Queen of Candesce (16 page)

“No deal.” He stood up and gestured to the others to follow him as he walked to the metal door.

“A printing press!” she called after him. He looked back, puzzled. “In order for that money to work,” she continued, “don't you need to mint thousands of copies of the bills and put them into circulation? It has to be used by everybody to work, right? So where's your printing press?”

He glanced at his people. “It'll happen.”

“Oh? What if I offered you your own mint—delivery of the presses in a month—as well as a solid budget to print your money?”

Bryce appeared to think about it, then reached for the door handle.

“And what if you had an impregnable place to house the press?” she called, frantically reaching for the only other thing she could think to offer. “
What if Buridan Tower was yours?
”

One of his lieutenants put a hand on Bryce's arm. He glared at the man, then made a sour face and turned. “Why on Spyre would we trust you to keep your end of the bargain?”

“The tower contains proof that I'm an imposter,” she said quickly. “The council is going to want to visit it, I'm sure of it—but how can I clean it up and make it presentable? None of my new servants could be trusted with the secret. But you could—and you could take photographs, do what you need to do to assemble proof that I'm not the heir. So you'll have that to hold over me. You'll have the tower, you'll have money, and as much influence as I can spare for you.”

He was thinking about it, she could tell—and the others were impressed as well. “Best of all,” she added before he could change his mind, “if my deception is ultimately revealed, you may get your civil war anyway. What could be better?”

Bryce walked slowly back to her. “Again I say, why should we trust you? If there's proof as you say in Buridan Tower…if you'd even let us get there before the police descended on us…Too many ifs, Ms. Thrace-Guiles.”

“I'll draft you a note right now,” she said. “Made out to the night watch at the elevators, to let your people ride the elevator down to Buridan Tower. You can do it right now and release me after you're sure I'm right.”

“And be trapped there when your charade is exposed?”

That was just too much for Venera. “Then forget it, you bastard!” she yelled at him. “Go on, get out! I'm sure you're far too busy playing the romantic revolutionary leader. Go and sacrifice the lives of a few more of your friends to convince the rest of them that you're actually doing something. Oh, and blow up a few women and babies for good measure. I'm sure that'll make you feel better—or start your damned war and kill ten thousand innocents, I don't care! Just get out of my sight!”

Bryce's face darkened with anger, but he didn't move. Finally he stalked over and scowled at her. Venera glared back.

“Bring this woman some paper,” he said. “You'll write that note,” he said in a low voice, “and we'll see what we can find in Buridan Tower.”

 

The streets had not changed since his childhood. Garth Diamandis strode familiar ways, but after such a long absence it was as if he saw them with new eyes. His town-wheel, officially known as Wheel 3, had been called Hammerlong for centuries. Its riveted iron diameter spanned nearly a mile, and the inside surface on which the buildings were set was nearly half that wide. It had spun for five hundred years. In that time, the layout of Hammerlong's gargoyled buildings had been rearranged—or not where they accommodated stubborn holdouts—dozens of times. New edifices had hiked their buttresses over the shoulders of older ones as the population grew, then shrank, then grew again. The wheel had been fixed, reinforced, rejigged, and thrown out of whack by weight imbalances so often that its constant creaking and groaning was like background music to the citizens who lived there. The smell of rust permeated everything.

With finite space, the citizens of the wheel had jammed new buildings in between existing ones; corkscrewed them inward and outward from the rim; overgrown what was original with the new. Streamlined towers hung like knife blades below the rim, their bottom-most floors straining under nearly two gravities while the stacked apartments overhead converged to shadow the streets and a second layer of avenues, then a third, were built up where weight diminished. Ying-yang stairs, elevator cables, ancient rust-dribbling spokes, and leaking pipes all knotted together at the smoke-wreathed axis. Ships and shuttles clustered there like grazing flies.

Hammerlong seemed designed for skulking and the population did just that. Most were citizens of nations based on Greater Spyre, after all, so they brought the paranoia of that realm with them to the city. Those born and raised in Hammerlong and the other wheels were more open, but they formed a separate class and had fewer rights in their own towns. Left to their own devices, they cultivated a second economy and culture in the alleys, air shafts, and crawlspaces of the layered city.

