, or in the rotating cities that hover in the open
air around which Spyre revolves. Few of them have ever taken an interest in the
world beyond Spyre; yet this woman has drifted in on the weightless air from that
very world.
      Garth manages to catch her before she tumbles to death on Spyre’s inner
surface and takes her home to the damp basement he’s called home for the past
dozen years or so. It is here that Venera Fanning awakens a day later.
      Ah, Venera: sociopath princess, pampered courtier, and spy-mistress;
casual murderer, recent savior of the world, and wife of Admiral Chaison
Fanning of Slipstream. Garth, ladies-man that he is, is immediately besotted with
her. But he can’t puzzle out her strange story, which involves pirates, betrayal,
and ruin at the very heart of the world.
      Some of what she says is familiar. Garth knows that Spyre is one tiny object
spinning in the immense artificial world known as Virga. Virga is a hollow
sphere—a balloon, essentially—several thousand miles in diameter, orbiting on its
own somewhere in deep space. The balloon contains air, water, drifting rocks—all
the necessities of life, including man-made fusion suns that light small parts of its
vast volume. Nations coalesce around these suns, and the greatest sun is
Candesce, which lies at the very center of Virga. There is no gravity in Virga, save
that which you can make using centrifugal force. Spyre is one of the most ancient
of the habitats built to take advantage of Virga’s strange environment.
        It is also a place where, once you have arrived, you may never leave. Garth
tries to convince Venera of this fact, but she refuses to believe him. She comes from
Slipstream, a nation of mile-wide wood-and-rope town-wheels and free-floating
buildings and farms a thousand miles from Spyre. Born to privilege, used to
freedom—and ever sure of herself—she sneaks away from Garth to attempt a
grand leap off the edge of Spyre. Before she can reach weightless air and escape,
however, she is captured by soldiers of the four-acre nation of Liris. Dragged
inside the single cube-shaped stone building that makes up the ancient nation, she
is forcibly made into a citizen and called on to serve Margit , Liris’s “botanist” or
ruler.
        Serving the botanist is educational. Venera learns that the claustrophobic
principalities that dot the cylinder’s surface are ancient. Some are so old that they
still possess treasures taken from Earth when Virga was first made. Liris, for
instance, is the only place in the world where cherry trees grow. Liris and its
neighbors sell their rarities in the Great Fair of Spyre, and the botanist intends for
Venera to work there until the end of her days.
       Margit is going to guarantee Venera’s loyalty by injecting her with a drug
that will cause madness unless regular doses of an antidote are provided. Venera
knows that time is running out, but there are things she must know. She visits the
Fair to ask about goings-on in the outside world. Almost immediately she learns
that her husband, Admiral Chaison Fanning , has been reported killed in a great
battle on the far side of the world.
       Overcome with ice-cold grief and outrage, Venera confronts Margit in her
bedchamber. The two women fight but Venera gets the upper hand, injecting the
botanist with her own diabolical drug and sending her screaming into the night.
Then, assembling the stunned citizens of Liris, she declares Margit’s most tragic
victim to be the nation’s new botanist. Then she walks away from Liris, with no
plan and no home anymore to escape to. Alone, aimless and hopeless, she returns
to the one man in Spyre she can trust: Garth Diamandis.
                                       ****
       Venera has been listed as a traitor in her adopted home of Slipstream and
cannot return to the court intrigues of her childhood home in Hale. For a while
she drifts in a state of numb despair, living like a vagabond with Garth
Diamandis in the wilds of Greater Spyre. When she learns there may be a way off
of Spyre, though, she’s faced with making a choice. Either go home and confront
the fact of Chaison Fanning’s death; or delay the inevitable. She decides to delay,
by telling herself that she needs power to exact revenge on those responsible for
Chaison’s death. She will stay here in Spyre until she has that power.
       Garth knows of a way to get it. Observant as he is, he’s seen that she carries
an ancient signet ring (taken from the treasure of Anetene in the last book) marked
with the symbol of a horse. If the ring is what he thinks it is, vast riches may be
theirs for the taking. But it won’t be easy: to learn the truth they have to brave the
deadly airfall, a region of Greater Spyre where the ground has given way and
torrents of wind blast down and out of the world. Garth leads Venera along
hidden paths to the gates of a forlorn tower that stands alone in the midst of the
airfall. There, her ring turns out to work as a key, letting them in to Buridan
Tower, which has not been entered in two hundred years.
       Venera takes the identity of Amandera Thrace-Guiles , last heir of
Buridan, and rises up the Buridan elevator to Lesser Spyre to claim an
inheritance that has been waiting for an heir for centuries. Naturally the great
powers of Spyre are skeptical of her claim—none more so than Jacoby Sarto ,
spokesman for the feared nation of Sacrus. Sarto does his best to torpedo Venera’s
claim, an effort that culminates in a confrontation during her confirmation
interview. Sacrus, it turns out, is the homeland of Margit. Sarto knows about the
key to Candesce and reveals that Sacrus has it.
      During these escapades Venera also has a run-in with a local insurgent
group, which is led by a young man she finds attractive: Bryce is of noble
background but has adopted the Cause, which is to reintroduce a form of
emergent democracy to Spyre, and eventually Virga itself. Venera thinks he’s
doomed to fail, but he emerges as a key ally as events unfold.
       So now she has the wealth and power she craved—even if her hold on it is
tenuous. What to do? Venera’s not willing to admit the growing sense of affection
she feels for Garth, or the equally unfamiliar sense of loyalty she’s learning. She
decides to leave Spyre. At the same time, Garth is completing his own quest, a
search for someone named Selene Diamandis . They part ways, two
battle-scarred veterans of long emotional wars, with no expectation that they will
ever meet again.
                                        ****
      Free of Spyre at last, Venera feels a huge burden lifted from her shoulders.
She watches from a passenger ship as the twelve-mile-diameter open-ended
cylinder that is Virga’s oldest nation recedes among the clouds. But Spyre is not
done with her yet.
      Venera’s ostensibly on a trade expedition to the principalities of Candesce
on behalf of Buridan House. In fact she intends to jump ship at the nearest port
and make her way back to her adoptive home of Slipstream. There, she is
planning regicide, for she blames the sovereign Pilot of Slipstream for the death of
her husband Chaison. Venera’s not one to plan small.
