Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

Leal Maspeth was missing, too. The government wouldn't talk about it; the officials Antaea had spoken to acted like she should already know, and she'd been afraid to push lest they begin to question her authenticity. So far, though, Antaea had learned that somehow, impossibly, timid little Leal had gotten to know the famous sun lighter and adventurer Hayden Griffin, and then ... The rumors spoke of murder and of the Crier in the Dark, and then she was gone.

Antaea unbuttoned her jacket, aware with each twist of her fingers that she would never be putting it on again. She'd kept it out of sentimentality uncommon for her; it was time to let it go. She dropped it on the bed and forced herself to turn away.

Then, she dressed herself in civilian clothes, slid knives into the boots still hidden under her trousers, and added one to the back of her belt.

Crase wasn't going to make her leave. She'd failed to save her own sister from the dire mystery that pressed upon her world. Walking the streets here was about to get much more dangerous for her, and the ministries and offices she'd been able to enter as a Home Guard member would be closed. From now on, her appointments would be in the alleys and at the docks. It was going to be hard.

She would find Leal Maspeth.

Part One | THE OFFER

1

"LEAL, HURRY!"

Leal Hieronyma Maspeth took a look back to see how close their pursuer was and felt the scree under her feet give way. Suddenly on her knees and then her side, she began to slide. She heard shouts, and half-visible hands reached for her. Darkness opened below and, in desperation, she grabbed for a half-glimpsed jut of rock.

She swung, suddenly and shockingly, above open air. The gravel made a trickling sound as it sped past her, but she couldn't hear it land. It just disappeared.

"The rope's just to your left, Leal, can you see it?"

"No," said Leal. "That's okay. I'm going to reach for it now. Tell me if I..." She forgot words as she stretched out her left hand, and felt her right slip another inch. Now she was hanging on by just her fingertips.

She had an awful moment then. The thing that was following them was close. If it caught up to them, if it was the one to rescue her--for she was sure it would neither kill her nor leave her in this predicament--would she regret not having just let go?

Should she let go?

"Leal!" That was Piero Harper's voice ... She blinked; something brushed her face. "Grab the rope!" He was only a few feet away, but above her.

"You've got to keep going!" she hissed at him. He shook his head.

"This'll only take a second. Take hold, ma'am."

Damn his politeness. She flailed for the rope and met empty air. Her fingers slipped, were about to lose it--

Something tapped her knuckles, and then she felt cool fibers coil around her fingers. With relief Leal let go of the rock, but again there was that damned gravity pulling her straight. Stretched and jolted, she yelped with pain as, in jerks and yanks, she rose rather than fell.

Rock banged her shoulder and she felt herself being dragged over the lip of a rough ledge. "Are you okay?" said Piero as the rope unwound itself from her lacerated hand and slithered back. It was visible now in lantern light and she watched in abstract amusement as it inched and twisted its way back into the body of the large, four-footed creature standing next to Harper.

"I-I'm fine. Thanks," she said to both of them. Once again the emissary had taken a hand in saving her life. The emissary! She brought up her hands to touch her shoulders. "Are you there--"

"Yes," said a tiny voice near her ear. She felt little pulls on the cloth of her collar as a small doll regained its accustomed seat on her shoulder. "I fell down your back," it said, "but hung on."

"Good." She wilted with relief. "We've lost too much of you as it is..." The doll was made of junk: A coiled wire made up its left arm, a couple of broken pencils its right. Its head was the porcelain knob from some electrical device, with bright screws attached that moved uncannily like eyes. Its mouth was the reed from a ship's horn.

There was no magical spirit animating these random pieces, but fine, hairlike threads of something the emissary called nanotech. This body--this doll, so unlike the ones Leal had collected back when she lived in Sere--was part of the alien. It was the part that she spoke with, and could cup in her hands and so treat, if only for moments at a time, as a being like herself.

She fully intended to start moving, but for a long moment remained at the edge of the cliff, staring downward. She'd seen faces as she dangled: of poor Dean Porril, huddled in permanent mourning behind his great iron desk in a wind-rattled office deep underneath the university; of Easley Fencher, who could never keep his lanky elbows and knees from sticking out, nor his equally awkward thoughts and attitudes. Of her friend Seana, in the bright metal exoskeleton that kept her upright in the unfamiliar gravity of the city. Of fire, bright and orange and frantic, as it consumed Easley's home with Easley in it ...

"We'd best get going," said Piero quietly. The rest of the group had already moved on--predictably, with the limping silhouette of Eustace Loll, high official in her country's government, in the lead.

"For somebody who's half-lame, he sure moves," she muttered; Piero saw where she was looking and grinned.

They made to catch up, unspeaking. There was no sound for a while then, but for the muttering of the breeze and the distant crack of glacial ice falling from the wall of the world. Their pursuer had stopped yelling for them to stop, wait, just hold on a minute and talk to it. It must know it was going to catch them now, so why bother talking?

They'd had a seemingly insurmountable lead when they set out this morning. Leal had stood on a promontory and scanned the steep, seemingly infinite slope below their campsite. Far down there, barely visible in the gray light that only indicated a sky, something was heaving itself across the rocks. As usual, somebody had been watching it at all times, as the rest of them slept. She'd taken her turn, and she could see that it hadn't gotten very far since then.

They'd walked on up the slope, reassured. And then, an hour ago, she'd heard that familiar voice again.

And here it came again, from only a few hundred yards back: "Leal! Wait, please!"

As if in agreement, there came a deep grumble of sound from far above. At first, as they'd toiled their way up steeper and steeper slopes, those occasional bellows of thunder had seemed familiar. Leal had waited to see lightning, but there never was any. Gradually, she'd come to realize that she wasn't hearing storms. Thunder here meant something different than it did at home.

"Leal, come back! I can help you!"

"Come on, what are you waiting for?" she snapped at the little group of men whose faces were painted by lantern light in shades of worry and doubt. "All we need is a big overhang. We'll be fine."

She'd slipped because there was as much ice up here as rock. Generally you could tell the difference, but not always. She'd been careless; now she stalked on, head down, fiercely focused on the uneven tumbled stones ahead of her. Piero walked next to her; in another time and place, he might have gallantly demanded that she rest, but they had no time for that.

Another man had been walking beside her when they'd set out on this journey. He was gone now. He wouldn't be back, despite her doubts, despite the promise of that distant voice that followed her through her waking hours and even into her dreams. She shuddered and tried to bring her attention back to the tilted, broken slabs of the ancient roadway under her feet.

This worked for a while, but then a series of cracking sounds, like distant gunshots, echoed from far overhead. In the silence that followed, Leal and her men met one another's eyes; then somebody said, "Move!"