Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Page 9

  The panic was rising in him again. He couldn't help himself; he had to stand and leave the room. This time, though, he swore, he wouldn't take one of those dark archways and disappear into avoidance and solitude.

  His mouth set in a determined line, he headed for the plaza where the new airship was being built.

  He passed Gallard on the way down the stairs. "You were supposed to be in workshop this morning," Gallard commented, though not in a scolding tone.

  "Not now," said Keir, and he kept going.

  As he reached the bottom of the steps a nagging little voice in the back of his mind said, Why didn't you confront Gallard? Gallard was something of a friend; at least, Keir trusted him.

  But something had been done to Keir, and Maerta had promised someone that she would not tell him what that was. Who was that someone? Could it be Gallard? It could be anybody. Anybody in the Renaissance.

  He picked up the pace a bit until he reached the entrance to the plaza.

  Maerta was taking a walk around the airship with Leal Maspeth. An Edisonian remote was lumbering beside them, trying to explain in its halting way how the ship worked. Leal was shaking her head.

  He shouldn't interrupt them. Of course; he'd wait until they were done and then speak to Maerta alone.

  No. No, he wouldn't.

  She was right there. Yet he knew he couldn't do it. The panic had taken over, and he stumbled back into the shadow of the archway, covering his eyes with his hands.

  He could still see through his dragonflies, and they had fanned out into the plaza; so that's why he once again became the one to see something no one else was looking for.

  In the featureless, unchanging black sky above the plaza, a little orange spark had appeared. His misery kept Keir from wondering about it until it had grown into a dot with a truncated tail--and then it came to him that it was moving fast.

  "Look out!" He didn't know why he was running into the plaza, but as Maerta and Leal turned, he shouted, "Up there!"

  Maspeth turned to look, and her eyes widened in shock. She grabbed Maerta's arm and began to run for the colonnade at the plaza's edge.

  Maerta pulled back. "What is--"

  "Missile!" Leal pulled all the harder, and now Keir took Maerta's other arm. The Edisonian took a ponderous step, then aimed its blocklike head at the spear of fire. "Perchlorate oxidizer," it observed. "Evidence of a conical gas expansion device to exploit law of equal and opposite reaction."

  "Run, you stupid..." Keir had no word for it. Anyway, they'd reached the colonnade and fell together behind one of its vast, dark pillars.

  The Edisonian reached up as if to catch the missile, and the orange streak hit it with an overwhelming flash. What followed wasn't sound, but a hammer blow that picked Keir up and flung him against the wall.

  Dust and grit whirled, and pieces of the airship tumbled in the plaza. Most of the lamps that had lit the space were out, but a few were bouncing around like terrified lightning bugs. Weird shadows capered after them, but the whole scene was oddly silent except for a kind of long throbbing note. Keir helped Leal Maspeth to her feet, and although her lips were moving, she wasn't making any sound.

  His dragonflies had been scattered, but they could still see; and he realized that their vision was much better than that of his own eyes. He sent a couple through the dust to check if any of the plaza's entrances had collapsed, and shot another one up and up to loft finally out of the spiraling cone of dust.

  Another red spark appeared, and in the flash of its birth he glimpsed the thing that had fired it: a cylindrical craft of some kind, its prow narrow and surmounted with an ornate ram. On its sides and at its rear were engines of some sort, all pointed down and laboring to keep it aloft.

  It fired a third missile. "Come on!" Keir pushed and hauled Maerta and Leal in the direction of the nearest stairwell. They came readily enough and all three made it into the archway just before the second missile hit. This time, as the flash happened, they crouched as one and braced themselves.

  This time it was scry that he saw first. The Renaissance was lighting up with frantic messages and queries. They all boiled down to one question: What's going on?

  "We're under attack!" he projected. "Some kind of airship."

  Glyphs of astonishment and outrage flooded the air. Maerta, however, was projecting only confusion. As the shock of the second explosion passed, the three of them hurried farther down the stairs with Leal in the lead, and Keir saw that Maerta was flinging questions at her back. Maerta had forgotten that Maspeth didn't have scry.

