Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

by Karl Schroeder

  Flashlights swirled around and their light pinioned a door on the far wall of the gallery. The three men who'd suddenly appeared there blinked at the lights. "Uh ... Captain Sarto?" one of them said hesitantly.

  Sarto laughed. "You made it!"

  "Yes, but those things're right behind us, sir."

  "Then we'd best save the stories for later," said Sarto. "Who's got a clear idea of how to get out of here?"

  One of Sarto's men put up his hand. "I do."

  "Come on, then. Let's form up. We need one of those special guns you brought," Sarto said to Leal, "aimed at each of the six directions. We'll bunch up so they can't cut us off from each other like last time. Is everybody ready?"

  "What about..." Two of Sarto's men were cradling the bodies of their dead comrades.

  "Bring them, then," said Sarto brusquely. "But don't fall behind."

  Leal Maspeth looked around until she spotted Keir, then she flew over. "Are you sure you want to come?" she asked. "You still have time to turn and go back."

  He hesitated. The plan had made so much sense just a few hours ago--but that had been before his dragonflies had died and left him half-blind. "I don't know what to--" He shook himself. "Seems I have no choice but to go with you. If you'll have me."

  "Of course, but how are you going to get home again?"

  He shuddered. "Brink's not home."

  "Let's go!" shouted Sarto. The big-eyed woman--Antaea--was leading an unruly flock toward one of the black entrances. He should really get the weapon back; on the other hand, he'd never fired any sort of gun before today. Maybe it would do more good in her hands.

  He and Leal followed the rest. Two of her people took up the rear, one moving forward, the other clutching the back of the first one's belt. He let his comrade tow him while he faced backward. "Pull me like that?" Leal asked Keir.

  Keir wanted to say no--he couldn't see properly, freefall was making him nauseous, and there weren't even any scry tags on the people or things here--but in the end he nodded. It would be better to let Leal watch for danger coming up from behind, because he was beginning to doubt whether he would be able to see it if it came. He would just keep his two remaining eyes fixed on the backs of the people ahead of him.

  What followed was chaotic and terrifying and seemed to go on forever. They bounced, toppled, and flew up small passages like capillaries, large ones like arteries. Hissing whispering things awoke as they passed, and the darkness behind filled with the angry drone of pursuit. Startled shouts and gunshots erupted at random moments; once, everything dissolved into screaming and orange flashes and bangs for long minutes, and then Leal's hand found Keir's wrist again and pulled him onward.

  He did his best. He'd expected to lose his extra senses in Virga; it was just that he hadn't counted on the terrible feeling of helplessness that came with that loss.

  His scry had gone out for the first time in his life, and too late he was realizing that he'd relied on it far more than he'd known. Half-blind, half-deaf, he held the hand of a stranger as they fled together through a city of monsters.

  Only when the pursuit had faded behind them did he begin to feel the sharp pain in his left hand and realize he was tightly clutching something in it. He raised it in a stray beam of lantern light, and stiffly opened his fingers.

  One of his dragonflies nestled, half-crushed in his palm. Suddenly it seemed infinitely precious and he regretted leaving its brothers behind. He tenderly teased it out, and slipped it inside the pocket of his coat.

  9

  THE ICE-CHOKED CITY of Serenity fell behind, and with it the constant edge of anxiety that had become so familiar to Leal that she hardly knew it was there anymore. In the first minutes of the flight she felt a huge lifting away, as though some immense weight had lain on her heart; over the next hours that lifting continued, combined with a growing revelation that really, they were safe.

  In the little hold where the refugees from Aethyr had been put, Leal watched her lads celebrate with something like maternal affection. Their initial backslapping and cheering had faded to grins, but now they were starting to tell each other stories about the ordeal they'd been through together--stories they all knew, but were delighted to hear again.

  The biggest surprise was Piero, whom Leal had known for a few months now. She'd met him on Hayden Griffin's yacht, one black-skyed day when they'd been beset by monsters in the dark, and she'd told him a ghost story to distract them all. Now he was surprising her. "It's not so much that I think she'll be frantic with worry," he said about the wife Leal hadn't known he had, "as it's that I'm afraid she'll have remarried by the time I get back to her."

