Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

He parted some low-hanging branches and emerged onto the path where the oak and the cheetah sat still as statues. City light from high overhead bathed them in a pale lunar glow. No one was here, and the voices and music had faded to a distant murmur.

Kneeling, he gazed into the giant green glass eyes of the cheetah. They cupped refractions of city light, so it almost seemed they were glowing. "What did I have to hide?" he asked it. And from whom?

There was that other memory he'd been trying to catch all day. He'd taken his second body deep into Brink's unexplored reaches, and it had brought a fab unit. Together they had made something, he was sure of it; and yet he clearly remembered walking back to Complication Hall afterward, and he'd been carrying nothing. Nor had his second body brought anything back.

"You can't tell me, can you?" he asked the cheetah, and when it didn't answer, he straightened up.

At that moment vision flashed upon him again, and at the same time he felt a buzzing vibration in--no, on, his chest. Startled, he slapped at his jacket, thinking one of Virga's strange insects had flown into him. His secondary view staggered and suddenly he realized where it was coming from as a silvery dragonfly launched itself from his jacket pocket.

He gaped at it. This was impossible. He could clearly picture the final equations he'd solved to prove how Candesce's field worked and no, they would never allow a device like his dragonflies to operate here. Unless--

Breath caught in astonishment, it all unfolded in his mind while his inner vision soared with the dragonfly up through the trees, darting between branches, ducking and swerving along the path and past the legs of the shadowed man who was running up behind Keir with a raised sword in his hand.

20

LEAL HAD GONElooking for Keir. She found Antaea instead. The wraith was walking slowly through the twilit flower beds behind the tables, her head down, her arms crossed. She looked up when Leal approached, but did not smile.

"Have you seen Keir?"

Antaea shook her head in a distracted way. Leal hesitated, but she was acutely aware of the Abyssal soldiers discreetly trailing her. She decided to leave Antaea alone. As she turned away, though, Antaea suddenly said, "What if it was a mistake?"

"What?" Leal took another look at her. Antaea's eyes were red and she stood now in a crestfallen posture. "What mistake?"

"The emissary. Did you ever think ... it might be lying?"

Impatience flared in Leal. "Antaea, I saw the urgency, the way it was trying to communicate. I went to its home world--"

"I've seen other worlds, too!" Antaea stepped closer in sudden, unexpected anger. "Lots of us have! The Guard travel outside Virga all the time and we never met your 'emissary.' Were we lied to so well, all of us, century after century? Tell me, Leal, which is harder to believe? That we were lied to? Or that you, who'd never even left that little provincial city before, might be duped by the same enemy that fooled...?" She closed her lips tightly and looked down.

"I know this is important to you--" Leal began, but Antaea shook her head violently.

"No, you don't. You think this is about Telen. It was never about Telen. It's about the reason she and I joined the Guard to begin with." Antaea's hand rose to clutch a locket around her neck as she turned to look at the city, an arch of sparkling lights cupping green foliage, that swept above them. "It's because we knew how vulnerable all this really is; and we were willing to give our lives to keep it safe. Telen did. So would I, in a second."

She stopped, having finally noticed the commotion swirling around Chaison Fanning. The admiral was now at the podium, giving orders to an assembled body of officers while pages and couriers ran in and out the greenhouse's giant doorway. A puzzled look crossed Antaea's face and she began to walk that way. Leal fell into step beside her.

"I made your mistake once," Antaea continued. "I mean, of following someone because they were a friend, rather than because of my principles. I trusted them, and made the mistake of thinking that somebody else was my enemy because, well, I didn't know them. Leal, I learned my lesson. We need better reasons than loyalty and love to choose which side we're on. If you choose loyalty and love--or hate and revenge--over what's good for Virga, then no matter how noble and right you may feel you are, you've put yourself on the side of the devils."

The ball was dissolving into knots of people: the delegations, all finding their countrymen to talk urgently with them. Antaea's head turned from side to side as she strode through the arguing, gesticulating mob. "What the--"

"If you'd believed me earlier," said Leal bitterly, "if they'd all listened earlier, maybe it wouldn't have come to this."

Antaea broke into a run, arriving moments later at the foot of the main stage. She grabbed a Slipstream officer by the arm and shouted, "What's going on?"

"A fleet!" He shook his head in amazement. "A giant bloody fleet, and it's on the move!"

Leal came up to her. "Venera's escort just made it back from some place called Fracas. Jacoby Sarto betrayed us. Maybe he was working for Inshiri Ferance all along; why not? She's his countryman. Venera's been taken by them, and her guards barely made it back here. They were chased by warships from the armada that Ferance's apparently been building now for months."

Antaea looked thunderstruck, and Leal felt a savage satisfaction at seeing her that way. "This armada," said Antaea. "Where's it going?"

Leal sneered at her. "Oh, where do you think? They're on their way to Candesce. They couldn't take it by guile, so now they'll do it by force."

Antaea stepped back. "But--but that's--" Whatever else she said was lost to Leal as a sudden, violently bright light spiked upward, drawing the distant glass canopy in black and white and erasing the city outside. Then noise poured over them, knocking many to their knees as others put their hands to their heads in sudden shock.

It was like a bellowing crowd, many voices thundering some overlapping refrain almost like music, almost a chant. The light was welling from the grove beside the palace, shafts and pinions of it dancing across the building's walls. Around Leal, men were drawing their swords, nobles waving to their squires to bring their gun cases. Some men and women were hunkering down under the tables.

Abruptly the volume of the shouting cut in half, then half again. The light dropped back, its beams hesitating, then drooping to be replaced by a white glow that turned the tops of the trees into silver filigree.

"What was that?" shouted Antaea in alarm. But Leal laughed wildly, for she recognized that great voice and it did not frighten her. --Though it was the last thing she had expected to hear in this place.

"Come on!" And she was running now, careless of the Abyssal soldiers on her heels, through the stunned mob, over flower beds and under trees, to where the emissary had awakened.

* * *

SHE WOULDN'T HAVEexpected Leal to be a good runner, but the former educator was almost to the trees before Antaea caught up to her. "Stop! You don't know what's in there!"

"Yes I do!" Leal kept on going. Many others were converging on the grove now, mostly soldiers. The courtiers and diplomats hung back, talking and pointing.

The men who'd been posted at the entrance to the grove's pathways were staring in and so Leal burst past them before they could react. "Stop!" one of them yelled. "Something's crashing around!"

"I'll catch her," Antaea said on the way by. The guards started to follow Leal, but then noticed the crowd converging behind Antaea. They turned to deal with that.

She almost ran into her. Leal had stopped, was staring at something on the path. It was the body of a man, crumpled as though he'd fallen from a great height. Broken branches were scattered around him. Cautiously, Antaea knelt and turned his head to look at the face. She heard Leal gasp.