Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

Antaea didn't glance down, but even if she had the view wouldn't have daunted her. She was used to the yawning vistas of gravity-free air. Even if a fall from this ledge would be fatal, she had long ago become conditioned against a fear of heights.

She knelt carefully, holding the slick bricks with her fingertips. Now she could hear the voices better.

"--a city, he says." That was the voice of the man who'd interrupted the subminister. "Two hundred miles from the Site."

"And he was alone? What about the ships--and the Home Guard escort?"

"Something's not right," continued the subminister. "That was a Home Guard inspector in my office just now! Asking about Maspeth. Haven't they debriefed Loll themselves?"

"He slipped by them! Got himself smuggled through the Site on one of our regular supply ships. He was flying some little one-person aircraft, seems he was able to sneak on to one of our cruisers without the Guard noticing."

"Well, obviously the Guard suspects something. And all of these resources he's asking for?" scoffed the subminister. "TC-34s? And he's fast-tracking the gravity ships? How are we going to pay for all this?"

There was a pause. Then the other man said, "Would you rather ignore the request? See what happens?"

The subminister cursed, and then Antaea heard the scraping of chairs against the floor. The voices continued but were moving away again.

A glance through the glass showed that this smaller office was now empty. Antaea climbed back through the window she'd come out of, and left the subminister's office by the correct door. She was thinking hard, and ignored the gaze of the secretaries in the outer office as she stalked past them. No doubt there would be whispers once she'd left, or maybe even loud conversation: a winter wraith had visited them! Who cared; she had more important things to think about.

She didn't forget to change out of her uniform in the main-floor washroom. People in the lobby stared, but no one accosted her as she passed them. She kept her eyes forward and acknowledged no one.

She was out of options. All her money was gone, and her only possessions in the world were the clothes on her back, and the jet bike currently parked at Rowan Wheel's dock a mile overhead. All manner of revelatory conversations and events might be taking place in the offices above, but she had no access to any of them. There was only so much ledge-balancing and skulduggery a girl could do on her own.

She stopped at the taxi stand to think. The ragged remains of protest posters hung in strips from the lamppost next to it. The secret service had been by again, evidently, but the poster-printers kept just a step ahead of them. Although the crudely printed papers were gone, she--and everybody else in the city--knew what they said. In big bold letters, they asked, "WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT LYING TO US?"

There was no proof that the Crier in the Dark had been destroyed, the broadsheets went on. No proof at all. If the government remained incompetent to deal with the clearly still-existent threat, then it should be replaced.

That made her smile, and then, after a glance around, she walked away from the taxi stand. Two blocks up the curve of the wheel she paused again, under the velvet-draped entrance of a grand hotel she could never have afforded to stay in, even when she did work for the Guard. The doorman scowled at her as she brought out the card she'd been thumbing in her pocket for days. As she made up her mind and walked up to the door, he put his arm out to block her.

"Are you sure you have business here?" he asked in an all-too-familiar tone.

"Is this the Stormburl Hotel?" she asked sweetly.

"It is, but--"

"Then I have business here." She pushed past him and into the building.

"I'm sorry, miss, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to--"

"It's all right," said a voice behind them. "She's expected."

The clerk ducked his head; and Antaea turned, and there stood the man she'd met on the airship.

Jacoby Sarto smiled and put out his hand for her to shake. "I was just on my way to dinner. Would you like to join me?"

* * *

THE RESTAURANT WASlocated about a mile from Sere's biggest town wheel. It was an ornately carved wooden centrifuge about a hundred feet across. It rotated slowly to produce just enough gravity to make dining pleasant in the gaslit gardens that paved its inner surface. You could watch the kitchen workers pick and clean your fabulously expensive vegetables and herbs; if the duck Jacoby ordered was killed on the spot, too, they did it somewhere out of sight. It was the greens that mattered, because in a sunless country like Abyss, most vegetables were imported.

He watched Antaea watch the city. She was beautiful in a striking and unsettling way; he'd been unable to keep himself from glancing surreptitiously at her as they flew here. Her ears, nose, and chin were tiny, but her eyes were huge . Jacoby had heard of winter wraiths, those members of a genetically engineered offshoot of humanity whose features were designed to mesmerize ordinary humans. Antaea Argyre was certainly mesmerizing, but he had done his research since their meeting at the capital bug; he knew she was a capable and ruthless killer.

Now she turned back to him. "I'm not really sure why I'm here," she admitted.

"You're here because you think I may know things," he said with a mild shrug. "Maybe I do, and maybe I'm willing to share. How's that for a start?"

She eyed him warily. "But what's the price?"

"Well, there may not be one," he admitted, "if your interests are as aligned with mine as I think they are."

"Explain."

He suppressed a smile at her imperious tone. He was used to dealing with people who assumed command the way she was attempting to. His reply was to lean forward and spill a sheaf of photographs and reports onto the tabletop.

"I was born, raised, and spent almost my entire life in the nation of Sacrus, on Spyre," he said as he slid the pictures around with one finger. Argyre showed no sign of recognizing the name, so he tamped down on his irritated pride and explained: "Spyre was one of the ancient places, a metal cylinder twelve kilometers across and twenty long. Open at the ends, of course; it flew in the airs near Candesce, at the center of the world. Its inner surface was sown with countries like Sacrus--some small as a building, some miles in extent. All of them thousands of years old. Older than any of these places." He waved contemptuously at the rust- and verdigris-rimmed wheels of Sere.

"One day," he continued, "a woman from this outside world drifted in and miraculously survived her fall onto Spyre's inner surface." His fingers continued to move the pictures, but he was no longer looking at them. "Shortly after Venera Fanning's arrival--" He pretended not to notice as Argyre started at the name, nearly spilling her drink. "--Spyre fell apart. Literally. Sacrus, its ancient neighbors and rivals, all of them were ripped asunder and scattered to the six winds."

Antaea Argyre leaned back, obviously considering what to say. "From what I've heard of Venera Fanning, that doesn't surprise me in the least."

"I lost my home--my whole nation," Jacoby went on. "I'm an exile now, forced to make my living by means that are, frankly, sordid compared to what I once was."

"If it's revenge you're after," said Argyre, "all I can say is that I have no way of getting you close to Fanning."

Sarto crossed his arms and glowered at the photos. "I was born and raised to believe in the sanctity, not to mention the necessity, of revenge," he admitted. "But revenge against whom? Or, in this case, what?"

"Ah."

"Venera Fanning trampled all our traditions and values, and then blew up the world," said Jacoby as he handed some of the pictures to her. "But I'd be lying if I said those traditions and values didn't heartily deserve to be trampled. The world's a better place now that Sacrus is gone, and that's probably true for the rest of Spyre, too. --What do you see?" he said of the photos.