        Just as she’s about to put her plan into action, Venera receives an unsigned
letter telling her that her friend Garth Diamandis has been abducted back on
Spyre. The evil pocket nation of Sacrus has him, and they will torture and kill him
unless she returns to Spyre and does what they say.
      Venera pretends to be indifferent to Garth’s fate, but in reality she can’t
leave him. She has to invent an excuse for herself, but in the end returns to Spyre
to save him. Sacrus has made her mad; assassinating Slipstream’s king will have
to wait.
       Back in Buridan, Venera enlists the aid of the insurgents led by the dashing
if naive Bryce. She also returns to her former home of Liris to gain their aid, and
Liris’s new Botanist promises to bring in the powerful preservationist faction as
well. Venera intends a strike into the very heart of Sacrus territory to rescue Garth.
This would be impossible for any party traveling overland, but she intends to go
underland—below the skin of Spyre and up through the basement of Sacrus’s
fortress, the Grey Infirmary.
       What follows is a set piece of squad-scale combat as Venera’s group
infiltrates the building and finds Garth. In the course of this adventure, Venera
has another run in with her former employer, Margit of Sacrus, who is now
completely mad (Venera’s fault, but something she refuses to feel guilty about).
Margit has the key to Candesce and is about to kill Garth when Venera intervenes.
She escapes Sacrus with both Garth and the key.
       Back in safe territory, Venera complicates her life by unexpectedly falling
into bed with Bryce. Whether it’s just an adrenalin reaction or the sign of
something deeper, she has no time to find out because Sacrus has summoned the
Spyre Council to announce that Buridan, in the person of Venera Fanning, has
started a war.
                                        ****
                                          17
       Treble was a musician by day, and a member of Bryce’s underground by
night. He’d always known that he might be called upon to abandon his façade of
serene artistry and fight in the Cause—though like some of the others in the secret
organization, he was uneasy with the direction things had taken lately. Bryce was
becoming altogether too cozy with the imposing Amandera Thrace-Guiles.
       Not that it mattered anymore, as of this minute. Clinging to a knuckle of
masonry high on the side of the Lesser Spyre Ministry of Justice, Treble was in an
ideal position to watch the city descend into anarchy.
      Treble had gained access to the building disguised as a petitioner seeking
information about an imprisoned relative. His assignment was to plant some false
records in a Ministry file cabinet on the twelfth floor. He evaded the guards adroitly,
made his way up the creaking stairs with no difficulty, and had just ensconced
himself in the records office when two things happened simultaneously: the staccato
sound of gunfire echoed in through the half-open window; and three minor
bureaucrats approached the office, talking and laughing loudly.
       This was why Treble found himself clutching a rounded chunk of stone that
might once have been a gargoyle, and why he was staring in fascination at the streets
that lay below and wrapped up and around the ring of the town wheel. He hardly
knew where to look. Little puffs of smoke were appearing around the Spyre docks
directly overhead. The buildings there hovered in midair like child’s toys floating in a
bathtub and seldom moved; now several were gliding slowly—and ominously—in
collision courses. Several ships had cast off. Meanwhile, halfway up the curve of the
wheel, some other commotion had sprung up around the Buridan Estate. Barnacled
as it was by other buildings, he could never have identified the place had he not been
familiar with the layout, but it was clearly the source of that tall pillar of smoke that
stood up two hundred feet before bending over and wrapping itself in a fading spiral
around and around the inner space of the wheel.
       People were running in the avenue below. Ever the conscientious spy, Treble
shifted his position so that he straddled the gargoyle. He checked his watch, then
pulled out a frayed notebook and a stub pencil. He dabbed the pencil on the tip of
his tongue then squinted around.
       Item One: At four-fourteen o’clock, the preservationists broke our agreement
by attempting to prevent Sacrus from occupying the docks. At least, that was what
Treble assumed was happening. The hastily scrawled note from Bryce that had
mobilized the resistance told of arguments during the Sacrus raid last night, hasty
plans made and discarded in the heat of the moment. Thrace-Guiles wanted to rally
the nations of Greater Spyre that had lost people to Sacrus. The preservationists had
their own agenda, which involved cowing Sacrus into letting them run a railway line
through the middle of the great nation’s lands. Sacrus itself was moving and
activating its allies. So much was clear; but in the background of this fairly
straightforward political situation, a greater upheaval was taking place.
       Bryce had said on more than one occasion that Spyre was like the mainspring
of a watch wound too tight. A single tap in the right place might cause a vicious
uncoiling—a snap. Many in Spyre had read about the Pantry War with envy; over
centuries a thousand resentments and grudges had built up between the pocket
nations, and it was glorious to watch someone else finally try to settle a score.
Everyone kept ledgers accounting who had slighted whom and when. Nothing was
forgotten and behind their ivy- and moss-softened walls, the monarchs and
presidents of nations little bigger than swimming pools spent their lives plotting their
revenges.
       The well-planned atrocities of the resistance were little trip-hammer blows on
the watch’s case, each one an attempt to break the mechanism. Tap the watch, shake
it, and listen. Tap it again. That had been Bryce’s strategy.
       Sacrus and Buridan had hit the sweet spot. Shop-fronts were slamming all
over the place, like air-clams caught in a beam of sunlight, while gangs of men
carrying truncheons and knives seemed to materialize like smoke out of the alleys. It
was time for a settling of scores.
      Item Two: chaos in the streets. Maybe time to distribute currency?
      Treble peered at the line of smoke coiling inside the wheel. Item Three:
Sacrus seems to have had more agents in place in the city than we thought. They
appear to be moving against Buridan without council approval. So ... Item Four:
council no longer effective?
     He underlined the last sentence, then thought better and crossed it out.
Obviously the council was no longer in control.
     He leaned over and examined the flagstoned street a hundred feet below.
Some of those running figures were recognizable. In fact...
       Was that Amandera Thrace-Guiles? He shaded his eyes against Candesce’s
fire and looked again. Yes, he recognized the shock of bleached hair that
surmounted her head. She was hurrying along the avenue with one arm raised to
shoulder height. Apparently she was aiming a pistol at the man walking ahead of her.
Oh, that was definitely her then.
