Karl Schroeder - Queen of Candesce

“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. “Mister 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 with 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 importantly, 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.

With her foot hovering over the threshold of the estate, Venera found herself momentarily forgotten. Sirens were sounding throughout the wheel and she heard the clatter of soldiers’ boots on the flagstones. In the courtyard, someone was crying; somebody else was screaming for help.

Expressionless, she walked back to the gallery and peered over Aday’s shoulder. “Somebody bombed the crowd,” she said.

“It’s terrible, terrible,” moaned Aday, wringing his hands.

“This can’t have been planned,” she said reasonably. “So who would be walking around on a morning like this just carrying a bomb?”

“It’s the rebels,” said Aday furiously. “Bombers, assassins… This is terrible!”

Someone burst into the courtyard below and ran toward the most injured people. With a start Venera realized it was Garth Diamandis. He shouted commands to some stunned but otherwise intact victims; slowly they moved to obey, fanning out to examine the fallen.

It hadn’t occurred to Venera until this moment that she could also be helping. She felt a momentary stab of surprise, then… was it anger? She must be angry at Diamandis, that was it. But she remembered the mayhem of battle aboard the Rook when the pirates attacked, and the aftermath. Such fear and anguish, and in those moments the smallest gesture meant so much to men who were in pain. The airmen had given of themselves without a moment’s thought—given aid, bandages, and blood.

She turned to look for the stairs, but it was too late: the medics had arrived. Frowning, Venera watched their white uniforms fan out through the blackened rubble. Then she lit her lantern and stalked back to the archway.

“When my manservant is done, send him to me,” she said quietly. She strode alone into the long-sealed estate of Buridan.

In an abandoned bedchamber of the windswept tower, while the floor swayed and sighs moaned through the huge pipes that underlay the place, Diamandis had told Venera histories of Buridan, and more.

“They were the horse masters,” he said. “Theirs was the ultimate in impractical products—a being that required buckets of food and endless space to run, that couldn’t live a day in freefall. But a creature so beautiful that visitors to Spyre routinely fell in love with them. To have a horse was the ultimate sign of power, because it meant you had gravity to waste.”

“But that must have been centuries ago,” she’d said. Venera was having trouble hearing Diamandis, even though the room’s door was tightly closed and there were no windows in this chamber. The tower was awash with sound, from the creaking of the beams and the roaring of the wind to the basso-profundo chorus of drones that reverberated through every surface. Even before her eyes had adjusted to the darkness inside the building, before she could take in the clean-stripped smell of chambers and corridors scoured by centuries of wind, the full-throated scream of Buridan had nearly driven her outside again.