Cities of the Air, page 30
He didn’t have enough to tie her to the saddle, so he looked around for another solution. Put her in the cargo nets? Maybe—if he could get to them. The heat scored his face whenever he turned toward the suns; the very air was attacking his mouth and lungs. He wasn’t sure he could jump over to the nets and get back before the heat took him.
You’ve lost her already. Like he’d lost everyone else in his life. He should be used to this by now.
Heartsick, he gave her body the slightest of shoves, and she slipped through his fingers—waist, shoulders, finally one trailing hand smoothing his before the moment of separation. She seemed to be turning to look at him, face calm and lips parted as if to tell him it would be all right, while past her shoulder the mechanical flowers of Candesce curled behind their mirrored petals. As the eyes of the suns opened all around, Aubri Mahallan vanished into light.
Hayden turned and climbed onto the bike.
He spun up the fan and the burner started immediately. As the jet’s whine escalated he clung to familiar routines, listening to it, judging the health of the machine. He jiggled it with his knees, estimating how much fuel was left. Hayden knew his machines, and this one still had some life in it. A few refuelings and it would get him back to Rush, he was sure of it.
And then . . . He fingered the pockets of his jacket, which were full of jewels and coins from the treasure of Anetene. He probably had enough to hire the artisans he’d need. The core components of Aerie’s new sun were already in his possession. He might not even need the help of the Resistance to get it built.
Unsmiling, he opened the throttle and began to move away from the visitor’s station. There was a lurch as the cable tautened and the nets fell in line behind the bike. That cargo would slow him down, of course.
He might meet the Gehellens on the way out. —What if they got into the visitor’s center? Better close the door. He glanced back, and saw that the entrance to the visitor’s station was already shut. Crouched beside it in a hurricane of radiance was Venera Fanning.
The cargo net was passing her, just a few yards away. Her eyes met his; there was no appeal in her gaze, just defiance. Hayden nodded once, then deliberately turned back to his piloting. After a moment he felt a slight jerk translate up the cable and through the bike as Venera caught and clung to the passing net.
He opened the throttle and the bike accelerated, but slowly, too slowly as the inferno of dawn welled out from the heart of Candesce. He imagined he could hear the familiar low hiss of the Sun of Suns, even over the scream of the bike. In minutes it became impossible to see; then he could no longer breathe except in shallow gasps; and then he started to tear at his clothing as it burned him wherever it touched. All the while, the air rushed past faster and faster. Before he completely lost his senses he stopped himself from throwing away his jacket and shirt. The light burned his bare skin as much as their touch had.
Gradually the agony abated. Candesce was reaching out to ignite hundreds of miles of air, but he was escaping it, barely.
Squinting ahead, he could see many long fingers of shadow reaching past him. Catamarans or bikes? He turned his head, trying to make out what they were.
Everywhere, the sky was full of shrouded human bodies, all gliding silently in toward Candesce. Joining Aubri. The faint specks of a hundred funeral ships receded into the distance, returning to their ports after unloading their cargoes.
When he was finally able to regain his flapping shirt and jacket, and look around himself, Hayden found that he had no idea where he was. Originally they had planned to navigate by keeping Leaf’s Choir in view. They would head for one of Gehellen’s neighbors, and from there return to Slipstream. Hayden could be going in the opposite direction now, for all he knew.
It didn’t matter. He would find his way, eventually. He couldn’t imagine spending the days and nights without Aubri beside him; it seemed impossible that he had done so before. But he had to try. He had responsibilities now.
A few minutes later he felt another vibration through the cable. He looked back, shielding his eyes with one hand.
Venera Fanning made a black cross against the Sun of Suns as she launched herself into the air. They were doing a good sixty or seventy miles an hour at that moment; she swept her arms ahead of her in a diving posture and arrowed away, clothes fluttering.
With luck she would make it to the principalities of Candesce. Though he wished achingly that it could be Aubri silhouetted in exuberance against that light, he hoped Venera would survive and find her way home.
