Queen of Candesce (6 page)

One of the attackers was hanging back. As his face intersected a shaft of light she realized it was the boy who had warned her. He held his sword up, wavering, in front of his face and ducked away from the embattled older men.

It took Venera a few seconds to realize that two of the men bouncing from wall to wall were now dead. There were black beads dotting the air—blood—and more was trailing the bodies, which continued to move but only languidly, from momentum. One was the guide who had brought the two noblemen here; another was one of the attackers.

“Stand down!” Chaison's voice startled Venera so much that she nearly lost her grip on the wall. The remaining three attackers paused, holding onto ropes and bent shingles, and stared at their dead compatriots. The boy looked sick. Then one of his companions grabbed his arm and, with a roar of anger, jumped.

He spun away, slashed in the face by Chaison's companion. The other man had his sword knocked out of his hand by Chaison, who finished the uppercut motion with a blow to his jaw.

The boy was hanging in midair with his sword held out in front of him. Chaison glimpsed him out of the corner of his eye, spun and—stopped.

The blade trembled an inch from the boy's nose. He went white as a sheet.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” said Chaison. His voice was soft, soothing—in total contrast to the bellow he had given moments ago. “Who sent you here?”

The boy gulped and, seeing that he still held his sword, he let go it spasmodically. As it drifted away he said, “B-big man from palace. Red feather in his hat. Didn't give a name.”

Chaison made a sour face. “All right. Now off with you. Find another line of work—oh, and some better friends.” He reached for his companion's wrist and they locked arms to coordinate their flight. Together they turned to leave.

The man who'd been struck in the chin suddenly snapped his head up and raised his arm. A snub-nosed pistol gleamed in his grimy fist. The boy gasped as he aimed it point-blank at the back of Chaison's head.

Bang!
A spray of blood filled the air and the boy shrieked.

Venera peered through the blue cloud of gunsmoke. Chaison's would-be assassin was twitching in the air, and both noblemen were staring past him, at her.

She returned the pistol to her carrying bag. “I-I saw you were in trouble,” she said, surprised at how calm she sounded. “There was no time to warn you.”

Chaison glided over. He looked impressed. “Thank you, madam,” he said, graciously ducking his head. “I owe you my life.”

In her fantasies Venera always had a perfect comeback line at moments like this. What she actually said was, “Oh, I don't know about that.”

He laughed.

Then he extended his hand. “Come. We'll need to explain ourselves to the local police.”

Venera flushed and backed away. She couldn't be caught out here—quite apart from the scandal, her father would ask too many questions. The papers she had just recovered might come to his attention and then she was as good as dead.

“I can't,” she said and, turning, kicked off from the corner as hard as she could.

She heard him shouting for her to stop, but Venera kept on and didn't look back until she had passed through three crowded markets and slipped down five narrow alleys between soon-to-collide buildings. Cautiously, she worked her way back to the palace and changed in the guardroom while the man she'd bribed to let her out and in again waited nervously outside.

The next time she saw Chaison Fanning it would be two nights later, over the rim of a wineglass. He told her much later that his astonishment when he recognized her completely drove out all thoughts of the new treaty with Hale that he was celebrating. Certainly the expression on his face was priceless.

Venera had her own reason to smile, as she had learned who had tried to have this handsome young admiral killed. And as she danced with Chaison Fanning, she mused about what exact words she would use when she confronted her father. She already knew what it was she would be asking him for in exchange for her silence regarding his non-royal origins.

For the first time in her young life, Venera Fanning began to conceive of an existence for herself away from the intrigue and cruelty of the Court of Hale.

A thick cable rose from the roof of the nation of Liris. Venera squinted at it, then at the blunderbusses the soldiers cradled. Another, larger blunderbuss was mounted on a pivot under a little roof nearby. That must be the damnable gun whose firing kept waking her up in the morning.

None of those ancient arms looked very accurate. She could probably just jump off the roof and run for it…but run where? Chances were she'd be snapped up by some neighbor worse than these people.

