Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

Leal knelt, forgetting the babble of the officials. She gently pried the crushed dragonfly out of the soil, and cupped it in the palm of her hand.

She knelt there with it for a very long time, and when she finally raised her head, it was to find that a war had begun.

Part Three | THE CHOICE

21

JACOBY SARTO WATCHEDInshiri's men haul the blindfolded prisoner out of a dart-shaped racing yacht. He checked his pocket watch and grunted; they were actually on time. Inshiri would have no ready excuse to punish anybody. Not that that would stop her if she was in the mood.

He was holding on to a thin wooden spar that formed part of a long, open fretwork gantry. The thousand feet of tensegrity structure intersected a dozen or more similar girders that jumbled madly in the weightless air like a cloud of straw. A few, like the one he was looking out of, stood out as dotted strings of lanterns; all were faintly traced on the sky in crimson light. Now that the yacht had shut down its engines, Jacoby could hear only the constant creaking of the gantries, the distant fat blatting of a propeller and, behind it all, the ever-present lilting of birdsong.

He swung out of the gantry and jammed his feet into the stirrups attached to the indigo wings strapped to his back. A few kicks and the spring-loaded pinions flapped strongly, pushing him in the direction of the yacht. The prisoner was struggling and had succeeded in kicking one of her captors in the face despite being bound hand and foot.

He grinned. He would have expected no less.

Jacoby dressed to intimidate, which in this place meant wearing black. The severe uniform and sky-colored wings rendered him invisible to the men until he landed to perch on the gantry ahead of them. One jerked in surprise, stifled an oath, and said, "Sir! We were going to the stockade--" Jacoby shook his head, and simply held out his hand.

The man had been towing the prisoner by one ankle. He hauled on his cargo and the cursing figure sailed past him. Jacoby caught her by the same ankle and, without a word, kicked off into the open air.

Strange that, in all their dealings, this was the first time he'd actually touched her.

After a minute or so of flapping he felt her stop struggling. A minute or so after that she said, "I have to pee."

Jacoby didn't reply. His destination hung a few hundred feet ahead, its spars and rain shields lit luridly red from a single point inside the can-shaped framework.

"I can pee with great force and, if I may say so, fantastic accuracy," continued the prisoner. "You'd be wise not to learn firsthand what I can do. Now if we can find me a bottle and somewhere private, and you loosen my wrists--"

She went silent as they entered the observatory. Clearly the red light penetrated her blindfold, for she began craning her neck this way and that to try to find its source. "... Furnaces?" she muttered.

The light was visible in the air itself, a vast red cone whose point was centered on a woman who hung in the midst of the great space. She was lit as bright as a lamp's wick, a bold angelic figure blazing scarlet and gold in the focus of a mirror two hundred feet across.

"Cousin," Jacoby called, and her head turned, its wreath of pale hair a writhing nimbus of fire. She nodded, kicked the stirrups of her own wings, and flew out of the light. Her sudden extinguishing rendered her invisible.

As his eyes adjusted he saw her frowning at him. She gestured at the prisoner's bonds. With some caution--knowing this one as he did--he untied the ropes around the woman's ankles, then the ones on her wrists. Then he turned her in the right direction and flipped off the blindfold.

Dark hair billowed up to frame her face like a cloud. Venera Fanning blinked, peered around herself, and saw Jacoby. "There you are!"

Jacoby's employer gave a light flap with her wings and drifted back a few feet. The fan of white feathers behind her caught the shaft of crimson light and she became visible again. Venera Fanning turned from Jacoby, saw the red-lit woman, and hissed. "Ferance!"

"We've never met," said Inshiri. "You must have seen me in a photo from ... somewhere." She looked down her nose at Jacoby. Jacoby crossed his arms and flew back a few feet. He really, really wanted to watch this meeting--but not from too close.

Venera barked an angry laugh. Then she thrust out her arm, pointing an indignant finger at him. "I never needed his help to gather intelligence. And why is he still here? Is he your butler now?"

"I gathered you two knew each other," said Inshiri. She was drifting slowly into the light, parts of her clothing and exposed skin dawning one after another. "I thought if I couldn't persuade you to cooperate, maybe Jacoby could, since you're friends and everything."

"Hardly that," muttered Venera, throwing him a poisonous glance. "There's not a man in the world whose word I trust less."

"Ah! Then you do know him." Inshiri laughed and, for just a second, both women were looking straight at him, not as adversaries, but almost as if they were sharing a moment --and Jacoby found his skin crawling.

"Cooperate how?" Venera asked suddenly. "I'm your prisoner. You don't need my cooperation. And anything I know is now out of date by many weeks. Remember, I'd been traveling for a while when you picked me up."

Inshiri smiled unpleasantly. "Much as I would enjoy interrogating you, you're right; I don't need you for that."

"Then what? I assume you plan to use me against Chaison."

"I'm not interested in your trophy husband. What interests me," and here she leaned out of the light, blacking out her face, "is that you are one of two living people who has actually been inside the sun of suns."

Venera didn't reply.

"According to the legend, not only have you been inside, but while there you actually observed the process whereby Candesce's field was turned off."

Venera shook her head. "Observed. I didn't understand it. And anyway, you don't need me for that. Your allies from outside know how to do it. Wasn't Aubrey Mahallan one of theirs?"

"They claim not," said Inshiri dryly. "But in any case, there's always the possibility that my allies ," and she smiled at Jacoby, "will suffer some sort of accident that prevents them from getting inside Candesce. Now we would never want that to happen, but Heaven forbid if it should, it would be good if they were not the only ones who knew how to control Candesce."

Venera glanced at Jacoby. He kept his expression neutral.

"Where are your little friends, anyway?" Venera asked. She peered into the darkness. "I see no great fleet massed out there. Could it be that they no longer need you, now that events are in motion?" She turned to Jacoby. "They are in motion, aren't they?"

He gave a microscopic nod.

"Oh, they still need me, I've made sure of that. As to this place..." Inshiri smiled. "They don't know about it. Here! Let me show you." She reached out to grab Venera's arm; Jacoby saw her flinch at the touch. Inshiri flapped her wings and drew Venera over to the focal point of the giant, curved mirror. Jacoby narrowed his eyes and in the scarlet brilliance Venera did the same. As her eyes adjusted she slowly opened them, then they went wide and she said, "Oh!"

Venera hung at the focal point of a gigantic telescope aimed at Slipstream. She would be seeing the grandly rotating, metal town wheels of Rush, rendered in red and gold because the intervening air scattered out the blue end of the spectrum. The image wavered and was fuzzy, but was still good enough to show the inside surfaces of those cylinders, all papered with rooftops and streets and strolling people. --And more, it would be showing her the entire fleet her husband was amassing: their numbers, the types of their ships, the national crests painted on their sides, and their armament.