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Illustration by George Krauter
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Being literally thrown into an unknown environment forces a person to adapt-––and familiar ways of doing that may not be enough.
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Prologue
Garth Diamandis looked up, and saw a woman in the sky.
The balcony swayed under him; distant trees wavered in the hot afternoon air though there was no breeze. A twist of little clouds pirouetted far overhead, just beneath the glitter and darkness of the city that had exiled Gareth to this place so many years ago. Well below the city, only a thousand feet up at this point, a single human form had appeared out of the light.
She rotated up out of Garth’s view and he had to wait several minutes for her to come back around. Then, there she was: gliding with supernatural grace over the tall, ragged wall that rimmed the world at its nearer end. Behind her, infinite air beckoned, forever out of reach of Garth and the others like him. Ahead of the silent woman, a likely tumble into quickly moving trees, broken limbs and death. If she wasn’t dead already.
Someone tried to escape, he thought—an act that always ended in gunshots or bloody thrashing beneath a swarm of piranhawks. This one must have been shot cleanly by the day watch for she was spiraling across the sky alone, not attended by a retinue of blood droplets. And now the spin-gale was teasing the fringes of her outlandish garment, slowing her; bringing her down.
Garth frowned, for a moment forgetting the aches and pains that bedeviled him all day and all night. The hovering woman’s clothes had been too bright and fluttered too easily to be made of the traditional leather and metal of Spyre.
As the world turned the woman receded into the distance, frustrating Garth’s attempt to see more. The ground under his perch was rotating up and away along with the whole cylindrical world; the black-haired woman was not moving with it but rather sailing in majestically from one of the world’s open ends. But Spyre made its own winds as it turned, and those winds would pull her to its surface before she had a chance to drift out the other side.
She would have sped up by that time, but not enough to match Spyre’s rotation. Garth well knew what happened when someone began clipping the treetops and towers at several hundred miles per hour. He’d be finding pieces of her for weeks.
The ground undulated again. Frantic horns began echoing in the distance—an urgent conversation between the inner surface of Spyre and the city above.
Watching the woman had been an idle pastime, since it looked as though she was going to come down along the rail line. People with more firepower and muscle than Garth owned that; they would see her in a few moments and bring her down. Her valuable possessions and clothes would not be his.
But the horns were insistent. Something was wrong with the very fabric of Spyre, an oscillation building. He could see it in the far distance now: the land heaved minutely up and down. The slow ripple was making its way in his direction; he’d better get off this parapet.
The archway opening onto the balcony had empty air behind it and a twenty-foot drop to tumbled stones. Garth hopped over the rail without hesitation, counting as he fell. “One pilot, two pilot, three—” He landed among upthrusts of stabbing weed and the cloud-like brambles that had taken over this ancient mansion. Three seconds? Well, gravity hadn’t changed, at least not noticeably.
His muscles creaked as he stood up, but climbing and jumping were part of his daily constitutional, a grim routine aimed at convincing himself he was still a man.
He stalked over the crackling grit that painted a tiled dance floor. Railway ties were laid callously across the fine pallasite stones; the line cleaved the former Nation of Arbath like a whip-mark. Garth stepped onto the track daringly and stared down it. The great family of Arbath had not reached an accommodation with the preservationists and had been displaced or killed, he couldn’t remember which. Rubble, ruins, and new walls sided the tracks; at one spot an abandoned sniper tower loomed above the strip. It swayed now uneasily.
The tracks converged in perspective but also rose with the land itself, a long graceful curve that became vertical if he followed it far enough. He didn’t look that far, but focused on a scramble of activity taking place about a mile distant.
The Preservation Society had planted one of their oil-soaked sidings there like an obscene graffito. Some of the preservationists were pouring alcohol into the tanks of a big turbine engine that squatted on the tracks like an idol to industrialism. Others had started a tug and were shunting in cars loaded with iron plating and rubble. They were responding to the codes brayed out by the distant horns.
They were so busy doing all this that none had noticed what was happening overhead.
“You’re crazy, Garth.” He hopped from foot to foot, twisting his hands together. When he was younger he wouldn’t have hesitated. There was a time when he’d lived for escapades like this. Cursing his own cowardice, Garth lurched into a half run down the tracks—in the direction of the preservationist camp.
He had to prove himself more and more often these days. Garth still sported the black cap and long sideburns that rakes had worn in his day, but he was acutely aware that the day had come and gone. His long leather coat was brindled with cracks and dappled with stains. Though he still wore the twin holsters that had once held the most expensive and stylish dueling pistols available in Spyre, nowadays he just carried odd objects in them. His breath ratcheted in his chest and if his head didn’t hurt, his legs did, or his hands. Pain followed him everywhere; it had made crow’s-feet where once he’d outlined his eyes in black to show the ladies his long lashes.
The preservationist’s engine started up. It was coming his way so Garth prudently left the track and hunkered down beneath some bushes to let it pass. He was in disputed land, so no one would accost him here, but he might be casually shot from a window of the train and no one would care. While he waited he watched the dot of the slowly falling woman, trying to verify his initial guess at her trajectory.
Garth made it the rest of the way to the preservationist camp without attracting attention. Pandemonium still reigned inside the camp, with shaven-headed men in stiff leather coats crawling like ants over a second, rust-softened engine, under the curses of a supervisor. The first train was miles up the curve of the world now, and if Garth bothered to look down the length of Spyre, he was sure he would see many other trains on the move as well. But that wasn’t his interest.
Pieces of the world fell off all the time. It wasn’t his problem.
He crept between two teetering stacks of railway ties until he was next to a pile of catch-nets the preservationists had dumped here. Using a stick he’d picked up along the way, he snagged one of the nets and dragged it into the shadows. Under full gravity it would have weighed several hundred pounds; as it was, he staggered under the weight as he carried it to a nearby line of trees.
She was going by again, lower now and fast in her long spiral. The woman’s clothes were tearing in the headwind, and her dark hair bannered behind her. When Garth saw that her exposed skin was bright red he stopped in surprise, then redoubled his efforts to reach the nearest vertical cable.
The interior of Spyre was spoked by thousands of these cables; some rose at low angles to reattach themselves to the skin of the world just a few miles away. Some shot straight up to touch down on the opposite side of the cylinder. All were under tremendous tension and every now and then one snapped; then the world ran like a bell for an hour or two and shifted, and more pieces fell off of it.
Aside from keeping the world together, the cables served numerous purposes. Some carried elevators. The one Garth approached had smaller lines draped and coiled around its frayed black surface—some old, rusted, and disused pulley system. The main cable was anchored to a corroded metal cone that jutted out of the earth. He clipped two corners of the roll of netting to the old pulley. Then he jogged away from the tracks, unreeling the net behind him.
It took far too long to connect a third corner of the huge net to a corroded flagpole. Sweating and suffering palpitations, he ran back to the flagpole one more time. As he did she came by again.
She was a bullet. In fact, it was the land that was speeding by below her and pulling the air with it. If she’d been alive earlier she might be dead now; he doubted whether anyone could breathe in such a gale.
As soon as she shot past, Garth began hauling on the pulleys. The net lurched into the air a foot at a time. Too slow! He cursed and redoubled his effort, expecting to hear shouts from the preservationist camp at any moment.
With agonizing slowness, a triangle of netting rose. One end was anchored to the flagpole; two more were on their way up the cable. Had he judged her trajectory right? It didn’t matter; this was the only attachment point for hundreds of yards, and by now she was too low. Air resistance was yanking her down, and in moments she would be tumbled to pieces on the ground.
Here she came. Garth wiped sweat out of his eyes and pulled with bloody hands. At that moment the shriek of a steam whistle sounded from the preservationist camp. The rusted engine was on the move.
The mysterious woman arrowed in just above the highest trees. Garth thought for sure she was going to miss his net. Then, just as the rusted engine sailed by on the tracks—he caught snapshot glimpses of surprised preservationist faces and open mouths—she hit the net and yanked it off the cable.
A twirling screw hit Garth in the nose and he sat down. Sparks shot from screaming brakes on the tracks, and the black tangling form of the falling woman passed between the Y-uprights of a jagged tree, the trailing net catching branches and snapping them as she bounced with astonishing gentleness into a bed of weeds.