Hayden turned back to his own task. He was done with fighting, done with brooding over the past. His nation and his life had been in shambles for too many years; it was time to rebuild.
He had too much to do to waste his time on resentment.
He settled into the bike’s saddle, and opened the throttle wide.
QUEEN OF CANDESCE
Prologue
GARTH DIAMANDIS LOOKED up and saw a woman in the sky.
The balcony swayed under him; distant trees wavered in the hot afternoon air though there was no breeze. A twist of little clouds pirouetted far overhead, just beneath the glitter and darkness of the city that had exiled Garth, so many years ago, to this place. Well below the city, only a thousand feet up at this point, a single human form had appeared out of the light.
She rotated up out of Garth’s view and he had to wait several minutes for her to come back around. Then, there she was: gliding with supernatural grace over the tall, ragged wall that rimmed the world at its nearer end. Behind her, infinite air beckoned, forever out of reach of Garth and the others like him. Ahead of the silent woman, a likely tumble into quickly moving trees, broken limbs, and death. If she wasn’t dead already.
Someone tried to escape, he thought—an act that always ended in gunshots or bloody thrashing beneath a swarm of piranhawks. This one must have been shot cleanly by the day watch for she was spiraling across the sky alone, not attended by a retinue of blood droplets. And now the spin-gale was teasing the fringes of her outlandish garment, slowing her; bringing her down.
Garth frowned, for a moment forgetting the aches and pains that bedeviled him all day and all night. The hovering woman’s clothes had been too bright and fluttered too easily to be made of the traditional leather and metal of Spyre.
As the world turned the woman receded into the distance, frustrating Garth’s attempt to see more. The ground under his perch was rotating up and away along with the whole cylindrical world; the black-haired woman was not moving with it but rather sailing in majestically from one of the world’s open ends. But Spyre made its own winds as it turned, and those winds would pull her to its surface before she had a chance to drift out the other side.
She would have sped up by that time, but not enough to match Spyre’s rotation. Garth well knew what happened when someone began clipping the treetops and towers at several hundred miles per hour. He’d be finding pieces of her for weeks.
The ground undulated again. Frantic horns began echoing in the distance—an urgent conversation between the inner surface of Spyre and the city above.
Watching the woman had been an idle pastime, since it looked as though she was going to come down along the rail line. People with more firepower and muscle than Garth owned that; they would see her in a few moments and bring her down. Her valuable possessions and clothes would not be his.
But the horns were insistent. Something was wrong with the very fabric of Spyre, an oscillation building. He could see it in the far distance now: the land heaved minutely up and down. The slow ripple was making its way in his direction; he’d better get off this parapet.
The archway opening onto the balcony had empty air behind it and a twenty-foot drop to tumbled stones. Garth hopped over the rail without hesitation, counting as he fell. “One pilot, two pilot, three—” He landed among upthrusts of stabbing weed and the cloudlike brambles that had taken over this ancient mansion. Three seconds? Well, gravity hadn’t changed, at least not noticeably.
His muscles creaked as he stood up, but climbing and jumping were part of his daily constitutional, a grim routine aimed at convincing himself he was still a man.
He stalked over the crackling grit that painted a tiled dance floor. Railway ties were laid callously across the fine pallasite stones; the line cleaved the former nation of Arbath like a whip-mark. Garth stepped onto the track daringly and stared down it. The great family of Arbath had not reached an accommodation with the preservationists and had been displaced or killed, he couldn’t remember which. Rubble, ruins, and new walls sided the tracks; at one spot an abandoned sniper tower loomed above the strip. It now swayed uneasily.
The tracks converged in perspective but also rose with the land itself, a long graceful curve that became vertical if he followed it far enough. He didn’t look that far but focused on a scramble of activity taking place about a mile distant.
