Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Page 3

  --Which was good. He couldn't afford for anyone to find what he'd been doing on this little parapet, half a mile from the inhabited halls.

  He took a deep breath and stepped up to something that sat swaying slightly on the parapet, all folded angles and parchmentlike planes. "Are you ready?" he asked the ornithopter he'd been growing. "Tell me you're ready."

  "Not ready," it said in its mindless monotone. "Feed me."

  "You said you'd be ready!" he burst out. "You said you'd be ready to fly!"

  "Yes. Can fly. Cannot carry."

  "That's not what I--!" He punched its wing. It shuffled aside. Keir stepped back, clutching his knapsack and nearly in tears. He couldn't go through with his plan today, but Gallard was going to catch him for sure if he went back, and then he'd never get another chance. Or maybe he could be extra sneaky; maybe he could pretend to be a dutiful student for another few days. He could hide feedstock for the ornithopter, maybe make it down here one more time to feed it ...

  With a curse at his own indecision, he stalked back into the tower. He hadn't brought anything to feed the aircraft, because stealing feedstock was risky and anyway, he'd thought it was ready. But there was another potential source of the stuff here ...

  He waited for his dragonflies to catch up and when their eyesight supplemented his, he could see what he was after in one corner of the room. He hunkered down and shuffled toward it.

  A tiny pinprick of light suddenly glowed there, then another, then a dozen. Little gleaming midges flew up from the experiment he'd begun here a week ago. A pipsqueak voice sounded in his head: "I am the mighty Brick! Tremble before me, mortal!"

  "That's okay, it's okay," he said in a soothing tone as he reached slowly for the half-open bag of feedstock lying next to the brick. His fingers were almost touching it when the little midges dove at his hand. "Ow!"

  The air was suddenly full of dragonflies, and little dogfight battles erupted all over the room, complete with the pittering sound of minuscule machine guns firing and tiny smoking death spirals. "Do not defy the mighty Brick!" cried the brick. Keir ducked under the aerial battle and snagged the bag of feedstock. Then he ran from the room before the brick was able to bring its little howitzers to bear on him.

  He'd had some compelling reason for making a minitech AI think that it was the brick. It had been some sort of reminder to himself, he knew that. But the details ... they were gone, like so much of what he'd done and intended lately. All he had left was a terrible feeling of apprehension, a certainty that if he didn't get out of this place, and soon, something terrible was going to happen.

  Shakily, he went out to the balcony again and dumped the bag of feedstock in front of the ornithopter. As it eagerly scarfed down the mixture of metals, silicates, and rare earth elements, Keir leaned on the balustrade, looked out, and sighed.

  This world had suns--dozens of them--but they were too far away to provide even a hint of radiance to the sky. The city was as invisible as it ever was, its cornered intricacies lost in permanent shadow. Only that one ring of windows in one high tower betrayed habitation.

  Brink crested above that and over itself, in wave after frozen wave whose dark caps faded into obscurity in the heights. The near-infinite wall to which the city clung rose at an eighty-degree angle. Farther down, the angle decreased to a mythically distant, sunlit plain, while above it steepened to the vertical so far away that all gravity would cease by the time you got there.

  Giant knuckled slabs of glacier and stone were the city's only companions at this height. Paths wove from one patch of scree to another, avoiding the perilously slick black skin of the world's wall whenever possible. Eyeless goats brayed from their rock perches, and fungi and meatshrooms blossomed from cracks in the stone. He could hear booming sounds from distant avalanches; those had increased in frequency lately, sometimes shaking Complication Hall with the power of their passage.

  He'd thought about just walking off down that slope, but if he were to try it he'd surely be killed by icefall before he got ten kilometers; and anyway, down led only to the realm of the oaks, who had filled Aethyr with grasslands and forests that were prowled by strange predators, and sometimes by the oaks themselves. He'd hoped his ornithopter would take him high enough that they'd become weightless, and then it would have been easy to cross Aethyr to the wild but free worlds of the arena. Wild, free--and in their own way, far more dangerous than any encounter with the oaks.