  They reached a landing. Though the walls shook to another thumping explosion, they seemed far enough away now to be safe. Maerta grabbed Leal by the shoulder and whirled her around. She was shouting, and past the buzz and pain in his ears, he faintly heard her words: "Who did you bring here?"

  Leal shook her head and said something. Keir didn't hear the words, but her mouth shaped a name he recognized.

  Loll.

  Scry had done a head count, and nobody had been hurt. Except that, as Maerta pointed out, she, Keir, and Leal had damaged eardrums.

  "Come up to the Hall," somebody said. "We'll fix you up."

  Maerta shook her head. "Evacuate the Hall. One of these bombs would obliterate it. Everybody needs to get into interior corridors and rooms that are behind Aethyr's skin."

  Leal was flailing around frantically. After a moment Keir realized that it was entirely dark down here; she couldn't see. Only he could, apparently, through his dragonflies. Keir grabbed her hands, and she shouted something. He made out the words "my people" behind the ringing drone.

  "Does anybody know where the Virgans are?" he interjected.

  The walls of Brink faded, replaced by a wireframe map where everybody's location was indicated. He tapped both of the women on their shoulders, then took their hands and began guiding them through blackness to the empty depths of the city.

  * * *

  THEY'D FUSSED AROUND her ears for a minute, and now Leal had something icy cold in each one. Her junk-doll was standing on tiptoe, its hand in the left canal, which felt simultaneously odd and comforting.

  Running people and single-minded machines swirled around her as she sat on a crate that had just been brought into this long chamber. Keir's people looked panicked, but they acted in perfect synchrony, stacking supplies in precise locations, avoiding one another with uncanny accuracy. Piero Harper and the other Virgan airmen looked calm, but they were all over each other in their attempt to get organized.

  "How do you hear now?" asked the junk-doll. Surprisingly, the ringing had stopped.

  "Uh, fine. It's like normal." The ice seemed to be penetrating deep into her skull, twin spikes on either side. She felt they should be visible, like antennae or headlamps.

  Piero knelt down and looked at her with concern. "You're sure you're okay?"

  "She will be fine, thank you," said the doll. Leal couldn't help but smile.

  "Was it Loll? Did you see?"

  She shook her head. "It was too dark. But it must have been. Though I didn't think Abyss had ships that could come so deep into gravity..."

  "They've had time to experiment. Probably just clamped extra engines onto something until it stayed up. But," he added, glancing up at the stone ceiling, "I doubt they can land."

  "They don't have to. They can pummel the city into dust from above."

  He stood up again. "I don't think they can. Or will. Listen." Now that she could hear, Leal realized that the only sounds she heard were from the people and machines here. The assault had stopped, at least for the moment.

  "If it's Loll, he knows he don't have to kill us," Piero said. "He's sending a message, to you."

  She had to nod. And she knew what the message was: The door to Virga is closed.

  "He'll have spun some story about being the only survivor. I bet we're all dead, or the emissary's taken over our bodies. But would he go so far as to strand his own countrymen down on the plains?"

&
nbsp; "If he can convince the Guard to give up on rescuing them?" Piero snorted. "In a heartbeat. Beggin' your pardon, ma'am, but I never trusted him. Why did we bring him along?"

  She sighed wearily. "Because we're compassionate people, I guess. It's a flaw."

  Leal stared at the polished floor, where maybe no human feet had trod before hers. She gradually became aware that the others were gathering around. She looked up and did a count; nobody else was missing, at least.

  "We can't go back, can we, ma'am?"

  She opened her mouth to agree, the words like stones in her heart--and then saw Keir Chen walk by in the background.

  Leal stood up. "Not that way," she agreed.

  "But there may be another.

  "Keir!"

  7

  "REEL IN THE hulls!" shouted Jacoby Sarto. He turned to Antaea Argyre, his face only half-visible in the light of the few oil lanterns that hung from the ship's rigging. "I'm turning off our gravity. It's safer at this point."

