Queen of Candesce (10 page)

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.

The ground shook, a constant wavering shudder. The motion reminded her with every step that she stood on thin metal sheeting above an abyss of air. She began to see patches of speed ivy atop broken cornices and walls. And the loose soil thinned until they walked atop the metal of the wheel itself.

Wind pushed at her from behind; Venera had to consciously set her feet down, grinding them into the grit to prevent herself starting to run. Giving into that run would be fatal, Diamandis assured her. The reason why emerged slowly, horribly, from around the collapsed walls and tangled groves of once-great estates.

She clapped Diamandis on the shoulder and pointed. “How long ago?”

He nodded and leaned in so that she could hear him over the roar. “A question important to our enterprise. It happened generations ago, in a time of great unrest in the principalities. Back when the great nations of Spyre still traveled—before they began to hide in their fortresses.”

A hundred yards or so of slick decking extended past the last broken stones, then the first tears and gaps appeared. Long sheets of humming metal extended out, following the lines of the girders that underlay Spyre's upper skin. Soon even they disappeared, leaving only bright shreds and the girders themselves. A latticework of metal beams was all the ground there was for the next mile.

Below the plain of girders dark clouds shot past with dizzying speed. Propelled by Spyre's centrifugal force, a ceaseless hurricane roared in and down and through the empty windows of the broken ruins and leaped out of a vast hole in the world.

“Behold the airfall!” Diamandis gestured dramatically; but there was no need. Venera stood awestruck at the sheer savagery of the permanent storm that warred about her. If she lifted one foot or straightened her back she might be caught and yanked out and then down, and shot out of Spyre through this screaming, gouting wound.

“This—this is insane!” She hunkered down, clutching a boulder. Her leathers flapped up around her ears. “Am I expected to run into that?”

“No, not run! Crawl. Because up there—do you see it? There is your fourth alternative!” She squinted where he pointed and at first didn't see anything. Then she blinked and looked again.

The skin of Spyre had been stripped away for at least a mile in every direction. The hole must have unbalanced the whole wheel—towers, farms, factories, and even perhaps whole towns being sucked out and flung into the depths of Virga in a catastrophe that threatened to destroy the entire structure. For some reason the peeling and collapse had propagated only so far and then stopped—but the standing cyclone of exiting air must have unbalanced Spyre so much as to threaten its immediate destruction.

This, if anything, explained the preservationists and the fierce war they had fought to lay their tracks around Spyre. The unstable wobble of the wheel could only be fixed by moving massive weights around the rim to balance it. There was no patching this hole.

Everything above had been sucked out as the skin peeled away—except in one place. One solitary tower still stood a quarter mile into the plain of girders. It had the great fortune to have been built overtop a main intersection point for Spyre's skeletal system. Also, the place might once have been a factory with its own reinforced foundation, for Venera could see huge pipes and tanks splayed like the roots of a tree below the girders. The tower itself was dark as the clouds that framed it, and it slowly swayed under the force of the winds. The girders bounced it like an acrobat in a net.

Just looking at it made her nauseated. “What
is
that?”

“Buridan Tower,” said Diamandis. “It's our destination.”

“Why? And how are we going to get there through…through
that?
”

“Using our courage, Lady Fanning—and my knowledge. I know a way, if you'll trust me. As to why—that is a secret that
you
will reveal, to both of us.”

She shook her head, but Venera had no intention of backing out now. To do anything else but go forward in this mad adventure would be to invite relaxation—and thought. Grief drove her on, an active refusal to think. She waited, eyes tearing from the wind, and eventually Diamandis nodded sharply and gestured
come on.

They crept across the last acre of intact skin, grabbing onto every rock and jammed tree branch that might offer purchase. As they approached a great split in the metal sheeting, Venera saw where Diamandis was going, and she began to think that this passage might be possible after all.

Here, a huge pipe ran under Spyre's topsoil and skin. It was anchored to the girders by rusting metal straps and had broken in places but extended out below the skinless plain. It seemed to head straight for swaying Buridan Tower.

Diamandis had found a hole in the pipe that was sheltered by a tortured dune. He let himself down into the black mouth and she followed; instantly the wind subsided to a tolerable scream.

“I'm not even going to ask how you found this,” she said after dusting herself off. He grinned.

The pipe was about eight feet across. Sighting down it she beheld, in perspective, a frozen vortex of discolored metal and sedimented rime. Behind her it was ominously dark; ahead, hundreds of gaps and holes let in the welling light of Candesce. In this new illumination, Venera eyed their route critically. “There's whole sections missing,” she pointed out. “How do we cross those?”

