Cities of the Air, page 37
It was a random bullet that had changed everything. The walls around the disputed hallway had never been strong, but the combatants had hired a neutral third party to shore them up at regular intervals. Perhaps it was inevitable, though, that chinks and cracks should develop. One day, a bullet fired from the Vatoris barricade slipped through such a crack, ricocheted sixty feet down an abandoned air shaft, and killed the heir of a major nation as he stood at a punch bowl.
Venera rubbed her jaw. “I can imagine the reaction.”
“I’m not sure you can,” said Odess portentously. The nation in question was the mysterious Land of Sacrus, a country of “vast size,” according to Eilen.
“How vast?”
“Fully three square miles!”
Sacrus traded in power—but exactly how, no one was quite sure. They were one of the most secretive of countries, their fields being dotted with windowless factories, the perimeter patrolled by guards with dogs and guns. Small airships bristling with guns bobbed above the main complex. The Sacrans emerged from their smoke-wreathed towers only once or twice a year, and then they spoke almost exclusively to their customers. They were one of the few nations that had withstood the full force of the preservationists—in fact, nobody in the preservationist camp would talk about just how badly that particular battle had gone.
Sacrus was enraged at the death of their heir. Three days after the incident, the Vatoris barricade fell silent. The soldiers of Liris fired a few shots and got no response. When they cautiously advanced on the Vatoris position, they found it abandoned.
Discreet inquiries were made. No one had seen any of the Vatorins since the day of the fateful gunshot. In a moment of supreme daring, Liris sent its troops directly to the Vatoris apartments. They were empty.
At this point, rumors of a great stench rising from Vatoris itself reached Odess’s ears. “I was sitting in our showroom,” he said. “I remember it like it was yesterday. One of the scions of a minor nation entered and told me that his people were walking up and down along the border with Vatoris, sniffing the air and exchanging rumors. The smell was the smell of death.”
Odess returned home that night to warn his people. “But it was too late. As I lay down to sleep that evening, I heard it—we all did.” A hissing sound filled the chambers of Liris. It was faint, but for someone like Odess who had lived behind these walls his whole life, it had the effect of a siren.
“I stood, tried to run to the door. I fell down.” The others related similar experiences, of sudden paralysis, landings behind desks or next to wavering doors. “We lay there helpless, all of us, unable to even focus our eyes. And we listened.”
What they heard, after an hour or so, was a single set of footsteps. They moved smoothly from room to room, up stairs and down, not as if seeking anything, but as though whoever walked were taking inventory—committing every passage and chamber of Liris to memory. Eventually, they came to a stop. Silence returned.
The paralysis faded near dawn. Odess rose, retched miserably for a few minutes, and then—trembling—crept in the direction those footsteps had taken. As he went he saw others emerging from their rooms, or rising from where they had fallen in mid-walk. They converged on the place where the footsteps had halted: in the cherry tree courtyard.
“And there she sat,” said Odess, “exactly as she sits these days, with the same damned smile and the same damned air of superiority. The botanist. Our conqueror.”
________
“AND NO ONE has challenged her?” Venera barked a laugh of disbelief. “You fear reprisals, is that it?”
Odess shrugged. “She ended the war, and under her leadership the cherries bloom. Who else are we going to have lead us?”
Venera scowled at her cards. A pulse of pain shot up her jaw. “I thought you were a meritocracy.”
“And so we are. And she is the best botanist we have ever had.”
“What happened to the one she replaced?”
They exchanged glances. “We don’t know,” confessed Eilen. “He disappeared the day Margit came.”
Venera discarded one card and took another from the deck. The others did the same, then she fanned out her hand. “I win.”
Odess grimaced and began to shuffle.
“She came to me last night,” said Venera. She had decided that she needed information more than discretion at this point. “Margit was pleased with the work I did.” Odess snorted; Venera ignored him and continued. “She had a proposal.”
She told them about Margit’s idea of an extended trade expedition into the principalities. As she did, Venera watched all movement around the table stop. Even Odess’s practiced hand ceased its fanning of the cards. They were all staring at her.
“What?” She glanced around defensively. “Does this violate some ancient taboo? —I’m sure; everything else does. Or is it something you’ve been trying to get done for years, and now you’re mad that the newcomer has achieved it?”
Eilen looked down. “It’s been tried before,” she said in a quiet voice.
“You must understand,” said Odess; then he fell silent. Knitting his brows, he started furiously shuffling.
“What?” Now Venera was seriously alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“To travel outside Spyre . . . is not done,” said Odess reluctantly. “Not without safeguards to guarantee one’s return. Hostages, if one is married . . . but you’re not.”
Venera was disgusted. “The pillboxes, the guns, and razor wire—they really aren’t to keep people out, are they? They’re to keep them in.”
“Yes, but you see if Margit is willing to send you out despite you having no ties here, no hostages, or anything she could hold over you . . . then she’s obviously willing to try it again,” said Odess. He slammed the deck down on the table, kicked his chair back, and walked away. Venera watched him go in startled amazement.
The soldiers were standing too, not making eye contact with anyone.
