Pirate Sun (14 page)

She put both feet on the rope and oriented herself, then leaped with all her strength into the air. Seconds later she turned, unfurling her wings to land just a few feet from Corbus.

Corbus was blinking at her in surprise. Up close he looked quite grotesque, everything about him squashed and compacted by the forces of his past. “Who are you?” he asked, not loudly enough for the crowd to hear.

“Home guard,” she said. His slablike face split in a grin and he gestured at the stadium full of people. Antaea turned and saw Chaison; he was in the air not a dozen feet away. The expression on his face when he saw she’d gotten to Corbus first was priceless.

Antaea turned to the crowd. “My name is Antaea Argyre. I am a lieutenant in the Virga home guard!” A mutter went through the crowd. “Yes!” she laughed. “We exist. And I am here to help you!”

Chaison landed and introduced himself to Corbus. Others were rising from the crowd now, mostly older men who might have been leaders once, but had moved here to Falcon’s pleasure city years ago.

Chaison shot Antaea an inscrutable glance, then turned to the crowd. “I am Admiral Chaison Fanning of the Navy of Slipstream,” he shouted an authoritative voice. “I was visiting your city when all of this occurred. I…do not know whether you can fight the Gretels’ military without touching its people, or save your city without sacrificing yourselves. But I believe you should try.

“My skills and experience as a military commander are yours—if you want them.”

The crowd burst into screaming applause.

Others arrived and introduced themselves. Antaea hand-walked over to Corbus, and Chaison approached him from the other side. The former strongman—now defender of Stonecloud, sure to be crowned mayor in an hour or two—stared out at the throng, a look of awe on his face. “Well now,” he said. “All we need is a plan.”

Chaison smiled back. “That,” he said over the rumble of the half-wild crowd, “you can leave to me.”

ANTAEA ARGYRE GRABBED
Chaison’s arm. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She looked furious, which he supposed was perfectly understandable. “You’re going to get yourself killed, or maybe you always wanted a transfer from Falcon’s prison to one of the Gretels’!”

The rally continued in the stadium, but Corbus had turned it over to some prominent local businessmen. His plan seemed to be to bore the crowd until it calmed down and left. Meanwhile, backstage, he was assembling his team.

“Backstage” was a series of plank decks in the shape of balls nested inside the outer, wicker one. The central sphere was sheathed in heavy cast iron and it had big steam engines clamped to its outer surface from which long driveshafts extended outward. These could be employed to rotate the outermost sphere during the show. Corbus squatted on the side of one, talking nonstop to the people hovering around him. He looked almost feverish, his broad forehead dotted with sweat, his eyes wide as he frequently licked his lips, staring at nothing. Yet when he spoke he seemed completely lucid, if unsure of whether he liked the position he’d been thrust into. He had listened to Chaison’s story and shrugged off his political imprisonment. The two of them had then talked strategy for half an hour, and now the former admiral of Slipstream found himself in charge of mounting a defense of this foreign city, before even taking a tour of the place.

“Somebody has to do this,” he said to Antaea. It was a hopelessly inadequate response, he knew; he couldn’t explain to Antaea why he’d been driven to come here despite his exhaustion and the anxieties of being a fugitive. He had left his station at the smuggler’s hideout because he hoped he could find some news from home. When he’d heard what people in the passing crowd were saying, however, he’d responded instantly: Corbus was acting, not reacting, in response to Stonecloud’s crisis. Chaison had been tossed about by forces he had no control over for far too long, and felt a surge of adrenalin at the thought that he, too, might finally be free to act and not react. He joined the crowd streaming to the stadium. He needed to stop being the refugee and, if only for a night, be himself again.

“Somebody might have to do this, but not you!” Antaea was saying. “Did you stop to consider that these are the people who held you in a tiny cell for months, tortured and abused you, and fully intended to leave you there to die? How do you know they’re not going to trade you to the Gretels?”

He shrugged. “I’m of no value to the Gretels. And these are
not
the people who imprisoned me.” The pols were gone; these were civilians surrounding him now. Chaison had to admit he’d been impressed by the spectacle in the stadium—not by Corbus’s performance, because the man was a professional entertainer and knew how to work a crowd. It was the crowd itself that had convinced Chaison to volunteer. He had always been taught that it was the hereditary ruling class who should make vital decisions in matters of politics and war. Yet no one of that class cared as much about Stonecloud as the people who had no choice but to live in it. Corbus might have manipulated them, but they really were loyal to their city and he had, in the end, bowed to their will; perhaps he had only manipulated them into seeing what their will really was. Their fierce pride had touched Chaison in a way that nothing political had in a very long time.

