Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Page 14

  "The virtuals are preparing an all-out assault on Virga," Leal continued. "As long as Virga keeps A.N. out, our world stands as an example to others who resist final assimilation by their system. Those resisters have banded together, and they want to ally with the humans of Virga to defeat the virtuals, or at least to push them back."

  Fanning squinted at her. "Interesting..."

  "Not to mention preposterous. And why tell us?" Venera was swishing her sabre at her side in an unconscious but dangerous way. "Isn't this a message for the Home Guard?"

  "It would be, yes," said Leal. "That would be why we're here."

  Chaison put down his glass and walked up to Antaea. "Would that be why you're here?" he asked her.

  She nodded. "The Guard has been deceived by the virtuals. It's not the first time--"

  "How do we know it's not you who's been deceived? You come to us with offers of an alliance--with who? If they're friendly, why are they sending messengers instead of coming to us themselves?"

  "The morphonts did come to us," said Leal. "Virga proved to be too toxic for them to survive here. That's why I had to leave, to visit them in their own airs. Anyway, if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Hayden Griffin?"

  The Fannings exchanged a glance. "How's he involved in this?"

  "He can confirm my story," said Leal, "he and a few top-ranking members of the Guard he's currently trapped with. Even if I'm wrong, I'm offering you the chance to rescue Griffin, which alone would be a feat with great propaganda value to Slipstream.... Considering your new relationship with Griffin's country, Aerie."

  Antaea tilted her head, looking puzzled. "Which begs a question. Why are you two here, and not at the big party?"

  "We'd be a bad memory," said the admiral with a shrug. "Can't say I disagree.... What do you mean, rescue Griffin? Trapped? How's he trapped?"

  "That's a very long story," said Leal.

  "Let's hear it."

  Venera tapped Chaison's ankle with her sabre.

  "Well," said Leal, "I suppose it all started the day a great voice began crying in the darkness beyond the city lights..."

  Venera rapped Chaison's shin again. She made to do it a third time, but his blade was suddenly in the way.

  "Dear," said Venera sweetly, "why don't we invite the nice people over for dinner? I think that would be the best time for lengthy stories, don't you?"

  "No," he said, "I want to hear this now--"

  Venera's sabre slid along his and nearly disarmed him.

  The Fannings took a step away from each other as their swords came up.

  "Really," said Chaison, "if this is as important as it sounds--"

  She lunged and he bounced away. "Venera..."

  "They've come a long way," she said, punctuating her words with casual cuts at his head, "and they're very tired. It would be impolite not to offer them some food and refreshments." She broke off, turned to Leal, and said, "Shall we say six o'clock? The admiralty staff can direct you to our apartments."

  "Six o'clock would be fine," said Leal as she, too, backed away.

  "Now really--" Chaison moved to intercept Leal, and Venera interposed herself, blade up. The two began to circle one another warily.

  "Until six, then..." Leal waved for Antaea to follow her--Argyre was staring at Chaison Fanning--and she drew her out into the hall and closed the door even as the sound of clashing blades started up in earnest.

  11

  "YOU'RE TELLING ME that this terrible news is not true?" Antonin Kestrel, the unlikely prime minister of Slipstream's new government, glared up and down the table. "That it's a lie?"

  Leal Maspeth nodded at the prime minister, who sat at the head of the table in Chaison Fanning's surprisingly small dining room. "He was alive when I left him," she said. "The stories out of Abyss are simply untrue."

  "But why should we believe you, and not the government of Abyss?"

  "Because," she said with a winning smile, "I know where he is. We can pick him up and you can ask him yourself whether he's alive."

  From its position ringed by empty dishes, water jugs, and bottles in the center of the table, Leal's now-inert doll watched Kestrel curse and rub his lean chin.

  Leal kept glancing at the doll while she talked--whether in embarrassment, or in hope that it might rise and speak, Keir couldn't tell. It faced Kestrel as a strange kind of centerpiece; flanking Kestrel down the sides of the table were Leal, the Fannings, Antaea, and Keir, who felt as out of place as the doll.