Garth was there in seconds, cutting through the netting with his knife. Her clothes marked her as a foreigner, so her ransom potential might be low. He probably couldn’t even get much for her clothes; cloth like that had no business being worn in Spyre. Oh well; maybe she had some adornments that might fetch enough to buy him food for a few weeks.
Just in case, he put a hand on her neck—and felt a pulse. Garth cursed in astonishment. Jubilantly he slashed away the rest of the strands and pulled her out as a warning shot cracked through the air.
Unable to resist, he teased back the wave of black hair that fell across her face. The woman was fairly young—in her twenties—and had fine, sharp features with well-defined black eyebrows and full lips. The symmetry of her face was broken only by a star-shaped scar on her jaw. Her skin would have been quite fair were it not deeply sunburnt.
She only weighed twenty pounds or so. It was easy to sling her over his shoulder and run for the deep bush that marked the boundary of the disputed lands.
He pushed his way through the branches and onto private land. The preservationists pulled up short, cursing, just shy of the bushes. Garth Diamandis laughed as he ran; and for a precious few minutes, he felt like he was twenty years old again.
A low-beamed ceiling swam into focus. Venera Fanning frowned at it, then winced as pain shot through her jaw. She was definitely alive, she decided ruefully.
She was—but was Chaison Fanning also among the living, or was Venera now a widow? That was it, she had been trying to get back to her husband, Chaison Fanning. Trying to get home—
Sitting up proved impossible. The slightest motion sent waves of pain through her; she felt like she’d been skinned. She moaned involuntarily.
“You’re awake?” The thickly accented words had the crackle of age to them. She turned her head gingerly and made out a dim form moving to sit next to her. She was lying on a bed—probably—and he was on a stool or something. She blinked, trying to take in more of the long, low room.
“Don’t try to move,” said the old man. “You’ve got severe sunburn and sunstroke, too. Plus a few cuts and bruises. I’ve been wetting down the sheets to give you some relief. Gave you water, too. Don’t know what else to do.”
“Th-thanks.” Then she looked down at herself. “Where are my clothes?”
His face cracked in a smile, and for a second he looked much younger. He had slab-like features, with prominent cheekbones and piercing gray eyes. Eyes like that could send chills through you, and from his confident grin he seemed to know it. But as he shifted in the firelight, she saw that lines of care and disappointment had cut away much of his handsomeness.
“Your clothes are here,” he said, patting a chair or table nearby. “Don’t worry, I’ve done nothing to you—not out of virtue, mind, I’m not a big fan of virtue, mine or anyone else’s. No, you can thank arthritis, old wounds, and age for your safety.” He grinned again. “I’m Garth Diamandis. And you are a foreigner.”
Venera sighed listlessly. “Probably. What does that mean around here?”
Diamandis leaned back, crossing his arms. “Much, or nothing, depending.”
“And here is . . . ?”
“Spyre,” he said.
“Spyre . . .” She thought she should remember that name. But Venera was already falling asleep. She let herself do it; after all, it was so cool here . . .
When she awoke again it was to find herself propped half upright in a chair. Her forehead, upper body, and arms were draped with moist sheets. Blankets swaddled her below that.
Venera was facing a leaded-glass window. Outside, green foliage made a sunlit screen. She heard birds. That suggested the kind of garden you only got in the bigger towns—a gravity-bound garden where trees grew short and squat, and soil stayed in one place. Such things were rare—and that, in turn, implied wealth.
But this room . . . As she turned her head her hopes faded. This was a hovel, for all that it too seemed built for gravity. The floor was the relentless iron of a town foundation, though surprisingly she could feel no vibration from engines or slipstream vanes through her feet. The silence was uncanny, in fact. The chamber itself was oddly cantilevered, as though hollowed out of the foundations of some much larger structure. Boxes, chests, and empty birdcages were jammed or piled everywhere, a few narrow paths worn between them. The only clear area was the spot where her overstuffed armchair sat. She located the bed to her left, some tables, and a fireplace that looked like it had been clumsily dug into the wall by the window. There were several tables here and the clutter had infected them as well; they were covered with framed pictures.
Venera leaned forward, catching up the sheet at her throat. A sizzle of pain went through her arms and shoulders, and she extended her left arm, snarling. She was sunburned a deep brick red, which was already starting to peel. How long had she been here?
The pictures. Gingerly, she reached out to turn one in the light. It was of a young lady holding a pair of collapsible wrist-fins. She wore a strange, stiff-looking black bodice, and her backdrop was indistinct but might have been clouds.
All the portraits were of women, some two dozen by her estimation. Some were young, some older; all the ladies seemed well-off from their various elaborate hairdos. Their clothes were outlandish, though, made of sweeping chrome and leather, clearly heavy and doubtless uncomfortable. There was, she realized, a complete absence of cloth in these photos.
“Ah, you’re awake!” Diamandis shuffled his way through the towering stacks of junk. He was holding a limp bird by the neck; now he waved it cheerfully. “Lunch!”
“I demand to know where I am.” She started to stand and found herself propelled nearly to the ceiling. Gravity was very low here. Recovering with a wince, she coiled the damp sheet around her for modesty. It didn’t help; Diamandis frankly admired her form anyway, and probably would have stared even if she’d been sheathed in plate armor. It seemed to be his way, and there was, strangely, nothing offensive about it.
“You are a guest of the Principality of Spyre,” said Diamandis. He sat down at a low table and began plucking the bird. “But I regret to have to inform you that you’ve landed on the wrong part of our illustrious nation. This is Greater Spyre, where I’ve lived now for, oh . . . twenty-odd years.”
She held up the picture she had been looking at. “You were a busy man, I see.”
He looked over and laughed in delight. “Very! And why not? The world is full of wonders, and I wanted to meet them all.”
Venera touched the stone wall and now felt a faint thrum, but very slight. “You say this is a town? An old one . . . and you’ve turned gravity way down.” Then she turned to look at Diamandis. “What did you mean, ‘regret to inform me’? What’s wrong with this Greater Spyre?”
He looked over at her, and now he seemed very old. “Come. If you can walk, I’ll show you your new home.”
Venera bit back a sharp retort. Instead, she sullenly followed him through the stacks. “My temporary residence, you mean,” she said to the cracked leather back of his coat. “I am making my way back to the court at Slipstream. If ransom is required, you will be paid handsomely for my safe return . . .” He laughed, somewhat sadly.
“Ah, but that it were possible to do that,” he murmured. He exited up a low flight of steps into bright light. She followed, feeling the old scar on her jaw starting to throb.
The roofless square building had been built of stone and steel I-beams, perhaps centuries ago. Now devoid of top and floors, it had become a kind of open box, thirty feet on a side. Wild plants grew in profusion throughout the rubble-strewn interior. The hole leading to Diamandis’s home was in one corner of the place; there was no other way in or out as far as she could see.
Venera stared at the grass. She’d never seen wild plants under gravity before. Every square foot was accounted for in the rotating ring-shaped structures she called towns. They were seldom more than a mile in diameter, after all, often built of mere rope and planking. There was no other way to feel gravity than to visit a town.
She scanned the sky past the stone walls. In some ways it looked right: the endless vistas of Virga were blocked by some sort of structure. But the perspective seemed all wrong.
“Come.” Diamandis was gesturing to her from a nearly invisible set of steps that ran up one wall. She scowled, but followed him up to a level area just below the top of the wall. If she stood on tiptoe, she could look over. So she did.
Venera had never known one could feel so small. Spyre was a rotating habitat, like those she had grown up in. But that was all she could have said to connect it to the worlds she had known. Diamandis’s little tower sat among forlorn trees and scrub-grass in an empty plain that stretched to forest a mile or more in each direction. In any sane world, this much land under gravity would have been crammed with buildings; those empty plazas and tumbled-down villas should have been awash with humanity.
Past the trees, the landscape became a maze of walls, towers, open fields, and sharp-edged forests. And it went on and on to a dizzying, impossible distance. Diamandis’s tower was one tiny mote on the inside surface of a cylinder that must be ten or twelve miles in diameter and half again as long.
