Cities of the Air, page 49
She didn’t want to tell them that she knew what Sacrus was up to. The key to Candesce was a prize worth betraying old friends for. If they knew Sacrus had it, half these people would defect to Sacrus’s side immediately, and the other half would proceed to plan how to get it themselves. It might turn into a night of long knives inside Buridan Tower.
“Sacrus’s primary assets lie inside the Grey Infirmary,” she said. “Whatever it is that they manufacture and sell, that is its origin. At the very least, we need to know what we’re up against, what they’re planning to do. I propose that we invade the Grey Infirmary.”
There was a momentary, stunned silence from the new arrivals. Princess Corinne’s broad sunburnt face was squinched up in a failed attempt to hide a smile. Then Thinblood, the Carasthant general, and two of the minor house representatives all started talking at once.
“Impossible!” she heard, and “Suicide!” through the general babble. Venera let it run on for a minute or so, then held up her hand.
“Consider the benefits if it could be done,” she said. “We could rescue my man Flance, assuming he’s there. We could find out what Sacrus trades in—though I think we all know—but in any case find out what its tools and devices are. We might be able to seize their records. Certainly we can find out what it is they’re doing.
“If we want, we can blow up the tower.
“And it can be done,” she said. “I admit I was pretty hopeless myself until last night. We’d talked through all sorts of plans, from sneaking over the walls to shimmying down ropes from Lesser Spyre. All our scenarios ended up with us being machine-gunned, either on the way in or on the way out. Then I had a long talk with Princess Corinne, here.”
Corinne nodded violently; her hair followed her head’s motion a fraction of a second late. “We can get into the Grey Infirmary,” she brayed. “And out again safely.”
There was another chorus of protests and again Venera held up her hand. “I could tell you,” she said, “but it might be more convincing to show you. Come.” And she headed for the doors.
THE ROAR FROM the airfall was more visceral than audible here in the lowest of Buridan’s pipes. Bryce’s people had lowered ladders down here when they came to cut away the maddening random organ that had been created accidentally in Buridan’s destruction. The corroded metal surface gleamed wetly, and as Venera stepped off the ladder she slipped and almost fell. She stared up at the ring of faces twenty feet above her.
“Well, come on,” she said. “If I’m brave enough to come down here, you can be too.”
Thinblood ignored the ladder and vaulted down, landing beside her with a smug thump. Instantly the surface under their feet began swaying and little flakes of rust showered down. “The ladder’s here to save the pipe, not your feet,” Venera said loudly. Thinblood looked abashed; the others clambered down the ladder meekly.
The ladder descended the vertical part of the pipe and they now stood where it bent into a horizontal direction. This tunnel was ten feet wide and who knew what it might originally have carried—horse manure, Venera suspected. Whatever the case, it now ended twenty feet away. Late afternoon sunlight hurried shadows across the jagged circle of torn metal. It was from there that the roar originated.
“Come.” Without hesitation Venera walked to within five feet of the opening, then went down on one knee. She pointed. “There! Sacrus!”
They could barely have heard her over the roar of the thin air; it didn’t matter. It was clear what she was pointing at.
The pipe they stood in thrust forty or fifty feet into the airstream below the curve of Spyre’s hull. Luckily this opening faced away from the headwind, though suction pulled at Venera relentlessly and the air was so thin she was starting to pant already. The pipe hung low enough to provide a vantage point from which a long stretch of Spyre’s hull was visible—miles of it, in fact. Way out there, near the little world’s upside-down horizon, a cluster of pipes much like this one—but intact—jutted into the airflow. Nestled among them was a glassed-in machine-gun blister, similar to the one Venera had first visited underneath Garth Diamandis’s hovel.
“That’s the underside of the Grey Infirmary,” she yelled at the motley collection of generals and revolutionaries crowding at her shoulder. Someone cupped hand to ear and looked quizzical. “Infirmary! In! Firm!” She jabbed her finger at the distant pipes. The quizzical person smiled and nodded.