He was fed up with politics as usual; he supposed that was partly why he’d mounted the secret expeditionary force against Falcon to begin with. He had explicitly gone against the wishes of the pilot of Slipstream, and apparently Antonin Kestrel believed he was a traitor because of that decision. If Kestrel hadn’t been lying then all of Slipstream believed the same…

He didn’t want to face that possibility. “This is about loyalty to a principle,” he said quickly. “It’s about making a commitment to defend helpless people, rather than those who are in power.” She was staring at him with a funny expression on her face. “I know you don’t understand,” he added.

Antaea shook her head, he supposed in disbelief. “The Gretels will be here in a day, maybe less. What are you going to do to keep them out?”

“I have a plan,” he told her. He did, although it was a desperate one, more of a fallback position to delay defeat than a recipe for success. “I vouched for you to Corbus and he’s sufficiently impressed that he’s going to make you a line commander. You’ll take my orders during this engagement, and in my absence you will act on my authority.”

Antaea opened and closed her mouth. Again her expression was hard to read, but he figured she must be furious; he was not prepared to be sympathetic. It was true that they had narrowly escaped the pols, and the sensible course of action would be to lay low until they had a chance to flee the city. He had made this impossible, in fact he couldn’t have made his presence here more visible if he’d sent a semaphore message to the Falcon capitol buildings. Her carefully orchestrated rescue plan was in tatters.

So was her mission to learn the location of the key of Candesce. Antaea must know by now that she could neither talk nor torture it out of him. Where Falcon’s interrogators had failed, she would not succeed. She had absolutely no reason to stay with him at this point—so what would she do? He couldn’t see any reason why she would remain; her loyalties were to the guard and she had never, as far as he knew, taken the oaths of honor that he had.

She didn’t budge. “I’m sorry,” she finally managed to say, “this is a lot to take in.” Then she looked away.

Chaison stared at her. This mild submission was the very last reaction he had expected. What could possibly be compelling her to stay with him?—But he had no time to think about it right now. Corbus was waving him over.

Still, he felt her eyes on him as he flew away, and the sensation that she was accusing him of something he knew nothing about didn’t leave him during the rest of the night.

CHAISON WAS SURROUNDED
by the blare of saws and a swirl of flying workmen. One of twenty or more work gangs was cutting the street away from its neighbors, and he had finally taken a break from his planning sessions to come watch.

This street, which was very near the stadium, was made up of trees that had been joined to form the body of a woman, hundreds of feet long. Its hands were joined to two similar sculptures on either side of it. The workers were cutting its wrists.

Chaison frowned at the destruction. Everywhere he looked, he saw men and women shredding the work of centuries. Some were weeping as they worked, jewellike tears joining with the sawdust and torn leaves to make a fine mist that was slowly pervading the city. They were doing all this on Chaison’s orders.

He knew the emotions all of this ruin should be causing in him, but he couldn’t feel anything. Partly that was due to exhaustion, of course; but while Chaison was intensely busy, he had also found himself distracted all day. Memories kept assailing him, of significant moments in his life. Even during his darkest times in Falcon’s prison, he had been able to cling to a faint hope that if the walls magically flew away and he was transported home by some miraculous force, he would
be
home. He had been suspended, perhaps, kept away from his real life by circumstance; but that real life was still out there, waiting, if forlornly, for him to return.

Now, as he drew plans and gave orders to the very foreigners who had imprisoned him, he recognized that on some level he was letting go of that life. If he were to return, things would not be the same. Kestrel believed him a traitor, and that meant that most, maybe all of his countrymen must too. He had gambled with that possibility but, at the time, Venera had been at his side and he had felt brave enough to risk a loss of country. He would, after all, still have her.

But if she believed he were dead? If she learned that his name was blackened beyond repair now? She was too much the pragmatist, and he was too much the realist to believe she would remain the solitary widow for long.

Maybe he had been doomed from the start. On the evening that he had arrived to begin his very first diplomatic mission—more than ten years ago now—Chaison had found himself scrubbing small droplets of blood off his face and hands over a gold-rimmed basin. His traveling companion was doing the same in the basin next to his. Around them the walls murmured faintly with the many comings and goings of the palace of Hale.

“I can’t get the damn smell of gunsmoke out of my hair,” said Antonin Kestrel. This had been his first mission for the pilot as well. The two men (so young they had been!) glanced at one another ruefully as they scrubbed.