      Around her a mob swirled. Treble recognized some of his compatriots; there
were others, assorted preservationists, soldiers of minor nations, even one or two
council guards. Were they escorting Thrace-Guiles, or protecting someone else
Treble hadn’t spotted?
      Item Five: council meeting ended around four o’clock.
       He sighted in the direction Thrace-Guiles’s party was taking. They were
headed for Buridan Estate. From ground level they probably couldn’t tell that the
place was besieged. At this rate they might walk right into a crowd of Sacrus
soldiers.
       Treble could still hear voices in the room behind him. He tapped the file folder
in his coat pocket and frowned. Then with a shrug he swung off his masonry perch
and through the opened window.
      The three bureaucrats stared at him in shock. Treble felt the way he did when
he dropped a note in performance; he grinned apologetically, said, “Here, file this,”
and tossed his now-redundant folder to one of the men. Then he ran out the door
and made for the stairs.
       Garth Diamandis staggered and reached out to steady himself against the wall
of a building. He had to keep up; Venera Fanning was striding in great steps along
the avenue, her pistol held unwaveringly to Jacoby Sarto’s head. But Garth was
confused; people were running and shouting while overhead even lines of smoke
divided the sky. This was Lesser Spyre, he was sure of that. The granite voice of his
interrogator still echoed in Garth’s mind, though, and his arms and legs bellowed
pain from the many burns and cuts that ribbed them.
       He had insisted on coming today and now he regretted it. Once upon a time
he’d been a young man and able to bounce back from anything. Not so anymore.
The gravity here weighed heavily on him and for the first time he wished he was back
on Greater Spyre where he could still climb trees like a boy. Alone all those years, he
had reached an accommodation with himself and his past; there’d been days when
he enjoyed himself as if he really were a youth again. And then the woman who now
stalked down the center of the avenue ahead of him had appeared, like a burning
cross in the sky, and proceeded to turn his solitary life upside down.
       He’d thought about abandoning Venera dozens of times. She was self-reliance
personified, after all. She wouldn’t miss him. Once or twice he had gotten as far as
stepping out the door of the Buridan estate. Looking down those half-familiar,
secretive streets, he had realized that he had nowhere to go—nowhere, that is, unless
he could find Selene, the daughter of the woman whose love had caused Garth’s
exile.
       Logic told him that now was the time. Venera was bound to lose this foolish
war she’d started with Sacrus. The prudent course for Garth would be to run and
hide, lick his wounds in secret and then...
       Ah. It was this and then that was the problem. He had found Selene, and she
had turned him over to Sacrus. She was theirs—a recruit, like the ones Moss
claimed had left many of Spyre’s sovereign lands. Sacrus had promised Selene
something, had lied to her; they must have. But Garth was too old to fight them and
too old to think of all the clever and true words that might win his daughter’s heart.
      Selene, his kin, had betrayed him. And Venera Fanning, who owed him
nothing, had risked her life to save his.
      He pushed himself off from the wall and struggled to catch up to her.
      A man ran down the broad steps of the Justice ministry. He waved his arms
over his head. “Don’t go that way! Not safe!”
      Venera paused and glanced at him. “You’re one of Bryce’s.”
       “That I am, Miss Thrace-Guiles.” Garth half smiled at the man’s bravado;
these democrats refused to address people by their titles. Venera didn’t seem to
notice, and they had a hurried conversation that Garth couldn’t hear.
       “There you are.” He turned to find the preservationist, Thinblood, sauntering
up behind him. He grinned at Garth. “You ran off like a startled hare when she came
out of the council chamber.”
      Garth grunted. Thinblood seemed to have decided he was an old man who
needed coddling. It was annoying. He had to admit to himself that it was a relief to
have him here, though. The rest of this motley party consisted mostly of Venera’s
other freed prisoners and they made for bad company, for much the same reasons
as Garth supposed he did. They all looked apprehensive and tired. It didn’t help that
their presence at council didn’t seem to have made a dent in Sacrus’s support.
      Garth and Thinblood had been talking under an awning across the street when
Venera Fanning appeared at the official’s entrance to the council chamber. She
backed out slowly, her posture strange. As she emerged further it became clear that
she was holding a gun and aiming it at someone. That someone had turned out to be
Jacoby Sarto.
      Before he knew it Garth was by her side. “What are you doing?” he heard
himself shouting. She’d merely grimaced and kept backing up.
       “Things didn’t go our way,” she’d said. Past Sarto, the council guards were
lining up with their rifles aimed at her. At the same time, the commoners’ doors
around the long curve of the building were thrown open. A hoard of people spilled
out, some of them fighting openly. Venera’s supporters ran to her side as Bryce’s
agents appeared from nowhere to act as crowd control. And then a gasp went up
from the watching crowd as Principe Guinevera and Pamela Anseratte pushed the
council guards aside and came to stand at Venera’s side.
      “The lines have been drawn,” Anseratte said to the council guards. “Sacrus is
not on the council’s side. Stand down.”
      Reluctantly, the guards lowered their rifles.
      Garth leaned close to Venera. “Did he tell them your ... secret?” But she
shook her head.
      Maybe it was having Thinblood’s reassuring hand on his shoulder, but as
Venera argued now with Bryce’s spy, the fog of fatigue and pain lifted enough for
Garth to begin to wonder about that. Jacoby Sarto had not told the council who
Venera really was? That made no sense. Right now Amandera Thrace-Guiles was the
darling of the old countries. She was the resurrected victim of Sacrus’s historical
arrogance; she was a champion. If Sarto wanted to deflate Sacrus’s opposition all he
had to do was reveal that she was a fake.
      “Why did she do it?” he wondered aloud. Thinblood laughed.
       “You’re trying to second-guess our Amandera?” He shook his head. “She’s
got too much fire in her blood, that’s clear enough. Obviously, she saw a chance to
take Sarto and she went with it.”
      Garth shook his head. “The woman I know wouldn’t see Sarto as a prize to
be taken. She’d think him a burden and be happy to be rid of him. And if he’s a
prisoner why doesn’t he seem more concerned?” Sarto was standing with his arms
crossed, waiting patiently for Venera to finish her conversation. He seemed more to
be with her than taken by her. Garth seemed to be the only one who had noticed
this.