Venera backed up cautiously and the others scuttled ahead of her. At the pipe’s bend where breathing was a bit easier and the noise and vibration not so mind-numbing, she braced her rump against the wall and her feet in the mulch of rust lining the bottom of the pipe. “We brought down telescopes and checked out that machine-gun post. It’s abandoned, like most of the hull positions. The entrance is probably bricked up, most likely forgotten. It’s been hundreds of years since anybody tried to assault Spyre from the outside.”
She could barely make out the buzzing words of Carasthant’s general. “You propose to get in through that? How? By jumping off the world and grabbing the pipes as they pass?”
Venera nodded. When they all stared back uncomprehending, she sighed and turned to Princess Corinne. “Show them,” she said.
Corinne was carrying a bulky backpack. She wrestled this off and plunked it down in the rust. “This,” she said with a dramatic flourish, “is how we will get to Sacrus.
“It is called a parachute.”
SHE HAD TO focus on her jaw. Venera’s face was buried in the voluminous shoulder of her leather coat; her hands clutched the rope that twisted and shuddered in her grip. In the chattering roar of a four-hundred-mile-per-hour wind there was no room for distractions, or even thought.
Her teeth were clenched around a mouthpiece of Fin design. A rubber hose led from this to a metal bottle that, Corinne had explained, held a large quantity of squashed air. It was that ingredient of the air the Rook’s engineers had called oxygen; Venera’s first breath of it had made her giddy.
Every now and then the wind flipped her over or dragged her head to the side and Venera saw where she was: wrapped in leathers, goggled and masked, and hanging from a thin rope inches below the underside of Spyre.
All she had to do was keep her body arrow-straight and keep that mouthpiece in. Venera was tied to the line, which was being let out quite rapidly from the edge of the airfall. Ten soldiers had already gone this way before her so it must be possible.
It was night, but distant cities and even more distant suns cast enough light to silver the misty clouds that approached Spyre like curious fish. She saw how the clouds would nuzzle Spyre cautiously only to be rebuffed by its whirling rotation. They recoiled, formed cautious spirals, and danced around the great cylinder as if trying to find a way in. Dark speckles—flocks of piranhawks and sharks—browsed among them, and there in great black formations were the barbed wire and blockhouses of the sentries.
To be among the clouds with nothing above or below seemed perfectly normal to Venera. If she fell she only had to open her parachute and she’d come to a stop long before hitting the barbed wire. It wasn’t the prospect of falling that made her heart pound—it was the savage headwind that was trying to snatch her breath away.
The rope shuddered and she grabbed it spasmodically. Then she felt a hand grab her ankle.
The soldiers hauled her through a curtain of speed ivy and into a narrow gun emplacement. This one was dry and empty, its tidiness somehow in keeping with Sacrus’s fastidious attention to detail. Bryce was already here and he unceremoniously yanked the air line from Venera’s mouth. —Or tried; she bit down on it tenaciously for a second, glaring at him, before relenting and opening her mouth. He shot her a look of annoyance and tied it and her unopened parachute to the line. This he let out through the speed ivy, to be reeled back to Buridan for its next user.
Princess Corinne’s idea had sounded insane, but she merely shrugged, saying, “We do this sort of thing all the time.” Of course, she was from Fin, which explained much. That pocket nation inhabited one of Spyre’s gigantic ailerons, a wing hundreds of feet in length that jutted straight down into the airstream. Originally colonized by escaped criminals, Fin had grown over the centuries from a cold and dark subbasement complex into a bright and independent—if strange—realm. The Fins didn’t really consider themselves citizens of Spyre at all. They were creatures of the air.
Over the years they had installed hundreds of windows in the giant metal vane as well as hatches and winches. They were suspected of being smugglers, and Corinne had proudly confirmed that. “We alone are able to slip in and out of Spyre at will,” she’d told Venera. And, as their population expanded, they had colonized five of the other twelve fins by the same means they were using to break into Sacrus.
To reach Sacrus, one of Corinne’s men had donned a parachute and taken hold of a rope that had a big three-barbed hook on its end. He had unceremoniously stepped into the howling airfall and was snatched down and away like a fleck of dust.