Sunlight angled in from somewhere behind her; Venera turned quickly, needing the reassurance of something familiar. Beyond the open ends of the great cylinder, the reassuring cloudscapes of the normal world turned slowly; she had not left all sense and reason behind. But the scale of this town-wheel was impossible for any engineering she knew. The energy needed to keep it turning in the unstable airs of Virga would beggar any normal nation. Yet the place looked ancient, as evidenced by the many overgrown ruins and furzes of wild forest. In fact, she could see gaps in the surface here and there through which she could glimpse distant flickers of cloud and sky.
“Are those holes?” she asked, pointing at a nearby crater. Leaves, twigs, and grit fogged the air above it, and all the topsoil for yards around had been stripped away revealing a stained metal skin that must underlie everything here.
Garth scowled as if she’d committed some indiscretion by pointing out the hole. “Yes,” he said grudgingly. “Spyre is ancient and decaying, and it’s under an awful strain. Tears like that open up all the time. It’s everyone’s nightmare that one day, such a rip might not stop. If the world should ever come to an end, it will start with a tear like that one.”
Faintly alarmed, Venera looked around at the many other tears that dotted the landscape. Garth laughed. “Don’t worry, if it’s serious the patch gangs will be here in a day or two to fix it—dodging bullets from the local gentry all the while. They were out doing just that when I picked you up.”
Venera looked straight up. “I suppose if this is greater Spyre” she said, pointing, “then that is Lesser Spyre?”
The empty space that the cylinder rotated around was filled with conventional town-wheels. Uncoupled from the larger structure, these rings spun grandly in midair, miles above her. Some were ‘geared’ towns whose rims touched, while others turned in solitary majesty. A puff of smaller buildings surrounded the towns.
The wheels weren’t entirely disconnected from Greater Spyre. Venera saw cables standing up at various angles every mile or so throughout the giant cylinder. Some angled across the world to anchor in the ground again far up Spyre’s curve. Some went straight past the axis and down to an opposite point; if you climbed one of these lines, you could get to the city that hung like an iron cloud half a dozen miles above.
She didn’t see any elevator traffic on the nearest cables. Most were tethered inside the maze-like grounds of the estates that dotted the land. Would anyone have a right to use those cables but the owners?
When Diamandis didn’t reply, Venera glanced over at him. He was gazing up at the distant towns, his expression shifting between empty adoration and anger. He seemed lost in memory.
Then he blinked and looked down at her. “Lesser Spyre, yes. My home, from which I am exiled for life. Always visible, never to be achieved again.” He shook his head. “Unlucky you to have landed here, lady.”
“My name,” she said, “is Venera Fanning.” She looked out again. The nearer end of the great cylinder began to curve upward less than a mile away. It rose for a mile or two, then ended in open air. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What’s to prevent me—or you—from leaving? Just step off that rim yonder and you’ll be in free flight in the skies of Virga. You could go anywhere.”
Diamandis looked where she was pointing. Now his smile was condescending. “Ejected at four hundred miles per hour, Lady Fanning, you’ll be unconscious in seconds for lack of breath. Before you slow enough to awake you’ll either suffocate or be eaten alive by the piranhawks. Or be shot by the sentries. Or be eviscerated by the razor wire clouds, or hit a mine . . .
“No, it was a miracle that you drifted unconscious through all of that, to land here. A once-in-a-million feat.
“Now that you’re among us, you will never leave again.”
Diamandis’s words might have alarmed Venera had she not recently survived a number of impossible situations—not only that, he was manifestly wrong about the threat the piranhawks represented; after all, hadn’t she sailed blithely through them all? These things in mind, she followed him down to his hovel, where he began to prepare a meal.
The bird was pathetically small; they would each get a couple of mouthfuls out of it if they were lucky. “I’m grateful for your help,” Venera said as she lowered herself painfully back into the armchair. “But you obviously don’t have very much. What do you get out of helping me?”
“The warmth of your gratitude,” said Diamandis. In the shadow of the stone fireplace, it was impossible to make out his expression.
Venera chose to laugh. “Is that all? What if I’d been a man?”
“I’d have left you without a second thought.”
“I see.” She reached over to her piled clothes and rummaged through them. “As I suspected. I’ve not come through unscathed, have I?” The jewelry that had filled her flight jacket’s inner pockets was gone. She looked under the table and immediately spotted something: it looked like a metal door in the floor, with a rope loop as its handle. Her feet had been resting on it earlier.
“No, it’s not down there,” said Diamandis with a smile.
Venera shrugged. The two most important objects in her possession were still inside her jacket. She could feel the spent bullet through the lining. As to the other—Venera slipped her hand in to touch the scuffed white cylinder that she and her husband had fought their way across half the world to collect. It didn’t look like it was worth anything, so Diamandis had apparently ignored it. Venera left it where it was and straightened to find Diamandis watching her.
“Consider those trinkets to be payment for my rescuing you,” he said. “I can live for years on what you had in your pockets.”
“So could I,” she said levelly. “In fact, I was counting on using those valuables to barter my way home, if I had to.”
“I’ve left you a pair of earrings and a bracelet,” he said, pointing. There they were, sitting on the table next to her toeless deck shoes. “The rest is hidden, so don’t bother looking.”
Seething but too tired to fight, Venera leaned back, carefully draping the moist sheet over herself. “If I felt better, old man, I’d whip you for your impudence.”
He laughed out loud. “Spoken like a true aristocrat! I knew you were a woman of quality by the softness of your hands. So what were you doing floating alone in the skies of Virga? Was your ship beset by pirates? Or did you fall overboard?”
She grimaced. “Either one makes a good story. Take your pick. Oh, don’t look at me like that, I’ll tell you, but first you have to tell me where we are. What is Spyre? How could such a place exist? From the heat outside I’d say we’re still near the sun of suns. Is this place one of the principalities of Candesce?”
Diamandis shrugged. He bent over his dinner pot for a minute, then straightened and said, “Spyre’s the whole world to those of us who live here. I’m told there’s no other place like it in all of Virga. We were here at the founding of the world, and most people think we’ll be here at its end. But I’ve also heard that once, there were dozens of Spyres, and that all the rest crumbled and spun apart over the ages . . . So I believe we live in a mortal world. Like me, Spyre is showing its age.”
He brought two plates. Venera was impressed: he’d added some cooked roots and a handful of boiled grains and made a passable meal of the bird. She was ravenous and dug in; he watched in amusement.
“As to what Spyre is . . .” He thought for a moment. “In the cold-blooded language of the engineers, you could say that we live on an open-ended rotating cylinder made of metal and miraculously strong cables. About six miles from here there’s a giant engine that powers the electric jets. It is the same kind of engine that runs the suns. Once, we had hundreds of jets to keep us spinning, and Spyre’s outer skin was smooth and didn’t catch the wind. Gravity was stronger then. The jets are failing, one by one, and wind resistance pulls at the skin like the fingers of a demon. The old aristocrats refuse to see the decay that surrounds them, even when pieces of Spyre fall away and the whole world becomes unbalanced in its turning. When that happens, the preservationist society’s rail engines start up and they haul as many tons as needed around the circle of the world to reestablish the balance.
“The nobles fought a civil war against the creation of the preservation society. That was a hundred years ago, but some of them are still fighting. The rest have been hunkered down on their estates for five centuries now, slowly breeding heritable insanities in the quiet of their shuttered parlors. They’re so isolated that they hardly speak the same language anymore. They’ll shoot anyone who crosses their land, yet they continue to live, because they can export objects and creatures that can only be made here.”
Venera frowned at him. “You must not be one of them. You’re making sense as far as I can tell.”
“Me? I’m from the city.” He pointed upward. “Up there, we still trade with the rest of the principalities. We have to, we’ve got no agriculture of our own. But the hereditary nobles own us because they control the industries down here.”
The bitterness in his voice was plain. “So, Garth Diamandis, if you’re a city person, what are you doing living in a hole in the ground in Greater Spyre?” She said it lightly, though she was aware the question must cause him more pain.