      “Attention!” Venera raised her pistol and for a moment he thought she was
about to fire off a round. She already had the attention of everyone in sight, though,
and seemed to realize it. “Buridan is under siege!” she cried. “Our ancient house is
surrounded by Sacrus’s people. We can’t go back there.”
       Garth hurried over. “What are we going to do? They’ve moved faster than we
anticipated.”
       She nodded grimly. “Apparently, their ground forces are moving to surround
the elevator cables—the ones they can get to, that is.”
       “Most of our allies are on Greater Spyre,” he said. If Sacrus isolated them up
here in the city, they would have to rely on the preservationists, and a few
clearheaded leaders such as Moss, to organize the forces down there.
        For a moment that thought filled Garth with hope. If Venera was sidelined at
this stage, she might be able to avoid being drawn into the heart of the coming
conflagration. A checkmated Buridan might survive with honor, no matter who won.
      Clearly Venera had no intention of going down that road. “We need to get
down there,” she was saying. “Sacrus doesn’t control all the elevators. Pamela, your
country’s line, where is it?”
        Anseratte shook her head. “It’s two wheels away from here. We might make
it, but if Sacrus already has men in the streets they’ve probably taken the axis cable
cars as well.”
      Guinevera shook his head as well. “Our line comes down about a mile from
Carrangate. They’re an old ally of Sacrus. They could use us for target practice on
our way down.”
       “What about Liris?” It was one of Moss’s men, standing alertly with a proud
look in his eye. “Lady, we are the only nation in Spyre that has recently fought a war.
There may not be many of us, but...”
      She turned a dazzling smile on the man. “Thank you. Yes—but your elevator
is above the Fair, isn’t it?”
        “And the Fair, m’lady, is six blocks up the wheel, that way.” He pointed off
to the left.
       “This way!” Venera gestured for Sarto to precede her, then stalked toward the
distant pile of buttresses and roofs that was the Fair.
        Garth followed, but as the fog of exhaustion and pain slowly lifted from him
he found himself considering their chances. It was folly for Venera to involve herself
in this war. Sidelined, she might be safe.
      Sacrus had known what to reveal about her to draw her fangs, but they had
chosen not to reveal it. The only person on this side of the conflict who knew was
Garth himself. If word got out, Venera would naturally assume that it was Sacrus’s
doing. It would be so simple...
       Troubled but determined to follow this thought to its conclusion, Garth put an
extra effort into his footsteps and kept up with Venera as she made for the Fair.
                                         ****
       Liris perched on the very lip of the abyss. At sunoff the building’s roof was
soaked with light, all golds and purple and rose. The sky that opened beyond the
battlement was open to all sides; Venera could almost imagine that she was back in
the provinces of Meridian where the town wheels were small and manageable and
you could fly through the free air whenever you chose. She leaned out, the better to
lose herself in the radiance.
       Tents had been set up on the rooftop behind her, and Moss was holding court
to a wild variety of Spyre dignitaries. They came in all shapes and sizes, masked and
unmasked, lords and ladies and diplomats and generalissimos. United by their fear of
Sacrus and its allies, they were hastily assembling a battle plan while their tiny armies
traveled here from across Greater Spyre. Venera had looked for those armies
earlier—but who could spot a dozen men here or there making their way between the
mazelike walls of the estates?
       It would be an eerie journey, she knew. Garth had shown her the overgrown
gates to estates whose windows were slathered with black paint, whose occupants
had not been seen in generations. Smoke drifted from their chimneys; someone was
home. The soldiers of her alliance might stop at one or two of those gateways and
shout and rattle the iron, hoping to find allies within. But there would be no answer,
unless it be a rifle shot from behind a wall.
      For the first time in days, Venera found herself idle. She was too tired to look
for something to do, and so as she gazed out at the endless skies that familiar deep
melancholy stole over her. This time, she let it happen.
        She wanted Chaison back. It was time to admit it. There were many moments
every day when Venera longed to turn to him and grin and say, “Look what I did!”
or “Have you ever seen anything like it?” She’d had such a moment only an hour
ago, as the first of the Dali horses were led into their new paddock in the far corner
of Liris’s lot. The spindly steeds had been trained to be ridden, and she had
mounted up herself and trotted one in a circle. Oh, she’d wanted to catch
someone’s eye at that moment! But she was Amandera Thrace-Guiles now. There
was no one to appeal to, not even Garth, who was making himself scarce since their
arrival.
      She heard a footstep behind her. Bryce leaned on the stones and casually
reached out to take her hand. She almost snatched it back, but his touch awoke
something in her. This was not the man she wanted, but there was some value in him
wanting her. She smiled at him.
       “All the pawns and knights are in play,” he said. His thumb rubbed the back
of her hand. “It’s our opponent’s move. What would you like to do while we wait?”
      Venera’s pulse quickened. His strong fingers were kneading her hand now,
almost painfully.
      “Uh...” she said, then before she could talk herself out of it, “They’ve given
me an actual room this time.”
      “Well.” He smiled ironically. “That’s an honor. Let’s go try it out.”
      He walked toward the stairs. Venera hesitated, turning to look out at the
dimming sky. No: the pang was still there, and no amount of time with Bryce was
going to make it go away. But what was she to do?
       Venera followed him down the stairs, her excitement mounting. Several people
hailed her, but she simply waved and hurried past. “This way,” she said, grabbing
Bryce’s arm as he made to descend the main stairs. She dragged him through a
doorway hidden behind a faded tapestry. This led to a narrow and dusty little
corridor with several doors leading off of it. Hers was at the end.
      She barely had time to open the door before his arms were around her waist.
He kissed her with passionate force and together they staggered back to the bed
under its little pebbled-glass window.
      “Shut the door!” she gasped, and as he went to comply she undid her blouse.
As he knelt on the bed she guided his hand under the silk. They kept their mouths
locked together as they undressed one another, then she took his cock in her hands
and didn’t let go as they sank back onto the cushions.
      Later as they sprawled across the demolished bed, he turned to her and said,
“Are we partners?”
      Venera blinked at him for a moment. Her mind had been entirely
elsewhere—or more exactly, nowhere. “What?”
     He shrugged onto his side and his hand casually fell on her hip. “Am I your
employee? Or are we pursuing parallel interests?”
