Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

by Karl Schroeder

  At that moment the light that had poured steadily from the meeting area went out. Cries of alarm went up from the delegations, and she ran back to the clearing, dodging the black silhouettes of gowned ladies and broad-shouldered officers. There was pandemonium under the oak, with lamps being brought in and everybody talking and running at once.

  Leal walked up to the iron cat. The emissary had frozen in mid-gesture, one paw raised, palm out, in a curiously human stance. The lines of light on the branches of the oak had been extinguished, and its limbs no longer moved.

  "Hold it together!" Chaison shouted, his voice cutting across the bedlam. "Whatever gave them speech is finished, but our work is not. We need paper, pens! We need to draft this alliance and then mobilize our people. Come on!"

  After more shouting and cajoling, he got his wish. Palace workmen set up a table and chairs, and paper lanterns were strung over it. The whole thing looked bizarrely festive, but no one was smiling. As the details of an alliance began to take shape on paper, Leal wandered within the soft perimeter cast by the lanterns, watching, yet wishing she was anywhere else.

  Something small glittered in the grass just in front of the oak. Leal blinked at it. This spot was right in the center of the area where the cat-shaped emissary had been able to prowl. During their conversation it had sometimes paced away to probe at the paths. She'd seen it stagger and jump back twice, as it apparently hit some invisible wall beyond which it couldn't go.

  Leal knelt, forgetting the babble of the officials. She gently pried the crushed dragonfly out of the soil, and cupped it in the palm of her hand.

  She knelt there with it for a very long time, and when she finally raised her head, it was to find that a war had begun.

  Part Three | THE CHOICE

  21

  JACOBY SARTO WATCHED Inshiri's men haul the blindfolded prisoner out of a dart-shaped racing yacht. He checked his pocket watch and grunted; they were actually on time. Inshiri would have no ready excuse to punish anybody. Not that that would stop her if she was in the mood.

  He was holding on to a thin wooden spar that formed part of a long, open fretwork gantry. The thousand feet of tensegrity structure intersected a dozen or more similar girders that jumbled madly in the weightless air like a cloud of straw. A few, like the one he was looking out of, stood out as dotted strings of lanterns; all were faintly traced on the sky in crimson light. Now that the yacht had shut down its engines, Jacoby could hear only the constant creaking of the gantries, the distant fat blatting of a propeller and, behind it all, the ever-present lilting of birdsong.

  He swung out of the gantry and jammed his feet into the stirrups attached to the indigo wings strapped to his back. A few kicks and the spring-loaded pinions flapped strongly, pushing him in the direction of the yacht. The prisoner was struggling and had succeeded in kicking one of her captors in the face despite being bound hand and foot.

  He grinned. He would have expected no less.

  Jacoby dressed to intimidate, which in this place meant wearing black. The severe uniform and sky-colored wings rendered him invisible to the men until he landed to perch on the gantry ahead of them. One jerked in surprise, stifled an oath, and said, "Sir! We were going to the stockade--" Jacoby shook his head, and simply held out his hand.

  The man had been towing the prisoner by one ankle. He hauled on his cargo and the cursing figure sailed past him. Jacoby caught her by the same ankle and, without a word, kicked off into the open air.

  Strange that, in all their dealings, this was the first time he'd actually touched her.

  After a minute or so of flapping he felt her stop struggling. A minute or so after that she said, "I have to pee."

  Jacoby didn't reply. His destination hung a few hundred feet ahead, its spars and rain shields lit luridly red from a single point inside the can-shaped framework.

  "I can pee with great force and, if I may say so, fantastic accuracy," continued the prisoner. "You'd be wise not to learn firsthand what I can do. Now if we can find me a bottle and somewhere private, and you loosen my wrists--"

  She went silent as they entered the observatory. Clearly the red light penetrated her blindfold, for she began craning her neck this way and that to try to find its source. "... Furnaces?" she muttered.

  The light was visible in the air itself, a vast red cone whose point was centered on a woman who hung in the midst of the great space. She was lit as bright as a lamp's wick, a bold angelic figure blazing scarlet and gold in the focus of a mirror two hundred feet across.