The Preservation Society had planted one of their oil-soaked sidings there like an obscene graffito. Some of the preservationists were pouring alcohol into the tanks of a big turbine engine that squatted on the tracks like an idol to industrialism. Others had started a tug and were shunting in cars loaded with iron plating and rubble. They were responding to the codes brayed out by the distant horns.
They were so busy doing all this that none had noticed what was happening overhead.
“You’re crazy, Garth.” He hopped from foot to foot, twisting his hands together. When he was younger he wouldn’t have hesitated. There was a time when he’d lived for escapades like this. Cursing his own cowardice, Garth lurched into a half-run down the tracks—in the direction of the preservationist camp.
He had to prove himself more and more often these days. Garth still sported the black cap and long sideburns that rakes had worn in his day—but he was acutely aware that the day had come and gone. His long leather coat was brindled with cracks and dappled with stains. Though he still wore the twin holsters that had once held the most expensive and stylish dueling pistols available in Spyre, nowadays he just carried odd objects in them. His breath ratcheted in his chest and if his head didn’t hurt, his legs did, or his hands. Pain followed him everywhere; it had made crow’s-feet where once he’d outlined his eyes in black to show the ladies his long lashes.
The preservationist’s engine started up. It was coming his way so Garth prudently left the track and hunkered down beneath some bushes to let it pass. He was in disputed land, so no one would accost him here, but he might be casually shot from a window of the train and no one would care. While he waited he watched the dot of the slowly falling woman, trying to verify his initial guess at her trajectory.
Garth made it the rest of the way to the preservationist camp without attracting attention. Pandemonium still reigned inside the camp, with shaven-headed men in stiff leather coats crawling like ants over a second, rust-softened engine under the curses of a supervisor. The first train was miles up the curve of the world now and if Garth bothered to look down the length of Spyre, he was sure he would see many other trains on the move as well. But that wasn’t his interest.
Pieces of the world fell off all the time. It wasn’t his problem.
He crept between two teetering stacks of railway ties until he was next to a pile of catch-nets the preservationists had dumped here. Using a stick he’d picked up along the way, he snagged one of the nets and dragged it into the shadows. Under full gravity it would have weighed several hundred pounds; as it was he staggered under the weight as he carried it to a nearby line of trees.
She was going by again, lower now and fast in her long spiral. The woman’s clothes were tearing in the headwind and her dark hair bannered behind her. When Garth saw that her exposed skin was bright red he stopped in surprise, then doubled his efforts to reach the nearest vertical cable.
The interior of Spyre was spoked by thousands of these cables; some rose at low angles to reattach themselves to the skin of the world just a few miles away. Some shot straight up to touch down on the opposite side of the cylinder. All were under tremendous tension and every now and then one snapped; then the world rang like a bell for an hour or two, and shifted, and more pieces fell off of it.
Aside from keeping the world together, the cables served numerous purposes. Some carried elevators. The one Garth approached had smaller lines draped and coiled around its frayed black surface—some old, rusted, and disused pulley system. The main cable was anchored to a corroded metal cone that jutted out of the earth. He clipped two corners of the roll of netting to the old pulley. Then he jogged away from the tracks, unreeling the net behind him.
It took far too long to connect a third corner of the huge net to a corroded flagpole. Sweating and suffering palpitations, he ran back to the flagpole one more time. As he did she came by again.
She was a bullet. In fact, it was the land that was speeding by below her and pulling the air with it. If she’d been alive earlier she might be dead now; he doubted whether anyone could breathe in such a gale.
As soon as she shot past Garth began hauling on the pulleys. The net lurched into the air a foot at a time. Too slow! He cursed and redoubled his effort, expecting to hear shouts from the preservationist camp at any moment.
With agonizing slowness, a triangle of netting rose. One end was anchored to the flagpole; two more were on their way up the cable. Had he judged her trajectory right? It didn’t matter; this was the only attachment point for hundreds of yards, and by now she was too low. Air resistance was yanking her down and in moments she would be tumbled to pieces on the ground.