He did look away before smiling ruefully at her. “I made the cardinal mistake of all gigolos: I cultivated popularity among women only. I bedded one too many princesses, you see. I was kindly not killed nor castrated for it, but I was sent here.”
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “Why is it impossible to leave? You said something about defenses . . . but why are they there?”
Diamandis guffawed. “Spyre is a treasure! At its height, this place was the equal of any nation in Virga, with gravity for all and wonders you couldn’t get anywhere else. Why, we had horses! Have you heard of horses? And dogs and cats. You understand? We had here all the plants and animals that were brought from Earth at the very beginning of the world. Animals that were never altered to live in weightlessness. Even now, a breeding pair of house cats costs a king’s ransom. An orange is worth its weight in platinum. We had to defend ourselves and prevent our treasures being stolen. So for centuries now Spyre has been ringed with razors and bombs to prevent attack—and to prevent anyone smuggling anything out. And believe me, when all else has descended to madness and decadence, that is the one policy that will remain in place.” He hung his head.
“But surely one person, traveling alone—”
“Could carry a cargo of swallowed seeds. Or a dormant infant animal in a capsule sewn under the skin. Both have been tried. Oh, travel is still possible, for nobles of Lesser Spyre and their attendants, but there are body scans and examinations, interrogations, and quarantines. And anyone who’s recently been on Greater Spyre comes under even more suspicion.”
“I . . . see.” Venera decided not to believe him. She would be more cheerful that way. She did her best to shrug off the black mood his words had inspired and focused on her meal.
They ate in silence for a while, then he said, “And you? Pirates or a fall overboard?”
“Both and neither,” said Venera. How much should she tell? There was no question that lying would be necessary, but one must always strike the right balance. The best lies were built of pieces of truth woven together in the right way. Also, it would do her no good to deny her status or origins; after all, if the paranoid rulers of Spyre needed money, then Venera Fanning herself could fetch a good price. Her husband would buy her back, or reduce this strange wheel to metal flinders. She had only to get word back to him.
“I was a princess of the kingdom of Hale,” she told Diamandis. “I married at a young age, he is Chaison Fanning, the admiral of the migratory nation of Slipstream. Our countries lie far from here—hundreds or thousands of miles, I don’t know—far from the light of Candesce. We have our own suns, which light a few hundred miles of open air that we farm. Our civilizations are bounded by darkness, unlike you who bask in the permanent glory of the sun of suns . . .”
Some audiences would need more—not all people knew that the whole vast world of Virga was artificial, a balloon thousands of miles in diameter that hung alone in the cosmos. Lacking any gravity save that made by its own inner air, Virga was a weightless environment whose extent could easily seem infinite to those who lived within it. Heat and light were provided not by any outside star but by artificial suns, of which Candesce was the oldest and brightest.
Even the ignorant knew it was a manmade sun that warmed their faces and lit the crops they grew on millions of slowly tumbling clods of earth. But the world itself? One glance up from your own drudge-work might encompass vast, cloud-wreathed spheres of water, miles in extent, their surfaces scaled with mirror-bright ripples; thunderheads the size of nations, which made no rain because rain required gravity but rather condensed balls of water the size of houses, of cities, then threw them at you; and a glance down would reveal depths of air painted every delicate shade by the absorption and attenuation of the light of a dozen distant suns. How could such a place have an end? How could it have been made by people?
Venera had seen the outer skin of the world, watched icebergs calve off its cold black surface. She had visited the region of machine-life and incandescent heat that was Candesce. The world was an artifact, and fragile. In her coat pocket was something that could destroy it all, if you but knew what it was and how to use it.
There were things she could tell no one.
A thing she could tell was that her adopted home of Slipstream had been attacked by a neighboring power, Mavery. Missiles had flashed out of the night, blossoming like red flowers on the inner surface of the town-wheels of Rush. The city had been shocked into action, a punitive expedition mounted with her husband leading it.
She explained to Diamandis that Mavery’s assault had been a feint. He listened in mesmerized silence as she described the brittle dystopia known as Falcon Formation, another neighbor of Slipstream. Falcon had conspired with Mavery to draw Slipstream’s navy away from Rush. Once the capital was undefended, Falcon Formation was to move in and crush it.
The true story was that Venera’s own spy network had alerted them to this plot. Chaison and Venera Fanning had taken seven ships from the fleet and left on a secret mission to find a weapon powerful enough to stop Falcon. The story she told Diamandis now was that her flagship and its escort were pursued by Falcon raiders, chased right out of the lit air of civilization into the darkness of permanent winter that permeated most of Virga.
That had been a month ago.
After that, more things she could tell: a battle with pirates, being captured by same; escape, and more adventures near the skin of the world. She told Diamandis that they had sailed toward Candesce in search of help for their beleaguered country. She did not tell him that their goal was not any of the ancient principalities that ringed the sun. They were after a pirate’s treasure, in particular the one seemingly insignificant piece of it that now rested in Venera’s jacket. They had come seeking the key to Candesce itself.
In Venera’s version, the Slipstream expedition had been met with hostility and chased into the furnace-like regions around Candesce. Her ships had been set upon and half of them destroyed by treacherous marauders of the nation of Gehellen.
In fact, she and her husband had orchestrated the theft of the pirate’s treasure from under the noses of the Gehellens and then fled with it—he, back to Slipstream and her, into the sun of suns. There she had temporarily disabled one of Candesce’s systems. While it was down, Chaison Fanning was to lead a surprise attack on the fleet of Falcon Formation.
Slipstream’s little expeditionary force was no match for the might of Falcon—normally. For one night, the tables should have been turned.
Venera had no idea whether the whole gambit had been successful or not. She would not tell Diamandis—would not have told anyone—that she feared her husband was dead, the force destroyed, and that Falcon cruisers ringed the Pilot’s palace at Rush.
“I was lost overboard when the Gehellens attacked,” she said. “Like much of the crew. We were close to the sun of suns and as dawn came, we burned . . . I had foot-fins, and at first I was able to fly away, but I lost one fin, then the other. I don’t remember anything after that.”
Diamandis nodded. “You drifted here. Luckily, the winds were in your favor. Had you circulated back into Candesce you’d have been incinerated.”
That much, at least, was true. Venera suppressed a shudder and sank back in her chair. She was infinitely weary all of a sudden. “I need to sleep.”
“By all means. Here, we’ll get you to the bed.” He touched her arm and she hissed in pain. Diamandis stepped back, concern eloquent on his face.
“There are treatments—creams, salves . . . I’m going to go out and see what I can get for you. For now you have to rest. You’ve been through a lot.”
Venera was not about to argue. She eased herself down on the bed, and despite being awash in burning soreness, fell asleep before hearing him leave.
Near dawn, the lands of Greater Spyre were lit only by the glitter of city lights high overhead. In the faint glow, the ancient towers and forests seemed as insubstantial as clouds. Garth paused in the black absence beneath a willow tree. He had run the last hundred yards, and it was all he could do to keep his feet.
Silhouettes bobbed against the gray outline of a tower. Whoever they were, they were still following him. It was unprecedented: he had snuck through the hedgerows and fields of six hereditary barons, each holding no more than a square mile or so of territory but as fanatical about their boundaries as any empire. Garth knew how to get past their guards and dogs, he did it all the time. Apparently, these men did also.
It must have been somebody at the Goodwill Free Clinic. They’d waited until he was gone and then signaled someone. If that was so, Garth would no longer be able to count on the neutrality of the Kingdom of Hallimel—all six acres of it.
He moved on cautiously, padding quietly onto a closely cropped lawn dotted with ridiculously heroic statues. It was quiet as a tomb here; and certainly nobody had any business being out. He allowed himself a little righteous indignation at whoever it was that was following him. They were trespassers; they should be shot.
It would be most satisfying to raise the alarm and see what happened—a cascade of genetically crazed hounds from the doorway of yon manor house, perhaps, or spotlights and a sniper on the roof. The trouble was, Garth himself was a known and tolerated ghost in only a few of these places, and certainly not the one he was passing through now. So he remained discreet.
