Analog SFF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Around the corner of the courtyard shaft, the ancient, filigreed morning gun still sat on a tripod under its little canopy. Venera started to laugh, but the sound died in her throat. “Come on!"

  The two women wrestled the weapon off its stand. It was a massive thing, and though it weighed little in this gravity, it was difficult to maneuver. “Do we have shells?” Venera asked.

  "Bullets, no shells,” said Eilen. “There's black powder in that bin."

  Venera opened the gun's breach. It was of a pointlessly primitive design. You poured black powder into it and then inserted the bullet and closed the breach. It had a spark wheel instead of a percussion trigger. “Well, then, come on.” Eilen grabbed up the box of bullets and a sack of powder, and they ran along the inner edge of the roof. In the darkness and confusion Eilen stumbled, and Venera watched as the bullets spilled out into the air over the courtyard. Eilen screamed in frustration.

  One bullet spun on the flagstones at Venera's feet. Cradling the gun, she bent to pick up the metal slug. A wave of cold prickles swept over her shoulders and up her neck.

  This bullet was identical to the one that nestled inside her jacket—identical save for the fact that it had never been fired.

  She couldn't believe it. The bullet she carried—that had sailed a thousand miles through the airs and clouds of Virga, avoiding cities and farms, adeptly swerving to avoid fish and rocks and oceanic balls of water, this bullet that had lined up on Slipstream and the city of Rush and the window in the admiralty where Venera stood so innocently; had smashed the glass in a split-second and buried itself in her jaw, spinning her around and nailing a sense of injured outrage to Venera forever—it had come from here. It had not been fired in combat. Not in spite. Not for any murderous purpose, but for tradition, and to celebrate the calmness of a morning like any other.

  Venera had fantasized about this moment many times. She had rehearsed what she would say to the owner of the gun when she finally found him. It was a high, grand, and glorious speech that, in her imagination, always ended with her putting a bullet in the villain. Cradling this picture of revenge to herself had gotten her through many nights, many cocktail parties where out of the corner of her eye she could see the ladies of the admiralty pointing to her scar and murmuring to one another behind their fans.

  "Huh,” she said.

  "Venera? Are you all right?"

  Venera shook her head violently. “Powder. Quick!” She held out the gun, and Eilen filled it. Then she jammed the clean new bullet into the breach and closed it. She lofted the gun and spun the wheel.

  "Everybody down!” Nobody heard her, but luckily a gap opened in the line at the last second. The gun made a huge noise and nearly blew Venera off the roof. When the vast plume of smoke cleared she saw nearly everybody in sight recovering from having ducked.

  It might not be powerful or accurate, but the thing was loud. That fact might just save them.

  She ran toward the Lirisians. “The cannons! Start shouting stuff about cannons!” She breached the smoking weapon and handed it to Eilen. “Reload."

  "But we lost the rest of the bullets."

  "We've got one.” She reached into her jacket pocket. There it was, its contours familiar from years of touching. She brought out her bullet. Her fingers trembled now as she held it up to the red flare light.

  "Damn you anyway,” she whispered to it.

  Eilen glanced up, said, “Oh,” and held up the gun. There was no time for ceremony; Venera slid the hated slug into the breach and it fit perfectly. She clicked it shut.

  "Out of my way!” She crossed the roof in great bounding steps, dodging between fighting men to reach the battlement where the ladders jutted up. The gunfire from below had stopped; the snipers didn't want to hit their own men as they topped the wall. Venera hopped up onto a crenel and sighted nearly straight down. She saw the startled eyes of a Sacrus soldier between her feet, and half a dozen heads below his. She spun the spark wheel.

  The explosion lifted her off her feet. Everything disappeared behind a ball of smoke. When she staggered to her feet some yards away, Venera found herself surrounded by cheering people. Several of Sacrus's soldiers were being thrown off the roof, and for the moment no more were appearing. As the smoke cleared she saw that the top of the ladder she'd fired down was missing.

  "Keep filling it,” she said, thrusting the gun at Eilen. “Bullets don't matter—as long as it's bright and loud."

