Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

"If it's Loll, he knows he don't have to kill us," Piero said. "He's sending a message, to you."

She had to nod. And she knew what the message was: The door to Virga is closed.

"He'll have spun some story about being the only survivor. I bet we're all dead, or the emissary's taken over our bodies. But would he go so far as to strand his own countrymen down on the plains?"

"If he can convince the Guard to give up on rescuing them?" Piero snorted. "In a heartbeat. Beggin' your pardon, ma'am, but I never trusted him. Why did we bring him along?"

She sighed wearily. "Because we're compassionate people, I guess. It's a flaw."

Leal stared at the polished floor, where maybe no human feet had trod before hers. She gradually became aware that the others were gathering around. She looked up and did a count; nobody else was missing, at least.

"We can't go back, can we, ma'am?"

She opened her mouth to agree, the words like stones in her heart--and then saw Keir Chen walk by in the background.

Leal stood up. "Not that way," she agreed.

"But there may be another.

"Keir!"

7

"REEL IN THEhulls!" shouted Jacoby Sarto. He turned to Antaea Argyre, his face only half-visible in the light of the few oil lanterns that hung from the ship's rigging. "I'm turning off our gravity. It's safer at this point."

She nodded. Behind Jacoby, the crew was hulking silhouettes, their half-seen hands reaching up to clutch and drag at the gravity ropes.

Antaea heard a quiet clatter--Jacoby's teeth chattering--and she smiled. "Finding winter too cold for you, Jacoby? You're from the principalities, after all." Her breath fogged as she spoke.

They stepped down from the railing as Jacoby's ship, the Torn Page of Fate , began to sway. Half a mile overhead, the faint lights of the ship's other hull faded in and out of view as clouds obscured it.

"Time for the winter gear, I suppose," Jacoby agreed grudgingly. "I shall be back." She watched him walk to the forward cabin, bouncing slightly in the lowering gravity. Then one of the men shouted something and she turned and squinted, watching the airman's lips move as he held up a lantern.

"Ice!"

Antaea spun around in time to see a pale boulder, smudged with darkness and the size of a house, glide by off to starboard. Jacoby had given the order to draw in the hulls just in time.

She made her way to the bow, using her hands as much as her feet for purchase. Lines creaked overhead and the men began greeting their companions in the other hull, whom they hadn't seen in days.

They would be passing more icebergs soon enough--and perhaps, other things. When the first of the vast, dark lanterns had loomed out of the darkness, Antaea had half-believed it was a mirage. She'd spent her childhood and much of her adult life in these frozen regions, far from the light of civilized suns, and there should be no man-made constructions here--other than the walls of Virga itself.

The lantern had been a hundred feet across, clenched together out of rusted girders and huge, bowed sheets of glass. Those glossy panes were dark; once this lamp might have been visible a hundred miles away. From one of its corners, thick cables twisted away into the dark. It was moored to the skin of the world somewhere, but if the photos from Jacoby's magic telescope were right, it was just an outrigger. Once, she imagined, the city the lantern pointed to had been its own beacon, a glittering jewel nestled in a forest of bergs on the world's wall. All lost to the dark now.

The cables had kept the lantern pointed in one direction. That heading had confirmed Jacoby's inertial map, and so they had followed the dark lamp's lead. The Page had eventually come to another lantern, then another.

Antaea's feet left the deck. She grabbed some rigging to stabilize herself as the ceiling of the second hull lowered over her. By splitting the hull of the spindle-shaped Page down its midline they could let the two pieces out and spin them around a common axis. The result looked a bit like two ancient gravity-bound ships of the sea, attached mast-to-mast and pinwheeling together through the sky. In this way, they had enjoyed gravity throughout most of the journey. Now, with a set of muffled thuds, the Page 's two halves closed over one another and what had been exposed decks were now the inside walls of a single hull.

Antaea watched as Mauven, the first mate, took reports from the men in the other hull. To her surprise, she felt a sigh of relief escape her at being enclosed by the hulls--cut off, finally, from the necessity of having to feel the wintry airs of Virga's outer reaches.

She'd hoped never to have to come here again. This place was the realm of the Virga Home Guard--of precipice moths, and strange beasts like the eaners; of icebergs that coated the world's wall like stucco; of myths and darkness and dreams. It had also been her home as a child, and for much of her adult life with the Guard.

She remembered this darkness lit with fire. Battles had been fought here in the days following an incident now referred to as the outage : a brief time when Candesce's shield against the monsters of the outside world had failed. Antaea and her sister, Telen, had been members of the Home Guard then, and they had joined ranks with the fearsome precipice moths to beat back an incursion that followed the start of the outage so closely that the two must have been coordinated somehow. Scheduled.

Antaea herself had been an "extraction specialist"; she specialized in rescuing people from sticky situations such as jail and imminent execution. Ironic, then, that she had ended up in a Guard prison herself after the events following the outage.

She'd become caught up in circumstances beyond her control, forced to kidnap Admiral Chaison Fanning of Slipstream under the threat that Telen would be killed if she did not. Antaea had been emotionally shattered by the discovery that her sister had died long before, and after the triumphant return of Fanning and the fall of Slipstream's pilot, she had left civilization entirely. For months she had flown through the near-infinite depths of Virga's skies, visiting countries she'd never heard of and basking in the light of nuclear-fusion suns glowing in every color of the spectrum. She'd been running as much from herself as from the Guard; but in the end, the Guard had found her.

She waited now for a few minutes until the warmth of the ship drove away the memory of ice. Then she flew to Jacoby Sarto's cabin and knocked. "Come," he said curtly.

He had taken off his jacket, and the white linen shirt emphasized his barrel chest. He held a helix glass of amber liquid, and as he saw it was her he gently lofted it over to her. Antaea took a cautious sip, and as the liquid slipped into her mouth, she almost coughed. It was rum, and very strong.

"Good, eh?" he said with a quick grin.

He'd found all sorts of ways to divert her attention over the past few days: with preparations, with plans, with the details of sailing the Page . Antaea had begun to relax around him, and he, it seemed, around her. She decided it was time to be blunt. "When I first asked you how an exile like yourself could afford this ship, you told me that you'd taken over Sacrus's international network after the fall of Spyre."

"Yes," he said. "What of it?"

"Your crewmen," she nodded at the door, "are little more than pirates. They're the cheapest of a bad lot. Hard to imagine you'd be buying men at bargain rates if you really had access to your country's assets."

He wound some liquor from a small cask into another glass. "I didn't lie to you," he said before taking a sip. "I did take over the network. Briefly. Long enough to extract those men who were loyal to me--and a goodly amount of money, to boot."