A high stone wall loomed over the garden of statues. Its bricks were crumbling and made an easy ladder for Garth in the low gravity. As he rolled over the top he heard voices behind him—someone exclaiming something. He must have been visible against the sky.
He landed in brambles. From here on, the country was wild. This was disputed territory, owned by now-extinct families, its provenance tied up in generations-old court cases that would probably drag on until the end of the world. Most of the disputed lands were due to the railway allotments created by the preservationists; they had needed clearances that ran completely around the world, and they had gotten them, for a price of blood. This section of land had been abandoned for other reasons, though what they were Garth didn’t know. He didn’t care, either, as long as the square tower he called home was left in peace.
His intention was to reach it so that he could warn the lady Fanning that they had company—but halfway across the open grassland he heard thuds behind him as half a dozen bodies hit the ground on his side of the wall. They were catching up, and quickly.
He flattened and rolled to one side. Grass swished as dark figures passed by, only feet away. Garth cursed under his breath, wishing there were some way to warn Venera Fanning that six heavily-armed men were about to pay her a visit.
Venera heard them coming. The darkness wasn’t total—Diamandis had left a candle burning—so she wasn’t completely disoriented when she awoke to voices saying, “Circle around the other side,” and “this must be his bolt-hole.” A flush of adrenalin brought her completely awake as she heard scratching and scuffling just outside the hovel’s door.
She rolled out of bed, heedless of the pain, and ran to the table where she snatched up a knife. “Down here!” someone shouted.
Where were her clothes? Her jacket lay draped across a chair, and on the table were the bracelet and earrings Diamandis had left her. She cast about for her other things, but Diamandis had apparently moved them. There they were, on another table—next to the opening door.
Venera’s first inclination would normally be to draw herself up to her full five foot seven and stare these men down when they entered. They were servants, after all, even if they were armed. If she could speak and make eye contact, Venera was completely confident in her ability to control members of the lower classes.
At least, she used to be. Recent events—particularly her unwelcome dalliance with captain Dentius of the winter pirates—had made her more cautious. In addition, she was sore all over and had a pounding headache.
So Venera snatched up the candle, her jacket, and the jewelry and knelt under the table. The rope ring scraped her raw skin as she yanked on it; after a few tugs the mysterious hatch lifted. She felt down with her foot, making contact with a metal step. As men blundered into Diamandis’s home, she billowed the damp sheet behind her, with luck to drape over the hatch and hide it.
The candle guttered and nearly went out. Venera cupped a hand around it and cautiously felt for the next step. She counted seven before finding herself standing in an icy draft on metal flooring. A constant low roar made it hard to hear what was going on above.
This small chamber was oval, wider at the ceiling than at the floor, and ringed with windows. All the panes were flush with the wall, but a couple vibrated at a high speed, making a low braying sound. They seemed to be sucking air out of the room; it was the walls that soaked cold into the place.
Diamandis evidently used the room for storage because there were boxes piled everywhere. Venera was able to make her way among them to the far end, where a metal chair was bolted to the floor. The windows here were impressive: floor-to-ceiling, made of some resilient material she had never seen before.
The candlelight seemed to show a dense weave of leaves on the other side of the glass.
She was going to freeze unless she found something to wear. Venera ransacked the boxes, alternately cursing and puffing out her cheeks in wonder at the strange horde of broken clocks, worn-out shoes, rusted hinges, frayed quills, moldy sewing kits, left socks, and buckles. One crate contained nothing but the dust jackets of books, all their pages having been systematically ripped out. It was a small library’s worth of intriguing but useless titles. Another was full of decaying military apparel, including holsters and scabbards, all of it bearing the same coat of arms.
At least the activity was keeping her warm, she reasoned. The faint clomp of boots above continued, so she moved on to a new stack of boxes. This time she was rewarded when she found it packed with clothing. After dumping most of that onto the floor she discovered a pair of stiff leather pants, too small for Diamandis but sufficient for her. Getting into them wasn’t easy, though—the material scoured her already-raw skin so that it hurt to move. The leather cut out the wind, however.
Once she had done up the flight jacket, Venera sat down in the metal chair to wait for whatever happened next. This was much harder; it wasn’t in Venera’s nature to remain still. Staying still made you think, and thinking led to feeling, which was seldom good.
She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around her shins. It came to her that if they took away Diamandis and she couldn’t get out of here, she would die and no one would ever know what had happened to her. Few would care, either, and some would rejoice. Venera knew she wasn’t well liked.
More stomping up above. She shivered. How far away was her home in Slipstream? Three thousand miles? Four? An ocean of air separated her from her husband, and in that ocean gyred the nations of enemies, rising, lowering, drifting with the unpredictable airs of Virga. Awaiting her out there were the freezing abysses of winter, full of feathered sharks and pirates. Before the sun of suns had roasted her into unconsciousness, she had been determined and sure of her own ability to cross those daunting distances alone. She had leaped from the cargo nets of Hayden Griffin’s jet and soared for a time like a solitary eagle in the skies of Virga. But the sun had caught up to her and now she was here, trapped and in pain hardly any distance from where she’d started.
She climbed off the chair, fighting a wave of nausea. Better to surrender herself to whoever waited above than die here alone, she thought—and she almost ran up the steps and surrendered. It was a pulse of pain through her jaw that stopped her. Venera drew her fingertips across the scar that adorned her chin, and then she backed away from the steps.
Her heel caught the edge of a box she’d dropped, and she stumbled back against the icy windows. Cursing, she straightened up, but as she did she noticed a gleam of light welling up through the glass. She put her cheek to it—which dampened the pain a bit—and squinted.
The windows were covered with a long-leafed form of ivy. The stuff was vibrating with uncanny speed—so quickly that the leaves’ edges were blurred. Diamandis had said that Spyre rotated very fast; was she looking into the air outside?
Of course. This oval chamber stuck out of the bottom of the world. It was an aerodynamic blister on the outside of the rotating cylinder, and that chair might have once fronted the controls of a heavy machine gun or artillery piece mounted outside. It still might. Frowning, Venera clambered over the mounds of junk back to the metal seat and examined it.
There was indeed a set of handles and levers below the chair, and more between the windows. She didn’t touch them but peered out through the glass there, as light continued to well through the close-set leaves.
Candesce was waking up. The sun of suns lit a zone hundreds of miles in diameter here at the center of Virga. Past the trembling leaves, Venera could see a carousel of mauve and peach-painted cloud tumbling past with disorienting speed; but she could also see more.
The oval blister was mounted into a ceiling of riveted metal, as she’d expected. That ceiling was the hull of Spyre. Covering this surface in long runnels and triangles was the strange ivy. Its leaves were like knives, sharp and long, and they all aligned in the flow of the wind. Venera had heard of something called “speed ivy”; maybe that’s what this was.
The ivy seemed to prefer growing on things that projected into the airstream. Sheets of metal skin were missing here and there—in fact, there were outright holes everywhere—and the ivy clustered on the leading and trailing edges of these, smoothing the airflow in those places. Maybe that was what it was for.
This view of Spyre was not reassuring. The place was showing its age—dangling sheets of titanium whirred in the wind and huge I-beams thrust down into the dawn-tinted air, whole sagging acres just waiting to peel off the bottom of the world. It was amazing that the place kept itself together.
Next to the blister, a rusted machine gun was mounted on the surface. It faced stoically into the wind, and didn’t move when Venera tried the controls in front of the chair.
Well. All this was interesting, but not too interesting. She headed back to the stairs, but the light coming through the ranked leaves was considerable now, and she could see more of the blister’s interior. So the little passage that opened out behind the stairs was now obvious.
Venera gnawed her lip and rolled her eyes to look at the closed hatch overhead. One hand was on her hip; even here, with no audience, she posed as she thought.
She needed shoes, but she’d recovered the important items, the key to Candesce and her bullet. Venera was quite aware that she was obsessed with that bullet, and who wouldn’t be, she usually reasoned, if one like it had flown a thousand miles or more across Virga to randomly spike through a window and into their jaw? This particular projectile had been fired in some distant war or hunting party and missed its target; since there was no gravity nor solid ground to stop it, the thing had kept going and going until it met her. From that encounter Venera had gained a scar, regular crippling headaches, and something to blame for her own meanness. She’d kept the bullet and over time had become consumed with the need to know where it had come from. It was not, she would admit, a healthy need.
