Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Read online

  Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

  Karl Schroeder

  Contents

  Title Page

  Map

  Prologue

  Part 1: The Offer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2: The Cheetah and the Tree

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part 3: The Choice

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Tor Books by Karl Schroeder

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  DARKNESS, AND A rope road.

  "Champagne?" asked the flight attendant. Antaea Argyre raised her hand to wave him away, then turned the motion into acceptance of the helix glass. It wasn't as if she was on duty, after all. She sipped the tart wine from one end of the glass coil that surface tension held it to, and watched the undulating rope ravel by outside the window.

  None of the other passengers were watching. In knots of two or three or five, they preened and posed, drank and laughed at one another's jokes. The gaslights of this passenger ship's lounge lit the space brightly, highlighting the gold filigree around the doorjambs and the deep mazelike patterns in the velvet of the cushioned pillars. Everything held sumptuous color and texture, except the floor-to-ceiling window that took up one entire wall. This was black, like the uniform Antaea wore. She was the only passenger close enough to touch the cold glass; the only one looking out.

  The last hour had somehow managed to be tedious and nerve-racking at the same time. The lounge was full of diplomats, military commanders, politicians, and newspaper reporters. They were all attentive to one another, and all were adept at negotiating today's social minefield.

  They had all stopped talking when Antaea entered the room.

  Even now she felt eyes on her back, though of course, nobody would have the courage to actually approach her.

  She took a bigger drink of the champagne, and was just regretting not having started in on it earlier when the doors to the lounge opened and a new knot of officials sailed in. They caught various discreet straps and guide ropes and glided to a unified halt just as the distant drone of the ship's engines changed in tone.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," said a bright young thing in a sequined corset and diaphanous harem pants, "we've arrived."

  There was a murmur and polite applause; Antaea turned back to the window. As her hand felt for the railing, it fell on someone else's. "Oh!"

  "Excuse me." The voice was a deep, commanding rumble. It came from a man with the craggy features of an elder statesman and silver hair tied back in a short tail. He was dressed in a silk suit of a red so dark it was almost black. He seemed quite relaxed in the company of so many powerful people; but his accent pegged him as a foreigner.

  He'd shifted his grip and she put her hand on the rail next to his. Only then did she notice that they were still the only ones at the window; everyone else was listening attentively to the government delegation. Of course they were. They couldn't very well ignore their hosts.

  The rope that their ship had been following through the weightless air of Virga ended at a beacon about a mile ahead. This was a heavy cement cylinder with flashing lamps on its ends. Right now their flickering light was highlighting the rounded shapes of clouds that would otherwise have been invisible in the permanent darkness. Without the rope and the beacon, it would have been impossible for any ship to find this particular spot in the thousands of cubic kilometers of darkness that made up Virga's sunless reaches.

  "We thank you all for coming with us today," the young thing was saying breathily. "We know the rumors have been intense and widespread. There've been stories of monsters, of ancient powers awakened in the dark old corners of Virga. We're here today to help put any anxieties you might have to rest."

  "There." The man beside her raised one hand and pressed his index finger against the glass. For a second she was distracted by the halo of condensation that instantly fogged into existence around his fingertip. Then she looked past and into the blackness.

  She saw nothing there but the ghostly curve of a cloud bank.

  "For some months last year, our nation of Abyss felt itself to be under siege," the spokeswoman continued. "There were reports of attacks on outlying towns. Rumors began to circulate of a vast voice crying in the dark. Ah! I see by the expression on some faces that some of our visitors from the warm interior of the world have already figured out the mystery. Don't tell! You must understand how traumatic it was for us, who live here in the permanent dark and cold near the wall of the world. Many of the things you take for granted in the principalities are never seen out here. Maybe that makes us provincials, I don't know; but we had no reason to expect the kind of attack that really did happen."

  The man next to Antaea removed his finger from the glass, leaving a little oval of frost behind. "You don't see it, do you?" he asked in obvious amusement.

  She shrugged in irritation. "Behind that cloud?"

  "So you think that's a cloud?"

  Startled, she looked again.

  "The crisis culminated in an attack on the city of Sere," the spokeswoman said. "There was panic and confusion, and people claimed to have seen all manner of things. The hysteria of crowds is well known, and mass hallucination is not uncommon in such circumstances. Of course, the stories and reports immediately spread far beyond Sere--to your own countries, and I daresay beyond. A deluge of concern came back to us--inquiries about our safety, our loyalties, the stability of our trade agreements. It's become a big mess--especially because we long since sorted out the cause of the problem, and it's been dealt with."

  The officials from the Abyssal government moved to the window, not too far from where Antaea and the stranger perched. "Behold," said the spokeswoman, "the Crier in the Dark!"

  She gestured dramatically, and floodlights on the outside of the ship snapped on. The thing Antaea had at first taken to be a vast cloud blinked into view; at least, part of it did.

  There were shouts of surprise, and relieved laughter; then, applause. "A capital bug!" someone shouted.