“Trust me.” He set off at a confident pace.

What was there to do but follow?

The pipe writhed in sympathy with the twisting of the beams. The motion was uncomfortable, but not terrifying to one who had ridden warships through battle, walked in gravities great and small throughout Virga, and even penetrated the mysteries of Candesce.—Or so Venera told herself, up until the tenth time her hand darted out of its own accord to grip white-knuckled some peel of rust or broken valve rim. Rhythmic blasts of pain shot up her clenched jaw. An old anger, born of helplessness, began to take hold of her.

The first gaps in the pipe were small and thankfully overhead. The ceiling opened out in these places, allowing Venera to see where she was—which made her duck her head down and continue on with a shudder.

But then they came to a place where most of the pipe was simply gone, for a distance of nearly sixty feet. Runnels of it ran like reminders above and to the sides, but there was no bottom anymore. “Now what?”

Diamandis reached up and tugged a cable she hadn't noticed before. It was bright and strong, anchored here and somewhere inside the black cave where the pipe picked up again. Near its anchor point the line was gathered up and pinched by a huge spring, allowing it to stretch and slacken with the twisting of the girders.

“You did this?”

He nodded; she was impressed and said so. Diamandis sighed. “Since I've had no audience to brag to, I've done many feats of daring,” he said. “I did none in all the years when I was trying to impress the ladies—and none of them will ever know I was this brave.”

“So how do we…Oh.” Despite her pounding headache, she had to laugh. This was a zip line; Diamandis proposed to clip rollers to it and glide across. Well, at least the great girder provided a wall to one side and partial shelter above. The wind was not quite so punishing here.

“You have to be fast!” Diamandis was fitting a pulley-hold onto the cable. “You can't breathe in that wind. If you get stranded in the middle you'll pass out.”

“Wonderful.” But he'd strapped her in securely, and falling was not something that frightened people who lived in a weightless ocean of air. When the time came she simply closed her eyes and kicked off into the white flood of air.

They had to repeat this process six times. Now that he had someone to give up his secret to, Diamandis was eager to tell her how he had used a powerful foot-bow to shoot a line across each gap, trusting to its grip in the deep rust on the far side to allow him to scale across once. After stronger lines were affixed it was easy to get back and forth.

So, walking and gliding, they approached the black tower.

In some places its walls fell smoothly into the abyss. In others, traces of ground still clung tenaciously where sidewalks and outbuildings had once been. They clambered out of the pipe onto one such spot; here, thirty feet of gravel and plating stretched like a splayed hand up to the tower's flank. Diamandis had strung more cables along that wall, leading toward a great dark shadow that opened halfway around the wall's curve. “The entrance!” Battered by wind, he loped over to the nearest line.

The zip lines in the pipe had given Venera the false impression that she was up for anything. Now she found herself hanging onto a cable with both hands—small comfort to also be clipped to it—while blindly groping with her feet on the side of a sheer wall, above an infinite drop now illuminated by full daylight.

Only a man with nothing to lose could have built such a pathway. She understood, for she felt she was in the same position. Gritting her teeth and breathing in shallow sips in vortices of momentary calm caused by the jutting brickwork, she followed Diamandis around Buridan Tower's long curve.

At last she stood, shaking, on a narrow ledge of stone. The door before her was strapped iron, fifteen feet tall and framed with trembling speed ivy. Rusting machine guns poked their snouts out of slits in the stone walls surrounding it. A coat of arms in the ancient style capped the archway. Venera stared at it, a brief drift of puzzlement surfacing above her apprehension. She had seen that design somewhere before.

“I can't go back that way. There has to be another way!”

Diamandis sat down with his back to the door and gestured for her to do the same. The turbulence was lessened just enough there that she could breathe. She leaned on his shoulder. “Garth, what have you done to us?”

He took some time to get his own breath back. Then he jabbed a thumb at the door. “People have been pointing their telescopes at this place for generations, all dreaming of getting inside it. Secret expeditions have been mounted to reach it, but none of them ever came via the route we just took. It's been assumed that this way was impossible. No…” He gestured at the sky. “They always climb down the elevator cable that connects the tower to Lesser Spyre. And every time they're spotted and shot by Spyre sentries.”

“Why?”

“Because the nation of Buridan is not officially defunct. There are supposed to be heirs, somewhere. And the product of Buridan still exists, on farms scattered around Spyre. No one is legally allowed to sell it until the fate of the nation is determined once and for all. But the titles, the deeds, the proofs of ownership and provenance…” He thumped the iron with his fist. “They're all in here.”