Venera pinned Eilen with her gaze. “Try what?”
The woman sighed deeply. “Margit is a master of chemistry and biology,” she said. “That’s why she is the botanist. Three years ago she conceived the idea of sending an expedition like the one you’re describing. She chose a man who was competent, intelligent, and brave, but one whom she didn’t completely trust. To guarantee that he would return, she . . . injected him. With a slow poison that was not supposed to begin to act for ten days. If he returned within those ten days, she would give him the antidote and he would be fine.”
Venera eyed the splayed cards. “What happened?”
“The return flight was delayed by a storm. He made it back on the eleventh day.”
Venera hesitated—but she already knew the answer when she asked, “Who was it that Margit sent?”
“Moss,” said Eilen with a shudder. “She sent Moss.”
6
“I HAVE TO admit I was expecting this,” said Margit. Venera stood in the doorway to her apartment, dressed down in close-fitting black leathers. Two soldiers hulked behind her, their meaty hands resting heavy on her shoulders.
“In retrospect,” Venera said ruefully, “I should have anticipated the trip wires.” The inside walls of the courtyard were just too enticing a surface; freed of her metal clothing, Venera weighed only twenty pounds or so and she could easily clamber hand over hand up the drainpipe that ran next to Odess’s little window. “There’s no other way in or out of the building but up that wall. Naturally you’d have alarms.”
“. . . I just wasn’t anticipating it so soon,” said Margit. She twitched a house coat over her lavender nightgown and lit another candle off the one she was holding. Even in the dimness of midnight Venera could see that her apartment was sumptuous, with several rooms, high ceilings, and tiled mosaics on the floor beneath numerous tapestries.
Of course Margit wouldn’t live like the people she ruled. Venera wouldn’t have either. She understood Margit enough by now that staying here in Liris had not been an option. So, after bidding her coworkers good night, she had retired to her closet and waited. When the building was silent and dark, Venera had crept out and jimmied open a window that led onto the courtyard.
She hadn’t been thinking clearly. The revelation about Moss had shaken her and she had acted rashly. If she didn’t regain control of this situation she would be in real trouble.
“Come in, sit down. We need to talk,” said Margit. “You may leave us,” she said to the soldiers. They lifted their hands off Venera’s shoulders and retreated past the heavy oak door. They would have a long walk down the winding steps that led down to Liris’s ground floor. Good, thought Venera.
She sat down on a decadent-looking divan; but she kept her feet braced against the floor, ready to leap up instantly if that was required.
The first step to taking control of the situation was taking control of the conversation. Margit opened her mouth but Venera spoke first: “What is an heir of Sacrus doing running a minor nation like Liris?”
Margit narrowed her eyes. “Shouldn’t I be asking the questions? Besides, what’s your interest?” she asked as she gracefully sat opposite Venera. “Professional curiosity, perhaps? —You are a noble daughter yourself, are you not? A nation like Liris would be an interesting playground for someone learning how to use power. Are you interested in rulership?”
“In the abstract,” said Venera. “It’s not an ambition of mine.”
“Neither is assisting your new countrymen, I gather. You were trying to escape us.”
“Of course I was. I was press-ganged into your service. And you admit yourself you expected me to try it.” She shrugged. “So what could we possibly have to talk about?”
“A great deal, actually,” said Margit. “Such as how you came to be here at all.”
Venera nodded slowly. She had been thinking about that, and the conclusions she had come to had motivated her to run as much as the facts about Moss. “I arrived here through an odd chain of events,” she said. “At the time I wasn’t prepared to wonder why there were armed troops sneaking over the lawns of Spyre during the nighttime. I was mostly concerned with evading them. I didn’t know enough to ask the right question.”
Margit raised an eyebrow and sat back.
“It’s my father, you see,” said Venera in a confessional tone. “He’s flagrantly paranoid and he wanted his daughters to be as well. He raised me to disbelieve coincidence. So if I was herded here, what could the reason be? The troops who were following me weren’t from Liris. In fact, I assumed they weren’t after me at all but were chasing down another trespasser whom I had met. It wasn’t until today that I realized that those other soldiers had been from Sacrus.”
Margit laughed. “That truly is paranoid. You would implicate my nation in every one of your misfortunes?”
“No, just this one.” She sat forward. “Since we’re talking, though, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.” Smiling her maddening smile, Margit nodded. “The first question is whether you maintain constant contact with your nation. I’ve been told you don’t, but I don’t believe that.”
Margit shrugged. “It would be easy. So what if I did? Can’t a daughter talk to her parents?”
“The second question,” said Venera, “is whether Sacrus itself travels regularly into the principalities.” Seeing Margit’s suddenly guarded expression, Venera nodded. “You do, don’t you?”
“So what?”
“Someone guessed where I had come from,” marveled Venera. “More than likely the Gehellens have circulated descriptions of myself and my husband throughout the principalities. They seek us, and it’s an open secret why.”
Margit grinned in obvious delight. “Oh, you are smart! I was right to bring you into Liris in the way I did.”
Venera cocked her head. “What other way was there?”