  She nodded. Behind Jacoby, the crew was hulking silhouettes, their half-seen hands reaching up to clutch and drag at the gravity ropes.

  Antaea heard a quiet clatter--Jacoby's teeth chattering--and she smiled. "Finding winter too cold for you, Jacoby? You're from the principalities, after all." Her breath fogged as she spoke.

  They stepped down from the railing as Jacoby's ship, the Torn Page of Fate, began to sway. Half a mile overhead, the faint lights of the ship's other hull faded in and out of view as clouds obscured it.

  "Time for the winter gear, I suppose," Jacoby agreed grudgingly. "I shall be back." She watched him walk to the forward cabin, bouncing slightly in the lowering gravity. Then one of the men shouted something and she turned and squinted, watching the airman's lips move as he held up a lantern.

  "Ice!"

  Antaea spun around in time to see a pale boulder, smudged with darkness and the size of a house, glide by off to starboard. Jacoby had given the order to draw in the hulls just in time.

  She made her way to the bow, using her hands as much as her feet for purchase. Lines creaked overhead and the men began greeting their companions in the other hull, whom they hadn't seen in days.

  They would be passing more icebergs soon enough--and perhaps, other things. When the first of the vast, dark lanterns had loomed out of the darkness, Antaea had half-believed it was a mirage. She'd spent her childhood and much of her adult life in these frozen regions, far from the light of civilized suns, and there should be no man-made constructions here--other than the walls of Virga itself.

  The lantern had been a hundred feet across, clenched together out of rusted girders and huge, bowed sheets of glass. Those glossy panes were dark; once this lamp might have been visible a hundred miles away. From one of its corners, thick cables twisted away into the dark. It was moored to the skin of the world somewhere, but if the photos from Jacoby's magic telescope were right, it was just an outrigger. Once, she imagined, the city the lantern pointed to had been its own beacon, a glittering jewel nestled in a forest of bergs on the world's wall. All lost to the dark now.

  The cables had kept the lantern pointed in one direction. That heading had confirmed Jacoby's inertial map, and so they had followed the dark lamp's lead. The Page had eventually come to another lantern, then another.

  Antaea's feet left the deck. She grabbed some rigging to stabilize herself as the ceiling of the second hull lowered over her. By splitting the hull of the spindle-shaped Page down its midline they could let the two pieces out and spin them around a common axis. The result looked a bit like two ancient gravity-bound ships of the sea, attached mast-to-mast and pinwheeling together through the sky. In this way, they had enjoyed gravity throughout most of the journey. Now, with a set of muffled thuds, the Page's two halves closed over one another and what had been exposed decks were now the inside walls of a single hull.

  Antaea watched as Mauven, the first mate, took reports from the men in the other hull. To her surprise, she felt a sigh of relief escape her at being enclosed by the hulls--cut off, finally, from the necessity of having to feel the wintry airs of Virga's outer reaches.

  She'd hoped never to have to come here again. This place was the realm of the Virga Home Guard--of precipice moths, and strange beasts like the eaners; of icebergs that coated the world's wall like stucco; of myths and darkness and dreams. It had also been her home as a child, and for much of her adult life with the Guard.

  She remembered this darkness lit with fire. Battles had been fought here in the days following an incident now referred to as the outage: a brief time when Candesce's shield against the monsters of the outside world had failed. Antaea and her sister, Telen, had been members of the Home Guard then, and they had joined ranks with the fearsome precipice moths to beat back an incursion that followed the start of the outage so closely that the two must have been coordinated somehow. Scheduled.

  Antaea herself had been an "extraction specialist"; she specialized in rescuing people from sticky situations such as jail and imminent execution. Ironic, then, that she had ended up in a Guard prison herself after the events following the outage.

  She'd become caught up in circumstances beyond her control, forced to kidnap Admiral Chaison Fanning of Slipstream under the threat that Telen would be killed if she did not. Antaea had been emotionally shattered by the discovery that her sister had died long before, and after the triumphant return of Fanning and the fall of Slipstream's pilot, she had left civilization entirely. For months she had flown through the near-infinite depths of Virga's skies, visiting countries she'd never heard of and basking in the light of nuclear-fusion suns glowing in every color of the spectrum. She'd been running as much from herself as from the Guard; but in the end, the Guard had found her.

