Karl Schroeder - Queen of Candesce

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-martial.

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 frozen 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 daywatch 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 suddenly 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 knotlike collections of buildings in freefall. Ropes led from these 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 gun slits 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 mid-air 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 callous 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.