  Part of that was feeling underdressed; they'd had only a day to prepare for this meeting, and so he wore the livery of a junior naval officer, minus any badge of rank or affiliation. The admiral himself was in a white dress uniform that looked carved rather than sewn. Antaea Argyre, whom Keir had seen before only in leather and trousers, was displaying her cleavage in a gold gown. The dress was gorgeous, but she obviously wasn't comfortable in it; here, Venera had her outclassed. The admiral's wife had squeezed into a long slinky black number made of a material so thin that Keir found his eyes drifting despite himself to trace every muscle and curve of her glorious body. She awoke something buried in him, a startling excitement; but he had no time to think about it right now.

  Compared with the other women, Leal Maspeth looked dowdy in brown slacks and a white top. Dresses and skirts were admittedly rare in Virga (in some countries, he'd heard, only prostitutes would wear an article of clothing that was so revealing in freefall). While Slipstream clearly allowed them, Maspeth was just as clearly not used to seeing them, much less wearing one. She, too, kept surreptitiously goggling at Venera and Antaea.

  Chaison Fanning half-rose. "Mr. Prime Minister, I know this is a lot to take in, and my apologies again for dragging you away from the opera. We've only just learned many of these details ourselves; in fact, we're not done yet, but the conversation had gotten to a point where I thought it best to bring you in." The delay had cost them an hour, but Fanning had been insistent that they wait. With no safe topics of conversation, the time had dragged as they sipped their coffees and stared at one another--but Chaison had kept them in line, glaring around the table like a disciplinary father.

  "Here's where we stand," he said now. "Item one: We have learned that foreigners have made the offer of an alliance to all the humans in Virga."

  It was Leal Maspeth's tale that had convinced Fanning to call in the prime minister. Granted, her story alone would have been enough to bring the house down in any decent theater, especially the revelation about the existence of other spheres like Virga. It had been hard for her to drag the Fannings past that realization, and now the admiral demanded that she do it again for Kestrel. When she finished, Kestrel steepled his hands, scowled at her, and said only, "You're telling me that they brought this to us first, instead of taking it to the Guard?"

  Maspeth raised her chin defiantly--an admirable posture she was clearly unused to. "Good," said Kestrel. "Go on."

  Venera Fanning was nodding. "If you'd gone to the Guard you would have been placing yourself at their mercy. I wouldn't have done it."

  "Item two," Fanning said now; he looked every inch the bureaucrat as he ticked off another finger. "The Guard seem to be divided about what to do. Even worse, they seem to have been caught napping by the offer."

  Now it was Antaea's turn to throw in what she knew about Jacoby Sarto's serpentine cousin Inshiri, and her apparent alliance with forces from outside Virga. Kestrel looked skeptical, but surprisingly, Venera sprang to Antaea's assistance. "I can vouch for this," she said. "My own people have seen increasing civilian traffic to the tourist center at the walls of Virga, and also to the place where the Gates of Virga are supposed to be. Some kind of high-level governmental liaison is going on between certain key governments in Virga and the Home Guard."

  "I've heard nothing of this," said Kestrel, clearly disturbed.

  "Slipstream would be the last place they'd include in their consultations," Antaea pointed out. "Sarto was quite clear about it, though
; he told me they're visiting pilots and kings and presidents and making them some sort of proposal. I don't think it's the same as the one Leal's beasts are suggesting."

  "What my people are seeing," ventured Venera, "is consistent with the view that the Guard's traditional allies outside Virga are putting political pressure on both the Guard and the ruling class of Virga itself."

  "Pressure about what?" asked the prime minister.

  "This is where we'd gotten to when I decided to bring you into the conversation," said Fanning. "Keir Chen? Can you show our guest what you showed us?"

  He hopped up from his chair, nearly knocking it over. Damn--he still wasn't used to the gravity in Rush. Stepping around the main table, he went to a side table under a window, where a white tablecloth draped Exhibit A. "On our way into Virga," he said to Kestrel, "we ran into some of these." With what he hoped was an appropriate flourish, he pulled the tablecloth away, revealing the inert knife-ball that had fixed itself to Sarto's ship. Kestrel swore and did knock his own chair over as he stood up.