“Oh, I think you can guess.”
“Under duress. Tortured,” said Venera. “Why do you think I tried to flee just now? It suddenly made no sense to me that I was walking around freely. And your offer to let me travel outside Spyre . . . made even less sense.”
“You became alarmed. That’s understandable. I was told to learn everything you know about the key to Candesce,” said Margit. “You figured that out, of course.”
Venera looked innocent. “Sorry, the what?”
Margit stood up and paced over to a side table. “Drink?” Venera shook her head.
“Something happened a short time ago,” said the botanist. She stood with her back to Venera and in those seconds Venera looked around quickly for anything that might give her an advantage. There were no handy hat pins, letter openers, or pistols lying on the pillowed furniture. She did spot a battered wooden cabinet that looked markedly out of place compared to the rest of the pieces, but had no time to get to it before Margit turned again, drink in hand.
“Something happened,” Margit repeated. “A fight in the capital of Gehellen, rumors of a stolen treasure, and then an event that our scientists are starting to refer to as the outage.”
Venera tensed. She hadn’t expected Margit to know this part of the story.
“Candesce does many things besides light our skies,” said the botanist. “We watch the Sun of Suns closely; we have to, our very lives depend on it. So when one of Candesce’s many systems shuts down, even for a moment, we know about it. Even though such an event has not occurred in living memory.”
She sat down again. “Only someone with a key could enter Candesce and manipulate it. And the last key was lost centuries ago. You can imagine the uproar that the outage has caused, here and abroad. The principalities are mobilizing, and agents of the Virga home guard have been seen nosing around, even here.”
Home guard? She wanted to kick herself for failing to realize that the gambit she and her husband had played would alert all the powers in the world. Hit another trip wire, she mused.
“It was only a matter of days before we had your name and description, and that of your husband and others in your party,” said Margit. “We pay our spies well. So when a woman fitting that description miraculously appeared in the skies of Greater Spyre, we mobilized.”
“Clearly I’ve been a fool,” said Venera bitterly. “Then it was Sacrus troops who drove me here?”
“I actually don’t know for sure,” Margit admitted. “Our men were out that night, I know that much. But there may have been others as well. In any case, once I communicated that I had you, I was told to hand you and the key over. I couldn’t very well refuse my masters the key—but you, I declined to part with.”
Venera felt a pulse of anxious anger as she realized what Margit was saying. “Then the key is—”
”Locked away in the Grey Infirmary, where Sacrus keeps all their new acquisitions,” said Margit with some smugness. She drained her wineglass and tilted it at Venera. “But you’re here. I took Liris in order to have a base from which to grow my own power. You provide potential leverage. Why should I give you up?”
“And the offer to let me travel . . . ?”
“I increase my leverage and buy some insurance by getting you out of Spyre and to a safe place that only I know about,” said Margit. “But you should really be happy that I haven’t tortured you for what you know. I’d prefer to have you on my side. You must admit, I’ve treated you well.”
Cautiously, Venera nodded. “It was too risky to keep the key to Candesce for yourself. But a lesser piece of leverage . . .”
“. . . Who knows something vital about it that I can trade . . . that’s useful to me at the moment.” Margit smiled, catlike.
It still didn’t quite add up. “Why did you let me go up to Lesser Spyre?” Venera asked. “Why risk exposing me at the Fair?”
“That was to prove that I had you,” said Margit with a shrug. “While I was negotiating what to give up. Sacrus was at the Fair. I told them to watch for you, but with the guards and defenses that surround the Fair they couldn’t snatch you from me. It was the safest place in Spyre to display you.”
Someone unused to being used as a political pawn might have been surprised at these revelations. For Venera, discovering that she had been played was almost reassuring. It placed her in a familiar role.
She knew exactly what Sacrus was going to do now. Venera had fantasized about it herself: you took the key and entered Candesce, and then shut down the Sun of Suns. As the darkness and cold began to seep into the principalities, you made your demands of the millions whose lives depended on Candesce. You could ask for anything—power, money, hostages, or slaves. Your leverage would be total.
It would help to have enough experienced men to crew a navy, though, because one of your first demands would be that the principalities deliver up their own ships. “Sacrus doesn’t have any ships, do they?” she asked. “Surely not enough to run the blockade that the principalities would put in place.”
Margit shrugged. “Oh, we have several. Sacrus is a big nation. But in terms of weapons . . .” She laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant laugh. “I doubt we would have to worry much about any fleet of the principalities.”
Her confidence was suddenly unnerving. Margit sauntered over to the battered wooden cabinet and opened the top. “Since you’re here,” she said, “let’s talk about the key to Candesce.”
“Let’s not.” Venera stood up. “My knowledge is my only bargaining chip, after all. I’m not going to squander that.”
This time Margit didn’t answer. She pulled a bell rope that hung next to the cabinet.
The gravity was low enough and Venera still strong enough that she could probably make it to the window in one leap. Then, she could scale the stonework by the tips of her fingers if she had to and make it to the roof in under a minute. Not, however, faster than the soldiers could climb a flight of stairs to retrieve her.