Here she came. Garth wiped sweat out of his eyes and pulled with bloody hands. At that moment the shriek of a steam whistle sounded from the preservationist camp. The rusted engine was on the move.
The mysterious woman arrowed in just above the highest trees. Garth thought for sure she was going to miss his net. Then, just as the rusted engine sailed by on the tracks—he caught snapshot glimpses of surprised preservationist faces and open mouths—she hit the net and yanked it off the cable.
A twirling screw hit Garth in the nose and he sat down. Sparks shot from screaming brakes on the tracks and the black tangling form of the falling woman passed between the Y-uprights of a jagged tree, the trailing net catching branches and snapping them as she bounced with astonishing gentleness into a bed of weeds.
Garth was there in seconds, cutting through the netting with his knife. Her clothes marked her as a foreigner, so her ransom potential might be low. He probably couldn’t even get much for her clothes; cloth like that had no business being worn in Spyre. Oh well; maybe she had some adornments that might fetch enough to buy him food for a few weeks.
Just in case, he put a hand on her neck—and felt a pulse. Garth cursed in astonishment. Jubilantly he slashed away the rest of the strands and pulled her out as a warning shot cracked through the air.
Unable to resist, he teased back the wave of black hair that fell across her face. The woman was fairly young—in her twenties—and had fine, sharp features with well-defined black eyebrows and full lips. The symmetry of her face was broken only by a star-shaped scar on her jaw. Her skin would have been quite fair were it not deeply sunburnt.
She only weighed twenty pounds or so. It was easy to sling her over his shoulder and run for the deep bush that marked the boundary of the disputed lands.
He pushed his way through the branches and onto private land. The preservationists pulled up short, cursing, just shy of the bushes. Garth Diamandis laughed as he ran, and for a precious few minutes he felt like he was twenty years old again.
1
A LOW BEAMED ceiling swam into focus. Venera Fanning frowned at it, then winced as pain shot through her jaw. She was definitely alive, she decided ruefully.
She was—but was Chaison Fanning also among the living, or was Venera now a widow? That was it, she had been trying to get back to her husband, Chaison Fanning. Trying to get home—
Sitting up proved impossible. The slightest motion sent waves of pain through her; she felt like she’d been skinned. She moaned involuntarily.
“You’re awake?” The thickly accented words had the crackle of age to them. She turned her head gingerly and made out a dim form moving to sit next to her. She was lying on a bed—probably—and he was on a stool or something. She blinked, trying to take in more of the long low room.
“Don’t try to move,” said the old man. “You’ve got severe sunburn and sunstroke too. Plus a few cuts and bruises. I’ve been wetting down the sheets to give you some relief. Gave you water too. Don’t know what else to do.”
“Th-thanks.” She looked down at herself. “Where are my clothes?”
His face cracked in a smile and for a second he looked much younger. He had slablike features with prominent cheekbones and piercing gray eyes. Eyes like that could send chills through you, and from his confident grin he seemed to know it. But as he shifted in the firelight she saw that lines of care and disappointment had cut away much of his handsomeness.
“Your clothes are here,” he said, patting a chair or table nearby. “Don’t worry, I’ve done nothing to you. Not out of virtue, mind; I’m not a big fan of virtue, mine or anyone else’s. No, you can thank arthritis, old wounds, and age for your safety.” He grinned again. “I’m Garth Diamandis. And you are a foreigner.”
Venera sighed listlessly. “Probably. What does that mean around here?”
Diamandis leaned back, crossing his arms. “Much, or nothing, depending.”
“And here is . . . ?”
“Spyre,” he said.
“Spyre . . .” She thought she should remember that name. But Venera was already falling asleep. She let herself do it; after all, it was so cool here. . . .
When she awoke again it was to find herself propped half-upright in a chair. Her forehead, upper body, and arms were draped with moist sheets. Blankets swaddled her below that.