Garth was on a third-level street when the full force of nostalgia hit him. He had to stop, his imagination filling in gaps in the crowds that scurried to and fro like so many black-clad ants. He saw the young dandies of his youth, swaggering and hipshot to display their pistols; the young ingenues leaning on their balconies high above, their attention apparently elsewhere. He had walked or run or fled down these ways dozens of times.

Some of his old compatriots were dead, he knew, some had moved on to build prosperous families and deny their youths. Others…the prisons were still full, one of Venera Fanning's new carpenters had told him this morning. And, if one knew where to look, and how to read…there, yes, he saw a thin scrawl of graffiti on a wall ten feet beyond the parapet. Made with chalk, it was barely visible unless you knew to look for it.
REPEAL EDICT
1, said the spiky letters.

Garth smiled. Ah, the naivete of youth! Edict 1 had been passed so long ago that most citizens of Spyre didn't even know it existed, nor would they have understood its significance if it were described to them. The hotheaded youth of Spyre were still political, it seemed, and still as incompetent at promoting their politics as in his day. Witness that appalling bomb attack the other day.

The memory chased all sentimentality out of Garth's mind. His mouth set in a stoic frown, he continued on down the street, digging his hands deep into his coat pockets and avoiding the glances of the few women who frequented the walkway. His aching feet carried him to stairs and more stairs, and his knees and hips began to protest at the labor. The last time he'd gone this way he'd been able to run all the way up.

Hundreds of feet above the official street level of Hammerlong, a bridge had been thrown between two buildings back in the carefree Reconstructionist period. Culture and art had flourished here before the time of the preservationists, even before the insular paranoia that had swallowed all the great nations.

The bridge was two stories tall and faced with leaded glass windows that caught the light of Candesce. It wasn't used by occupants of either tower; the forges of one had little use for the papermaking enterprise in the other. For decades, the lofting, sunlit spaces of the bridge had been used by bohemian artists—and the agitators and revolutionaries who loved them.

Garth's heart was pounding as he took the last few steps up a wrought-iron fire escape at the center of the span. He paused to catch his breath next to the wrought-iron curlicues of the door, and listened to the scratchy gramophone music that emanated from it. Then he rapped on the door.

The gramophone stopped. He heard scrambling noises, muffled voices. Then the door cracked open an inch. “Yes?” a man said belligerently.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Garth said with a broad smile. “I'm looking for someone.”

“Well, they're not here.” The door started to close.

Garth laughed richly. “I'm not with the secret police, young pup. I used to live here.”

The door hesitated. “I painted this iron about…oh, twenty years ago,” Garth said, tracing his finger along the curves of metal. “It was rusting out, just like the one in the back bathroom. Do the pipes still knock when you run the water?”

“What do you want?” The voice held a little less harshness.

Garth withdrew his hand from the remembered metal. With difficulty he brought his attention back to the present. “I know she doesn't live here now,” he said. “Too much time has passed. But I had to start somewhere and this was the last place we were together. I don't suppose you know…any of the former occupants of the place?”

“Just a minute.” The door closed, then opened again, widely this time. “Come in.” Garth stepped into the sunlit space and was overwhelmed by memory.

The factory planks paving the floor had proven perfect for dancing. He remembered stepping into and out of that parallelogram of sunlight—though there had been a table next to it and he'd banged his hip—while she sang along with the gramophone. That same gramophone sat on a windowsill now, guarded by twin potted orange trees. A mobile of candles and wire turned slowly in the dusty sunlight, entangling his view of the loft behind it. Where he'd slept, and made love, and played his dulcimer for years…

“Who are you after?” A young woman with cropped black hair stood before him. She wore a man's clothing and held a tattoo needle loosely in one hand. Another woman sat at the table behind her, shoulder bared and bleeding.

