"What's happened?” Odess emerged from the rush of faces. The rest of the trade delegation was behind him.
"I've deposed the botanist,” said Venera. They gaped at her. She sighed. “It wasn't that hard,” she said.
"But—but how?” They crowded around her.
"But why?" Eilen had grabbed her arm.
Venera looked up at her. Suddenly she felt tears in her eyes.
"My… my husband,” she whispered through a suddenly tight throat. “My husband is dead."
For a while there was silence, it seemed, though Venera knew abstractly that everyone was shouting, that the news of Margit's sudden departure was spreading like fire through Liris. Eilen and the others were speaking to her, but she couldn't understand anything they said.
Strangely calm, she looked through the rushing people at the one other person who seemed still. He was giving orders at the foot of the stairs to Margit's chambers, putting out his arm to prevent people without firefighting tools from going up, pointing out where to get sand or buckets to those just arriving. His face was impassive, but his gestures were quick and focused.
"What are we going to do?” Odess was literally wringing his hands, something Venera had never actually seen someone do. “Without the botanist, what will happen to the trees? Will Sacrus forgive us for what you did? We could all be killed. Who is going to lead us now?"
Eilen turned to Odess, shaking his shoulder crossly. “Why shouldn't it be Venera?"
"V-Venera?” He looked terrified.
She laughed. “I'm leaving. Right now. Besides, you already have your new botanist.” She pointed. “He's been here all along."
Moss looked up from where he was directing the firefighting. He saw Venera, and the perpetually desperate expression around his eyes softened a bit. She walked over to him.
As shouts came down the stairs saying that the fire was under control, she laid a hand on the former envoy's arm and smiled at him. “Moss,” she said, “I don't want you to be sad anymore."
"I-I'll t-try,” he said.
Satisfied, she turned away from the people of Liris. Venera traced the steps Margit had taken only minutes before, pausing only to arm herself in Liris's barracks. She walked up the broad stone steps over which towered row after row of portraits—centuries of botanists, masons, doctors, and scholars, all of whom had been born here, lived here, and died here leaving legacies that might have been known only to a handful of people, but were meaningful nonetheless. She trod carefully patched steps whose outlines were known intimately by those who tended them, past arches and doors that figured as clearly as heroes out of myth in the dreams and ambitions of the people who lived under them—people to whom they were the very world itself.
And on the dark empty roof, cold fresh air blew in from the abandoned lofts of Winter.
She threw back the trapdoor and stalked to the roof's edge. These were the final steps of her old life, she felt. Venera was about to mourn, something she had never done and did not know how to do. She stepped onto a swaying platform and began winching it down, feeling the uncoiling certainty of her husband's death in her gut. It was like a monster shaking itself awake; any moment now it would devour her, and who knew what would happen then? Her only defense was to keep turning the wheel to winch herself down. She focused her eyes on the tall grass that swayed at the foot of Liris, willing it closer.
In the dim light cast by Lesser Spyre, Venera Fanning walked into the wild acres of the disputed territories. She moved aimlessly at first, admiring the glittering lights overhead and the vast arcs of land and forest that swept up and past them.
When she lowered her eyes it was to see the black silhouette of a man separate itself from a grove of trees ahead of her. Venera didn't pause, but turned slightly towards the figure. He came out to meet her, and she nodded to him when he offered his arm for her to lean on.
"I've been waiting for you,” said Garth Diamandis.
They walked into the darkness under the trees.
7
Venera didn’t really notice the passage of the next few days. She stayed with Diamandis in a clapboard hut near the edge of the world and did little but eat and sleep. He came and went, discreet as always; his forays were usually nocturnal and he slept when she was awake.
Periodically she stepped to the doorway of the flimsy hideout and listened to the wind. It tore and gabbled, moaned and hissed incessantly, and in it she learned to hear voices. They were of people she’d known—her father, her sisters, sometimes random members of the crew of the Rook, whom she had not really gotten to know but had heard all about her during her adventures with that ship.
