Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Read online

  "You have friends here?" He was skirting very close to the truth, but she had no option now. She nodded.

  He leaned forward in the chair. "Then where are they? And why did you use your disguise," he nodded to her frayed old uniform, "to wrangle your way onto a government-sponsored expedition today?"

  "I'll tell you that if you tell me why the Guard is lying about the Crier in the Dark."

  He exchanged a glance with another of the men. Then he stood up and walked up to loom over her. "I want you out of here on the next ship," he said. "None of this concerns you. You're not Home Guard anymore."

  She could probably have put him and his friends on the floor, if she'd been training the way she used to. As it was, she had to stand there and take his intimidation. She hung her head, and consciously kept her hands from balling into fists.

  Crase shoved past her, and he and his goons clotted the doorway. "You know what happens to people who pretend to be Guardsmen," he said before closing the door. "You got off lucky this time."

  The click of the door locking itself surprised her into motion. Antaea went to her bags and began assessing what they'd done. Crase really had let her off easily; imposters usually disappeared. And though they'd gone through her luggage with trained efficiency, they hadn't taken anything. When she was sure of this, she sat down on the edge of the bed and let out a heavy sigh. Her chest hurt, and her arm. There would be finger-shaped bruises there later.

  Crase might have stayed to interrogate her further, but they had a bit of a history. He knew her well enough to suspect that she was tougher than he was. She half-smiled at the thought, then reached into her jacket for the item that, if they'd frisked her, would have told them why she'd come here.

  She hadn't lied about this being the only place where she had ties--it was just that those ties were almost impossibly thin, and left to herself, she would never have come back because of any of them.

  The letter in her hands was so worn from travel and folding and refolding that it was practically falling apart. Still, she smoothed it carefully onto the bedspread. She didn't have to read it; she just needed the reassurance of knowing it existed at all.

  Dear Antaea, it read.

  My name is Leal Hieronyma Maspeth. I don't know if you remember me, I studied with your sister at the academy. We had supper together, the three of us, one time. Your sister once told me she wanted to join the Home Guard and I told her it was a myth. I guess I was wrong.

  She did remember Leal Maspeth; she'd been her sister's timid, academically minded roommate when Telen went to college here in the city of Sere. Maspeth was one of the few people in the world who'd known of Telen and Antaea's plan to track down the supposedly mythical Virga Home Guard and join up.

  I'm writing you, Maspeth continued, because we have a problem, and the government refuses to admit to it, and they refuse to let the Home Guard in to investigate. I don't know who else to turn to, so I've asked the Guard to bring this letter to Slipstream and maybe they can get it to you.

  There is something in the dark.

  Antaea stood and walked to the window. It looked out over Rowan Wheel's main street, providing an unchanging vista of lit windows and deep shadow. No sun ever rose here. No one born and raised in Abyss should be afraid of the dark.

  Nobody will talk about it. Officially, things are fine. But people have been disappearing--whole town wheels! They're outlier communities, fringe places whose people only show up to market once or twice a year. Now they're not showing up at all. Far as we are from any sun, the darkness has always seemed normal. You know, you grew up here. Lately, though, it broods. I believe something has awakened in one of the cold abandoned places of the world. It is picking off the weak and those who get separated from the group and it is growing bolder.

  If you make inquiries no one will admit to anything, so don't even try! I know I'm asking a lot, but you must trust me. We need someone who has experience with this world's mysteries, Antaea. We need a hunter.

  Nobody cares about Abyss. We're all like you and Telen, as far as the sunlit countries are concerned: just winter wraiths of no account. Maybe you no longer care about your old home, either, in which case I shall never hear from you.

  But if you do care--if you believe me even a little--please come home. I don't know who else to turn to.

  --Leal Maspeth

  Once, the darkness hadn't bothered Antaea, either. There had been a time when she wondered what waited there--oh, not in the unlit cloud banks and fungal mists beyond the lights of Sere, but beyond: past the iceberg-choked walls of Virga itself, in the vast universe that bounded and, lately, threatened this little world. Telen had wondered and had found out, and been more than killed for that knowledge. Antaea had chased her, too late to catch her, and didn't know what it was that she'd found other than that it was horrible.