  If he and the ornithopter sailed off to the arena right now, no one would see him go. Of course, there would be no one to see him crash on the steep slopes below the city, break a leg or a collarbone, and slowly freeze to death. Even if they noticed his absence right away, they wouldn't know where to look for him.

  He should have tried the other door, the one that led to the one world he knew would be safe for his kind. The door to it wasn't even closed. --No, not closed, merely guarded by monsters.

  Keir hugged himself, feeling miserable. He scowled down at the darkness, and one of his dragonflies soared away from the miniature battle in the room, spiraled into the air over his head, and spotted something.

  In the dark below the city, a cluster of lights wavered.

  They were fantastically small pinpricks, hovering on the very edge of visibility, but now the rest of his dragonflies could see them, too. Kilometers down the gradually decreasing curve of the world's wall, something had carved a little cave of illumination out of the dark.

  "Hey," he said to the ornithopter, "are you ready to carry me yet?"

  "Need to digest," it said. "Two hours."

  "Hmmpf." He stared at the little lights. Who could that possibly be? Nobody from the Renaissance ever went out on the slopes; the constant avalanches made it too dangerous. There was nothing down there but blind goats and unstable scree, anyway. Visitors came to Brink occasionally--but they only ever came by air.

  Whatever those lights were, he had other priorities.

  --Although, if somebody had wanted to sneak up on the city, coming up from below like that would certainly be the way to do it.

  "Not my problem," he said to the ornithopter. It turned its camera eyes to him, then resumed munching the feedstock.

  "The grown-ups can take care of it," he continued.

  It said nothing.

  He stood for a while looking down at the faint lights.

  "Could you fly down there and back?"

  "Yes," it said. It didn't move.

  Keir opened his mouth, closed it, then, cursing his own curiosity, ordered one of his dragonflies to clamp itself to the ornithopter's foot. "Go on, then," he said. The mechanical bird dropped the feedstock bag, bunched up its wings, and leaped awkwardly into the air. Startlingly graceful once aloft, it swooped away and disappeared into the gloom.

  A minute later it returned, and as it collapsed in some sort of mechanical relief onto the flagstones at his feet, Keir received a download of images from the dragonfly that had ridden with it.

  The people down there weren't part of the Renaissance. Some dozen or so of the climbers looked human, though with them were things that had the unmistakable air of morphonts: artificial life-forms that built bodies for themselves from strands of nanotech. These morphonts walked on legs, and they had heads. They also twined together, forming something like a mobile fence, and they stayed downslope from the humans, a sort of living guardrail.

  The humans looked ragged and half-starved, and some of them were limping. The morphonts were clearly friendly, and morphonts meant the sophistication and resource-rich worlds of the arena; but the humans seemed neither sophisticated nor rich. He'd seen photos of people like them--telephoto images taken through kilometers of air. Keir's recent memories were fuzzy, but he did remember the pictures: of a people who lived in permanent weightlessness, building rotating cities for gravity and flying chemical-powered aircraft in a world where only the most primitive of technologies worked.

  But it couldn't be. They couldn't be here.

  He
scowled and barked a laugh and walked to the edge of the balcony to get a look at those lights with his own eyes. They were still there.

  He heard the gunshot cracks that signaled an avalanche--they went on and on, signaling a big fall this time. Squinting, he thought he could actually see something way up the wall above the city, like a vast pale hand reaching down. Keir turned all his dragonflies to that view, and now he could make it out: a veritable continent of ice peeling away from the slope ten kilometers or more overhead.

  He called up his scry, the collection of processors, communications systems, and interfaces that helped him keep up with the multilayered, surreal world the adults of the Renaissance had built. He tried to call the nannies, then anybody else in Complication Hall; but it was too far away.