  "Cousin," Jacoby called, and her head turned, its wreath of pale hair a writhing nimbus of fire. She nodded, kicked the stirrups of her own wings, and flew out of the light. Her sudden extinguishing rendered her invisible.

  As his eyes adjusted he saw her frowning at him. She gestured at the prisoner's bonds. With some caution--knowing this one as he did--he untied the ropes around the woman's ankles, then the ones on her wrists. Then he turned her in the right direction and flipped off the blindfold.

  Dark hair billowed up to frame her face like a cloud. Venera Fanning blinked, peered around herself, and saw Jacoby. "There you are!"

  Jacoby's employer gave a light flap with her wings and drifted back a few feet. The fan of white feathers behind her caught the shaft of crimson light and she became visible again. Venera Fanning turned from Jacoby, saw the red-lit woman, and hissed. "Ferance!"

  "We've never met," said Inshiri. "You must have seen me in a photo from ... somewhere." She looked down her nose at Jacoby. Jacoby crossed his arms and flew back a few feet. He really, really wanted to watch this meeting--but not from too close.

  Venera barked an angry laugh. Then she thrust out her arm, pointing an indignant finger at him. "I never needed his help to gather intelligence. And why is he still here? Is he your butler now?"

  "I gathered you two knew each other," said Inshiri. She was drifting slowly into the light, parts of her clothing and exposed skin dawning one after another. "I thought if I couldn't persuade you to cooperate, maybe Jacoby could, since you're friends and everything."

  "Hardly that," muttered Venera, throwing him a poisonous glance. "There's not a man in the world whose word I trust less."

  "Ah! Then you do know him." Inshiri laughed and, for just a second, both women were looking straight at him, not as adversaries, but almost as if they were sharing a moment--and Jacoby found his skin crawling.

  "Cooperate how?" Venera asked suddenly. "I'm your prisoner. You don't need my cooperation. And anything I know is now out of date by many weeks. Remember, I'd been traveling for a while when you picked me up."

  Inshiri smiled unpleasantly. "Much as I would enjoy interrogating you, you're right; I don't need you for that."

  "Then what? I assume you plan to use me against Chaison."

  "I'm not interested in your trophy husband. What interests me," and here she leaned out of the light, blacking out her face, "is that you are one of two living people who has actually been inside the sun of suns."

  Venera didn't reply.

  "According to the legend, not only have you been inside, but while there you actually observed the process whereby Candesce's field was turned off."

  Venera shook her head. "Observed. I didn't understand it. And anyway, you don't need me for that. Your allies from outside know how to do it. Wasn't Aubrey Mahallan one of theirs?"

  "They claim not," said Inshiri dryly. "But in any case, there's always the possibility that my allies," and she smiled at Jacoby, "will suffer some sort of accident that prevents them from getting inside Candesce. Now we would never want that to happen, but Heaven forbid if it should, it would be good if they were not the only ones who knew how to control Candesce."

  Venera glanced at Jacoby. He kept his expression neutral.

  "Where are your little friends, anyway?" Venera asked. She peered into the darkness. "I see no great fleet massed out there. Could it be that they no longer need you, now that events are in motion?" She turned to Jacoby. "Th
ey are in motion, aren't they?"

  He gave a microscopic nod.

  "Oh, they still need me, I've made sure of that. As to this place..." Inshiri smiled. "They don't know about it. Here! Let me show you." She reached out to grab Venera's arm; Jacoby saw her flinch at the touch. Inshiri flapped her wings and drew Venera over to the focal point of the giant, curved mirror. Jacoby narrowed his eyes and in the scarlet brilliance Venera did the same. As her eyes adjusted she slowly opened them, then they went wide and she said, "Oh!"

  Venera hung at the focal point of a gigantic telescope aimed at Slipstream. She would be seeing the grandly rotating, metal town wheels of Rush, rendered in red and gold because the intervening air scattered out the blue end of the spectrum. The image wavered and was fuzzy, but was still good enough to show the inside surfaces of those cylinders, all papered with rooftops and streets and strolling people. --And more, it would be showing her the entire fleet her husband was amassing: their numbers, the types of their ships, the national crests painted on their sides, and their armament.

  She looked impressed. "You're spying on us from here?"