Her fear was beginning to give way to curiosity. She looked up at the door. “Do we knock?”

“The legend says that the last members of the nation live on, trapped inside. That's nonsense, of course, but it's a useful fiction.”

It began to dawn on her what he had in mind. “You intend to play on the legends.”

“Better than that. I intend to prove that they are true.”

She stood up and pushed on the door. It didn't budge. Venera looked around for a lock, and after a moment she found one, a curious square block of metal embedded in the stone of the archway. “You've been here before. Why didn't you go in?”

“I couldn't. I didn't have the key and the windows are too small.”

She glared at him. “Then why…?”

He stood up, smiling mysteriously. “Because now I do have the key. You brought it to me.”

“I…?”

Diamandis dug inside his jacket. He slid something onto his finger and held it up to gleam in the light of Candesce.

One of the pieces of jewelry Venera had taken from the hoard of Anetene had been a signet ring. She had found it in the very same box that had contained the key to Candesce. It was one of the pieces that Diamandis had stolen from her when she first arrived here.

“That's mine!”

He blinked at her tone, then shrugged. “As you say, Lady. I thought long and hard about playing this game myself, but I'm too old now. And anyway, you're right. The ring is yours.” He pulled it off his finger and handed it to her.

The signet showed a fabulous ancient creature known as a horse. It was a gravity-bound creature and so none now lived in Virga—or were they the product that Buridan had traded in? Venera took the heavy ring and held it up, frowning. Then she strode to the lockbox and placed the ring into a like-shaped indentation there.

With a mournful grating sound, the great gate of Buridan swung open.

Gunner Twelve-Fifteen wrapped his fingers around the dusty emergency switch and pulled as hard as he could. With a loud snap, the red stirrup-shaped handle came off in his hand.

The gunner cursed and half-stood to try and retrieve the end of the emergency cord that was now poking out of a hole in his canopy. He banged his head on the glass and the whole gun emplacement wobbled, causing the cord to flip out into the bright air. Meanwhile, the impossible continued to happen outside; the thing was now a quarter mile above him and almost out of range.

Gunner Twelve-fifteen had sat here for sixteen years now. In that time he had turned the oval gun emplacement from a cold and drafty purgatory into a kind of nest. He'd stopped up the gaps in the metal armor with cloth and, later, pitch. He'd snuck down blankets and pillows and eventually even took out the original metal seat, dropping it with supreme satisfaction onto Greater Spyre two miles below. He'd replaced the seat with a kind of reclining divan, built sunshades to block the harsher rays of Candesce, and removed layers of side armor to make way for a bookshelf and drinks cabinet. The only thing he hadn't touched was the butt of the machine gun itself.

Nobody would know. The emplacement, a metal pod suspended above the clouds by cables strung across Greater Spyre, was his alone. Once upon a time there had been three shifts of sentries here, a dozen eyes at a time watching the elevator cable that ran between the town-wheels of Lesser Spyre and the abandoned and forlorn Buridan Tower. With cutbacks and rescheduling, the number had eventually gone down to one: one twelve-hour shift for each of the six pods that surrounded the cable. Gunner Twelve-fifteen had no doubt that the other gunners had similarly renovated their stations; the fact that none were now responding to the emergency meant that they were not paying any attention to the object they were here to watch.

Nor had he been; if not for a random flash of sunlight against the beveled glass of a wrought-iron elevator car he might never have known that Buridan had come back to life—not until he and the other active sentries were hauled up for court-marshal.

He pushed back the bulletproof canopy and made another grab at the frayed emergency cord. It dangled three inches beyond his outstretched fingers. Cursing, he lunged at it and nearly fell to his death. Heart hammering, he sat down again.

Now what? He could fire a few rounds at the other pods to get their attention—but then he might kill somebody. Anyway, he wasn't supposed to fire on
rising
elevators, only objects coming down the cable.

The gunner watched in indecision until the elevator car pierced another layer of cloud and disappeared. He was doomed if he didn't do something right now—and there was only one thing to do.

He reached for the other red handle and pulled it.

In the original design of the gun emplacements, the ejection rocket had been built into the base of the gunner's seat. If he was injured or the pod was about to explode, he could pull the handle and the rocket would send him, chair and all, straight up the long cable to the infirmary at Lesser Spyre. Of course, the original chair no longer existed.

The other gunners were startled out of their dozing and reading by the sudden vision of a pillowed divan rising into the sky on a pillar of flame. Blankets, books, and bottles of gin twirled in its wake as it vanished into the gray.