  Leal Maspeth was missing, too. The government wouldn't talk about it; the officials Antaea had spoken to acted like she should already know, and she'd been afraid to push lest they begin to question her authenticity. So far, though, Antaea had learned that somehow, impossibly, timid little Leal had gotten to know the famous sun lighter and adventurer Hayden Griffin, and then ... The rumors spoke of murder and of the Crier in the Dark, and then she was gone.

  Antaea unbuttoned her jacket, aware with each twist of her fingers that she would never be putting it on again. She'd kept it out of sentimentality uncommon for her; it was time to let it go. She dropped it on the bed and forced herself to turn away.

  Then, she dressed herself in civilian clothes, slid knives into the boots still hidden under her trousers, and added one to the back of her belt.

  Crase wasn't going to make her leave. She'd failed to save her own sister from the dire mystery that pressed upon her world. Walking the streets here was about to get much more dangerous for her, and the ministries and offices she'd been able to enter as a Home Guard member would be closed. From now on, her appointments would be in the alleys and at the docks. It was going to be hard.

  She would find Leal Maspeth.

  Part One | THE OFFER

  1

  "LEAL, HURRY!"

  Leal Hieronyma Maspeth took a look back to see how close their pursuer was and felt the scree under her feet give way. Suddenly on her knees and then her side, she began to slide. She heard shouts, and half-visible hands reached for her. Darkness opened below and, in desperation, she grabbed for a half-glimpsed jut of rock.

  She swung, suddenly and shockingly, above open air. The gravel made a trickling sound as it sped past her, but she couldn't hear it land. It just disappeared.

  "The rope's just to your left, Leal, can you see it?"

  "No," said Leal. "That's okay. I'm going to reach for it now. Tell me if I..." She forgot words as she stretched out her left hand, and felt her right slip another inch. Now she was hanging on by just her fingertips.

  She had an awful moment then. The thing that was following them was close. If it caught up to them, if it was the one to rescue her--for she was sure it would neither kill her nor leave her in this predicament--would she regret not having just let go?

  Should she let go?

  "Leal!" That was Piero Harper's voice ... She blinked; something brushed her face. "Grab the rope!" He was only a few feet away, but above her.

  "You've got to keep going!" she hissed at him. He shook his head.

  "This'll only take a second. Take hold, ma'am."

  Damn his politeness. She flailed for the rope and met empty air. Her fingers slipped, were about to lose it--

  Something tapped her knuckles, and then she felt cool fibers coil around her fingers. With relief Leal let go of the rock, but again there was that damned gravity pulling her straight. Stretched and jolted, she yelped with pain as, in jerks and yanks, she rose rather than fell.

  Rock banged her shoulder and she felt herself being dragged over the lip of a rough ledge. "Are you okay?" said Piero as the rope unwound itself from her lacerated hand and slithere
d back. It was visible now in lantern light and she watched in abstract amusement as it inched and twisted its way back into the body of the large, four-footed creature standing next to Harper.

  "I-I'm fine. Thanks," she said to both of them. Once again the emissary had taken a hand in saving her life. The emissary! She brought up her hands to touch her shoulders. "Are you there--"

  "Yes," said a tiny voice near her ear. She felt little pulls on the cloth of her collar as a small doll regained its accustomed seat on her shoulder. "I fell down your back," it said, "but hung on."

  "Good." She wilted with relief. "We've lost too much of you as it is..." The doll was made of junk: A coiled wire made up its left arm, a couple of broken pencils its right. Its head was the porcelain knob from some electrical device, with bright screws attached that moved uncannily like eyes. Its mouth was the reed from a ship's horn.

  There was no magical spirit animating these random pieces, but fine, hairlike threads of something the emissary called nanotech. This body--this doll, so unlike the ones Leal had collected back when she lived in Sere--was part of the alien. It was the part that she spoke with, and could cup in her hands and so treat, if only for moments at a time, as a being like herself.