  "What the hell is that?" He came around to look at it, and as he did, Keir described the gigantic invasion fleet waiting in the frigid blackness just beyond the world's skin. "These are the tiniest motes compared to those vessels," he pointed out.

  "You found these in an abandoned city, you say?" Kestrel ran his fingertip along one of the thing's blades. "I know that traditionally, monsters hang around empty places for no apparent reason--and I've always assumed that the lack of a decent food supply in crypt clouds and abandoned town wheels explained why said monsters are not more plentiful. But you say they guarded a door. If these things were scouts--pickets waiting for a signal..."

  Antaea was nodding. "After the outage, my sister and I fought beasts a lot like those ones," she said. "There's all sorts of eggs and seeds and dormant dragons slumbering among the icebergs of the world's wall. The Guard and their precipice moths patrol the wall, rooting them out where we find them. Where they find them ... Candesce keeps them at bay, so when the outage happened, thousands of them woke up, and they came in. The dagger-balls at the city aren't just aimlessly hanging around there; they're waiting for an opportunity ... waiting for another outage."

  "And that," said Fanning, "means we have an item four: Some enemy of our world is waiting to pounce if we let our guard down." He glanced at his wife and said, "In large part, this current crisis is my fault. In order to win a local war, I sent Venera and Hayden Griffin into Candesce. They caused the outage, which allowed me to win an important battle. But what we didn't know was that it also opened the door for the monsters Antaea and her people had to fight. And it seems to have encouraged those monsters. They've started trying different tactics to get in. This latest one seems to be diplomatic."

  "--Backed up by an invasion force," Venera pointed out.

  "Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "That's how diplomacy works."

  "And anyway," Venera went on, "it wasn't our fault. We were manipulated by that bitch, Aubrey Mahallan. It was her idea to shut down the sun of suns--and she came from outside Virga."

  "So." Chaison Fanning stood with his arms crossed; except for Kestrel, who was still examining the knife-ball, the rest of the dinner party was still seated.

  "Item five," said Fanning, "and it's the most significant. We have little proof of any of these things. Worse, although there's rumors and wide-eyed legends galore about recent events, almost nobody in Virga has heard anything like the stories we've just traded. Most people still don't even know there's a universe beyond our own walls."

  "My people don't believe it," agreed Maspeth. "They think Virga is the universe, and that it's always existed just as it is. They'd never believe in a threat to the whole world, especially one from outside."

  "Yes," said Kestrel as he returned to his seat, "and while your story is interesting, Ms. Maspeth, I'm not compelled to believe it, either, on the strength of your word and this--" He leaned forward and plucked up her doll from the table. "--this figurine that you claim talks, but only to you, and only when you're conveniently outside of the world..."

  Maspeth glared at him. "Proof is easy to get! Just send a ship to Serenity. The rest of our men should have been rescued by Keir Chen's people by now. And with them is Hayden Griffin--"

  Kestrel held up a hand. "I'd be a fool not to at least try to verify your story. So the admiral will be sending the ship--although the logical thing to do would be tell the Guard about the situation at Serenity and go in there together."

  "Ah," said Venera. "But how do we contact the Guard? They stay in the shadows. Antaea is the one and only Guardsman we've ever met, and even she's a pariah to them now. Mr. Prime Minister: Since you've been in power, has the Guard contacted you in any way?"

  With obvious reluctance, he shook his head.

  The admiral smiled slightly. "They might sit up and notice if we were to rescue not just Griffin, but their own men from Aethyr."

  "A public handover would humiliate them," Kestrel pointed out. "I wouldn't do that--"

  "--but we might threaten to," finished Venera with a smile.

  Antaea shook her head. "They won't respond well to threats. You try to blackmail them and they'll make you disappear. They have the forces to do it and mop up the witnesses afterward. How do you think they've remained a legend all these centuries? Few people who've seen them ever tell."

  "This isn't their problem anyway," Maspeth burst out. "The offer I'm carrying isn't for them, it's for the people of Virga!"

  Antaea nodded. "Hear, hear!"

  "We need to approach them, so we will," said Fanning. "But at the same time it's risky to keep what we've learned secret.

  "So I say we don't."

  Kestrel frowned.