She patted the jacket, feeling the heavy shape inside it; then she slipped past the steps and into the narrow passage, and left Diamandis and his invaders to their own little drama.
It was more of a crawlway than a corridor. Venera walked bent over, gasping as the old leather chafed her hips and knees. Why didn’t these people dress sensibly? Lit only by intermittent portholes, the passage wormed its way a hundred yards or so before ending in a round metal door. It was all so obviously abandoned—stinking of rust and inorganic decay—that Venera didn’t bother knocking on the door, but turned the little wheel in the middle of it and pushed.
She stepped down into a mirror image of the blister she had just left. She half expected to find another maze of boxes on the other side of the steps, with another junk-framed hovel and another Garth Diamandis waiting for her above. But no, the blister was empty save for a half foot of stagnant water and a truly revolting gallery of fungus and cobwebs. The windows were hazed over but provided enough light for a tiny forest that was trying to conquer the metal chair at the far end. The stairs were jammed with soil and roots.
The prospect of dipping her bare feet into that horrid water nearly made her turn back. What stopped her was a tiny chink of light visible in the midst of the soil plug. After wading cautiously and with revulsion through the stinking stuff, she reached up and pulled at the roots. Gradually, in little showers of dirt, worms, and fibrous tubers, she widened a hole big enough for her to shimmy through. A minute later she dragged herself up out and into the middle of a grassy field.
Too bad about Diamandis, but with luck he was still off on his errand and the interlopers wouldn’t be there when he got back. Anyway, he’d been more than compensated for taking care of her; that had been a pilot’s ransom of gems and faience he’d taken from her jacket. She half hoped those loud burglars found the stuff—it would serve him right.
Venera’s own destination was clear. Spyre being a cylinder, it had ends, and one of those was only half a mile away. There the artificial land curved up hundreds of feet in a gesture that would close off the end if continued. The curve ended in a broad gallery above and beyond which the winds of Virga shuddered. She had only to make it up that slope and hop off the edge and Venera would be in free flight again. She would take her chances with the piranhawks and snipers. She doubted any of them could hit one small woman leaving Spyre at four hundred miles per hour.
In this case, wearing leather would serve her well.
Between Venera and the edge of the world lay a chessboard of estates. Each had its tottering stone walls, high hedges, towers, and moats to defend its two or three acres from the ravages of greedy neighbors. Constrained by space and what Venera sensed was deep paranoia, the estates had evolved into similar designs—the larger ones walled, with groves surrounding open fields and a jumble of towers, annexes, and greenhouses at the center; small ones often just a single square building that took up the entire demesne. These edifices were utterly windowless on the outside, but higher up the curve of the world she could see that most contained courtyards crammed with trees, fountains, and statuary.
The walls of some estates were separated by no more than twenty feet of no-man’s land. She ran through these weed-choked alleys, dodging young trees, past iron-faced pillbox gates that faced one another across the minor space like boxy suits of armor. The footing was treacherous, and she suspected traps.
Venera was used to higher gravity than Spyre’s. Tired and sore though she was, it was easy for her to leap ten feet to the top of a stone wall and run its length before dropping to the grass beyond. Her feet barely felt brick, root, and stone as she wove in and out of the trees, sprinted around open ponds under windows that were just beginning to gleam yellow in the light of Candesce. As she ran she marveled that such distances could exist; she had never run so far in a straight line and could hardly believe it possible.
The birds were the only ones making sound, but as she ran Venera began to notice a deep rushing roar that came from ahead of her. It was the sound of the edge of the world, and with it there came the beginnings of a breeze.
She heard surprised shouts as she crossed one fanatically perfect lawn, bare feet kissing wet grass. Glancing to the side, Venera caught a glimpse of a small party of men and women sitting on curlicued iron chairs in the morning light. They were sipping tea or something similar.
They stood up—stiff ornamented garments ratcheting into their standing configurations like portcullises slamming down—and the three men howled “intruders!” as if Venera were an entire army of pirates. After a moment, sirens sounded inside the looming stone pile behind them.
“Oh, come on! ” She was panting with exhaustion now, her head swimming. But there were only two more estates to pass, and then she would be on the slope to the world’s edge. With a burst of speed she raced by more lighting windows and opening doors, noting abstractly that the considerable mob of soldiers who had spilled out of the first place’s doors had stopped at the edge of their property as if they’d slammed into an invisible fence.
So she only had to outrace the alarm in each particular property. It could be a game, and Venera actually would have enjoyed the chase if she hadn’t been on the verge of fainting from exhaustion and residual heatstroke. If only she had the breath to taunt the idiots on the way by!
Gunshots cut the air as she passed the last estate. This was one of the big single-building affairs, all gray asteroidal stone drizzled with veins of bright metal. Its only external windows were murder slits that started fifteen feet up, and she saw no doors. Empty upward-curving fields beckoned on the other side of the edifice; she staggered onto what Diamandis had called ‘disputed territory’ and paused to catch her breath. “Ha! Safe!”
The wind was now a harsh constant moan, flickering past her in gusts. It spun in little permanent tornadoes over gaps and holes in Spyre’s skin. There were more and more such holes as the slope rose to the edge. The edge itself was ragged, a crenellation of collapsed galleries, up-thrusting spars and flapping plates that added to the din.
She heard something else, too. A regular creaking sound seemed to be coming from overhead. Venera looked up.
Six wooden platforms had been lowered over the top of the stone cube and were being winched down. Each was crowded with men in tall steel helmets and outlandish spiked armor. They clutched pikes and rifles with barrels longer than they were tall. Several were pointing at her excitedly.
Venera swore and took off up the rubble-strewn slope. The wind was at her back, and it became stronger the closer she got to the edge. Several gusts lifted her off her feet. Venera noticed that the metal skin of Spyre was completely exposed in the final yards leading up to the edge. Only fair-sized rocks inhabited the area behind it. As she watched, a stone the size of her foot rolled up the metal and spun off into the air. A few more yards and the wind would take her, too.
Her foot sank into the slope and Venera fell in ridiculous slow-motion. As she pried herself upright again she saw that the metal plate bent by her foot was vibrating madly in the square hole it had made. Then with a loud pop it disappeared and suddenly a hurricane was howling into the bright aperture it had left.
Venera was sucked down and slid forward until she was right over the hole. She reached out and braced her hands on either side while the air screamed past her. It was trying to escape Spyre with even more passion than hers. For a few seconds she could only stare down and see what faced her if she made it to the edge and jumped.
Many long flagpole-like beams thrust out below the edge of the world. They trailed wire nets into the furious wind; anyone caught on those nets would suffocate before they could be pulled up. Far beneath the nets, where scudding clouds spun past, Venera glimpsed thousands of black specks and grayish veins in the air. Mines? More razor wire? Diamandis had not been lying, after all.
“Damn! Shit!” She tried to scream more curses—every one she could think of—but the air was being pulled out of her lungs. She was about to faint into the hole and die.
Strong hands took her by the arms and legs and hauled her back. Venera was hoisted onto someone’s back and unceremoniously toted back down the slope. With every jolting step escape, and home, and Chaison receded past the frame of her grasping fingers.
Although he was her favorite uncle, Venera never saw much of Prince Albard. He was a mysterious figure on the periphery of the court, sweeping into Hale in his yacht to regale her with tales of strange cities and the outlandish women he’d met there (always sighing when he talked of them). His face was split down the center by a saber scar, putting his lips into a permanent twist that made it look like he was smirking. Unlike most of the people who encountered him, Venera knew that he was smirking—laughing inside at all the pointless desperation and petty recrimination of life. In that regard he was the polar opposite of her father, a man with a mind focused by a single lens of suspicion; maybe that was why she clung to Albard’s knees when he did appear, and treasured the odd-shaped dolls and toys he brought.