  She fully intended to start moving, but for a long moment remained at the edge of the cliff, staring downward. She'd seen faces as she dangled: of poor Dean Porril, huddled in permanent mourning behind his great iron desk in a wind-rattled office deep underneath the university; of Easley Fencher, who could never keep his lanky elbows and knees from sticking out, nor his equally awkward thoughts and attitudes. Of her friend Seana, in the bright metal exoskeleton that kept her upright in the unfamiliar gravity of the city. Of fire, bright and orange and frantic, as it consumed Easley's home with Easley in it ...

  "We'd best get going," said Piero quietly. The rest of the group had already moved on--predictably, with the limping silhouette of Eustace Loll, high official in her country's government, in the lead.

  "For somebody who's half-lame, he sure moves," she muttered; Piero saw where she was looking and grinned.

  They made to catch up, unspeaking. There was no sound for a while then, but for the muttering of the breeze and the distant crack of glacial ice falling from the wall of the world. Their pursuer had stopped yelling for them to stop, wait, just hold on a minute and talk to it. It must know it was going to catch them now, so why bother talking?

  They'd had a seemingly insurmountable lead when they set out this morning. Leal had stood on a promontory and scanned the steep, seemingly infinite slope below their campsite. Far down there, barely visible in the gray light that only indicated a sky, something was heaving itself across the rocks. As usual, somebody had been watching it at all times, as the rest of them slept. She'd taken her turn, and she could see that it hadn't gotten very far since then.

  They'd walked on up the slope, reassured. And then, an hour ago, she'd heard that familiar voice again.

  And here it came again, from only a few hundred yards back: "Leal! Wait, please!"

  As if in agreement, there came a deep grumble of sound from far above. At first, as they'd toiled their way up steeper and steeper slopes, those occasional bellows of thunder had seemed familiar. Leal had waited to see lightning, but there never was any. Gradually, she'd come to realize that she wasn't hearing storms. Thunder here meant something different than it did at home.

  "Leal, come back! I can help you!"

  "Come on, what are you waiting for?" she snapped at the little group of men whose faces were painted by lantern light in shades of worry and doubt. "All we need is a big overhang. We'll be fine."

  She'd slipped because there was as much ice up here as rock. Generally you could tell the difference, but not always. She'd been careless; now she stalked on, head down, fiercely focused on the uneven tumbled stones ahead of her. Piero walked next to her; in another time and place, he might have gallantly demanded that she rest, but they had no time for that.

  Another man had been walking beside her when they'd set out on this journey. He was gone now. He wouldn't be back, despite her doubts, despite the promise of that distant voice that followed her through her waking hours and even into her dreams. She shuddered and tried to bring her attention back to the tilted, broken slabs of the ancient roadway under her feet.

  This worked for a while, but then a series of cracking sounds, like distant gunshots, echoed from far overhead. In the silence that followed, Leal and her men met one another's eyes; then somebody said, "Move!"

  Everything was tilted at an absurdly steep angle here, but luckily gravity had been lessening as they climbed. It was easy to balance on the narrowest of ledges or blades of shattered pavement, and she could jump distances she would never have considered on the daylit plains they'd come from. Like fleas on some vast monster's back, they popped from stone to stone, trying to get away from what was coming.

  The whole slope shuddered and slid down a few feet. Leal stumbled, luckily, as something slashed through the air just above her. Clattering and pattering, splinters of shrapnel ice shot from the point where some glacial mountain had hit the rocks behind them. Distant booms signaled the landing of other house-sized chunks of hail.

  "Maybe it's a seasonal thing." Piero's voice sounded very small in the sudden quiet.

  Leal shook her head. The icefalls had been increasing in frequency for days. Something was peeling away the great glacial sheets that built up above the rock line. Up there, the world's wall was black and smooth, a fine weave of carbon nanotubes that was only a meter or two thick. Thin as it was, it transmitted the chill of interstellar vacuum from the other side. Water--and even air--froze to it. The glaciers that resulted would normally split and fall away in their own time, but they were hurrying now, as if they sensed the presence of intruders coming from below.