  "Not just you," said the heir of Sacrus. "We can point this telescope anywhere in Virga, though if we were to aim it at the world's heart and even just glimpse the sun of suns, you and I would light up like matches. This particular instrument works best when you aim it toward the darker corners of the world. But it works well for Slipstream, wouldn't you say? I can see your husband's whole plan unfolding, and when his fleet leaves, I'll be able to track its movements with utter precision."

  "You're to remain a spectator here, then?" Venera inquired in a polite tone.

  "Of course not. I intend to be there when you open Candesce's doors with the key the Home Guard so conveniently found for us." Inshiri waved a hand. "But we can talk about this later. For now, I want you to think about whose hands you would prefer to be on those controls when we finally penetrate the mystery of mysteries. Ours? --Yours and mine, I mean; or theirs." And she nodded to the darkness.

  Venera scowled at Inshiri, who casually pushed her in Jacoby's direction. "Lord Sarto, put her somewhere that's not overly comfortable." He took Venera's hand and kicked down to flap his wings. They left Inshiri of Sacrus lofting like a blood-soaked angel in the fire of her giant spyglass.

  * * *

  VENERA AIMED HER gaze down her arm at him. "What happened to your hand?"

  He grimaced. "Inshiri took my little finger as proof of my loyalty. She likes hostages, as I'm sure you've noticed."

  "So she's promised to give it back later?" she asked lightly.

  "Not exactly."

  There was a brief pause as they sailed slowly through the sky. Then Venera said: "I really do have to pee."

  "Posthaste, then.

  "My apologies, by the way, for the manner in which you were brought here," said Jacoby after a silence in which he had become uncomfortably aware that he was holding her hand.

  She thought about that. "Where are we, anyway?"

  "It's called Kaleidogig. And I really am sorry. My plan was to capture you for my own purposes, not to hand you over to her."

  "Was it also your plan to get sent home with a whipping after that foolish attack on Serenity?"

  He growled.

  "Two for two, then."

  "Maybe," he said, "but there's still one vital piece in play."

  She twisted her hand in his and spun slowly to look at the ungainly galaxy of giant mirrors and steaming, brightly lit boilers. "If we were near the principalities, the whole sky would be lit up. So where are we--in winter?"

  He nodded. "On the same latitude as Meridian, but a thousand miles from the nearest sun."

  "And yet," she mused, "there's light."

  Kaleidogig burned like a string of giant's lanterns. Its jumbled scaffolding cupped a dozen or more curving mirrors, each hundreds of feet across, which mostly lit nets and balls of water filled with floating plants. The mirrors were fairly easy to make, Jacoby had learned--you waited for calm air and then blew a vast bubble from a seed of liquid resin; when it dried you cut it into bowl-shaped sections and silvered them and there were your mirrors.

  Days away, nuclear-fusion lamps carved sunlit spheres of air out of the darkness, and nations swarmed around them like moths around a candle. Each fusion lamp lit a few hundred miles of air in every direction--but Virga was five thousand miles across. Most of its interior was dark, hence unsuitable for settlement.

  "I always thought it would be totally dark out here," he told Venera. "But there's a very faint glow from the suns, and you can concentrate it. Which they do. All the blue gets filtered out by the time it gets here, but the red turns out to be perfect for plants. They also concentrate some of it until it's hot enough to melt iron; they have industries. It's really quite ingenious."

  Venera looked back at him. "You say 'they.' This is not your new home, then?"

  "I suppose you'd call it my current place of employ."

  She was silent for a while; then suddenly she pulled her hand out of his. "I suppose you were working for Inshiri all along."

  "Actually, no." He frowned pensively into the night. "I said you'd call this my current place of employ. I don't consider myself to be working for Inshiri at all. Any more than I ever said I was working with you and Chaison."

  "But what about loyalty? How do you suppose Antaea Argyre felt when you attacked Serenity? We all knew it was you."

  It hurt just thinking about how that debacle had gone; but Venera didn't need to know that. "What do you know about loyalty?" he retorted.

  "Maybe more than either you or I suspected," she said quietly; and despite his deeply ingrained cynicism, Jacoby found that the words stung him.