  The other lads variously grumbled and joked at that; one smacked Piero lightly on the back of the head and said, "As it is, she's not going to recognize you with all that weight you've lost." They all laughed--except for Keir Chen, who was half-curled into a silent ball on the edge of the discussion.

  Piero pressed his stomach with tentative fingers. "It's muscle," he protested; but Leal had turned away from the discussion. One of the ship's crew had appeared at the edge of the lantern light and was gesturing for her to follow him. Harper flew over to perch next to her. He looked where she was gazing, and nodded.

  "If this Antaea Argyre really has had some kind of falling-out with the Guard," he said, "then she may not take us to them."

  "All I can do is ask," said Leal. She was still astonished that her halfhearted appeal to Antaea had actually been answered. The Guard had accepted the letter from Leal, but had made it very plain that they had little intention of bringing it to Antaea herself, since they considered her a traitor.

  Leal shook her head. "Maybe she'll remember my friendship with her sister." She kicked off lightly and, following the airman who'd come for her, sailed up the center of the ship.

  She was traveling the length of two decks that visually made a floor and ceiling, but which were both rigged as floors. The ship must split lengthwise, probably so the two sections could spin around a common center for gravity. The portholes were open, letting in cold air and revealing only blackness. Leal knew the ship was running at speed with its headlights poking as far ahead into the darkness as they could--but that was not far, and their airspeed was not great.

  "Haul it in, boys!" Up ahead, one of the big starboard hatches was open. Some airmen were pulling on a rope, and to Leal's shock a dagger-ball bounced into the ship. It was securely netted and unmoving, but still her hackles rose at the sight of it.

  The older man, Jacoby Santo, was there, directing the airmen. "It's playing dead or something," he said. "Better clip those knives just in case."

  Leal saw an opening. "Not playing dead," she said as she flew over. "Really dead--or dormant, at best. Where did you find it?"

  "Clutching the hull with a death grip," said an airman, making a clawing shape with his own hands. "Gave me the fright of my life when I saw it."

  The commander looked at Leal again, then frowned at the airman she had been following. "Where were you taking her?" he asked the man.

  "Lady's orders."

  "I see." He drifted himself over and stuck out his hand for Leal to shake. "Jacoby Sarto. Welcome to my ship, the Torn Page of Fate."

  "Leal Maspeth. My men and I are very grateful that we met you, Captain Sarto. I didn't relish the notion of fighting our way out of the city on our own."

  "Hmmpf," he said. "Neither did we. The thanks go both ways." Sarto glowered at the knife-ball. "It's dead, you say? Why?"

  "Because we're well inside the walls of Virga now. Under the spell of the sun of suns, you might say."

  To her surprise he nodded as if this made perfect sense to him. "So you know something about these beasts."

  Leal half-smiled. "I've recently become something of an expert in monsters."

  Sarto rubbed his chin, then flicked a hand at the men who were securing the dead dagger-ball. "Carry on. You," he said to the airman who'd been guiding Leal, "back to your duties. I'll take it fr
om here." He began rappelling his way up the ship's central core, slowly enough that she could fall in beside him.

  "So you know Antaea Argyre," he said. Leal nodded.

  "It's been many years," she admitted. "But tell me, how did you come to find me?"

  "We followed the trail," he said, "of a man you may know."

  She laughed grimly. "Loll!"

  They had come to a set of tiny cabins built under the forward compartment. Sarto rapped on one door, and Leal heard Antaea's voice say something muffled. Sarto opened it.

  The moment was strangely powerful, because in this lantern light, cleaned up and dressed in something like her old style, Antaea looked much as she had back in Leal's college days. For a moment their surroundings vanished and Leal saw her leaning on the doorjamb of the tiny apartment her sister had shared with Leal. Always the active one, Antaea rarely sat down, often paced, usually with a bottle in one hand. Her sister, more quiet but more self-assured, would interrupt the stream of Antaea's monologues to divert its direction, but rarely to stop it.