  The only door home from this strange and perilous world was past those glaciers, at the very top of the wall. Leal and her companions had no choice but to come this way if they were ever to see their countries and people again.

  She eyed the silhouette of Eustace Loll, who had fallen back from the lead and was watching the skies fearfully. The politician had branded her a traitor, and though he'd promised to lift that accusation if they ever made it home, he couldn't be trusted. If she ever walked the copper streets of Sere again, she feared it would be as a paraded prisoner, in chains and spat upon by the countrymen she had tried so hard to save.

  One foot ahead of the other. Just keep walking ... She ignored her pounding headache and the ever-present knot in her stomach. She had a job to do.

  They'd gone about a mile when Piero held up his hand. "Wait," he said. They all stopped, and in the new silence Leal heard it: cracks and pops and splintering sounds, layered over one another in an almost continuous grumble. This was like the sound that presaged the fall of a glacier, but stretched out, as if not just one berg but an entire sky full of bergs was about to come down ...

  Piero swore, and Loll stumped back to blink at them both. "What do we do?"

  The little junk-doll suddenly grabbed her ear. "There!" It stood up, pointing past her eyebrow at something ...

  Miles above, a little string of lights broke the total darkness. It was impossible for them to be there--Aethyr was an empty world, and nowhere was as desolate as this long treacherous slope--and yet there they were:

  Windows.

  * * *

  THE SOUND OF children playing faded as Keir Chen took the down stairs three steps at a time. He didn't have much time; recess would be over in fifteen minutes.

  The stairwell was pitch black, and he had no light; to guide him, Keir relied on the little cloud of buzzing dragonflies that accompanied him everywhere. They were his second set of eyes, and they did pretty well in low light. Now they showed him the knapsack he'd stowed here yesterday. It was heavy as he picked it up--stuffed with food, clothing, and other supplies. He'd carefully spent months accumulating it all, taking his time so the others wouldn't se
e the pattern.

  He wanted to run, but even if the gravity was low here in the city of Brink, he couldn't risk a fall. Some of these stone stairwells plummeted for miles through the foundations of the city. It took too many seconds to pick his way down, so when he reached the bottom he began pelting at full speed through a succession of dark, empty corridors and chambers where his footsteps were the only sound. His dragonflies had been gamely trying to catch up, and when he reached one particular side chamber and finally stopped, they came to zizz around his head angrily.

  This little room had two doors, one leading inside where he'd just come from, the other letting onto a balcony. There was a spot next to the entrance where he'd stood a few times; he went there now and put his back to the wall. Then he knelt and picked up a sharp rock that lay by the door. When he straightened with his back against the wall, he lifted his hand to scratch it behind his head.

  Keir lowered the stone, his eyes fixed on the black-on-black doorway that led outside. "Don't worry about such things," Maerta had told him when he'd revealed his suspicion to her. "You're a kid, Keir. Why don't you just enjoy being a kid?"

  He took one more deep breath, squared his shoulders as he'd seen some of the older men do, and stepped away from the wall. He turned around and, summoning his dragonflies, peered at the latest mark he'd made. There was at least a half-centimeter gap between it and the last one he'd made.

  There was no doubt about it.

  He was getting shorter.

  He'd talked to the other kids, and he'd been watching them. They were all growing up; but he wasn't. They were learning new things every day, a fine layering of knowledge on knowledge that was taking them all to adulthood.

  Keir knew that he knew less than he once had, not more.

  He stepped out onto the balcony, and turned around to look up.

  From this little balcony the city was visible only as black piled up on black, its cornered intricacies lost in permanent shadow--all save for that one ring of windows in one high tower. With the aid of his dragonflies' eyes, he could see the city's overall shape, and size. Their vision gave him a little courage, too, when the distant winds sighed like voices from the empty apartments, and when he fancied he saw movement in the blackest shadows of the stone gardens. They let him see and verify that, no, nothing ever spoke here, and nothing ever moved.