      “Oh. Well, that’s your decision, isn’t it?”
      “Hmm.” He smiled, but she could tell he wasn’t satisfied with that reply. “My
people have been acting as your spies for the past few weeks. They’re not happy
about it. Truth to tell, Amandera, I’m not happy about it.”
       “Aaahhh...” She stretched and leaned back. “So the past hour was your way
of softening me up for this conversation?”
       “Well, no, but if there’s going to be a good strategic moment to raise the
issue, this has got to be it.” She laughed at his audacity. He was no longer smiling,
though.
      “You’d be mistaken if you thought I was picking sides in this war,” he said. “I
don’t give a damn whether it’s Sacrus or your faction that wins. It’s still titled
nobles, and it’ll make no difference to the common people.”
      Now she sat up. “You want your printing press.”
      “I have my printing press. I forged your signature on some orders and it was
delivered yesterday. Those of my people who aren’t in the field right now are
running it. Turning out bills by the thousands.”
       She examined his face in the candlelight. “So ... how many of your people
really are in the field?”
      “A half dozen.”
      “You told me they were all out!” She glared at him as a knife of pain shot up
her jaw. “A half dozen? Is this why we had no warning that the estate was being
attacked? Because you were keeping a handful of people where they’d be visible to
me?—So I’d think they were all out?”
      “That’s about the size of it, yes.”
      She punched him in the chest. “You lost me my estate! My house! What else
have you given to Sacrus?”
       “Sacrus is not my affair,” he said. Bryce was deadly earnest now. Clearly she
had misjudged him. “Restoring emergent democracy in Virga is my only interest,” he
said. “But I don’t want you to die in this war, and I’m sorry about your house, if it’s
any consolation. But what choice did I have? If everything descends into chaos,
when am I going to get my ink? My paper? When were you going to do what I
needed you to do? Look me in the eye and tell me it was a priority for you.”
      Venera groaned. “Oh, Bryce. This is the worst possible time...”
      “—The only time I have!”
       “All right, all right, I see your point.” She glowered at the plaster ceiling.
“What if ... what if I send some of my people in to run the press? We don’t need
trained insurgents to do that. All I want is to get your people out in the field! I’ll give
you as much ink and paper as you want.”
      He flopped onto his back. “I’ll think about that.”
      There was a brief silence.
      “You could have asked,” she said.
      “I did!”
      Venera was trying to think of some way to reply to that when there was a loud
bang and she found herself inside a storm of glass, shouting in surprise and trying to
jump out of the way, banging her chin while shards like claws scrawled up her ribs
and along her thigh.
       Scratched and stunned, she sat up to find herself on the floor. Bryce was
kneeling next to her. The candle had gone out, and she sensed rather than saw the
carpet of broken glass between her and her boots. The little window gaped, the
leading bent and twisted to let in a puff of cold night air. “What was...” Now she
heard gunfire.
       “Oh shit.” Bryce stood up and reached down to draw her to her feet. “We’ve
got to get out there.
      “Sacrus has arrived.”
                                         ****
                                          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...”
                                         ****
                                          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 tiiiiiime!”
       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—tiiiiiiiiiime!”
                                        ****
                                         20
       The sound of bullets hitting Liris’s walls reminded Garth Diamandis of those
occasional big drops that fall from trees after a rain. Silence, then a pat followed in
this case by the distant sound of a shot. From the gunslit where he was watching he
could see the army of the Council Alliance assembling next to the rust-streaked
roundhouse. In the early morning light it seemed like a dark carpet moving, in
ominous silence, in the direction of Liris. Little puffs of smoke arose from the
Sacrus line, but the firing was undisciplined.
       “Come away from there,” said Venera’s friend Eilen. They stood in a musty
closet crammed with door lintels, broken drawers, cracked table legs: useless junk,
but impossible for a tiny nation like Liris to throw away. Lantern light from the
corridor shone through Eilen’s hair. She could have been attractive, a habitual part of
his mind noted. At one time, he could have helped her with that.
      “I have a good view of the Sacrus camp,” he said. “And it’s too dangerous to
be on the roof right now.”
      “You’ll get a bullet in the eye,” she said. He grunted and turned back to the
view, and after a moment he heard her leave.
      He couldn’t tell her that he had recognized one of the uniformed figures
moving down there—maybe two of them, he couldn’t be sure. Garth was sure that
Eilen would tell him he was suffering an old man’s delusions if he said he’d
recognized his daughter among the hundreds of crimson uniforms.
       He could be imagining it. He’d had scant moments to absorb the sight of her
before she’d signaled her superiors and Sacrus’s thugs had moved in on him. Yet
Garth had an eye for women, was able to recall the smallest detail about how this or
that one moved or held herself. He could deduce much about character and
vulnerability by a woman’s stance and habitual gestures, and he damned well knew
how to recognize one at a distance. That was Selene standing hipshot by that tent, he
was sure of it.
      Garth cursed under his breath. He’d never been one to probe at sore spots,
but ever since they’d thrown him into that stinking cell in the Gray Infirmary, his
thoughts had pivoted around the moment of Selene’s betrayal.
       He had told her that he was her father, just before she betrayed him. In the
seconds between, he’d seen the doubt in her eye—and then the mad-eyed woman
with the pink hair had come to stand next to Selene.
      “He said he’s my father,” Selene murmured as the soldiers cuffed Garth. The
pink-haired woman behind her laughed.
      “And who knows?” she’d said. “He might well be.” She had laughed again,
and Garth had glimpsed a terrible light in his daughter’s eye just before he was
hauled out of her sight.
       There it was again, that mop of blossom-colored hair poking out from under a
gray army cap. She was an officer. The last time Garth had seen her had been in a
bizarre fever dream where Venera was whispering his name urgently. This woman
had been there, among glass cases, but she was naked and laved with crimson from
head to toe. Venera had spoken her name then, but Garth didn’t remember it.
       The sound of firing suddenly intensified. Garth craned his neck to look in the
direction of the roundhouse. Sacrus’s forces were moving out to engage the council
troops on the inside of Liris. Behind him, though, he could see an equally large
contingent of Sacrus’s soldiers circling back around the building—headed toward
the edge of the world.