Naturally there were no leads as to who had tried to have them killed earlier that afternoon. He and Kestrel had been led into an ambush in an alley by their official guide, and only good swordsmanship and the intervention of a passing stranger had saved them. (He had no idea at the time, but that passing stranger had been his future wife, Venera.) The local authorities professed to be outraged, and were, he’d been told, torching the neighborhood where the attack had happened, just to be safe. Chaison imagined someone in a sumptuous palace lounge planning the whole thing, offering the destruction of an undesirable block of buildings as a bonus to the paranoid king of Hale.

They continued cleaning up, and neither spoke for a long time. Then Chaison said what was on both their minds. “Do you think we were sent here to be disposed of?”

“By Hale’s king?” asked Kestrel, scowling at the lemon-yellow wallpaper. “Or our own pilot?”

“I hate to say this,” Chaison said with a grimace, “but it could be either—or both.”

Chaison Fanning’s crimson dress uniform did not mark him as coming from a family that had any hope of succession to the throne of Slipstream. This might not matter; the wandering nation he called home was kept together more by external threats than internal cohesion. Chaison represented the admiralty—was their bright young hope—and the admiralty’s power was the pilot’s chief worry. Kestrel was from the civil service. Did the pilot see them both as future threats? He had claimed that sending only Chaison and one companion to Hale would be seen as a gesture of trust by the king; it also made it easier to kill them once they got here.

Kestrel gave up on his hair. “The problem, old man, is that we have to play our parts, no matter what. Even if it means walking into more traps.”

Chaison had nodded stoically. His “part” on that occasion was to tell the paranoid king of the backward little nation that Slipstream had no intention of altering the trajectory of two cities, holding half a million people between them, that were on a collision course with Hale. While air moved quickly within Virga, massive objects like asteroids, lakes, and cities tended to maintain majestically slow orbits, circling around Candesce and rising and falling in the fountains of air that the great sun of suns propelled outward. Unlike most nations, Slipstream had tied its fortunes—literally—to a mountain of rock that obstinately steered its own course around the world, indifferent to politics or economics. Slipstream was about to brush past Hale. The friction of its passing could be minimal, or huge. This was the message Chaison was to deliver to the crabbed old murderer who sat uneasily on Hale’s throne.

In retrospect, it was almost obvious that the most convenient outcome for both Slipstream and Hale would be the messenger’s death. Just as it was obvious in hindsight that the pilot of Slipstream had known about Falcon’s imminent attack, and had been prepared to allow it to happen for some reason—perhaps as a joint operation between Falcon and Slipstream to intimidate the Gretels, with no real conquest and some stronger alliance to come out of it. Maybe Chaison hadn’t been set up to fall this time, but he’d made himself a convenient patsy anyway.

He’d always thought he was a realist. It was starting to hit home to Chaison just how much of a dreamer he’d really been.

THE DISTANT SUNS
were shutting down again, the sky painted in tones of mauve and amber, when Antaea’s troublesome admiral finally stumbled into the circus dormitory. Antaea had arranged for them to be given the same room—pinioning the place’s self-styled concierge with a withering stare when he objected—and was already here. She had even managed to sleep a couple of hours, but the fear of him walking in on her as she slept kept waking her up. That, and drifting thoughts about the things he’d said after their ridiculous revivalist induction into Corbus’s defense league. Chaison had talked like one of the heroes from the storybooks she’d once read for Telen (and herself). She’d never believed that heroes like that existed in real life, but you could be wistful and dream sometimes. Yet here he was, the noble admiral, sacrificing himself to save a city. It was romantic, and ridiculous, and extremely confusing.

With Corbus’s defense league only hours old, there was no reason Chaison should receive the message telling him where to sleep, so Antaea was both surprised and relieved when he stalked down the little centrifuge’s narrow flight of steps and came to a halt in the center of the living room. He looked dazed.

“So,” she said brightly, “how was your day?” She had changed into a black silk robe with long-necked birds embroidered on it. He didn’t seem to notice either her irony or her attire as he rubbed a hand across his brow.

“This is going to be a disaster. I tried to convince them to posture—mount a credible-looking defense and then negotiate for better surrender terms. They want to fight. I don’t understand why they insist on doing it, they’ll just lose more that way.”

“I understand them,” said Antaea. She stood up, feeling the Coriolis and centrifugal forces of the dormitory cylinder pulling the different parts of her in different directions. He collapsed on a couch under a huge set of crossed circus javelins, and she came to sit on a yellow-and-red star-spangled drum, draped with blankets, that served as the room’s only other seat. “You need to spend some time out in the streets. Then you’d see.”

He grimaced. “I was out for a while. It’s a beautiful city, aye. I’m not sure the Gretels would dismantle it. It’s exactly the sort of prize they’re after.”