 

The day-watch liaison officer shrieked in surprise when Gunner Twelve-fifteen burst in on her. The canvas she had been carefully daubing paint onto now had a broad blue slash across it.

She glared at the apparition in the doorway. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Begging your pardon, ma'am,” said the trembling soldier. “But Buridan has reactivated.”

For a moment she dithered—the painting was ruined unless she got that paint off it right now—then was struck by the image of the man standing before her. Yes, it really
was
one of the sentries. His face was pale and his hair looked like he'd stuck it in a fan. She would have sworn that the seat of his leather flight suit was smoking. He was trembling.

“What's this about, man?” she demanded. “Can't you see I'm busy?”

“B-Buridan,” he stammered. “The elevator. It's rising. It may already be here!”

She blinked, then opened the door fully and glanced at the rank of bellpulls ranked in the hallway. The bells were ancient and black with tarnish and clearly none had moved recently. “There was no alarm,” she said accusingly.

“The emergency cord broke,” said the gunner. “I had to eject, ma'am,” he continued. “There was, uh, cloud; I don't think the other sentries saw the elevator.”

“Do you mean to say that it was cloudy? That you're not sure you
saw
an elevator?”

He turned even more pale; but his jaw was set. As the liaison officer wound up to really let loose on him, however, one of the bellpulls moved. She stared at it, forgetting entirely what she had been about to say.

“…Did you just see…” The cord moved again and the bell jiggled slightly. Then the cord whipped taut and the bell shattered in a puff of verdigris and dust. In doing so it managed to make only the faintest
tinking
sound.

She goggled at it. “That—that's the Buridan elevator!”

“That's what I was trying to—” But the liaison officer had burst past him and was running for the stairs that led up to the elevator stations.

Elevators couldn't be fixed to the moving outer rim of a town-wheel; so the gathered strands of cable that rose up from the various estates met in a knotlike collection of buildings in freefall. Ropes led from this to the axes of the towns themselves. The officer had to run up a yin-yang staircase to get to the top of the town (the same stairway that the gunner had just run down); as her weight dropped the steps steepened and the rise became more and more vertical. Puffing and nearly weightless, she achieved the top in under a minute. She glanced out one of the blockhouse's gunslits in time to see an ornate cage pull into the elevator station a hundred yards away.

The gunner was gasping his way back up the steps. “Wait,” he called feebly. The liaison officer didn't wait for him, but stepped to the round open doorway and launched herself across the empty air.

Two people were waiting by the opened door to the Buridan elevator. The liaison officer felt an uncanny prickling in her scalp as she saw them, for they looked every bit as exotic as she'd imagined someone from Buridan would be. Her first inclination (drummed into her by her predecessor) that any visitation from the lost nation must be a hoax, faded as one of the pair spoke. Her accent wasn't like that of anyone from Upper Spyre.

“They sent only you?” The woman's voice dripped scorn. She was of medium height, with well-defined brows that emphasized her piercing eyes. A shock of pale hair stood up from her head.

The liaison officer made a midair bow and caught a nearby girder to halt herself. She struggled to slow her breathing and appear calm as she said, “I am the designated liaison officer for Buridan-Spyre relations. To whom do I have the honor of addressing myself?”

The woman's nostrils flared. “I am Amandera Thrace-Guiles, heir of Buridan. And you? You're nobody in particular, are you…but I suppose you'll have to do,” she said. “Kindly direct us to our apartments.”

“Your…” The Buridan apartments existed, the officer knew that much. No one was allowed to enter, alter, or destroy Buridan property until the nation's status was determined. “This way, please.”

She thought quickly. It was years ago, but one day she had met one of the oldest of the watch officers in an open gallery on Wheel Seven. They had been passing a broad stretch of crumbling wall and came to a bricked-up archway. “Know what that is?” he'd asked playfully. When she shook her head he smiled and said, “Almost nobody does, nowadays. It's the entrance to the Buridan estate. It's all still there—towers, granaries, bedrooms, and armories—but the other nations have been building and renovating around and over it for so long that there's no way in anymore. It's like a scar, or a callus maybe, in the middle of the city.

“Anyway, this was the main entrance. Used to have a sweeping flight of steps up to it, until they took that out and made the courtyard yonder. This entrance is the official one, the one that only opens to the state key. If you ever get any visitors from Buridan, they can prove that they are who they say they are if they can open the door behind that wall.”

“Come with me,” said the officer now. As she escorted her visitors along the rope that stretched toward Wheel Seven, she wondered where she was going to get a gang of navvies with sledgehammers on such short notice.