  This far up the world's slope, gravity was less than half a standard g. He looked up at the majestically bowing facade of ice, then down at those wavering, faint lights below the city; and he asked his scry how long it would take before the one landed on the other.

  The answer came back almost instantly; but then Keir stood there frowning for long seconds, as his breath frosted in front of him.

  Then he cursed and ran inside, down two halls, and out to another stairway. His instinct was to hesitate, but he'd set a timer in his scry telling him exactly how long he had before the ice reached the slope below. So he tested the top steps and, when they held him, leaped down the rest recklessly, accompanied by a cloud of watchful eyes. Soon he was standing on the round parapet of a minaret, and in the upper right corner of his visual field, the timer was still ticking down. He went down this next staircase, but in the darkness it took much longer than he'd hoped. When he emerged from an outside doorway to stand on unworked rock, he was sure it was too late.

  This slope lay in the shadow of Complication Hall's lights, but it wasn't completely dark. A faint red glow permeated the air from the far distance, and this gave just enough light for him to make out tumbled stones and a nearby goat path.

  Here he made the mistake of looking up. With the help of the dragonflies he could plainly see a ceiling of white, kilometers wide, lowering toward the city.

  He could see the strangers' lights--they were close at hand now--and, very close by, the entrance to a tunnel that doubtless ran into Brink's foundations. It was clear the people with the lanterns couldn't see that archway, because it lay above them and behind some tall boulders, and their little lights could only reach a few meters anyway.

  "Heeeyy!" He jumped and waved his arms, but nobody noticed. The strangers were picking their way one step at a time, heads bent and focused on their task. Yet they must have heard the cataclysmic cracking of the ice sheet; must know that even now it was silently bearing down on them.

  Now that he was close enough Keir tried to hail the newcomers through his scry. It didn't register them at all. And according to his timer the ice would be here in a matter of seconds.

  He swore and began leaping down the rocks toward them.

  Now the orange-lit ovals of their faces turned in his direction. They all stopped walking and he could see them talking--verbally--among themselves; there was a sudden flurry of movement and, just as he half-slid down the last few meters, four of them produced odd, compact handheld devices and pointed them at him. Keir's scry identified these as weapons--but the idea that they might threaten him more than what was approaching was simply laughable.

  "Run!" He pointed in the direction of the entrance he'd spotted, which really was invisible from here. "Ruuuuun! There!"

  One of them stepped forward. She was pale-skinned, her features oddly mis-composed, as though she'd never taken the effort to adjust her bone structure or skin type. "Who are you?"

  "Never mind! Run!" And, because his timer had about fifteen seconds left to it, he bounded past them, making for that other entrance. "Come on!"

  "Why?" she shouted after him. "Is it--"

  "The ice!" Belatedly, they began to move. With eight seconds left, Keir made it to the archway. Two blind goats were cowering in the entrance, but beyond them, it ran back into indeterminate blackness.

  Eleven seconds, and the first of the strangers reached the arch.

  Thirteen, and the strange goat-railing creatures scrabbled up; one was carrying a man on its back.

  Fifteen seconds and the rest of them were in. Nothing happened, and the last of the strangers--including the woman--were only meters away.

  A new silhouette appeared in the doorway. It looked like a man, but when the woman saw it she screamed. One of the men raised something that looked like a primitive weapon and shouted, "Keep back!"

  "Let me in!" shouted the stranger. "I just want to talk."

  Keir jumped at a loud bang and the silhouette staggered back. The woman ducked her face in her hands, the others were standing, shouting, and--

  Whump! The stranger disappeared behind a wall of white. The entire slope bowed under the impact of something gigantic. A roar beyond sound, a physical wall of noise, hit Keir. He was tossed about the tunnel, hitting wall and ceiling and floor as the thunder went on and on, and outside the cave mouth all that was visible was a churning chaos of grinding and hammering snow.