  They were approaching a quickly spinning town wheel. The thing was little, not more than a hundred feet across, and consisted of just a few streamlined wooden buildings joined together by swaying catwalks. It was really just a swinging bridge rolled into a circle and set rolling through the skies.

  Jacoby nodded at it. "Home, for now. I have to warn you, it's a sixer." He was referring to the rate per minute of the wheel's rotation. "If you have any inner-ear problems, we can set you up somewhere else."

  "Oh, please. I once bedded a pirate in a twelver." She grabbed his elbow and let him lead her through the air to the landing pad at the wheel's axle. "Anyway, what about it? Are you going to stand by and let Inshiri torture me into compliance? Or death?"

  Their feet found the inner surface of the barrel-shaped landing pad. Lanterns glowed here, showing the way to four long ladders that led in four directions to the circle's rim. Jacoby gestured for her to go first. As they climbed down he said, "If you hadn't been suicidally brave at Fracas, you wouldn't be in this situation. I can protect you for now, but you have to at least pretend to cooperate with Inshiri."

  They'd been gaining weight as they climbed down, and now entered the top floor of a house. It was ordinary enough, with carpets, wood-paneled walls, and lamps in sconces. The floor curved up rather quickly to each side, but that was to be expected in a sixer. Jacoby's own stomach was turning over with the wheel's spin, but he refused to let Venera see that. In the sudden quiet of the house, he pitched his voice lower and said, "I was after three things: control of the door to Brink, which would have made me the gatekeeper for your little alliance; you, to control your husband; and the key to Candesce, to bring Inshiri and the outsiders in line. With them I could have headed off this fiasco and steered us to a diplomatic solution."

  Venera planted her hands on her hips and glowered. "Your solution."

  "It would have been better than what's coming."

  "But Inshiri--"

  "My plans for her are another story, but as I said, the key is still in play. --Anyway, from the way you're shifting from foot to foot, I'd say you don't have the time for that particular tale."

  "Urm, yes, the water closet--"

  "Is that way."

  * * *

  NICOLAS REMORAN, GE
NERAL Secretary of the Virgan Home Guard, braced himself in the hatch of the battleship, watching its mighty engines settle it close to one of Kaleidogig's spidery docking arms. When he spotted the distant shapes of Inshiri Ferance and Jacoby Sarto waiting there, he turned and said, "Remember your orders. Observe only."

  Antaea nodded, and unconsciously smoothed the black material of her new uniform. She knew she only wore it because Remoran wanted to keep her close and in line; still, every morning when she awoke, the first thing she did was go to the closet to check that it was really there.

  "General Secretary, how good to see you," Inshiri called. As the ship inched closer to the dock she turned her head to take in its immensity, and said, "I'm somehow glad I never knew that the Guard had forces like these. It would have given me nightmares." Then she noticed Antaea.

  "Argyre! I see you've regained your rank," she said as she reached out to take Antaea's hand. "Or," she squinted at Remoran, "was she yours all along?"

  "She's been demoted, actually," said Remoran. "We could hardly justify her expulsion after we admitted that Gonlin's plan had been the right one. But her blind acceptance of his orders was a problem."

  "Ah." Ferance looked down at her toes, which were together and pointing into the black abyss that lay beyond Kaleidogig's red light.

  "I'm placing Argyre with you as an advisor," continued Remoran. "She's spent time in the enemy camp, after all."

  Inshiri arched an eyebrow, but didn't complain. "Jacoby?"

  "You can trust her judgment," he said, which nearly made Antaea guffaw out loud. Who're you to talk about trust! she wanted to say; but she kept her expression neutral.

  They boarded the battleship and Antaea found herself in an echoing, warehouse-sized hangar lit with unwavering electric light. Dozens of missile-festooned attack ships hung from cranes here, and airmen swarmed around them, working, cursing, and throwing tools back and forth.

  Inshiri pinwheeled slowly, taking it all in. "Wondrous," she said. "You could kill so many people with this thing."

  "Hopefully we won't have to," said Remoran. "I'm still expecting the Last Line to come to their senses. No segment of the Home Guard has ever revolted--at least, never on this scale." He shot Antaea an ironic look. "They've swallowed the propaganda that Lacerta brought back from Aethyr, but the internal contradictions will bring them around soon. There are already cracks."