Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

A cowled figure waited in the shadow of the yacht. Leal saw it only when Venera suddenly stopped and put her arm across Leal's chest. As Keir bumped into Leal, Venera reached for an absent sidearm; they'd been required to leave their weapons on the yacht.

"Please, I'm a friend," said a woman's voice. The gray-cloaked shape bobbed through the dock's minuscule gravity to perch before them, and as Venera said "Who--" it threw back its hood.

Leal recognized the face; this young woman had been at the banquet. She'd been seated at the first table to the right of the main table, which meant she was a person of high standing. Leal carefully bowed, and didn't quite have to kick Keir in the shins before he did, too. Venera held her head high--but of course, Venera bowed to no one.

They all stood in half-shadow, but the young woman clearly thought that this wasn't discreet enough; she windmilled her arms and sailed a few feet back, into the darkness. "Please, I can't be seen here," she called softly.

Venera glanced up at the well-lit main hatch of the yacht. "There's another way in," she said curtly. "This way." She led them under the belly of the yacht. To the left were the lights, gantries, and piled crates of the docking ring that rode at the central axle of the town wheel; to the right was a sheer drop-off, and night skies.

Venera fished a key out of her belt, then reached up into blackness. "Keir, give me a boost," she said. He knitted his fingers together and she stepped up to push an unseen door aside. She clambered in, and a moment later let down a rope ladder.

When they were all inside--in the yacht's cramped storage locker, as it turned out--Venera turned to the stranger and said, "You can speak freely in front of my companions. What is this about?"

"My name is Thavia. I'm the satrap's niece." She eyed Leal and Keir suspiciously, but then found a perch on some boxes and without further hesitation said, "You are not the first to come to us with talk of an invasion from the outside universe. The viziers made a big show tonight of sending a delegation to your grand colloquy, but according to my father, our government has already committed our loyalty to a different faction."

Venera scowled. "Who were they?"

Thavia described two foreigners who had visited court. She had been pale-skinned, pale-haired, her lips a red slash across her beautiful face. Her name was Inshiri Ferance, and though Thavia had never heard of her, the mere mention of her was enough to make the satrap and his viziers turn as pale as her. Thavia had always feared the viziers, who were known to be capricious and judgmental, and she had never seen them afraid. They were afraid of Inshiri.

She offered the satrap power and new riches if he would ally with her against that upstart pirate sun, Slipstream. The Slipstreamers would arrive soon, spreading their lies, and Inshiri advised the satrap to imprison them at once. Her friends would be grateful if that were to happen. But as she spoke, she kept her head turned, ever so slightly, in the direction of the silent, bronze-skinned man who had accompanied her here. He was never introduced, but merely stood in the background with his arms crossed and watched Inshiri's performance. No one in the room, Thavia swore, had doubted who was really in charge here.

"They made a deal," Thavia told Venera. "I wasn't party to it, but whatever it was, my parents were supremely uncomfortable with it. After they left, I was told I was being sent to some city named Fracas, as a 'special ambassador' of some sort. I don't want to go..."

Venera stroked the scar on her chin. "Fracas? Would any of the people there recognize you?"

"Surely not."

Venera smiled. "In that case, I have a plan."

* * *

JACOBY SARTO CLOSEDthe door to his hotel room, and then had to lean on it heavily as a wave of pain and nausea overtook him. He looked up and down the hall, but there was no one to see his weakness. With a muted curse he walked carefully to the stairs, keeping his head high despite the almost overwhelming urge to simply lie down and curl around his maimed hand.

She had left his hotel room half an hour before. Theirs had not been a romantic rendezvous. The least of it had been the interrogation she'd subjected him to. He'd expected that, of course; how could she know he could be trusted, since she didn't even know where he'd been and what he'd been up to since they had parted ways.

That had been humiliating, but nothing compared with what had happened next. Inshiri still didn't trust him; she needed a guarantee of his loyalty.

"Fool," he muttered to himself as he leaned on the doorjamb to the stairwell. As Sacrus's representative on Spyre's grand council, he'd had a legitimate claim to all of Sacrus's remaining assets after the destruction of Spyre. He could have fought Inshiri for them-- should have taken it down to a contest of loyalties and cunning then, when she was vulnerable. He had all of Sacrus's foreign operations in his hand, since he'd been able to act days before any of the surviving members of the ruling families thought to try it themselves.

But with the reins of true power in his hands at last, Jacoby Sarto had lost his nerve. Now he looked at the blood-soaked bandages wrapped around his left hand and said, "You've got no one to blame but yourself, Jacoby."

Unused to wielding power for his own sake, he'd found he had no idea what to do with the resources he'd acquired. He would never admit it to anyone else, but he'd been terrified to be saddled with the responsibility it all came with.

Inshiri Ferance hadn't had to threaten him. At the first opportunity he'd turned the foreign services back over to her, and he'd flown away from his chance at real power with haste and a terribly unmanning relief.

Inshiri knew he'd blinked, and though she'd allowed him back into her inner circle, she treated him with contempt. The guarantee she'd taken from him tonight was minor for her, but calculated to make him aware, every day for the rest of his life, that he was and would always remain a servant.

He put his good hand on the railing and stared down the stairwell, which seemed to be tipping slowly over--whether due to this wheel's rotation, or the delirium of pain he was in, he couldn't have said.

"Sane people put their docks up top," he said, then laughed at himself. He was talking to no one! Anyway, it was true; at the axis of a wheel there was no gravity and you could moor or unmoor at leisure. The engineers at Kaleidogig were stupid barbarians, though, and they liked to live dangerously. He slowly descended the steps, leaning on the wall to guarantee that he knew up from down.

When he entered the Kaleidogig docking galleries he shook his head in fury: how was he going to make it across this jumble of half-built jet bikes, stolen taxis, and decommissioned military catamarans, all of them swinging off hooks like fresh-caught game? The floor under them was a minefield of big hatches that could be thrown open by the pull of a lever--and might fall out from under you if you stepped on them. Even as he leaned there trying to pick out a safe route, the lamps in the long, upward-curving room flickered as one of the hatches banged down and a puff of wind rushed through the place. A courier who sat astride his bike above this hatch reached up, casually unclipped the chain suspending him, and he and the bike fell through the opening and into the hundred-mile-per-hour headwind made by the town wheel's spin.

A dockhand approached, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. "Yer all right, sar?"

"Fine. I'm fine." He hid his left hand behind himself, and wiped away the sweat on his forehead with his palm. "I'm expecting someone," he added curtly.

"If yer say so. Just don't go near the cats." The hand nodded at the bigger military craft, which hung nodding behind a yellow rope.