  Moss's grinning face emerged from the gloom. “They're hesitating!"

  She nodded. Sacrus didn't have so many people that they could afford to sacrifice them in wave attacks. The darkness and confusion would help; and though they had probably heard it every day of their lives, the thunderous sound of the morning gun at this close range would give pause to the men holding the ladders.

  "It's not going to keep them at bay for long, though,” she said. “Where are the rest of our people?"

  Now Moss frowned. “T-trapped, I fear. Guinevera l-led them into an ambush. Now they have their backs to the open air.” He pointed toward the edge of the world and the night skies beyond.

  Venera hopped up on the edge of the elevator platform and took a quick look around. Sacrus's people were spread in a thin line around two of the approaches to Liris. On their third side, ragged girders and scoured metal jutted off the end of the world. And on the fourth—behind her—a jumble of brambles, thorn-bushes, and broken masonry formed a natural barrier that Sacrus wasn't bothering to police.

  In the darkness beyond, hundreds of torches lit the contours of an army small by Venera's standards, but huge for Spyre. There might be no more than a thousand men there, but that was all the forces that opposed Sacrus on this world.

  Spreading away behind that army was the maze of estates that made up Greater Spyre. Somewhere out there was the long low building where the hollowed bomb hung, with its promise of escape.

  She turned to Moss. “You need to break through Sacrus's lines. Otherwise, they'll overwhelm us, and then they can turn and face our army with a secure fortress behind them."

  He nodded. “But all our leaders are t-trapped."

  "Well, not all.” She strode across the roof to the battlements that overlooked the bramble-choked acres. He came to stand at her side. Together they gazed out at the army that lay tantalizingly out of reach.

  "If the semaphore were working—” She stopped, remembering Bryce. Moss shook his head anyway.

  "S-Sacrus has encircled the t-tower. They would read every letter."

  "But we need to coordinate an attack—from outside and inside at the same time. To break through..."

  He shrugged. “Simple matter. If we c-can get one p-person through the lines."

  She speculated. If she showed up there among the brambles, would the generals of that army have her arrested? How far had news of her deceptions spread?

  "Get them ready,” she said. “Everyone into armor, everyone armed. I'll be back in two minutes.” She headed for the stairs.

  "Where are you g-going?"

  She shot him a grim smile. “To check in on our bargaining chip."

  * * * *

  Venera ran through empty halls to the old prison on the main floor.

  As she'd suspected, the guards had deserted their posts when the roof was attacked. The main door was ajar; Venera slowed when she saw this. Warily, she toed it open and aimed her pistol through. There was nobody in the antechamber. She sidled in.

  "Hello?” That was Jacoby Sarto's voice. Venera had never heard him sound worried, but he was clearly rattled by what was happening. He's never been in a battle before, she realized—nor had any of these people. It was shocking to think that she was the veteran here.

  Venera went on her tiptoes to look through the door's little window into the green-walled reception room. Sarto was the sole occupant of a bench designed to seat thirty; he sat in the very center of a room that could have held a hundred. He squinted at the door, then said, “Fanning?"

>   She threw open the door and stepped in. “Did you tell them?"

  He appeared puzzled. “Tell who what?"

  She showed him her pistol; he wouldn't know it was empty. “Don't play games, Sarto. Someone told Guinevera who I really am. Was it you?"

  He smiled with a trace of his usual arrogance. He stood up and adjusted the sleeves of the formal shirt he still wore. “Things not going your way out there?"

  "Two points,” said Venera, holding up two fingers. “First: I'm holding a gun on you. Second: you're rapidly becoming expendable."

  "All right, all right,” he said irritably. “Don't be so prickly. After all, I came here of my own free will."

  "And that's supposed to impress me?” She leaned on the doorjamb and crossed her arms.

  "Think about it,” he said. “What do I have to gain from revealing who you are?"

  "I don't know. Suppose you tell me?"