They recognized each other, this vagabond prince in his motley and the pouting princess in clothes she systematically tattered as soon as she was in them. So maybe it was natural that when the time came, it was in her bedroom that Albard barricaded himself.
He only noticed her after he had dragged her wardrobe across the door and piled some chairs and tables around it. “Damn, girl, what are you doing here?”
Venera had cocked her head and squinted at him. “This is my room.”
“I know it’s your room, dammit. Shouldn’t you be at lessons?”
“I bit the tutor.” Banished and bored, she had (not out of anger but a more scientific impulse) been beheading some of her dolls when Albard swept in. Venera had assumed that he was there to talk to her and had politely waited, limp headless body in one hand, while he proceeded to move all the furniture. So he wasn’t there to see her? What, then, was this all about?
“Oh, never mind,” he said irritably, “just stay out of sight. This could get ugly.”
Now she could hear shouting outside, sounds of people running. “What did you do?” she asked.
He was leaning back against the pile of furniture as though trying to propel it out the room. “I bit someone, too,” he said. “Or, rather, I was about to, and they found out.”
Venera came and sat down on the fuchsia carpet near him. “My father, right?”
His eyebrows rose comically. “How did you guess?”
Venera thought about this for a while. Then she said, “Does that mean that everybody who makes Father mad has to come to this room?”
Albard laughed. “Niece, if that were true, the whole damn kingdom would be in here with us.”
“Oh.” She was slightly reassured.
“Give it up, Albard!” someone shouted from outside. It sounded like her father. There was some sort of mumbling discussion, then: “Is, uh . . . is Venera in there with you?”
“No!” The prince put a finger to his lips and knelt next to her. “The one thing I absolutely will not do,” he said gently, “is use you as a bargaining chip. If you want to leave, I will tear down this barricade and let you go.”
“What will they do to you?”
“Put me in chains, take me away . . . then it all depends on your father’s mood. There’s a black cloud behind his eyes lately, have you seen it?” She nodded vigorously. “It’s getting bigger and bigger, that cloud, and I think it’s starting to crowd out everything else. That worries me.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I daresay you do.” There followed a long interval during which Albard negotiated with the people on the other side of the furniture. Venera retreated to the window, but she was far from bored now. At last Albard blew out his cheeks and turned to her.
“Things are not going well,” he said. “Do you have a pen and some writing material?” She pointed to the desk that perched on top of the barricade. “Ah. Much obliged.”
He clambered up and retrieved a pen and some paper. Then, frowning, he dropped the paper. He went to his knees and began hunting around for something, while Venera watched closely. He came up with one of her dolls, a favorite that had a porcelain head and cloth body.
“Do you mind if I borrow this for a minute?” he asked her. She shrugged.
Albard rubbed the doll’s face against the stone floor for a while, while crashing sounds started from the hallway. The barricade shook. Holding the doll up critically, the prince grunted in satisfaction. Then he hunched over and began delicately pressing the pen against its face.
He was standing in the center of the room with his hands behind his back when the barricade finally fell. A dozen solders came in, and they marched him out; he only had time to look back and wink at Venera before he was gone.
After they’d taken him away, some members of the secret police ransacked her room. (That it looked substantially the same when they left as before Albard had arrived was a testament to her own habits.) They seized everything that could write or be written on, even prying the plaster off the wall where she’d scribbled on it. Venera herself was frisked several times, and then they swirled out, all clinking metal and bandoliers, leaving her sitting in the exact spot where he had been standing.
Neither she, nor anyone she would later meet, ever saw Albard again.
Eventually, she moved over to the window and picked up a particular doll. Its tunic was ripped where the secret policemen had cut it open looking for hidden notes. Venera held it up to the window and frowned.
So that was what he’d been doing. Albard had rubbed its eyebrows off against the stone. Then, in meticulous tiny lines and curls, he had repainted them. From a distance of more than a few inches they seemed normal. Up close, though, she could see what they were made of:
Letters.
The nation of Liris curled around its interior courtyard as though doubled up in pain. Every window stared down at that courtyard. Every balcony overhung it. The bottom of this well would be in permanent shadow if not for the giant mirrors mounted on the roof, which were aimed at Candesce.
Venera could plainly see that the courtyard was the focus of everything—but she couldn’t see what was down there. For the first two days of her stay she was shuttled from small room to small room, all of them lined up in a short hallway painted institution green. After a brief interview in each chamber she was taken back to a drab waiting room, where she sat and ate and slept fitfully on the benches. She was startled awake every morning by a single gunshot sounding somewhere nearby. Morning executions?
It seemed unlikely; she was the sole inhabitant of this little prison. Prison it clearly was. She had to fill out forms just to use the one washroom, a cold cube with wooden stalls defaced by centuries of carven graffiti. Its high, grated windows gave her a view of the upper stories of the inner courtyard. They hinted at freedom.
“B-b-back to waking?” Venera sat up warily on the third morning and tried to smile at her jailor.
He was tall, athletically muscled, and possessed the sort of chiseled good looks one saw in actors, career diplomats, or con artists. As dapper as could be expected for a man dressed in iron and creaking leather, he might have melted any lady’s heart—provided she never looked in his eyes or heard him speak. Either of those maneuvers would have revealed the awful truth about Moss: his mind was damaged somehow. He seemed more marionette than man and, sadly, appeared to be painfully aware of his deficit.
Just as he had yesterday, Moss carried a stack of forms in one hand, bearing it as though it were a silver platter. Venera sighed when she saw this. “How long is it going to take to process me into your prison?” she asked as he clattered to a stop in front of her.
“P-p-prison?” Moss gaped at her. Carefully, as though they were gold, he placed the papers on the peeling bench. His metal clothing gnashed quietly as he straightened up. “You’re n-not in p-p-prison, my lady.”
“Then what is this place?” She gestured around at the sound-deadening plaster walls, the smoke-stained light sconces and battered benches. “Why am I here? When do I get my things back?” They’d gone through her jacket and taken its contents—jewelry, key, and bullet. She wasn’t sure which loss worried her most.
Moss’s face never changed expression as he spoke, but his eyes radiated some sort of desperate plea. They always did, even if he was staring at the wall. Those eyes seemed eloquent, but Venera was beginning to think that nothing about Moss’s looks or demeanor meant anything about his inner state. Now he said, in his intensely flat way, “This is the im-immigration department of the g-g-government of Liris. You were brought here to t-t-take your citizenship-ip exams.”
“Citizenship?” But now it all made sense—the forms, the sense of being processed, and the succession of minor officials who’d taken up hours of her time over the past days. They had grilled her mercilessly, but not about how or why she had come here, or about what her plans or allegiances might be. They didn’t even want to know about her peeling sunburns. No, they’d wanted to know the medical histories of her extended family, whether there was madness in her line (a question that had made her laugh), and what was the incidence of criminality among her relatives.
“Well, my father stole a country once,” she had answered. She had of course asked them to let her go, in perhaps a dozen different ways. Her assumption was that she would be ransomed or otherwise used as a bargaining chip. With this in mind, she had sat anxiously for hours, wondering about her value to this or that state or person. It had never occurred to Venera that she might be adopted by Liris as one of its own.
Now as she realized what was going on, Venera had one of the strangest moments of her life. She felt, for just a second, relief at the prospect of spending the rest of her life hidden away here, like a jewel in a safe. She shook herself, and the moment passed. Disturbed, she stood and turned away from Moss.
“B-b-but the news is good,” said Moss, who looked like he was begging for death as he said it. “D-don’t fret. You have p-p-passed all the t-t-tests so far. J-just one set of forms to g-go.”
Venera gnawed at her knuckle, each bite sending little pulses of pain up her jaw. “What if I don’t want to be a citizen of Liris?”
Moss proceeded to laugh, and Venera swore to herself she would do anything to avoid seeing that again. “F-Fill these out,” he said. “A-and you’re done.”
It wasn’t eagerness to become a citizen of a nation the size of a garden that made her sign the papers. Venera just wanted to get her things back—and get out of the waiting room. What she’d felt a moment ago was just a craving for anonymity, she told herself. Citizenship of any nation meant nothing to her, except as a sign of lowly status. Her father was hardly a citizen of Hale, after all; he was Hale, and other people were citizens of him. Venera had grown up believing she, too, was above such categories.