She strained to hear her husband’s voice in the rush, but his was the only voice she could not summon.
One dawn she was fixing breakfast (with little success, having never learned to cook) when Garth poked his head around the doorjamb and said, “You’ve disturbed a whole nest of hornets, did you know that?” He strolled in, looking pleased with himself. “More like a nest of whales—or capital bugs, even. There’s covert patrols crawling all over the place.”
She glared at him. “What makes you think they’re after me?”
“You’re the only piece out of place on this particular board,” said Diamandis. He let gravity settle him into one of the hut’s two chairs. “A queen in motion, judging by the furor. I’m just a pawn, so they don’t see me—and as long as they don’t, they can’t catch you either.”
“Try this.” She slammed a plate down in front of him. He eyed it dubiously.
“Mind telling me what you did?”
“Did?” She gnawed her lip, ignoring the stabbing pain in her jaw. “Not very much. I may have assassinated someone.”
“Mayhave?” He chortled. “You’re not sure?” She simply shrugged. Diamandis’s expression softened. “Why am I not surprised,” he said under his breath.
They ate in silence. If this day were to follow the pattern of the last few, Diamandis would now have fallen onto the cot Venera had just vacated, and would immediately commence to snore in competition with the wind. Instead, he looked at her seriously and said, “It’s time for you to make a decision.”
“Oh?” She folded her hands in her lap listlessly. “About what?”
He scowled. “Venera, I utterly adore you. Were I twenty years younger you wouldn’t be safe around me. As it is, you’re eating me out of house and home and having an extra mouth to feed is, well, tiring.”
“Ah.” Venera brightened just a little. “The conversation my father and I never had.”
Hiding his grin, Diamandis ticked points off on his fingers. “One: you can give yourself up to the men in armor who are looking for you. Two: you can make yourself useful by going with me on my nightly sorties. Three: you can leave Spyre. Or, four—”
“I thought you said I could never leave,” she said, frowning.
“I lied.” Seeing her expression, he rubbed at his chin and looked away. “Well, I had a beautiful young woman in my bed, even if I wasn’t in there with her, so why would I let her go so easily? Yes, there is a way out of Spyre—potentially. But it would be dangerous.”
“I don’t care. Show me.” She stood up.
“Sit down, sit down. It’s daytime, and I’m tired. I need to sleep first. It’s a long trek to the bomb bays. And anyway… don’t you want to hear about the fourth option?”
“There is no other option.”
He sighed in obvious disappointment. “All right. Let me sleep, then. We’ll visit the site tonight and you can decide whether it’s truly what you want to do.”
* * * *
They picked their way through a field of weeds. Lesser Spyre twirled far above. The dark houses of the great families surrounded them, curving upward in two directions to form a blotted sky. Venera had examined those estates as they walked; she’d hardly had the leisure time to do so on her disastrous run to the edge of the world. Now, as the rust-eaten iron gates and crumbling battlements eased by, she
had time to realize just how strange a place Spyre was.
On the steep roof of a building half-hidden by century oaks, she had seen a golden boy singing. At first she had taken him for some automaton, but then he slipped and caught himself. The boy was centered in bright spotlights and he held a golden olive branch over his head. Whether there was an audience for his performance in the gardens or balconies below; whether he did this every night or if it were some rare ceremony she had chanced to see—these things she would never know. She had touched Garth’s shoulder and pointed. He merely shrugged.
Other estates were resolutely dark, their buildings choked in vines and their grounds overgrown with brambles. She had walked up to the gate of one such to peer between the leaves. Garth had pulled her back. “They’ll shoot you,” he’d said.
In some places the very architecture had turned inward, becoming incomprehensible, even impossible for humans to inhabit. Strange cancerous additions were flocked onto the sides of stately manors, mazes drawn in stone over entire grounds. Strange piping echoed from one dark entranceway, the rushing sound of wings from another. At one point Venera and Garth crossed a line of strange footprints, all the toes pointed inward and the indentations heavy on the outside as if the dozens of people who had made them were all terribly bow-legged.