 

The demolition of the brick wall made just enough of a delay to allow Lesser Spyre's first ministers to show up. Venera cursed under her breath as she watched them padding up the gallery walk: five men and three women in bright silks, with serious expressions. Secretaries and hangers-on fluttered around them like moths. In the courtyard below, a crowd of curious citizens was growing.

“This had better work,” she muttered to Diamandis.

He adjusted his mask. It was impossible to read his expression behind it. “They're as scared as we are,” he said. “Who knows if there's anything left on the other side of that?” He nodded to the rapidly falling stones in the archway.

“Lady Thrace-Guiles!” One of the ministers swept forward, lifting his silk robes delicately over the mortar dust. He was bejowled and balding, with a fan of red skin across his nose and liver spots on his lumpish hands. “You look just like your great-great-great-grandmother, Lady Bertitia,” he said generously. “Her portrait hangs in my outer office.”

Venera looked down her nose at him. “And you are…?”

“Aldous Aday, acting chairman of the Lesser Spyre Committee for Public Works and Infrastructure,” he said. “Elected by the Upper House of the Great Families—a body that retains a seat for you, kept draped in velvet in absentia all these years. I must say, this is an exciting and if I do say so, surprising, day in the history of Upper—”

“I want to make sure our estate is still in one piece,” she said. She turned to Diamandis. “Master Flance, the hole is big enough for you to squeeze through. Pray go ahead and tell me that our door is undamaged.” He bowed and edged his way past the workmen.

He and Venera wore clothing they had found preserved in wax paper in the lockers of Buridan Tower. The styles were ancient, but for all that they were more practical than the contraptions favored by Spyre's present generation. Venera had on supple leather breeches and a black jacket over a bodice tooled and inscribed in silver. A simple belt held two pistols. On her brow rested a silver circlet they had found in an upstairs bedchamber. Diamandis was similarly dressed, but his leathers were all a deep forest green.

“It's a great honor to see your nation again after so many years,” continued Aday. If he was suspicious of her identity, he wasn't letting on. She exchanged pleasantries with him through clenched teeth, striving to stay in profile so that he and the others could not see her jaw. Venera had done her best to hide the scar and had bleached her hair with some unpleasant chemicals they'd found in the tower, but someone who had heard about Venera Fanning might recognize her. Did Aday and his people keep up on news from the outside world? Diamandis didn't think they did, but she had no idea at this point how far her fame had spread.

To her advantage was the fact that the paranoid societies of Spyre rarely communicated. “Sacrus won't want anyone to know they had you,” Diamandis had pointed out one evening as they sat huddled in the tower, an ornate chair burning merrily in the fireplace. “If they choose to unmask you, it's at the expense of admitting they have connections with the outside world—and more important, they won't want to hint that they have the key to Candesce. I don't think we'll hear a peep out of them, at least not overtly.”

The workmen finished knocking down the last bricks and stepped aside just as Diamandis stuck his head around the corner of the archway. “The door is there, ma'am. And the lock.”

“Ah, good.” Venera stalked past the workers, trying to keep from nervously twisting the ring on her finger. This was the proverbial moment of truth. If the key didn't work…

The brick wall had been built across an entryway that extended fifteen feet and ended in a large iron-bound door similar to the one at Buridan Tower. The ministers crowded in behind Venera, watching like hawks as she dusted off the lockbox with her glove. “Gentlemen,” she said acidly, “there is only so much air in here.—Though I suppose you have some natural skepticism about my authenticity. Put that out of your minds.” She held up the signet ring. “I am my own proof—but if you need crass symbols, perhaps this one will do.” She jammed the key against the inset impression in the lockbox.

Nothing happened.

“Pardon.” Diamandis was looking alarmed and Venera quashed the urge to make some sort of joke. She must not lose her air of confidence, not even for a second. Bending to examine the lock, she saw that it had been overgrown with grit over the years. “Brush, please,” she said in a bored tone, holding out one hand. After a long minute someone placed a hairbrush in her palm. She scrubbed the lock industriously for a while, then blew on it and tried the ring again.

This time there was a deep click and then a set of ratcheting thumps from behind the wall. The door ground open slowly.

“You are the council for…infrastructure, was it not?” she asked, fixing the ministers with a cold eye. Aday nodded. “Hmm,” she said. “Well.” She turned, preparing to sweep like the spoiled princess she had once been, through the opened door into blackness.

A loud
bang!
and fall of dust from the ceiling made her stumble. There was sudden pandemonium in the gallery. The ministers were milling in confusion while screams and shouts followed the echoes of the explosion into the air. Past Aday's shoulder Venera saw a curling pillar of smoke or dust that hadn't been there a second ago.