Analog SFF, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Margit is going to guarantee Venera's loyalty by injecting her with a drug that will cause madness unless regular doses of an antidote are provided. Venera knows that time is running out, but there are things she must know. She visits the Fair to ask about goings-on in the outside world. Almost immediately she learns that her husband, Admiral Chaison Fanning, has been reported killed in a great battle on the far side of the world.

  Overcome with ice-cold grief and outrage, Venera confronts Margit in her bedchamber. The two women fight but Venera gets the upper hand, injecting the botanist with her own diabolical drug and sending her screaming into the night. Then, assembling the stunned citizens of Liris, she declares Margit's most tragic victim to be the nation's new botanist. Then she walks away from Liris, with no plan and no home anymore to escape to. Alone, aimless and hopeless, she returns to the one man in Spyre she can trust: Garth Diamandis.

  * * * *

  Venera has been listed as a traitor in her adopted home of Slipstream and cannot return to the court intrigues of her childhood home in Hale. For a while she drifts in a state of numb despair, living like a vagabond with Garth Diamandis in the wilds of Greater Spyre. When she learns there may be a way off of Spyre, though, she's faced with making a choice. Either go home and confront the fact of Chaison Fanning's death; or delay the inevitable. She decides to delay, by telling herself that she needs power to exact revenge on those responsible for Chaison's death. She will stay here in Spyre until she has that power.

  Garth knows of a way to get it. Observant as he is, he's seen that she carries an ancient signet ring (taken from the treasure of Anetene in the last book) marked with the symbol of a horse. If the ring is what he thinks it is, vast riches may be theirs for the taking. But it won't be easy: to learn the truth they have to brave the deadly airfall, a region of Greater Spyre where the ground has given way and torrents of wind blast down and out of the world. Garth leads Venera along hidden paths to the gates of a forlorn tower that stands alone in the midst of the airfall. There, her ring turns out to work as a key, letting them in to Buridan Tower, which has not been entered in two hundred years.

  Venera takes the identity of Amandera Thrace-Guiles, last heir of Buridan, and rises up the Buridan elevator to Lesser Spyre to claim an inheritance that has been waiting for an heir for centuries. Naturally the great powers of Spyre are skeptical of her claim—none more so than Jacoby Sarto, spokesman for the feared nation of Sacrus. Sarto does his best to torpedo Venera's claim, an effort that culminates in a confrontation during her confirmation interview. Sacrus, it turns out, is the homeland of Margit. Sarto knows about the key to Candesce and reveals that Sacrus has it.

  During these escapades Venera also has a run-in with a local insurgent group, which is led by a young man she finds attractive: Bryce is of noble background but has adopted the Cause, which is to reintroduce a form of emergent democracy to Spyre, and eventually Virga itself. Venera thinks he's doomed to fail, but he emerges as a key ally as events unfold.

  So now she has the wealth and power she craved—even if her hold on it is tenuous. What to do? Venera's not willing to admit the growing sense of affection she feels for Garth, or the equally unfamiliar sense of loyalty she's learning. She decides to leave Spyre. At the same time, Garth is completing his own quest, a search for someone named Selene Diamandis. They part ways, two battle-scarred veterans of long emotional wars, with no expectation that they will ever meet again.

  * * * *

  12

  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 only taken a simple request and a travel visa had been delivered to her the next day. Of course she couldn't simply wave goodbye 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?” she asked. “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.”

  “M
adam!”

  “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 wicker-work 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 stunk 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 directly 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 blue-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: semi-stable up- and down-drafts. 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 nations 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 world. 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 clutched 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.

  TO: Venera Fanning

  FROM:—

  SUBJECT: Master Flance, otherwise known as Garth Diamandis

  We have arrested your accomplice (above-named). As an exiled criminal, he has no rights in Greater or Lesser Spyre. If you want him to continue living, you will return immediately to Spyre and await our instructions.

  She swore and knocked over the writing desk. The lamp broke and went out. “My lady!” shouted Brydda from the doorway.

  “Shut up! Get out! Don't disturb me again!” She slammed the door in the maid's face and began pacing, the letter mangled in her fist.

  How dare they! This was obviously Sacrus asserting their hold over her—but in the most clumsy and insulting manner possible. There was a message in their bluntness and it was simple: They had neither the need nor the patience to treat her carefully. She would do as they asked, or they would kill Garth.