  Gradually that vast cry, like the thunderous rage of a giant, dwindled to ordinary thunder, then to grumbling and sighs interspersed with pattering and sliding sounds. Though the floor still swayed and dipped beneath him, Keir staggered to the entrance to look out. Towering thunderheads reared to all sides, their bases rooted in the world's slope. Yet for a dozen or more meters to every side, the rocks were clear of ice.

  Keir found he was trembling. He'd known the tunnel would survive the avalanche; the metropoloid that called itself Brink had built itself strong enough to withstand the occasional glacial fall. Yet it was terrifying to be so close to the avalanche that he could feel its wind on his face, and taste the flavor of ancient ice.

  His ears were ringing and he was sure the others were half-deaf, too, but a little deafness wouldn't stop scry. As she picked herself up and dusted herself off, Keir tried pinging the woman again; when there was no response, he tried the others. There was no reply from the humans, but an icon cloud rose from the backs of the strange, trunk-to-tail-entwined guardrail goats. A glyph of men fencing appeared in the upper left corner of Keir's vision as his scry did a handshake with theirs. The humans remained dark to data; they didn't even seem to be able to see the data cloud he was emitting.

  The shaking subsided; the thunder and hammering echoes rolled away and away, and a great slow sigh of icy air wafted into the tunnel, causing the survivors to huddle together.

  "Thank you," shouted the woman. Keir barely heard her; his ears were still stunned.

  He pointed at the entrance. "But why did you shoot that man?"

  "That wasn't a man." She walked among her people, touching each in turn and speaking to them. Some nodded; some shook their heads. Keir estimated there were about a dozen of them, an impossibly tiny party to deploy for the purposes of scaling a world's wall.

  She returned and now gave Keir a frank, head-to-toe appraisal. He wanted to ask more about the incident with the gun, but she spoke first. "Where did you come from?"

  "I--I live here," he stammered; and in the pale light of the strangers' lanterns, he took in her archaic, hand-sewn apparel, the tightly drawn-back hair and her intriguing, imperfect features, and knew that his earlier guess had been right. "Are you from Virga?"

  She nodded, then shot him a suspicious look. "But you're not. Who are your people?" Then, in a somewhat dazed tone, "We saw lights."

  "That's Complication Hall. Where I live."

  Another man, red-faced and mustachioed, came to stand next to the woman. They exchanged a glance, and she shrugged. Behind him, several of the others were moving outside, presumably to look for the one they had shot. Keir knew it would be futile, that the ice would have scoured him away to nothing.

  "Do you have water, and a place to sleep?" asked the red-faced man.

  Ke
ir shrugged wryly. "A whole city's worth of guest rooms. None ever slept in. I--"

  "I'm not sure we can pay," she said quickly.

  Keir thought through these words, and he had to smile. "Nobody's ever offered to 'pay' me for anything before," he said. "I think that would be ... amazing. What is it you pay with?"

  "Forget I mentioned it," she said, frowning quizzically. She put out her hand and Keir gingerly took it in his own to shake. He'd never actually performed this particular ritual before, but again she didn't seem to notice.

  "I'm Leal Maspeth," she said. It took him a moment to realize she'd given him her name, since the words were just a garble of sound buried in her accent. She swept an arm to indicate her companions. "We were stranded on the floor of Aethyr, some weeks ago. We're walking back to the axle of the world, so we can get back to Virga with some important information."

  "Really?" His scry had finished handshaking with the goats' and subtitles were starting to appear under Maspeth's chin when she spoke. A sizable cloud of tags hovered over her party now, so Keir no longer needed to pester her with questions, which would be rude. He'd review their records as they walked.

  The men who'd gone to look outside returned, shaking their heads grimly. They could all return the way Keir had come, but there might be straggler avalanches; better to take this tunnel back to one of the central stairwells.

  Keir commanded his dragonflies to explore the tunnel. They'd been clinging for dear life to his jacket and now wafted off of him in a little cloud. The Virgans looked startled at this sudden motion. After a short sortie the dragonflies reported that the tunnel was clear, and so Keir began walking up it.