She decided—for the tenth time today—to remain patient and see what happened. No one in Liris seemed to have any immediate desire to harm her. Her best strategy was to play along with them until the moment came when she could escape.

“Now pay attention,” whined Samson Odess. The fish-faced little man had been introduced yesterday as her new “boss.” The very idea of a commoner giving her orders without an immediate threat to back them up struck Venera as both bizarre and funny. She had so far done the things he had asked but Odess seemed to sense that she wasn't taking him seriously. He was becoming ever more defensive as the morning wore on.

“This is our lifeline to Lesser Spyre,” Odess said, slapping the cable. Venera saw that he stood on a low platform, at the center of which was a boxy machine that clamped the cable with big ratchet wheels. “By means of this engine, we can rise to the city above, where the Great Fair is held once a week. Visitors from everywhere in the world come to the Fair. It is the trade delegation's sacred task to ensure that we conduct the most advantageous transactions in the name of Liris.” As he spoke the rest of the delegation popped up through the roof's one hatch. Four heavily armed men bracketed an iron box that must have held pithed cherries. Flanking them were two men and two women, the women veiled like Venera and dressed in ceremonial robes of highly polished silver inlayed with crimson enamel.

“Is the gravity the same up there as it is here?” Venera asked. If it was a standard g, they wouldn't be able to move. Odess shook his head vigorously.

“You can see the spin rate from down here. We'll shed our heavy vestments for city clothes once we're up there.”

“Why not change down here?” she asked, puzzled.

Odess goggled at her in astonishment. He'd stared exactly that way yesterday, when he was first introduced. Moss had taken Venera to Odess's office, a glorified closet that made her wonder if Diamandis's pack-rat ways might not be the rule here, rather than the exception. Odess had filled the small space over the years, perhaps his whole lifetime, with oddments and souvenirs that likely made sense to no one but him. What was the significance of that single shoe, mounted as though it were a trophy and given its own little niche in the wall? Could anyone read the faded text on those certificates hung behind his chair? And was that some sort of exotic mobile that drooled from the dimness overhead, or the hanging mummified remains of some sort of animal? Books were stacked everywhere, and a pile of dishes three feet tall teetered next to a rolled-up mattress.

Odess's first words were addressed to Moss, not Venera. “You expect us to accept this…this
outsider
in our midst?”

“Is th-that not what you d-do?” Moss had asked. “G-go
outside
?” Startled, Venera had sent him a sidelong look. Was there somebody home behind those glazed eyes, after all?

“B-besides, the b-botanist commanded it.”

“Oh, God.” Odess had put his head in his hands. “She thinks she can do anything now.”

Any slight deviation from routine or custom threw Odess into a panic. Venera's very presence was upsetting him, though the rest of the delegation had been pathetically happy to meet her. They would have partied until dawn if she hadn't begged off early, pointing out that she had not yet seen the room where she was expected to sleep for the rest of her life.

Eilen, Mistress of Scales and Measures, had shown Venera to a closet just outside the delegation's long, cabinet-lined office. The closet was seven feet on a side—its walls of whitewashed stone—and nearly twelve feet high. There was room for a bed and a small table, and there was no window. “You can put your chest under the bed,” Eilen said, “when you get one. Your clothes you can hang on those pegs for now.”

And that was all. If Venera were inclined to sympathy with other people, she would have been saddened at the thought that Eilen, Odess, and the others accepted conditions like these as the norm. After all, they had likely been born and raised in such tiny chambers. Their playgrounds were dusty servants' ways, their schoolrooms window niches. Yet of all the citizens of Liris, they were the privileged ones, for as members of the delegation they were allowed to see something of the world outside their walls.

While Odess sputtered and tried to explain why tradition demanded that they rise to Lesser Spyre in full ceremonial gear, Venera watched the soldiers deposit their precious cargo on the platform. After the rest of the delegation was on board, they flipped up railings on all sides (to her relief ) and one bent to examine the archaic engine. This was what really interested her.