      Garth had some inkling of what the council army was doing. They were
pressing up against the no-man’s land of thorn and tumbled masonry, a scant
hundred yards from the walls of Liris. From there they could turn left or
right—inward or toward world’s edge—at a moment’s notice. Sacrus would have to
split their forces into two to guard against both possibilities.
      It was an intelligent plan and for a moment Garth’s spirits lifted. Then he saw
more of Sacrus’s men abandon their positions below him. They were leaving a noisy
and smoke-wreathed band of some two hundred men to defend the inward side
while the rest of their forces marched behind Liris and out of sight from the
roundhouse. They clearly expected the council army to split right and try to relieve
Guinevera and Anseratte at the hurricane-wracked world’s edge. But how did they
know what the council was planning?
       He cursed and jumped down off the ancient credenza he’d been perched
upon. The corridors were stuffed with armed people, old men and women mostly
(strange how he thought of other people his age as old, but not himself). He elbowed
his way through them carelessly. “Where the hell is Moss?”
      Someone pointed down a narrow, packed hallway. Liris’s new botanist was
deep in discussion with the only one of Bryce’s men left inside the walls. “I need
semaphore flags,” Garth shouted over two shoulders. “We have to warn the troops
what Sacrus is doing!”
       To his credit, Moss didn’t even blink. He raised a hand, pointed to one man,
then held up two fingers. “Forward stores,” he said. He pointed to another man and
then at Garth. “Go with.”
       It took precious minutes for Garth and his new helper to locate the flags. Then
they had to fight their way to the stairs. They emerged outside to the mind-numbing
roar of the winds and an almost continuous sound of gunfire. Ducking low, they ran
for the edge of the roof.
                                          ****
       “They expect you to act as if you don’t know about the key,” Venera was
explaining for the tenth time. She was surrounded by nervous officers and staffers;
the gray-mustachioed army commander stood with his arms crossed, glowering as
she drew on the ground with a stick. “If you don’t know about it, then the obvious
strategic goal is to relieve Guinevera’s force. Jacoby Sarto has told them that we are
going to do that. This frees Sacrus to take Liris, their real objective.”
       The commander nodded reluctantly. A bullet whined past somewhere too near
for comfort. They stood behind a screen of brush on the edge of no-man’s land. An
arc of soldiers surrounded them, far too few for Venera’s taste. This force would
hardly qualify as a company in Chaison’s army. Yet Sacrus didn’t have much more.
       “So,” she continued. “We feint right, then strike left. I humbly suggest that we
start with sustained fire into Sacrus’s position on the edge side of no-man’s land.”
      There was some talk among the officers—far too much of it to suit her—then
the commander said, “It’s too risky. And I remain skeptical about your story.”
      He didn’t believe the key was real. Venera was tempted to take it out and
show it to him, but that might backfire. Who could believe a whole war would be
fought over an ivory wand?
      While she and the commander were scowling at one another Bryce ran up,
puffing. “They’re here!” Venera turned to look where he pointed.
     She turned back, grinning broadly. “Commander, would you be more
amenable to my plan if you had a secret weapon to help with it?”
      The commander and all the officers fell silent as they saw what was
approaching. Slowly, the commander began to smile.
                                       ****
      “Damn it, they’re ignoring us!” Garth ducked as another volley of fire from
below raked the edge of the roof. His assistant slumped onto the flagstones next to
him, shaking his head.
      “Maybe they don’t see us,” he said.
       “Oh, they see us all right. They just don’t believe us.” Garth risked a glance
over the stones. The council army was pressing hard against the barricades hastily
thrown up by Sacrus on the inward side of Liris. The bulk of their army was
hovering on the far side of the building, ready to speed toward the edge as soon as
they were given the word.
      Another ladder thunked against the wall. That made four in as many seconds.
Garth pushed his companion. “Back to the stairs!” Sacrus was moving to take Liris.
There was nothing anyone could do to stop them.
      Garth stood up to run, and hesitated for just a second. He couldn’t stop
himself from looking down through the gunfire and smoke to find his daughter. The
ground around Liris was boiling with men; he couldn’t see her.
       Something hit him hard and he spun around, toppling to the flagstones. A
bullet—was he dead? Garth clawed at his shoulder, saw a bright scar on the metal of
his armor but no hole.
        “Sir!” Damn him, his helper was running back to save him. “No, get to the
stairs dammit!” Garth yelled, but it was too late. A dozen bullets hit the man and
some of those went right through his armor. He fell and slid forward, and died at
Garth’s feet.
      Garth had never even learned his name.
      Up they came now, soldier after soldier hopping onto Liris’s roof. One loped
forward, ignoring rifle fire from the stairs, and pitched a firebomb into the central
courtyard. The cherry trees were protected under a siege roof, but a few more of
those and they would burn.
      Swearing, he tried to stand. Something hit him again and he fell back. This
time when he looked up, it was to see the black globe of a Sacrus helmet hovering
above him, and a rifle barrel inches from his face.
        Garth fell back, groaning, and closed his eyes.
                                         ****
       “We’ve lost our momentum,” said Bryce. He and Venera were crouched
behind an upthrust block of brickwork from some ancient, abandoned building. A
hundred feet ahead of them, men were dying in a futile attack on the Sacrus
barricade.
      She nodded, but the council officers were already ordering a retreat. For a few
seconds she watched the soldiers scampering back under relentless fire. Then she
cocked an eyebrow at Bryce, and grinned.
        “We’ve lost our momentum? When did you decide this was your fight?”
       “People are dying,” he said angrily. “Anyway, if what you say is true, there’s
far more at stake than any of us knew.” She shrugged and glanced again at the
retreat, but then noticed he was staring at her.
        “What?”
        “Who are you, really? Surely not Amandera Thrace-Guiles?”
      Venera laughed. He hadn’t been there for her moment of humiliation at the feet
of Guinevera—had, in fact, been flying through the air over brambles and scrub just
about then.
        She stuck out her hand for him to shake. “Venera Fanning. Pleased to meet
you.”
       He shook it, a puzzled expression on his face, but then a new commotion
distracted him. “Look! Your friends...”
       Through the drifting smoke, she could see a dozen spindly ladders wobbling
against the building’s walls. Men were swarming up them and there was fighting on
the roof. In seconds she could lose the people who had become most precious to
her. “Come on!”