  Antaea blinked, said nothing, and then unexpectedly she opened her arms. "Oh, Leal," she said, her voice cracking, "she's dead."

  Leal hugged her. "I know," she murmured, but really, until that moment, Telen's death had just been a fact to her, a piece of news from a distant land that she'd thought about, but not really come to grips with. Her old life had been busy and selfish. But Antaea had something of Telen's scent to her and suddenly it was real: Leal found herself blinking away tears.

  "How did you find me?" asked Leal as she disengaged herself. Suddenly awkward, Antaea floated back to the hammock that stretched from floor to ceiling. She steadied herself against the empty rope cocoon and shrugged.

  "Eustace Loll," she said. "He made something of a splash when he returned to Sere, calling up the navy and Guard to help him with something. We were both there for"--she shot Sarto a look--"different reasons. Jacoby here had heard of Serenity, and we thought he'd come from there."

  "And you?" asked Sarto. "What in the world were you doing in that hellhole?"

  "Just passing through. On my way to speak to the Guard, actually," she said.

  Antaea and Jacoby exchanged another glance, and Leal scowled in exasperation. "I'm a bit tired of politics," she said. "My message is too important to be restricted to just one audience. I came to deliver it to the Guard because they seemed most likely to be able to act on it, but after they bombed Brink I'm not so sure."

  "Bombed Brink?" said Antaea.

  "What message?" said Sarto.

  She decided that describing Brink would just take too long. "A message from some of the people who live outside of Virga," said Leal, "and it's simple: Stop bickering amongst yourselves and form a united front, or Virga will be destroyed--probably within the year."

  She'd seen this reaction in Hayden Griffin's airmen: both stared at her for a moment in shock, then simultaneously opened their mouths to argue or question. Leal held up her hand and turned her head away. "No," she said. "I'm tired of explaining myself to gatekeepers. The Guard are swarming around the door to Aethyr because of me and my message. A thousand ships are mustered because all they know is that Virga is threatened. I alone have the answer to their panic."

  She'd allowed some of her impatience to creep into her voice and stance, and she could see they were both taken aback by that sudden hint of ferocity.

  Jacoby Sarto raised an eyebrow. "So what would you have of us?" he asked with heavy irony. "That we deliver you to the Guard? The legends say they're based at the Gates of Virga." Antaea nodded as if this were common knowledge.

  "That was my original plan," Leal admitted. "But on our way here I thought about it, and I don't believe they'll listen to me now. My intention was to confront them with the witnesses who accompanied me up from the plains of Aethyr, but Eustace Loll was one of those men, and he's had plenty of time now to poison them with lies. If we go to the Gates, I'll just be arrested again and my message will never reach the ears of those who need to hear it."

  Sarto's ironic look slipped as he saw that she was dead serious. "You say that you alone have the answer to their panic. But," he pointed out, "I can't see that you've brought any proof with you. Or have you?"

  Bitterly, she shook her head. "The Guard knows much of what happened, and with my witnesses I might have convinced them--if Eustace Loll hadn't gotten to them first. No, I have no direct proof of my claims."

  "Then why should any of us believe you?"

  "Oh, you don't have to," she said with a grim smile. "Nobody has to, at this point. But I do have a way of getting all the proof I need, if you'll drop me and my men at a particular port."

  "And where would that be?" asked Sarto.

  Leal looked at Antaea. "I need to talk to a man I think you know," she said. "Bring me to the city of Rush, in the nation of Slipstream, that I may speak to Admiral Chaison Fanning."

  After Antaea flinched back and swore, Leal said again, "Take me to him.

  "And then things will start to happen."

  Part Two | THE CHEETAH AND THE TREE

  10

  "WHAT ARE YOU doing?"

  Keir had to turn his head to see who'd spoken. It was Leal Maspeth, but she seemed somehow transformed--younger. Part of that was freefall, he knew, which took years off you. But she seemed radiant from some other cause as well. A glance around was all it took to know what that was.