It did no good to look away from these sights. Venera occasionally glanced at the sky, but the sky was paved with yet more estates. After each glance she would hunch unconsciously away, and each time, a pulse of anger would shoot through her and she would straighten her shoulders and scowl.
Venera couldn’t hide her nervousness. “Is it much further?”
“You whine like a child. This way. Mind the nails.”
“Garth, you remind me of someone but I can’t figure out who.”
“Ah! A treasured lover, no doubt. The one that got away, perhaps?—Wait, don’t tell me, I prefer to wallow in my fantasies.”
“…A particularly annoying footman my mother had?”
“Madam, you wound me. Besides, I don’t believe you.”
“If there really is a way off of Spyre, why haven’t you ever taken it?”
He stopped and looked back at her. Little more than a silhouette in the dim light, Diamandis still conveyed disappointment in the tilt of his shoulders and head. “Are you deliberately provoking me?”
Venera caught up to him. “No,” she said, putting her fists on her hips. “If this exit is so dangerous that you chose not to use it, I want to know.”
“Oh. Yes, it’s dangerous—but not that dangerous. I could have used it. But we’ve been over this. Where would I go? One of the other principalities? What use would an old gigolo be there?”
“—Let the ladies judge that.”
“Ha! Good point. But no. Besides, if I circled around and came back to Lesser Spyre, I’d eventually be caught. Have you been up there? It’s even more paranoid and tightly controlled than this place. The city is… impossible. No, it would never work.”
As was typical of her, Venera had been ignoring what Garth was saying and focusing instead on how he said it. “I’ve got it!” she said. “I know why you stayed.”
He turned toward her, a black cut-out against distant lights—and for once Venera didn’t simply blurt out what was on her mind. She could be perfectly tactful when her life depended on it but in other circumstances had never known why one should bother. Normally she would have just said it: You’re still in love with someone. But she hesitated.
“In there,” said Diamandis, pointing to a long, low building whose roof was being overtaken by lopsided trees. He waited, but when she didn’t say anything he turned slowly and walked in the direction of the building.
“A wise woman wouldn’t be entering such a place unescorted,” said Venera lightly as she took his arm. Diamandis laughed.
“I am your escort.”
“You, Mr. Diamandis, are why escorts were invented.”
Pleased, he developed a bit of a bounce to his step. Venera, though, wanted to slow down—not because she was afraid of him or what waited inside the dark. At this moment, she could not have said what made her hesitate.
The concrete lot was patched with grass and young trees and they scuttled across it quickly, both wary of any watchers on high. They soon reached a peeled-out loading door in the side of the metal building. There was no breeze outside, but wind was whistling around the edges of the door.
“It puzzles me why there isn’t a small army of squatters living in places like this,” said Venera as the blackness swallowed Diamandis. She reluctantly stepped after him into it. “The pressures of life in these pocket states must be intolerable. Why don’t more people simply leave?”
“Oh, they do.” Diamandis took her hand and led her along a flat floor. “Just a bit further, I have to find the door… through here.” Wind buffeted her from behind now. “Reach forward… here’s the railing. Now, follow that to the left.”
They were on some sort of catwalk, its metal grating ringing faintly under her feet.
“Many people leave,” said Diamandis. “Most don’t know how to survive outside of the chambers where they were born and bred. They return, cowed; or they die. Many are shot by the sentries, by border guards, or by the preservationists. I’ve buried a number of friends since I came to live here.”
Her eyes were starting to adjust to the dark. Venera could tell that they were in a very large room of some sort, its ceiling ribbed with girders. Holes let in faint light in places, just enough to sketch the dimensions of the place. The floor…
There was no floor, only subdivided metal boxes with winches hanging over them. Some of those boxes were capped by fierce vortices of wind that collectively must have scoured every grain of grit out of the place. Looking down at the nearest box, Venera saw that it was really a square metal pit with clamshell doors at its bottom. Those doors vibrated faintly.