       They braved rifle fire and ran back. The army commander was crouched over
a map. He looked up grimly as Venera approached. “Can you feel it?” When she
frowned, he pointed down at the ground. Now she realized that for some time now,
she had been feeling a slow, almost subliminal sensation of rising and falling. It was
the kind of faint instability of weight that you sometimes felt when a town’s engines
were working to spin it back up to speed.
        “I think Sacrus cut one too many cables.”
     “Let the preservationists deal with it when we’re finished,” she said. “Right
now we need to cut down those ladders.”
       He shook his head. “Don’t you understand? This is more than just a piece or
two falling off the world. Something’s happened. It—we...” She realized that he was
very, very frightened. So were the officers kneeling with him.
       Venera felt it again, that long slow waver, unsettling to the inner ear. Way out
past the smoke, it seemed like the curving landscape of Spyre was crawling,
somehow, like the itchy skin of a giant beast twitching in slow motion.
       “We can’t do anything about that,” she said. “We have to focus on saving
lives here and now! Look, I don’t think there’s more than three dozen men on those
barricades. The rest of their men are waiting on the far side for us to try to relieve
Guinevera.”
      With an effort he pulled himself together. “Your plan ... Can you do it?”
       “They’ll start to pull back as soon as they realize we’re concentrating here,”
she said. “When they do, we’ll have them.”
       “All right. We have to ... do something.” He got to his feet and began issuing
orders. The frightened officers sprinted off in all directions. Venera and Bryce ran
back in the direction of the roundhouse and as they passed the fringe of the
no-man’s land she saw scores of men standing up from concealment in the bushes.
Suddenly they were all bellowing and as more popped up from unexpected places
Venera found herself being swept back by a vast mob of howling armored men. She
and Bryce fought their way forward as hundreds of bodies plunged past them. She
had no time to look back but could imagine the Sacrus barricades being
overwhelmed in seconds; the ladders would tremble and fall, and when they rose
again it would be council soldiers climbing them.
       A small copse of trees stood at the end of no-man’s land; bedraggled and
half-burnt, they still made a good screen for what hid behind them. Venera smelled
the things before she saw them, and her spirits soared as she heard their nervous
snorting and stamping.
       With murmurs and an outstretched hand, she approached her Dali horse. A
dozen others stood huddled together, flanks twitching, their heads a dozen feet off
the earth. All were saddled and some of the horsemen were already mounted.
      Bryce stopped short, a wondering expression on his face. Venera put her
hand on the rope ladder that led up to her beast’s saddle, then looked back at him.
“See to your people,” she said. “Run your presses. If I live, I’ll see you after.”
       He smiled and for a moment looked boyishly mischievous. “The presses have
been running for days, and I’ve sent my messages. But just in case ... here.” He dug
inside his jacket and handed her a cloth-wrapped square. Venera unwrapped it,
puzzled, then laughed out loud. It was a brand-new copy of the book Rights
Currencies. She raised it to her nose and smelled the fresh ink, then stuffed it in her
own jacket.
       She laughed again as Bryce stepped back and the rest of her force mounted
up behind her. Venera turned and waved to them, and as Bryce ran back toward the
roundhouse and safety, she yelled, “Come on! They’re not going to be expecting
this!”
                                      ****
      Garth could see it all. They’d tied his hands behind him and stood him near
the body of the man who’d come with him to the roof. From behind him came the
sounds of Sacrus’s forces mopping up on the lower floors of Liris. Prisoners were
being led onto the roof under the direction of the pink-haired woman, whose name,
he now remembered, was Margit. She had climbed up the ladder with ferocious
energy a few minutes before.
      Garth had turned away when his daughter stepped onto the roof behind her.
       Turning, he saw what was developing under the shadow of the building, and
despite all the tragedy it made him smile.
       A dozen horses, each one at least ten feet tall at the shoulder, were stepping
daintily but rapidly through no-man’s land. The closely packed thorn bushes and
tumbled masonry were no barrier to them at all. Each mount held two riders except
the one in the lead. Venera Fanning rode that one, a rifle held high over her head.
Garth could see that her mouth was wide open—Mother of Virga, was she howling
some outlandish battle cry? Garth had to laugh.
      “What’s so funny, you?” A soldier cuffed him on the side of his head. Garth
looked him in the eye and nodded in Venera’s direction.
      “That,” he said.
      After he finished swearing, the man ran toward Margit, shouting, “Sir! Sir!”
Garth turned back to the view.
       Sacrus had taken Liris with a comparatively small force, and was now
depleted on the Spyre side of the building. The bulk of the council army was
wheeling in that direction, pushing back the few defenders on the barricades. They’d
take the siege ladders on that side in no time. It shouldn’t have been a problem for
Sacrus; they now held the roof and could lower ladders, ropes, and platforms to
relieve their own forces from the other side of the building. Now that they knew
where the council army was going, their ground forces had started running back in
that direction from the world’s edge. This seemed safe because they had a large
force below no-man’s land to block any access from the direction of the
roundhouse.
      But Venera’s cavalry had just crossed over no-man’s land and were now
stepping into the strip of cleared land next to the building. Without hesitation they
turned right and galloped at the rear of the Sacrus line. Simultaneously, those council
troops fronting the roundhouse assaulted them head-on.
       A hysterical laugh pierced the air. Garth turned to see Margit perched atop the
wall. She was staring down at the horses with a wild look in her eye. “I’m seeing
things in broad daylight now,” she said, and laughed again. “This is a strange dream,
this one. Things with four legs ... taller than a man...”
      Selene reached up to take Margit’s arm, but the former botanist batted her
hand aside. Stepping back, her face full of doubt, Selene looked around—and her
eyes met Garth’s. He frowned and shook his head slowly.
      Angrily, she turned away.
       The twelve horses stepped over a barricade while their riders shot the men
behind it. The horses were armored, Garth saw, although he was sure it wouldn’t
prove too effective under direct fire. Sacrus’s men weren’t firing, though. They were
too amazed at what they were seeing. The beasts towered over them, huge masses of
muscle on impossibly long legs, festooned with sheet metal barding that half hid their
giant eyes and broad teeth. The monsters were overtop and past and wheeling before
the defenders could organize. And by then bullets and flicking hooves were finding
them, and they all fell.