Garth took a deep breath and committed the name to speech for the first time in twenty years. “Her name is Selene. Selene Diamandis…”

Spyre was awe-inspiring even at a distance of ten miles. Venera held onto netting in a rear-facing doorway of the passenger liner
Glorious Dawn
and watched the vast blued circle recede in the distance. First one cloud shot by to obscure a quadrant of her view, then another, then a small team of them that whirled slowly in the ship's wake. They chopped Spyre up into fragmented images: a curve of green trees here, a glint of window in some tower (Liris?). Then, instead of clouds, it was blockhouses and barbed wire flicking by. They were passing the perimeter. She was free.

She turned, facing into the interior of the ship. The velvet-walled galleries were crowded with passengers, mostly visiting delegations returning from the Fair. But a few of the men and women were dressed in the iron and leather of a major nation: Buridan. Her retainers, maids, the Buridan trade delegation…she wasn't free yet, not until she had found a way to evade all of them.

Now that she was undisputed head of the nation of Buridan, Venera had new rights. The right to travel freely, for example; it had taken only a simple request and a travel visa had been delivered to her the next day. Of course she couldn't simply wave good-bye and leave. Nobody was fully convinced that she was who she said she was. So, it had been necessary for her to invent a pointless trade tour of the principalities to justify this trip. And that in turn meant that she could not be traveling alone.

Still, after weeks of running, of being captured by Liris and made chattel; after run-ins with bombers and bombs, hostile nobility, and mad botanists—after all of that, she had simply boarded a ship and left. Life was never like you imagined it would be.

And she could just keep going, she knew—all the way back to her home in Rush. The idea was tempting, but it wasn't why she had undertaken this expedition. It was too soon to return home. She didn't yet have enough power to undertake the revenge she planned against the Pilot of Slipstream. If she left now it would be as a thief, with only what she could carry to see her home. No, when she finally did leave Spyre, it must be with power at her back.

The only way to get that power was to increase her holdings here, as well as the faith of the people in her. So, like Liris and all the other nations of Spyre, Buridan would visit the outer world to find
customers.

Her smile faltered as the last of the barbed wire and mines swept by to vanish among the clouds. True, if she just kept going she wouldn't miss anything of Spyre, she mused. Yet even as she thought this Venera experienced a little flash of memory: of Garth Diamandis laughing in sunlight, then of Eilen leaning on a wall after drinking too much at the party.

Last night Venera too had drunk too much wine, with Garth Diamandis. Sitting in a lounge that smelled of fresh paint and plaster, they had listened to the night noises of the house and talked.

“You're not kidding either of us,” he'd said. “You're leaving for good. I know that. So let me tell you now, while I can, that you've stripped many years off my shoulders, Lady Venera Fanning. I hope you find your home intact and waiting for you.” He toasted her then.

“I'll prove you wrong about me yet,” she'd said. “But what about you? When all of this really is finished with, what are you going to do? Fade into the alleys of the town-wheels? Return to your life as a gigolo?”

He shook his head with a smile. “The past is the past. I'm interested in the future. Venera…I found her.”

Venera had smiled, genuinely happy for him. “Ah. Your mysterious woman. Your prime mover. Well, I'm glad.”

He'd nodded vigorously. “She's sent me a letter, telling where and when we can meet. In the morning, you'll head for the docks and your destiny, and I'll be off to the city and mine. So you see, we've both won.”

They toasted one another, and Spyre and eventually the whole world before the night became a happy blur.

She kicked off from the ship's netting, almost colliding with one of the crew, and began hauling her way up the corridor to the bow of the ship. One of her new maids fell into formation next to her.

“Is there something wrong, lady?” The maid, Brydda, wrung her hands. Her normally sour face looked even more prudish as she frowned. “Is it leaving Spyre that's upset you so?”

Venera barked a laugh. “It couldn't happen soon enough. No.” She kept hand-walking up the rope that led to the bow.

“Can I do anything for you?”

She shot Brydda an appraising look. “You've traveled before, haven't you? You were put onto my staff by the council, I'll bet. To watch me.”