  Now he scowled at her, as if she were some common servant girl who'd had the temerity to interrupt him while he was talking. “I have spent thirty-two years learning the ins and outs of council politics. All that time, becoming an expert—maybe the expert—on Spyre, learning who is beholden to whom, who's ambitious and who just wants to keep their heads down. I have been the public face of Sacrus for much of that time, their most important operative, because for all those years, Spyre's politics was all that mattered. But look at what's happening.” He waved a hand to indicate the siege and battle going on beyond Liris's thick walls. “Everything that made me valuable is being swept away."

  This was not what Venera had been expecting to hear from him. She came into the room and sat down on a bench facing Sarto. He looked at her levelly and said, “Change is inconceivable to most people in Spyre; to them a catastrophe is a tree falling across their fence. A vast political upheaval would be somebody snubbing somebody else at a party. That's the system I was bred and trained to work in. But my masters have always known that there's much bigger game out there. They've been biding their time, lo these many centuries. Now they finally have in their grasp a tool with which to conquer the world—the real world, not just this squalid imitation we're standing in. On the scale of Sacrus's new ambitions, all of my accomplishments count for nothing."

  Venera nodded slowly. “Spyre is having all its borders redrawn around you. Even if they never get the key from me, Sacrus will be facing a new Spyre once the fighting stops. I'll bet they've been grooming someone young and malleable to take your place in that new world."

  He grimaced. “No one likes to be discarded. I could see it coming, though. It was inevitable, really, unless..."

  "Unless you could prove your continuing usefulness to your masters,” she said. “Say, by personally bringing them the key?"

  He shrugged. “Yesterday's council meeting would otherwise have been my last public performance. At least here, as your, uh, guest, I might have the opportunity to act as Sacrus's negotiator. Think about it—you're surrounded, outgunned, you're approaching the point where you have to admit you're going to lose. But I can tell you the semaphore codes to signal our commanders that we've reached an accommodation. As long as you had power here, you could have functioned as the perfect traitor. A few bad orders, your forces ordered into a trap, then it's over the wall for you and I, the key safely into my master's hands, you on your way home to wherever it is you came from."

  Venera tamped down on her anger. Sarto was used to dealing in cold political equations; so was she, for that matter. What he was proposing shouldn't shock her. “But if I'm disgraced, I can't betray my people."

  "Your usefulness plummets,” he said with a nod. “So, no, I didn't tattle on you. You're hardly of any value now, are you? All you've got is the key. If your own side's turned against you, your only remaining option is to throw yourself on the mercy of Sacrus. Which might win me some points if I'm the one who brings you in, but not as much, and—"

  "—And I have no reason to expect good treatment from them,” she finished. “So why should I do it?"

  He stood up—slowly, mindful of her gun—and walked a little distance away. He gazed up at the room's little windows. “What other option do you have?” he asked.

  She thought at first that he'd said this rhetorically, but something about his tone ... It had sounded like a genuine question.

  Venera sat there for a while, thinking. She went over the incident with the council members on the roof; who could have outted her? Everything depended on that—and on when it had happened. Sarto said nothing, merely waited patiently with his arms crossed, staring idly up at the little window.

  Finally she nodded and stood up. “All right,” she said. “Jacoby, I think we can still come to an ... accommodation. Here's what I'm thinking..."

  * * * *

  19

  As sometimes happened at the worst of moments, Venera lost her sense of gravity just before she hit the ground. The upthrusting spears of brush and stunted trees flipped around and became abstract decorations on a vast wall she was approaching. Her feet dangled over sideways buildings and the pikes of soldiers. Then the wall hit her, and she bounced and tumbled like a rag doll. Strangely, it didn't hurt at all—perhaps not so strangely, granted that she was swaddled in armor.

  She unscrewed her helmet and looked up into a couple of dozen gun barrels. They were all different, like a museum display taken down and offered to her; in her dazed state she almost reached to grab one. But there were hands holding them tightly and grim men behind the hands.