  Fanning seemed lost in thought; but after swirling his coffee for a moment he shot a rakish grin at his dinner guests.

  "If Sarto's cousin Inshiri is doing diplomacy on the sly, and the Guard know no other way of doing it, then what we need to do is turn all this civilized backroom dealing into a public fight--and as nasty a one as we can manage. We hold a grand colloquy, to which we will invite all the heads of state, ambassadors, newspaper reporters, and gossips of Virga. We will accuse the Guard of outrageous things to draw them out. And at this colloquy, we will reveal all that we know.

  "Twice in five years, some force within Artificial Nature has tried to gain entrance to Candesce. We're already at war. Let's bring that war to the doorsteps of every man, woman, and child in Virga--or at least, threaten to."

  Kestrel's eyebrows had shot up, and he looked around the table in bemusement. Antaea was grinning openly, but that came as no surprise; but Venera Fanning was also nodding, as was Leal Maspeth. It seemed, for the moment, like Fanning's idea would carry the day.

  "There's just one problem," Kestrel said loudly, "even assuming we find the proof you claim is out there. The problem is you can't control what people will do when they find out. What you're proposing is to let go completely of any control of the situation we might have had!"

  Fanning shrugged. "And how much is that?" he said. "Next to none, right now."

  Kestrel growled, but then nodded slowly. "Your plan has an interesting edge to it, anyway. So as our chief strategist, what do you propose we do next?"

  The admiral clearly had a love for ticking things off his fingers, as he did it again now: "One, we gather our proof, which means recovering Hayden Griffin from Aethyr and establishing better contact with Leal's new friends; two, we gather Slipstream's allies, call in favors, and make outrageous promises." He turned to Venera. "Dear, that will be your job. And three, we shake the Guard out of its den and demand a public accounting of what they're up to, to be given at a time and place of our choosing.

  "We have two advantages right now," he went on, "that we can't afford to go to waste. Firstly, we have a secret door into Aethyr, and contact already made with allies there. And secondly, we have a way to prove that the Guard is lying, if we can return Hayden Griffin. He's
a hero to the people, and the story out of Abyss that he's dead has taken all the wind out of the celebrations here."

  Kestrel shrugged. "The backlash will be so much stronger when they find out they've been lied to."

  Fanning fixed Antaea, Keir, and Leal in turn with a fierce look. "You've each undergone terrible experiences," he said, "in the course of bringing what you know to us on this day, in this place, and for this decision. I want you to understand that everything that's happened prior to tonight--the outage and the battles around it, the betrayals and deaths, our loss of loved ones and the ruin of Spyre and the fall of civilized life in Abyss--all these were just scene-setting. They merely laid the groundwork for what is to follow, and when history looks back on these years they will be footnotes; because what's really important is what's about to happen. --What we are about to do.

  "If you're right about the scale of the threat we face, then what we thought were the adventures of our lives have merely been training, if you will, for our real tasks. Therefore, we will go forth from here, each in our own directions, to gather what we need in order to keep our whole world from vanishing the way that our comfortable lives, our illusions, our families and cities have already gone. We've lost so much, but can we even imagine what it will be like if we lose Virga itself?

  "We'll go our ways, and gather information, proof, power, allies, and weapons. We will rendezvous back here in two months, and the grand colloquy will be called. And then, everyone who has been conspiring behind the backs of the people of Virga will be exposed. Then, the real history of our time will be made."

  He folded his napkin neatly on the table and stood up. "I think that's it for dinner, then."

  * * *

  THIS CLOSE TO Slipstream's sun, nights were warm and evenings always sultry. As the sun's eight-hour maintenance shift approached, the sky dimmed through purple and mauve to pink and peach, and the vast cloudscapes became a mandala of shifting colors--endless tunnels of hue and sheen receding in any direction you looked.

  There were various places around the Fanning estate where one could pause to watch this fabulous display unfold; one was a tall recessed window, half-curtained, at the end of the attic corridor containing the guest apartments. Keir sat in the window box, his arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees. Fireworks were starting now that the light was dim enough. The crowds--thousands of black dots on the air--had not lessened, and in fact as night came they were turning into stars: each person or family group had brought its lantern and they were now lighting them.