“If we're all ready, we will sing the ‘Hymn of Ascension,'” said Odess portentously.

Venera looked around. “The what?”

He looked as though he'd been slapped—but Eilen put a hand on his arm. “We didn't tell her about it, so how would she know?”

“Anyone in Spyre could see us arise, hear the…” He realized his mistake. “Ah yes. A true foreigner.” Shaking himself, he put both hands on the rail and puffed out his cheeks. “Listen, then, and learn the ways of a civilized society.”

While they sang their little ditty Venera watched the soldier spark the hulking rotary engine into life. Its chattering roar immediately drowned out the miniature choir, who didn't seem to notice. The wheel turned, gripping the cable, and the platform inched slowly into the air.

The purpose of the railings soon became clear. Only a few yards above the rooftop they caught the edge of the howling gale that swept toward the open end of Spyre. This steady hurricane was produced by the rotation of the great wheel, Venera knew; she'd seen its like in smaller wheels like those of Rush. A wind came in at the cylinder's axis of rotation and shot out again along the rim. If she simply jumped off the platform at this point, she would be propelled out of Spyre entirely, and at goodly force.

The four soldiers were here to shoot anyone who tried that. And now that they were higher up she could see other guarantors of obedience: gun emplacements were suspended in the middle air by more cables, and some of them were visibly manned. Hanging in the sunny clouds beyond the wheel were more bunkers and turrets. It seemed a miracle now that she had, unconscious, threaded her way between them all to land here.

“Father would love this place,” she muttered.

Chaison Fanning, her missing husband, would probably consider Spyre a moral obscenity and would want to blow it up.

They rose some miles, through filigrees of cloud, puffballs that hovered like anxious angels between the incoming and out-blowing gales; past houses and pillboxes, bolted to other cables, whose glittering windows revealed nothing of what might be taking place inside them. The lands of Greater Spyre widened and widened below Venera, its patchwork estates becoming a mesmerizing labyrinth: the blockhouses of a dozen, a hundred and more nations of Liris, it seemed, painted the inside of the cylinder. Slicing through these, leaving ruin and wildflowers on their sidings, were the railways of the preservationists.

All the while, Lesser Spyre came closer.

Venera had seen a geared town once before—in the dead hollow heart of Leaf's Choir Chaison Fanning's ships had moored next to the asphyxiated city of Carlinth. But Carlinth's pale grandeur couldn't match the wonder of Lesser Spyre because that other city had been motionless in death, and Lesser Spyre lived. Its great wheel-shaped habitats, each a half-mile or more in diameter, turned edge to angled edge like the meshwork of a vast clock. The citizen of one wheel could stroll to its edge and simply step onto the surface of another as their rims came within touching distance. The wheels were kept in configuration by a lattice of giant spars and thick cables, from which black banners fluttered.

The cable car eluded gravity entirely after a while, and its passengers clipped their metal costumes to the railing and waited until their destination hove into sight. The cable terminated in a knot of dozens of others, at a complicated cagework that threaded the axle of a town-wheel. Venera could see other people embarking and disembarking there. They moved in small groups that gave one another a wide berth.

She saw something else, though, that gave her hope for the first time in days: ships were berthed here. Sleek yachts, for the most part, of many different designs and flying diverse colors—but all foreign. They signaled the possibility of escape, real escape, for the first time since her arrival.

She tapped Odess's tin shoulder and pointed. “Our customers?”

He nodded. “Pilgrims from all the principalities of Candesce come to us, hoping to leave again with some trinket or token of ours. Do you recognize any of those ships?”

Venera nodded. “That one is from Gehellen.” It was the only one she knew, but Odess was obviously impressed. “I know that we'll trade them cherries,” she went on. “But what do the rest of Spyre's countries sell?”