“Madam!”

“Oh, don't deny it. Just come with. I need a…distraction. You can point out the sights as we go.”

“Yes, madam.”

They arrived at a forward observation lounge in time for the ship to exit the cloud banks. The
Glorious Dawn
was a typical passenger vessel: a spindle-shaped wooden shell one hundred fifty feet long and forty wide, its surface punctuated with rows of windows and open wickerwork galleries. Big jet nacelles were mounted on short arms at the stern, their whine subdued right now as the ship made a scant fifteen miles per hour through the thinning clouds. The ship's interior was subdivided into staterooms and common areas and contained two big exercise centrifuges. With the engine sound a constant undertone, Venera could easily hear the clink of glassware in the kitchens, muted conversations, and somewhere, a string quartet tuning up. The lounge smelled of coffee and fresh air.

Such a contrast to the
Rook,
the last ship she had flown on. When she'd left it the Slipstream cruiser had stank of unwashed men, stale air, and rocket exhaust. Its hull had been peppered with bullet holes and scorched by explosions. The engines' roar would pierce your dreams as you slept and the only voices were those of arguing, cursing airmen.

The
Glorious Dawn
was just like every vessel she had ever traveled on prior to the
Rook.
Its luxuries and details were appropriate to one of Venera's station in life; she should be able to put the ship on like a favorite glove. In the normal course of affairs she would never have set foot on a ship like the
Rook,
much less would she have seen it through battle and boarding, pursuit and silent running.

Yet the quiet comforts of the
Glorious Dawn
annoyed her. Venera went right up to the main window of the lounge and peered out. “Tell me where we are,” she commanded the maid.

There was distraction to be found in this view. Candesce lay ahead, its brilliance too intense to be looked at directly. Venera well knew that light; it had burned her as she'd fled from its embrace. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked past it.

She saw the principalities of Candesce. Although she had spent a week in a charcoal-harvester's cabin perched on a burnt arm of the sargasso of Leaf's Choir, that place had been too close to Candesce; the white air cradling the Sun of Suns washed out any details that lay past it. Here, for the first time, she had a clear view of the nations that surrounded that biggest of Virga's artificial lights. And the sight was breathtaking.

Candesce lay at the center of the world, a beacon and a heart to Virga. Anything within a hundred miles of the Sun of Suns simply vanished in flame, a fact that the principalities exploited to dispose of trash, industrial wastes, and the bodies of their dead. This forbidden zone was completely empty, so Venera could see the whole inner surface of the two-hundred-mile-diameter bubble formed by it. On the far side of Candesce that surface was just a smooth speckled gray-green; in the middle distances Venera could make out dots and glitter, and individual beads of leaf color. As she turned to follow the curve of the material toward her the dots became buildings and the glints became the mirrored surfaces of house-sized spheres of water. The beads of green grew filigreed detail and became forests—dozens or hundreds of trees at a time with their roots intertwined around some buried ball of dirt and rocks.

Candesce presided at the center of a cloud of city whose inner extent was two hundred miles in diameter—and whose outer reaches could only be guessed at. The fog of habitations and farms receded into blue dimness, behind lattices of white cloud. Back in the darkening airs a hundred or two hundred miles away, smaller suns glowed.

“These are the principalities,” said Brydda, sweeping her arm to take in the sight. “Sixty-four nations, countless millions of people moving at the mercy of Candesce's heat.”

Venera glanced at her. “What do you mean by that? ‘At the mercy of'?”

The maid looked chagrined. “Well, they can't keep station where they please, the way Spyre does. Spyre is fixed in the air, madam, always has been. But these—” she dismissed the principalities with a wave—“they go where the breezes send them. All that keeps them together as nations is the stability of the circulation patterns.”

Venera nodded. The cluster of nations she'd grown up in, Meridian, worked the same way. Candesce's prodigious heat had to go somewhere, and beyond the exclusion zone it must form the air into Hadley cells: semistable up- and downdrafts. You could enter such a cell at the bottom, near Candesce, and be lofted a hundred miles up, then swept horizontally for another hundred miles, then down again until you reached your starting point. The Meridian Hadley cell was huge—a thousand miles across and twice that in depth—and nearly permanent. Down here in the principalities the heat would make the cells less stable, but quicker and stronger.

