Karl Schroeder - Queen of Candesce

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 into the harness 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.

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 for purchase 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 lock-box 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 sun-shades 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.