He laughed, and just then the platform came to rest at its terminus. As they clambered over to the axle like so many iron spiders, Odess said, “What do they trade? You ask that with refreshing innocence. If we knew what half our neighbors traded, we might arrange some extra advantage for Liris. The fame of many of Spyre's commodities is spread far and wide—but not all. There are sections of the Fair no stranger can enter without providing a guarantee of circumspection.”

“A what?”

“A hostage, sometimes,” said Eilen. They had entered a long cylindrical chamber with many small doors spiraling up its interior. Odess found one of these and, producing a massive key, unlocked it. Inside was a slot-shaped locker, its walls encrusted with rust and cobwebs, with one incongruously bright mirror at the far end. Odess and the others proceeded to strip off their metal shells, trading them for ornately tooled leather equivalents—except that in place of veils, each costume came with an elaborate mask. Odess passed a kit to Venera and she turned her back modestly to change. Her mask had a falcon's beak.

“There are nations,” Odess said, “that average one customer every ten years. Whatever it is they trade, it is so fabulously valuable that the whole country lives off the sale for a generation. That's an extreme example, but there are many others who guard the nature of their produce with their lives. Liris used to be one such. Now everyone knows what we produce, but that's actually worked to our advantage.”

“But what can those others be selling?” Venera shook her head in incomprehension. She was stretching a black jacket over a silver-traced vest, admiring herself in the mirror. With the mask in place she looked intimidating. She liked the effect.

“
She
is from one of them.” It was one of the soldiers who said it. He didn't have to say who
she
was; Venera knew he meant the botanist.

Venera raised an eyebrow. “She wasn't born in Liris?”

The soldier shook his head, glancing uneasily at Odess. “Our previous botanist…the trees were languishing, m'lady. They were dying, until she came.” Odess was scowling in obvious warning but the soldier shrugged. “Five years now, she's brought them back to health.”

“And you don't know anything about where she came from?”

“Of course we do!” Odess laughed loudly. “She's a lady of the nation of Sacrus. We know the families and lineage of Sacrus, we know who she is…even if we don't know what it is that Sacrus
does.
”

“You need better spies,” said Venera. Nobody laughed, but the thought intrigued her. Spyre, it seemed, was an investigator's playground. She would love to develop a network here, the way she had in secret in her adopted home of Slipstream.

They moved from the locker cylinder to the axle of the town-wheel. Here, dozens of yin-yang stairs and elevator shafts ran down to the copper-shingled roofs of the vast building lining the wheel. Odess showed their letters of transit to a succession of inspectors and gradually they worked their way over to one of the elevators.

“Stay alert, everyone,” Odess said as the wrought-iron doors grumbled shut behind them and they began to move down. “Watch for any signs of change. In particular, our new interpreter”—he nodded at Venera—“is going to cause a stir. We need to stick to our agreed story. You,” he said to Venera, “must only speak to the customers and then only when we ask you to. We don't want to give our rivals any clues about our capabilities or what's been going on inside Liris.”

This paranoia reminded Venera of Hale and the darkened corridors of her father's palace. “But why?” she asked in irritation. “Why this skulking?”

“Questions might be asked,” said Odess darkly. “About where you came from. About why our people might have ventured outside our walls. Where we might have gone, what we might have seen. What
you
might have seen.” He shook his head. “Your story is that you were born and raised in Liris.”

“But my accent—”

“Is why you will only speak to the customers.”

There was silence for the rest of the ride. Venera adjusted her mask, glanced around, and noted the tightening of shoulders, straightening of stances as gravity rose until it neared the level she was used to. And then the elevator clunked to a halt, and the doors opened.

The trade delegation of Liris edged cautiously into the Great Fair of Spyre.

 

Fabulous beasts swept across the dance floor, their skirts wheeling in time to the deep drumbeat of Spyre's music. The beasts had the faces of monsters, of animals, of gods. They danced in pairs, sometimes pausing in midpose as the music paused. It was during those pauses that business was transacted.