Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

Jacoby watched Argyre's mounting puzzlement as she shuffled through the images. "What is this: an eye?" She held up a photo that showed nothing but a white circle surrounded by black.

"That," said Jacoby, "would be entirely visible from where you're sitting, if this godforsaken country had a sun to light it. It's a photograph of the outer skin of Virga, an area only a hundred miles or so away from this very spot. The picture was taken through a telescope by ... a friend of mine. That circle is a span of Virga's outer wall. This picture was shot in infrared, so the cold parts are black."

"Then..." She frowned in confusion. "This circle is an area of the world's skin that is warm ?"

He nodded. "It's hundreds of miles across. And in the past few months, practically the entire Home Guard fleet has converged on a spot right at its center."

She blinked at him rapidly--a disconcerting sight given her huge eyes. "Really." She turned the other pictures over. "This?" Blurred and speckled with distance was an image of square blockhouses encircling a ragged black patch. "Is this ... a hole?"

"I wouldn't speculate on that," he said. "But that's what's at the very center of the circle. You can see there's ships clustering around that spot like flies on--"

"Yes, I can see that," she said. "But--" Her fabulous eyes widened even further. "The Site," she muttered. "He said he'd come from the Site..." She glanced up guiltily, but it was plain he'd heard her. Jacoby watched her struggle with a decision.

"A local cabinet minister went missing a while ago," she said. "During the monster scare. Now he's back. Back from somewhere on the other side of 'the Site.'"

"Ah..." Jacoby smiled as the waiter set down their appetizers. "I came here because I'm chasing the ones who are ultimately responsible for the destruction of Spyre. Care to tell me why you're here?"

She bit her lip, but they both knew there was no going back now--and he already thought he knew, from the research his spies had done on her.

"I'm looking for a friend of mine," she said. "Her name is Leal Maspeth; she was being groomed to become dean of the university's history department when she suddenly disappeared. The official reports say she defied the government over something to do with the monster. She supposedly stole state secrets and--this is utterly unbelievable--burned one of her coworkers to death in his own home. Then she fled into the arms of the monster itself. Well, maybe it's true. Maybe she went somewhere..." She paused, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth, and gazed at the photo lying between them. "Two hundred miles..."

Jacoby nearly dropped his own fork this time, and damn her, she noticed. "What's that?" he said irritably.

"I overheard a couple of clerks talking," she said. "One said that Loll had come from some kind of city that was two hundred miles from the Site."

Jacoby tried to act nonchalant as he dug through the papers, but he was sure his eagerness must be obvious as he brought out a different picture. "Look at this one," he said, tossing it down in front of her. Argyre snatched it up.

While she examined the picture, he scowled at the flamboyantly lit towers of Sere. "There's a certain kind of self-delusion particular to people who've lived in peace for too long," he said, half to himself. "Right up until the day that the enemy swoops in to torch their wheel, they think that their problems are the biggest problems in the world, and their power the biggest power. I've spent my whole life looking into the eyes of those people after I had taken away everything they had ... and then, quite suddenly, I lost my homeland in exactly the same way. Spyre, Sacrus, and even Virga itself ... they're just pawns in a larger conflict, aren't they? I know that now. You know. But who else really understands? It seems to me that Leal Maspeth does--or did."

Argyre held up the photo. "This is some city somewhere? What's the connection?"

He nodded. "The ancient city of Serenity. A dead place now, choked with icebergs, frozen into the outer wall of Virga like a corpse in winter ... and right at the edge of that mysterious warm circle." The image showed dark towers on a flat plain, ensnared by rivers of ice. "In fact, it's precisely two hundred miles from the Site."

"Aha! So maybe this is the real place, then--the monster's home..." She stopped as she saw Jacoby shaking his head.

"My people have cruised by the place several times. There's no ships docked there, no signs of life at all. The Guard haven't gone near Serenity. It may be that they don't even know it's there, it may be that they're just distracted by whatever it is they've found at the center of the circle."

"Maybe they're about to become interested," she said.

"You'd think. It's strange, though--my men spent much of the morning watching the rest of the Abyssal fleet set sail. Their trajectory will take them straight to what you've called the Site--the center of the circle. If this cabinet minister came from Serenity, why aren't they going there?"

"How many men do you have, anyway?" she asked with a little smile.

"Oh, a few."

She snorted, then turned her attention back to the photo. "We could speculate about this all day," she pointed out. "Or we could go to this city of Serenity, and find out."

Jacoby picked up the photos and shuffled them and the rest of the papers back into the file folder. "There, you see?" he said. "It turns out our interests align after all."

6

KEIR SAT INhis room, hands folded in his lap. His knapsack lay on the bed, but he'd pulled the clothes and rations out of it. With no means of escape other than walking, it just seemed pathetic to keep it ready to go.

Maerta had spoken to the Edisonians and forbidden them to evolve any kind of vehicle or personal transportation device for him. She didn't trust him, clearly--and he didn't blame her. The need for escape burned so brightly in him that he could no longer think about anything else.

And yet ... he could have done what Eustace Loll actually did; he could have taken the ornithopter himself and flown away. There'd been no guard on it, only his promise to Maerta that he wouldn't use it. If he wanted to get away so badly, why had he given her his word that he wouldn't; and why had he kept it?

Maybe for the same reason that, until today, he hadn't delved through his own scry to look at his memories from more than six months ago.

Because there weren't any. He remembered school. He remembered a mounting anxiety, a feeling that these happy days with the other kids, the lessons, the comfort of elders in the morning and evening--that these were a mask of some kind, covering ...

He stood up and started to pace to the door, but caught himself, and sat down again. That was how it had been: whenever he'd actually started to think about his situation, terror had bubbled up overwhelmingly, and escape became the only option. So he'd walked the dark corridors of the city, explored it end to end, and fantasized about being anywhere else. It had worked to stave off the panic, but only because it was a distraction.

And then, Maerta had said the name Sita .

There was no one in the Renaissance named Sita. His scry couldn't locate any reference to her, and when he'd asked the Edisonians they'd simply sat there like dumb blocks of stone. Yet Maerta thought he should know the name.

He looked down at his hands, where two of his dragonflies perched, then up at the forlorn knapsack. What he should have done was go after Maerta, demand that she explain. Or he should have talked to the others. That was something, in fact, that he should have been doing from the start. Why hadn't he cornered another of the adults, forced them to tell him what had happened? Surely they all knew.