  When she and Sarto had reached the rooftop of Liris, they found a theatrical jumble of bodies, torn tenting, and brazier fires surrounded by huddling men in outlandish armor. At the center of it all, the thick metal cable that rose up and out of sight into the turbulent mists; that cable glowed gold now as distant Candesce awoke.

  She had spotted Moss and headed over, keeping her head down in case there were snipers. He looked up, lines of exhaustion apparent around his eyes. Glancing past her, he spotted Sarto. “What's this?"

  "We need to break this siege. I'm going over the wall, and Sarto is coming with me."

  Moss blinked, but his permanently shocked expression revealed none of his thoughts. “What for?"

  "I don't know whether the commanders of our encircling force have been told that I'm an imposter and traitor. I need to bring Jacoby Sarto in case I need a ... ticket, I suppose you could call it ... into their good graces."

  He nodded reluctantly. “And how do you p-propose to reach our force? S-Sacrus is between us and them."

  Now she grinned. “Well, you couldn't do this with all of us, but I propose that we jump."

  Of course they'd had help from an ancient catapult that Liris had once used to fire mail and parcels over an enemy nation to an ally some three miles away. Venera had seen it on her second day here; with a little effort, it had been refitted to seat two people. But nobody, least of all her, knew whether it would still work. Her only consolation had been the low gravity in Spyre.

  Now Venera had two possible scripts she could follow, one if these were soldiers of the Council Alliance, one if they owed their allegiance to Sacrus. But which were they? The fall had been so disorienting that she couldn't tell where they'd ended up. So she merely put up her hands and smiled and said, “Hello."

  Beside her Jacoby Sarto groaned and rolled over. Instantly another dozen guns aimed at him. “I think we're not that much of a threat,” Venera said mildly. She received a kick in the back (which she barely felt through the metal) for her humor.

  A throb of pain shot through her jaw—and an odd thing happened. Such spasms of pain had plagued her for years, ever since the day she woke up in Rush's military infirmary, her head bandaged like a delicate vase about to be shipped via the postal system. Each stab of pain had come with its own little thought, whose content varied somewhat but always translated roughly to either I'm all alone or I'm going to kill them. Fear and fury, they stabbed her repeatedly throughout each day. The fierce headaches that oft
en built over the hours just added to her meanness.

  But she'd taken the bullet that struck her jaw and blown it back out the very same gun that had shot her. So, when her jaw cramped this time, instead of her usual misery, Venera had a flash of memory: the morning gun going off with a tremendous explosion in her hands, bucking and kicking and sending her flying backward into the Lirisians. She had no idea what the feeling accompanying that had been, but she liked it.

  So she grinned crookedly and stood up. Dusting herself off, she said with dignity, “I am Amandera Thrace-Guiles, and this is Jacoby Sarto of the Spyre Council. We need to talk to your commanders."

  * * * *

  "You have a reputation for being foolhardy,” said the army commander, his gray mustaches waggling. “But that was ridiculous."

  It turned out that they'd nearly overshot both Sacrus and Council Alliance positions. Luckily, several hundred pairs of eyes had tracked their progress across the rolled-up sky of Spyre and it was her army that had gotten to Venera and Jacoby first. Sarto didn't seem too upset about the outcome, which was telling. What was even more significant was that everyone was calling her “Lady Thrace-Guiles,” which meant that word of her deceptions hadn't made it out of Liris. Here, Venera was still a respected leader.

  She preened at the commander's backhanded compliment. He stood with his back to a brick wall, a swaying lamp nodding shadows across the buttons of his jacket. Aides and colonels bustled about, some shoving little counters across the map board, others reading or writing dispatches.

  Venera smelled engine oil and wet cement. The alliance army had set up its headquarters in a preservationist roundhouse about a mile from Liris; these walls were thick enough to stop anything Sacrus had so far fired. For the first time in days, Venera felt a little safe.

  "I wouldn't have had to be foolhardy if the situation weren't so dire,” she said. It was tempting to upbraid this man for hesitating to send his forces to relieve Liris; but Venera found herself uninterested anymore in taking such familiar pleasures. She merely said, “Tell me what's been happening out here."