  The spokeswoman bowed; behind her, the (entirely male) group of officials were smiling and nodding in obvious relief at the crowd's reaction. Their backdrop was a cavern of light carved by the floodlights out of an infinite ocean of night. The lights barely reached the gray skin of the city-sized beast that hung motionless and dormant in the icy air. Antaea could see a rank of tower-sized horns jutting from beyond the horizon of its back. In a live bug those horns would be blaring the notes of a chord so loudly that no ordinary form of life could survive within a mile of the thing.

  Everybody was talking now, and the reporters were throwing questions at the Abyssals: When did you discover it was a capital bug? Why is it silent now? How did you save the city from it? The stranger next to Antaea shook his head minutely and his lips quirked into a faint smile.

  "The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me," he murmured.

  Antaea realized that she'd bought this explanation, too, and frowned now in confusion. "You think it's a lie?" she asked qu
ietly.

  He gave her a pointed once-over--taking in, she assumed, her uniform, though not without a slight pause here and there. "You tell me," he said. "I'm sure the Abyssal government doesn't tie its collective shoes without the permission of the Virga Home Guard."

  Rather than answer that, she pointed to the obvious. "They do have a bug, don't they? Capital bugs aren't native to this part of Virga. It's too cold for them. So if one strayed this deep..."

  "Oh, yes, if one strayed this deep." He shook his head. "But I happen to know that a bug that's been living on the fringes of Meridian for years disappeared about a month ago. There were witnesses said they saw ships circling it in the evening sky--heard the sound of artillery being fired. Now, tell me: those horns there. Do they look intact to you?"

  She did think she could see dark pits in the giant horns, now that he'd mentioned it. Behind her, one of the men from the government was saying, "It took weeks for it to cool down enough to fall into a dormant state. We didn't really have to do anything, just keep it away from the city until it finally began snowing in its body cavity. Now, as you can see, it's in hibernation."

  Antaea frowned at the frost-painted hide, more landscape than flank, that curved far beyond the range of the ship's floodlights. She had to admit, she wanted the monster to have been something ordinary like this. It would be so much simpler; so reassuring.

  If she thought this way, though, how much more so would the officious, conservative bureaucrats who ran Abyss these days? Monster was not a column heading in their ledgers. So, would they invent an answer if they couldn't find one? Of course they would.

  She shot her companion a sour look. "Are you going to mention your little theory to our hosts? And how did you hear about it anyway?"

  "I pride myself in listening well," he said; then he put out his hand for her to shake. "Jacoby Sarto."

  That was definitely a name from the principalities of Candesce, thousands of kilometers from here. "Sayrea Airsigh," she said as they shook, and she saw his eyes widen minutely. He noticed her noticing, and grimaced.

  "Excuse me," he said. "You look like another Guardswoman of winter wraith descent..."

  Had he seen a photo of her somewhere? That wouldn't be unusual, what with her notoriety after recent events in Slipstream. "Well, there's more than one of us in the Guard, you know," she said, and then added icily, "and I'm told we all look alike."

  He refused to be baited. "So the Virga Home Guard agrees with Abyss's official story, that the monster was a capital bug all along? -- Even though there are dozens of Guard cruisers patrolling the sunless countries even now?"

  "Are there?" She didn't have to pretend her ignorance; this man seemed to know details of the situation that Antaea had only been able to wonder about.

  He gazed at the pebbled hide of the capital bug. "Some of us are keenly interested in the truth of the situation. Of course, as a member of the Home Guard, you know everything already. That being the case, I really have no reason to give you my card"--and here a small rectangle of white paper suddenly appeared between his fingers--"nor tell you that I'm staying at the Stormburl Hotel, on Rowan Wheel."

  Damn him, he had her figured out. She opened her mouth to say something dismissive, but his gaze flicked over her shoulder and back; she quickly snatched the card and palmed it before turning to find that two Abyssal cabinet ministers were closing in on her. "Gentlemen," she said with a gracious smile.

  "It's a magnificent beast, isn't it?" said one of the two. Antaea glanced over her shoulder; Sarto was gone.

  "Yes, beautiful," she said. "I've seen them before, but never up close, of course. Their song kills."

  "Yes." He nodded vigorously. "We trust that the Guard is, ah, in agreement with us that the disappearance of the outlying towns, the battle with the sun lighter--these were all caused by this one?"

  The battle with the sun lighter. She'd heard about that; well, practically everybody in Virga had by now. Hayden Griffin was fabled for building a new sun to free his country from enslavement by the pirate nation of Slipstream. He had been constructing another sun for a client here in Abyss when the monster interrupted his work. The stories had him pursuing it to its lair and incinerating it with the nuclear fire of his half-built generator. Antaea hadn't really believed this part of the rapidly mutating legend, but here was an Abyssal government official, offhandedly confirming it.

  She belatedly realized he wanted some response from her. "Um--sorry?"

  He looked impatient. "Do you think this explanation works?"