  She waited now for a few minutes until the warmth of the ship drove away the memory of ice. Then she flew to Jacoby Sarto's cabin and knocked. "Come," he said curtly.

  He had taken off his jacket, and the white linen shirt emphasized his barrel chest. He held a helix glass of amber liquid, and as he saw it was her he gently lofted it over to her. Antaea took a cautious sip, and as the liquid slipped into her mouth, she almost coughed. It was rum, and very strong.

  "Good, eh?" he said with a quick grin.

  He'd found all sorts of ways to divert her attention over the past few days: with preparations, with plans, with the details of sailing the Page. Antaea had begun to relax around him, and he, it seemed, around her. She decided it was time to be blunt. "When I first asked you how an exile like yourself could afford this ship, you told me that you'd taken over Sacrus's international network after the fall of Spyre."

  "Yes," he said. "What of it?"

  "Your crewmen," she nodded at the door, "are little more than pirates. They're the cheapest of a bad lot. Hard to imagine you'd be buying men at bargain rates if you really had access to your country's assets."

  He wound some liquor from a small cask into another glass. "I didn't lie to you," he said before taking a sip. "I did take over the network. Briefly. Long enough to extract those men who were loyal to me--and a goodly amount of money, to boot."

  "What happened?"

  Jacoby tilted his head, frowning at her. He was obviously considering how much truth to tell her--so Antaea said in exasperation, "I can hardly run out on you now. We're at the walls of the world."

  He grunted, and looked down. "The Sartos were one of two great ruling families in Sacrus. The other was the Ferances, and they were in charge when Spyre broke up. My cousin, Inshiri Ferance, was the ruler of Sacrus--and never was born a more vicious, morally distorted human being."

  Antaea raised an eyebrow. "Worse than Venera Fanning?"

  "Venera's a good person." He shook his head. "Inshiri has ... hobbies. That you wouldn't want me to describe. Sacrus's product--what we traded to the world--was expertise in the art of manipulating people, and nobody's better at it than Inshiri. One of her proteges was her niece, Margit, who had a little run-in with Venera and came out t
he worse for it. Venera got the better of Margit--but Inshiri would eat Venera alive. Maybe literally."

  He said this so matter-of-factly that Antaea couldn't doubt it was true. "You're afraid of her," she observed.

  "That's because I know her. And, because I know her, I didn't try to fight when she demanded that I give back control of the network. I cut my losses and ran."

  "I get it," she said, nodding. "This expedition we're on--you're doing this because it's the furthest thing from your cousin's interests you could find. You're staying out of her way."

  Now Jacoby sighed heavily. "Oh, if only that were true. I'd be able to sleep a lot better if it were."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Before Spyre fell, Inshiri made a political pact with an outsider--and by outsider, I mean an ambassador from beyond Virga. The same people--if you can call them people--who killed your sister, and who've been trying to take down Virga's defenses ... they're supporting Inshiri now."

  "Supporting--! Why didn't you tell me this before?"

  He laughed. "You wouldn't have signed up if you thought I had any connection at all with Artificial Nature."

  "Do you?"

  He shrugged. "I met one of their ambassadors once. He made Inshiri look like an amateur, not because he enjoys torment and terror the way she does, but because he doesn't seem to consider human beings as, well, human at all. But I don't know how much involvement he and his kind have with Inshiri. All I know is that she has plans."

  "To do what?"

  "I don't know!" He glowered at her. "All I know is that this friend of yours, Leal Maspeth, has Inshiri and her friends running scared for some reason. They're so afraid of her that they're stretching the network to its breaking point, sending spies and diplomats and courtesans to all the great nations. They're proposing alliances ... making friends. Getting ready for something."

  Antaea thought about this for a long while, and Jacoby watched her. The creak of the hull, the rumble of the Page's jets, and the distant murmur of the crew were the only sounds.