“So there's one nation per Hadley cell?” she asked. “That seems altogether too well-organized.”

The maid laughed. “It's not that simple. The cells break up and merge, but it takes time. Every time Candesce goes into its night-cycle the heat stops going out and the cells falter. Candesce always comes back on in time to start them up again but not without consequence.”

Venera understood what she meant by
consequence.
Without predictable airflow, whole countries could break apart, their provinces drifting away from one another, mixing with neighbors and enemies. It had happened often enough in Meridian, where the population was light and obstacles few. Down here, such an event would be catastrophic.

Brydda continued her monologue, pointing out border beacons and other sights of interest. Venera half-listened, musing at something she'd known intellectually but not grasped until this moment. She had been inside—had for one night been
in control of
—the most powerful device in the word. Whole cities rose and fell in a slow majestic dance driven by Candesce—as did forests, mists of green food crops and isolated buildings, clouds and ships and factories, supply nets a mile across, whale and bird paddocks. Ships and dolphins and ropeways and flapping, foot-finned humans threaded through it all.

She'd had ultimate power in her hands and had let it go without a thought. Strange.

Venera turned her attention back to Brydda. As the
Glorious Dawn
turned, however, she saw that Spyre lay in a kind of dimple in the surface of the bubble. The giant cylinder disrupted the smooth winds of the cells that surrounded it. Wrapped in its own weather, Spyre was an irritant, a mote in the gargantuan orb of the principalities.

“How they must hate you,” she murmured.

 

Slipstream had an ambassador at the Fitzmann States, an old and respected principality near Spyre. So it was that Buridan's trade delegation made its first stop there.

For two days Venera feted the local wealthy and talked horses—horses as luxury items, horses as tourist draws, as symbols of state power and a connection to the lost origins of Virga. She convinced no one, but since she was hosting the parties, her guests went away entertained and slightly tipsy. The arrangement suited everyone.

There was nothing scheduled for the third morning, and Venera awoke early with a very strange notion in her head.

Leave now.

She could do it. Oh, it would be so simple. She imagined her marriage bed in her chambers in Rush, and a wave of sorrow came over her. She was up and dressed before her thinking caught up to her actions. She hesitated, while Candesce and the rest of the capital town of Fitzmann still slept. She paced in front of her rented apartment's big windows, shaking her head and muttering. Every now and then she would glance out the window at the dark silhouette of the Slipstream ambassador's residence. She need only make it there and claim asylum and Spyre and all its machinations would lie behind her.

Slowly, as if her mind were on something else, she slipped a pistol into her bag and reached for a set of wings inside the closet. At that moment there came a knock on her door.

Venera came to herself, shocked to see what she had been doing. She leaned against the wall for a moment, debating whether to step into the closet and shut herself in it. Then she cursed and walked to the door of the suite. “Who's there?” she asked testily.

“It's Brydda, ma'am. I've a letter for you.”

“A letter?” She threw open the door and glared at the maid, who was dressed in a nightgown and clutching a white envelope in one hand. She saw Brydda's eyes widen as she took in Venera's fully dressed state. Venera snatched the letter from her and said, “Lucky thing that I couldn't sleep. But how dare you come to disturb me in the middle of the night over this!”

“I'm sorry!” Brydda curtsied miserably. “The man who delivered it was very insistent that you read it now. He says he needs a signed receipt from you saying you've read it—and he's waiting in the foyer…”

Venera flipped the envelope over. The words
Amandera Thrace-Guiles
were written on it. There was no other seal or indication of its origin. Uneasy, Venera retreated into the room. “Wait there a moment.” She went over to the writing desk; not seeing a letter opener anywhere handy, she slit the envelope open using the knife she'd been keeping in her vest. Then she unfolded the single sheet under the green desk lamp.