“Behold the bomb bays,” said Diamandis, sweeping his arm in a dramatic arc. “Designed to rain unholy fire on any fleet stupid enough to line itself up with Spyre’s rotation. This one chamber held enough firepower to carpet a square mile of air with bombs. And there were once two dozen such bays.”
The small hurricane chattered like a crowd of madmen; the bomb bay doors rattled and buzzed in sympathy. “Was it ever used?” asked Venera.
“Supposedly,” said Diamandis. “The story goes that we wiped out an entire armada in seconds. Though that could all be propaganda—if true, I can see why people outside Spyre would despise us. After all, there would have been hundreds of bombs that passed through the armada and simply kept going. Who knows what unsuspecting nations we strafed?”
Venera touched the scar on her chin.
“Anyway, it was generations ago,” said Diamandis. “No one seems to care that much about us since the other great wheels disintegrated. We’re the last, and ignored the way you pass by the aged. Come this way.”
They went up a short flight of metal steps to a catwalk that extended out over the bays. Diamandis led Venera halfway down the long room; his footfalls were steady, hers slowing as they approached a solitary finned shape hanging from chains above one of the bays.
“That’s a bomb!” It was a good eight feet long, almost three in diameter, a great metal torpedo with a button nose. Diamandis leaned out over the railing and slapped it.
“A bomb, indeed,” he said over the whistling gale. “At least, it’s a bomb casing. See? The hatch there is unscrewed. I scooped out the explosives years ago; there’s room for one person if you wriggle your way in. All I have to do is throw a lever and it will drop and bang through those doors. Nothing’s going to stop you once you’re outside, you can go a few hundred miles and then light out on your own.”
She too leaned out to touch the cylinder’s flank.
“So you’ll go home, will you?” he asked, with seeming innocence.
Venera snatched her fingers back. She crossed her arms and looked away.
“The people
who ran this place,” she said after a while. “It was one of the great nations, wasn’t it? One of the ones that specialize in building weapons. Like Sacrus?”
He laughed. “Not Sacrus. Their export is leverage. Means of political control, ranging from blackmail to torture and extortion. They have advisors in the throne rooms of half the principalities.”
“They sell torturers?”
“That’s one of the skills they export, yes. Almost nobody in Spyre deals with them anymore—they’re too dangerous. Keep pulling coups, trying to dominate the Council. The preservationists are still hurting from their own run-in with them. You met one of theirs in Liris?” She nodded.
Diamandis sighed. “Yet one more reason for you to leave, then. Once you’re marked in their ledgers, you’re never safe again. Come on, I’ll give you a boost up.”
“Wait.” She stared at the black opening in the metal thing. The thought came to her: this won’t work. She could not return to Slipstream and pretend that things that had been done had not been done. She could not in silence retire as the shunned wife of a disgraced admiral. Not when the man responsible for Chaison’s death—the Pilot of Slipstream—still sat like a spider at the center of Slipstream affairs.
Thinking this made her fury catch like dry tinder. A spasm of pain shot up her jaw, and she shook her head. Venera turned and walked back along the catwalk.
Diamandis hurried after her. “What are you doing?”
Venera struggled to catch her breath. She would need resources. If she was to avenge Chaison, she would need power. “Yesterday you said something about a fourth choice, Garth.” She rattled down the steps and headed for the door.
“Tell me about that choice.”
* * * *
You must be ready for this,Garth had said. It is like no place you have ever been or ever imagined. Near dawn, as they approached the region of Spyre known as the airfall, she began to understand what he meant.
The great estates dwindled as they threaded their way through Diamandis’s secret ways; even the preservationists avoided this sector of the great wheel. Ruins dotted the landscape and strange trees lay nearly prone like supplicants.
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