Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

She looked impressed. "You're spying on us from here?"

"Not just you," said the heir of Sacrus. "We can point this telescope anywhere in Virga, though if we were to aim it at the world's heart and even just glimpse the sun of suns, you and I would light up like matches. This particular instrument works best when you aim it toward the darker corners of the world. But it works well for Slipstream, wouldn't you say? I can see your husband's whole plan unfolding, and when his fleet leaves, I'll be able to track its movements with utter precision."

"You're to remain a spectator here, then?" Venera inquired in a polite tone.

"Of course not. I intend to be there when you open Candesce's doors with the key the Home Guard so conveniently found for us." Inshiri waved a hand. "But we can talk about this later. For now, I want you to think about whose hands you would prefer to be on those controls when we finally penetrate the mystery of mysteries. Ours? --Yours and mine, I mean; or theirs ." And she nodded to the darkness.

Venera scowled at Inshiri, who casually pushed her in Jacoby's direction. "Lord Sarto, put her somewhere that's not overly comfortable." He took Venera's hand and kicked down to flap his wings. They left Inshiri of Sacrus lofting like a blood-soaked angel in the fire of her giant spyglass.

* * *

VENERA AIMED HERgaze down her arm at him. "What happened to your hand?"

He grimaced. "Inshiri took my little finger as proof of my loyalty. She likes hostages, as I'm sure you've noticed."

"So she's promised to give it back later?" she asked lightly.

"Not exactly."

There was a brief pause as they sailed slowly through the sky. Then Venera said: "I really do have to pee."

"Posthaste, then.

"My apologies, by the way, for the manner in which you were brought here," said Jacoby after a silence in which he had become uncomfortably aware that he was holding her hand.

She thought about that. "Where are we, anyway?"

"It's called Kaleidogig. And I really am sorry. My plan was to capture you for my own purposes, not to hand you over to her."

"Was it also your plan to get sent home with a whipping after that foolish attack on Serenity?"

He growled.

"Two for two, then."

"Maybe," he said, "but there's still one vital piece in play."

She twisted her hand in his and spun slowly to look at the ungainly galaxy of giant mirrors and steaming, brightly lit boilers. "If we were near the principalities, the whole sky would be lit up. So where are we--in winter?"

He nodded. "On the same latitude as Meridian, but a thousand miles from the nearest sun."

"And yet," she mused, "there's light."

Kaleidogig burned like a string of giant's lanterns. Its jumbled scaffolding cupped a dozen or more curving mirrors, each hundreds of feet across, which mostly lit nets and balls of water filled with floating plants. The mirrors were fairly easy to make, Jacoby had learned--you waited for calm air and then blew a vast bubble from a seed of liquid resin; when it dried you cut it into bowl-shaped sections and silvered them and there were your mirrors.

Days away, nuclear-fusion lamps carved sunlit spheres of air out of the darkness, and nations swarmed around them like moths around a candle. Each fusion lamp lit a few hundred miles of air in every direction--but Virga was five thousand miles across. Most of its interior was dark, hence unsuitable for settlement.

"I always thought it would be totally dark out here," he told Venera. "But there's a very faint glow from the suns, and you can concentrate it. Which they do. All the blue gets filtered out by the time it gets here, but the red turns out to be perfect for plants. They also concentrate some of it until it's hot enough to melt iron; they have industries. It's really quite ingenious."

Venera looked back at him. "You say 'they.' This is not your new home, then?"

"I suppose you'd call it my current place of employ."

She was silent for a while; then suddenly she pulled her hand out of his. "I suppose you were working for Inshiri all along."

"Actually, no." He frowned pensively into the night. "I said you'd call this my current place of employ. I don't consider myself to be working for Inshiri at all. Any more than I ever said I was working with you and Chaison."

"But what about loyalty? How do you suppose Antaea Argyre felt when you attacked Serenity? We all knew it was you."

It hurt just thinking about how that debacle had gone; but Venera didn't need to know that. "What do you know about loyalty?" he retorted.

"Maybe more than either you or I suspected," she said quietly; and despite his deeply ingrained cynicism, Jacoby found that the words stung him.

They were approaching a quickly spinning town wheel. The thing was little, not more than a hundred feet across, and consisted of just a few streamlined wooden buildings joined together by swaying catwalks. It was really just a swinging bridge rolled into a circle and set rolling through the skies.

Jacoby nodded at it. "Home, for now. I have to warn you, it's a sixer." He was referring to the rate per minute of the wheel's rotation. "If you have any inner-ear problems, we can set you up somewhere else."

"Oh, please. I once bedded a pirate in a twelver." She grabbed his elbow and let him lead her through the air to the landing pad at the wheel's axle. "Anyway, what about it? Are you going to stand by and let Inshiri torture me into compliance? Or death?"

Their feet found the inner surface of the barrel-shaped landing pad. Lanterns glowed here, showing the way to four long ladders that led in four directions to the circle's rim. Jacoby gestured for her to go first. As they climbed down he said, "If you hadn't been suicidally brave at Fracas, you wouldn't be in this situation. I can protect you for now, but you have to at least pretend to cooperate with Inshiri."

They'd been gaining weight as they climbed down, and now entered the top floor of a house. It was ordinary enough, with carpets, wood-paneled walls, and lamps in sconces. The floor curved up rather quickly to each side, but that was to be expected in a sixer. Jacoby's own stomach was turning over with the wheel's spin, but he refused to let Venera see that. In the sudden quiet of the house, he pitched his voice lower and said, "I was after three things: control of the door to Brink, which would have made me the gatekeeper for your little alliance; you, to control your husband; and the key to Candesce, to bring Inshiri and the outsiders in line. With them I could have headed off this fiasco and steered us to a diplomatic solution."

Venera planted her hands on her hips and glowered. " Your solution."

"It would have been better than what's coming."

"But Inshiri--"

"My plans for her are another story, but as I said, the key is still in play. --Anyway, from the way you're shifting from foot to foot, I'd say you don't have the time for that particular tale."

"Urm, yes, the water closet--"

"Is that way."

* * *

NICOLAS REMORAN, GENERALSecretary of the Virgan Home Guard, braced himself in the hatch of the battleship, watching its mighty engines settle it close to one of Kaleidogig's spidery docking arms. When he spotted the distant shapes of Inshiri Ferance and Jacoby Sarto waiting there, he turned and said, "Remember your orders. Observe only."

Antaea nodded, and unconsciously smoothed the black material of her new uniform. She knew she only wore it because Remoran wanted to keep her close and in line; still, every morning when she awoke, the first thing she did was go to the closet to check that it was really there.

"General Secretary, how good to see you," Inshiri called. As the ship inched closer to the dock she turned her head to take in its immensity, and said, "I'm somehow glad I never knew that the Guard had forces like these. It would have given me nightmares." Then she noticed Antaea.