  "Oh. Yes, yes, of course. It's very, uh, convincing." She gestured to the bug. "Especially having the actual bug to show. A nice touch."

  He relaxed. "The response has been good, I think." Around them, the guests were chatting animatedly, and some of the reporters had left with a steward to find a good vantage point from which to photograph the bug. "I think we can finally lay this incident to rest." The official hesitated, then said, "But we'd understood that we had the Guard's consent to do this. It was a bit of a surprise to see you here. Was there any problem...?"

  "Oh! No, no, I'm just observing." She gave him a sphinxlike smile. "Everything is just fine."

  "Good," he said, as he and his companion nodded to one another. "That's ... good."

  They bowed themselves away, and she watched them go with mixed contempt and bemusement. Then she turned back to examine the bug.

  This was indeed a clue. Maybe she should rent a jet bike from one of the wheelside vendors back in Sere, and slip back here to check the thing out herself. Those horns did look shot up--though the Abyssal navy would have targeted them first if the creature really had been threatening the city. No. Any evidence she might find here would be inconclusive. She would need more if she was to disprove the government's story.

  Even assuming that she did, what then? Clearly, whatever was going on, the Home Guard knew about it. What could Antaea do here but satisfy her own curiosity?

  Well, there was one thing. A life to save, maybe. She should focus on that; this bug, and all the furor around it, was just a distraction.

  With a sharp nod she turned from the window. Before she left the lounge to join the photographers in the fresh air on the hull, she looked for Jacoby Sarto among the crowd. She didn't see him; and by the time the dart-shaped passenger liner had finished its tour of the capital bug, she had put him and his cryptic comments out of her mind.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the streetcar deposited her in front of her hotel, Antaea was exhausted. She had been in Sere a few days now--long enough to have gotten over any residual nostalgia from her college days. The city was the same as always, after all: locked in permanent darkness, its mile-wide copper wheels lit only by gaslight. Rings of windows turned above her head, and the streets soared up to either side to join in an arch overhead; nothing unusual there. Each window, though, spoke of some isolated room, some tightly constrained human life. There were thousands of them.

  It was raining, as it often did here. Rain was something that happened only in town wheels, and she'd used to think it was a wonderful novelty. The wheel cut into a cloud, and droplets of water that had been hanging in the weightless air suddenly became little missiles pelting in almost horizontally. They were cold, though. The novelty wore off fast; so she hunched her shoulders and trotted across the verdigris-mottled street to the hotel, where the permanent fans of light and shadow had faded the paint in the entryway, and thousands of footsteps had worn a gray smear in the once-red carpet.

  The boy behind the desk sent her a covert, hostile glance as she walked past. It was the thousandth such glance today and she ignored it. They might hate her kind, but as long as she wore this uniform, no one would dare lay a hand on her.

  In the elevator she pulled back her black hair and wiped the rain from her face. The dimly lit car thumped at each floor, monotonously counting its way up to her room. No one else got on or off. When it stopped, she fumbled for her key as she counted the doors to hers
, and, in a state of nonthinking exhaustion, slid the key into the lock.

  Antaea just had time to realize that the lights in the room were on before iron fingers clamped onto her wrist and yanked her arm behind her. She automatically went with the motion but before she could finish her recovery somebody'd kicked her leading foot out from under her, and then she hit the floor and the wind went out of her.

  Some heavy body was sitting on the small of her back, holding her wrists against the floor. She snarled, furious and humiliated.

  "Just like I thought," said a familiar male voice. "She's wearing it."

  "Crase?" She craned her neck and saw a small forest of black-clad shins and boots. After struggling to breathe for a few seconds, she managed, "What are you doing here?"

  "Today, I'm chasing down an imposter." Lieutenant Anander Crase of the Virga Home Guard knelt to look into her face. "You've no right to wear that uniform. Not since the trial."

  She hissed. "All I wanted to do was come home. Without the uniform, I'd have been arrested by now, or strung up by some vigilante gang. You know how they feel about winter wraiths here."

  He'd been looking her in the eye, but now that she'd highlighted the racism they both knew was common here, his gaze slid away. "Why did you come back, then?" he asked sullenly. "If there's no welcome here for you?"

  "It's not up to me to justify returning. It's up to them to justify keeping me out. Let me up," she added to whoever it was that sat on her back.

  Crase looked up, shrugged. The pressure on Antaea's back eased, and she rolled into a crouch.

  There were six of them, all men, only their standard-issue boots betraying that they were Home Guard. They'd tossed her room efficiently and ruthlessly. She almost smiled at the thought of how disappointed Crase must be at finding nothing.

  He went to sit in the small suite's one chair. "You almost make sense," he said, "but not quite. You lived here for a while, but Abyss isn't your home. You grew up on the winter wraith fleet."

  "--Which I did not want to return to. They're the most isolationist people in Virga, even if it's for good reason because normal people are always trying to kill them ... Crase, where did you expect me to go? I have no home anywhere. The Guard was my home. Without that..."