  He shifted his position slightly, allowing her to climb onto the mast beside him. "I feel less blind out here," he said in answer to her question. He'd been riding on the outside of the ship for the past hour, as light slowly emerged from the dark sky ahead of them.

  He opened his hands to show her what he'd been cupping in the ship's headwind. "A dragonfly?" she asked.

  He nodded.

  Inside the ship he was constantly reminded of the vision he now lacked. He kept hitting his head on unexpected obstacles, and rapping his knuckles on invisible objects in the dimness. It was upsetting. So he'd come out here.

  He pointed past the gray prow of the ship, to where a triangle of mauve and peach-colored sky beckoned past flocks of black cloud. "What is that?"

  "That," she said, obviously savoring the sight, "is a country."

  "Your country?"

  She shook her head. "My country has no sun. No--that should be Slipstream, in the Hadley cell called Meridian."

  Keir realized he'd been waiting for something to happen--waiting for his scry to update him on her recent activities; her alliances and distances within the group. But the intricate small-group politics of the Renaissance didn't exist in Virga. Some other kind of complexity did, and he couldn't figure out how it worked.

  "So ... how are you?"

  His question sounded utterly inane to his own ears, and it must have to her as well, because she simply smiled and said, "Antaea said this was yours."

  She handed him the gun he'd given Argyre. As he took it from Leal she gripped the spar between her feet and casually, gracefully back-flipped through the ship's open hatch and out of sight.

  "Oh, but I--" Don't need it. He sat there dumbly holding the weapon for a few seconds. There was no helpful advice from his scry about what she'd really wanted, or what he should do. After an awkward pause he clipped the gun onto his belt and turned back to the view.

  Had he not been half-blind already, he surely would have retreated inside soon after, because as the light welled up the terrifying scale of this ocean of air became visible. Keir couldn't remember much about his life before Brink, but he knew he'd grown up on a planet. He was used to skies that had, if not a visible boundary, at least some end to their cloudscapes. He was used to sky being framed by ground. In Virga there was only an infinity of cloudscapes spreading to all directions--tolerable, when it was dark, but a staggering assault on the imagination when its vast depths were sketched by light. It was exhilarating, magnificent, and far too big to take in no matter how much he stared.

  The ship wove its
way between mountain-sized clouds, making a steady sixty or eighty kilometers per hour. As it did the light from ahead brightened, becoming a broad region of canary-yellow sky cupping an intense red dot at its center. Though it must be hundreds of kilometers away, that red dot was the visible radiance of a man-made sun, a nuclear-fusion reactor of mightily primitive but practical design. This eternally falling drop of air, this world of Virga, was clouded with such suns--hundreds of them. Keir had never seen one with his own eyes, for bright as they were, the devices could only carve small spheres of day out of the dark. --With one exception, of course. Candesce, the sun of suns, immolated the whole middle space of Virga, and dozens of civilizations orbited it like birds wheeling around a lighthouse.

  Far to the right was another crimson dot, this one smaller--another nation, remote, half-eclipsed by its neighbor.

  Long minutes passed and Leal didn't return. Keir watched the dawn open like a flower, a sun not rising but emerging. And with it, at last, came details.

  First to become clear were this nation's heavy industries. They skimmed the shell of the spherical domain carved by the light: factories, complicated snarls of metal like vast seashells gouting smoke and grit and poisonous clouds into the dark. Any farther out, and these places stood to lose sight of their sun altogether--and could thus be doomed to wander the blackness unless by luck they found another country. Any further in, and they would pollute the agricultural spheres.

  These came next as the Page sailed on--as the light became brighter, Keir saw that some of the clouds around him were not white, but green. On an individual basis those specks were potato and corn, rice and millet and oats; gathered together in wave upon wave of ever-greater scale, they became cirrus and cumulus, nimbus and stratus--entire clouds of life.

  The Page passed a streamer of tomatoes. Keir watched a small knot of them sail by, five plants with their roots tangled around a common clod of dirt. Aphids and midges swarmed around the little world, and some sort of songbird trilled from inside the foliage.