       Margit stood there and watched while the commanders on the ground shouted
and waved. The other men on the rooftop stared at the fiasco unfolding below them,
then looked to Margit. The seconds dragged.
      In that time the horses reached a point midway between the bottled-up council
leadership and the Sacrus force below no-man’s land. Now they split into two
squads of six. Venera led hers in a thunderous charge directly at the men who had
pinned down Guinevera and the Liris army.
      Selene jumped onto the wall beside Margit. She stared for a second, then
cursed and whirling, shouted, “Shoot! Shoot, you idiots! They’re going to—”
       Margit seemed to wake out of her trance. She stepped grandly down from the
wall and frowned at the line of prisoners that had been led onto the roof. She strolled
over, loosening a pistol at her belt.
      “Where is Venera Fanning?” she shouted.
       A sick feeling came over Garth. He watched Margit walk up and down the
line, saw her pause before Moss, sneer at Samson Odess, and finally stop in front of
Eilen.
       “You were her friend,” she said. “You’ll know where she is.” She raised the
pistol and aimed it between Eilen’s eyes.
       Garth tried to run over to her, but a soldier kicked his legs out from under him
and only the light gravity saved him from breaking his nose as he fell. “She’s right
there!” Garth hollered at Margit. “Riding a horse! You were just looking at her.”
        Margit glanced back. Her eyes found Garth lying prone on the flagstones.
        “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said with a smile. “Those things weren’t real.”
        She shot Eilen in the head.
      Venera’s friend flopped to the rooftop in a tumble of limbs. The other
captives screamed and quailed. “Where is she?” shrieked Margit, waving the pistol.
Now, too late, Selene was running to her side. The younger woman put her hand on
Margit’s arm, spoke in her ear, tugged her away from the prisoners.
        As she led Margit away Selene glanced over at Garth. It was his turn to look
away.
       There was a lot of running and shouting then, though little shooting because,
he supposed, the men on the roof were afraid of hitting their own men. Garth didn’t
care. He lay on his stomach with his cheek pressed against the cold stone and cried.
      Someone hauled him to his feet. Dimly he realized that a great roaring sound
was coming from beyond the roof’s edge. Now the men on the roof did start
firing—and cursing, and looking at one another helplessly.
      Garth knew exactly what had happened. Venera had broken the line around
Guinevera’s men. They were pouring out of their defensive position and attacking
Sacrus’s force beneath no-man’s land. That group was now itself isolated and
surrounded.
       He wouldn’t be surprised if Venera herself had moved on, perhaps circling the
building to connect up with the main bulk of the council army. If she did that, then
none of the ladders and elevator platforms to this roof would be safe for Sacrus.
       “Come on.” Garth was hauled to his feet and pushed to the middle of the
roof. He coughed and realized that smoke was pouring up from the courtyard. The
prisoners were wailing and screaming.
        Margit’s soldiers had set the cherry trees alight.
      “Get on the platform or I’ll shoot you.” Garth blinked and saw that he was
standing next to the elevator that climbed Liris’s cable. Margit and Selene were
already on the platform, with a crowd of soldiers and several Liris prisoners
including Moss and Odess.
        He climbed aboard.
       Margit smiled with supreme confidence. “This,” she said as if to no one in
particular, “is where we’ll defeat her.”
                                       ****
      Venera looked down from her saddle at Guinevera, who stared at her with his
bloody sword half raised. “You spoke out of turn, Principe,” she called down.
“Even if I wasn’t Buridan before, I am now.”
       He ducked his head slightly, conceding the point. “We’re grateful, Fanning,”
he said.
      Venera finally let herself feel her triumph and relief, and slumped a bit in her
saddle. Fragmentary memories of the past minutes came and went; who would have
thought that the skin of Spyre would bounce under the gallop of a horse?
      Scattered gunfire echoed around the corner of the building, but Sacrus’s army
was in full retreat. Their force below no-man’s land had surrendered. No one had
any stomach for fighting anyway; Sacrus and council soldiers stood side by side,
exchanging uneasy glances as another long slow undulation moved through the
ground. Council troops were swarming up the sides of Liris, but there was no sound
from up there, and an ominous flag of smoke was fluttering from the roof line.
       Seeing that, Venera’s anxiety about her friends returned. Garth, Eilen, and
Moss—what had become of them during Sacrus’s brief occupation? Her eyes were
drawn to the cable that stretched from Liris up to Lesser Spyre. It seemed oddly
slack, and somehow that tiny detail filled her with more fear than anything else she’d
seen today.
      Closer at hand, she spotted Jacoby Sarto walking, unescorted, past ranks of
huddling Sacrus prisoners. He looked up at her, his face eloquently expressing the
unease she too felt.
     Another undulation, stronger this time. She saw trees sway and a sharp crack!
echoed from Liris’s masonry wall. Some of the soldiers cried out.
       Guinevera looked around. Ever the dramatist, his florid lips quivered as he
said, “This should have been our moment of triumph. But what have we won? What
have we done to Spyre?”
       Venera did her best to look unimpressed, though she was worried too. “Look,
there’s no way to know,” she said. That was a lie: she could feel it, they all could.
Something was wrong.
     A captain ran up. He saluted them both, but it was almost an afterthought.
“Ma’am,” he said to Venera. “It’s ... they’re waiting for you. On the roof.”
       A cold feeling came over her. For just a second she remembered lying on the
marble floor of the Rush admiralty, bleeding from the mouth and sure she would die
there alone. And then, curled around herself inside Candesce, feeling the Sun of
Suns come to life, minutes to go before she was burnt alive. She’d almost lost it all.
She could lose it all now.
      She flipped down the little ladder attached to her saddle and climbed down.
Her thighs and lower back spasmed with pain, but there was no echo from her jaw.
She wouldn’t have cared if there had been. As a tremor ran through the earth,
Jacoby Sarto reached to steady her. She looked him in the eye.
      “If you come with me,” she said, “whose side will you be on?”
      He shrugged and staggered as the ground lurched again. “I don’t think sides
matter anymore,” he said.
      “Then come.” They ran for the ladders.
                                       ****
                                        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.”
      Copyright ©2007 Karl Schroeder