“Come,” was all Moss said when she was finished. He led her out into the hallway, and at its end, he unlocked the great metal door with its wire-mesh window. Before pushing the portal open, he picked up an open-topped box and held it out to her.
Inside were the necklace and earrings he’d confiscated from her jacket when she arrived. Rolling next to them was her bullet.
The key to Candesce was not there.
Venera frowned but decided not to press the matter just now. Moss gestured with one hand and she edged past him into her new country.
Shafts of dusty sunlight silhouetted tall stone pillars. Their arched capitals were muted in shadow, but the polished floors gleamed like mirrors. Save for a wall where the edge of the courtyard should be, the whole bottom floor of the great cubic building seemed open. Filling the space were dozens and dozens of cubicles, desks, worktables, and stalls.
Indeed, it seemed as if all the roles of a midsized town were duplicated here—tailor over here, doctor there, carpenters on this side, bricklayers on that—but all gathered in one room. Bolts of cloth were stacked with bags of cement. Drying racks and looms had been folded up under the ceiling to make way for chopping blocks and flour-covered counters. And working in determined silence throughout this shadow-cut space was a small army of silent, focused people.
Each was isolated at some chair or desk, and Venera had the startled impression that these work stations had grown up and around some of the people, like shells secreted around water creatures. It must have taken years for that man there to build the small ziggurat of green bottles that reared above his desk; nearby a woman had buried herself in a miniature jungle of ferns. Mirrors on stands and hanging from strings cunningly directed every stray beam of light within ten feet at her green fronds. Each position had its eruption of individuality or downright eccentricity, but their limits were strictly kept; nobody’s keepsakes and oddities spilled beyond an invisible line about five feet in radius.
Moss led her to an outer wall, where he opened a dim chamber that reminded her of Diamandis’s warren. Here were crates and boxes full of what looked like armor—except she knew it for what it was. “You are required to wear four hundred and fifty p-p-pounds of mass during the day,” said Moss. “That will offset our r-reduced g-gravity and maintain the health of your bones.” He stood back, arms crossed, while Venera rooted through the mess looking for something suitable.
It seemed that Spyre’s tailors were an unimaginative lot. The room contained an abundance of blouses, dresses and skirts, pants and jackets, but all were done in intricately tooled and hinged metal. Only undergarments—those directly in contact with the skin—were made of suppler materials, mostly leather, though to her relief she did find some cloth. Venera tried on a vest made of verdigrised copper scales, added a skirt made of overlapping iron plates and weighed herself. Barely one hundred pounds. She went back and found greaves and wrist bracers, a platinum torque, and a steel jacket with tails. Better, but still too light. Moss waited patiently while she layered herself like a battleship. Finally when she topped the scales at one hundred pounds weight—five hundred pounds mass—he grunted in satisfaction. “B-but you need a h-h-hat,” he said.
“What?” She glared at him. He had something like a belaying pin tied to his head; it wobbled when he moved. “Isn’t all this humiliating enough?”
“We m-must put p-p-pressure on the s-spine. For l-long-term health.”
“Oh, all right.” She hunted through a cache of ridiculous alternatives, ranging from flowerpots with chinstraps to a glass fish bowl, currently empty but encrusted with rime. Finally she settled on the least offensive piece, a chrome helmet with earflaps and crow’s wings mounted behind the temples.
With all of this on her, Venera’s feet made a satisfactory smack when they hit the ground. She could feel the weight and it was indeed nearly normal, but spread all over her surface instead of internally. And she quickly discovered that it took a good hard push to start walking and that turning and stopping were not operations to be taken lightly. She had a quarter-ton of inertia now. After walking into several walls and doorjambs, she started to get the hang of it.
“N-now,” said Moss in evident satisfaction, “you are f-fit to see the B-B-Botanist.”
“The what?” He threaded his way among the pillars without further comment. Venera nodded and smiled at the men and women who were putting down their work to openly stare as she passed. She tried to unobtrusively discern what they were working on, but the light here was too uneven. Shadow and glare thwarted her.
Sunlight reflecting off the polished floor washed out whatever was ahead. Venera glanced back one more time before entering the lit area. Blackness and curving arches framed a dozen white ovals—faces—all turned toward her. On those faces she read every emotion: amazement, curiosity, anger, fear. None avoided her gaze. They goggled at her as though they’d never seen a stranger before.
Maybe they hadn’t. Venera’s scalp prickled, but Moss was waving her ahead. Blinking, she stepped from the dark gallery into the courtyard of Liris.
For a moment it seemed as if she’d entered one of the paintings on the ceiling of her father’s chapel. This one came complete with scented pink clouds. She reached out a hand to touch one of these and heard the sharp click of a weapon being cocked. Venera froze.
“It would be very unwise of you to complete that gesture,” drawled a voice from somewhere ahead. Slowly, Venera retracted her hand. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw the barrels of three antique-looking rifles aimed her way. Grim men in iron held them.
The soldiers made a shocking contrast to their setting. The entire courtyard was full of trees, all of one type, all in full flower. The scent and color of the millions of blossoms was overwhelming. It took Venera a moment to notice that the branches of many of the trees were hung with jewels, and gold rings encircled some of the trunks. It took her another moment to realize that a throne sat in the sole bare patch at the center of the courtyard. The woman lounging there was watching her with obvious amusement.
Her gown was of gold, silver, and platinum; on her head was a crown touched with gems of all shades that flashed in the concentrated light of Candesce. She appeared to be in early middle age, but was still beautiful; a cascade of hair dyed the same color as the blossoms wound down her shoulders.
“You seem reluctant to step into sunlight,” she said with evident amusement. “I can see why.” She tapped her own cheeks, eyes twinkling.
Venera eyed the soldiers, thought about it, and walked over. Since this was evidently a throne room of sorts, she bowed deeply. “Your . . . majesty?”
“Oh. Oh no.” The woman chuckled. “I am no queen.” She waved a hand dismissively. “We are a meritocracy in Liris. You’ll learn. My name is Margit, and I am Liris’s resident botanist.”
“Botanist . . .” Venera straightened and looked around at the trees. “This is your crop.”
“Please.” The lady Margit frowned. “We don’t refer to the treasure of Liris in such prosaic terms. These beings are Liris. They sustain us, they give us meaning. They are our soul.”
“Pardon, m’lady,” said Venera with another bow. “But . . . what exactly are they?”
“Of course.” Margit’s eyes grew wide. “You would never have seen one before. You are so lucky to gaze upon them for the first time when they are in flower. These, Citizen Fanning, are cherry trees.”
Why was that word so familiar? There’d been a ball once, and her beloved uncle had approached her with something in his hand . . . a treat.
“What are cherries?” she asked as guilelessly as she could.
“An indulgence of the powerful,” said Margit with a smile. “A delicacy so rare that it evidently never made it to your father’s court.”
“About that,” said Venera. “The court, I mean. My family is fantastically rich. Why make me a . . . citizen of this place, when you could just ransom me back? You could get a boatload of treasure for me.”
Margit scoffed. “If you were the princess of a true nation then perhaps we would consider it. But you’re not even from the principalities! By your own admission during the interviews, you come from the windswept wastes of Outer Virga. There’s nothing there, and I find it hard to believe your people could own anything that would be of interest to us.”
Venera narrowed her eyes. “Not even a fleet of battle cruisers capable of reducing this place to kindling from twenty miles away?”
Not only Margit laughed at this; the soldiers did as well. “Nobody threatens Spyre, young lady. We’re impregnable.” Margit said this so smugly that Venera swore she would find a way to throw her words back at her.
Margit snapped her fingers, and Moss stepped forward. “Acquaint her with her new duties,” said the botanist.
Moss stared at her, slack jawed. “W-what are those?”
“She knows the languages and cultures of other places. She’ll be an interpreter for the trade delegation. Go introduce her.” Margit turned away, lifting her chin with her eyes closed so that a beam of sunlight flooded her face.
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion
to the first part
in our March issue,
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