Venera had been watching from the tower and saw his parachute balloon open a second later. Instantly, he stopped falling away from Spyre and began curving back toward the hull. Down only operated as long as you were part of the spinning structure, after all; freed of the high speed imparted by Spyre’s rotation, he’d come to a stop in the air. He could have hovered there, scant feet from the hull, for hours. The only problem was the rope he held, which was still connected to Buridan.
The big wooden spool that was unreeling it was starting to smoke. Any second now it would reach its end and the snap would probably take his hands off. Yet he calmly stood there on the dark air, waiting for Sacrus to shoot past.
As the pipes and machine-gun nest leaped toward him he lifted the hook and, with anticlimactic ease, tossed it ahead of the rushing metal. The hook caught, the rope whipped up and into the envelope of speeding air surrounding the hull, and Corinne’s man saluted before disappearing over Spyre’s horizon. They’d recovered him when he came around again.
Now, brilliant light etched the cramped gun emplacement with the caustic sharpness of a black-and-white photograph. One of the men was employing a welding torch on the hatch at the top of the steps. “Sealed ages ago, like we thought,” shouted Bryce, jabbing a thumb at the ceiling. “Judging from the pipes, we’re under the sewage stacks. There’s probably toilets above us.”
“Perfect.” They needed a staging ground from which to assault the tower. “Do you think they’ll hear us?”
Bryce grimaced. “Well, there could be fifty guys sitting around up there taking bets on how long it’ll take us to burn the hatch open. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Suddenly the ceiling blew out around the welder. He retreated in a shower of sparks, cursing, and a new wind filled the little space. Before anybody else could move Thinblood leaped over to the hole and jammed some sort of contraption up it. He folded, pulled—and the wind stopped. The hole the welder had made was now blocked by something.
“Patch hatch,” said Thinblood, wiping dust off his face. “We’d better go up. They might have heard the pop or felt the pressure drop.”
Without waiting he pressed against his temporary hatch, which gave way with a rubbery slapping sound. Thinblood pushed his way up and out of sight. Bryce was right behind him.
Both were standing with their guns drawn when Venera fought her way past the suction to sprawl on a filthy floor. She stood up, brushing herself off, and looked around. “It is indeed a men’s room.”
Or was it? In the weak light of Thinblood’s lantern she could see that the chamber was lined in tiles that had once been white but which had long since taken on the color of rust and dirt. Long streaks ran down the wall to dark pools on the floor. Venera expected to see the usual washroom fixtures along the walls, but other than a metal sink there was nothing. She had an uneasy feeling that she knew what sort of room this was, but it didn’t come to her until Thinblood said, “Operating theater. Disused.”
Bryce was prying at a metal chute mounted in one wall. It creaked open and he stared down into darkness for a second. “A convenient method of disposal for body parts or even whole people,” he said. “I’m thinking more like an autopsy room.”
“Vivisectionist’s lounge?” Thinblood was getting into the game.
“Shut up,” said Venera. She’d gone over to the room’s one door and was listening at it. “It seems quiet.”
“Well, it is the middle of the night,” the preservationist commented. More members of their team were meanwhile popping up out of the floor like Jacks-in-the-box. Minus the windup music, Venera mused.
Soon there were twenty of them crowded together in the ominous little room. Venera cracked the door and peered out into a larger, dark space full of pipes, boilers, and metal tanks. This was the maintenance level for the tower, it seemed. That was logical.
“Is everyone clear on what we’re doing?” she asked.
Thinblood shook his head. “Not even remotely.”
“We are after my man Flance,” she said, “as well as information about what Sacrus is up to. If we have to fight, we cause enough mayhem to make Sacrus rethink its strategy. Hence the charges.” She nodded at the heavy canvas bag one of the Liris soldiers was toting. “Our first order of business is to secure this level, then set some of those charges. Let’s do it.”
She led the soldiers of half a dozen nations as they stepped out of their bridgehead and into the dark of enemy territory.
15
EVERYTHING IN THE Grey Infirmary seemed designed to promote a feeling of paranoia. The corridors were hung with huge black felt drapes that swayed and twitched slightly in the moving air, giving the constant impression that there was someone hiding behind them. The halls were lit by lanterns fixed on metal posts; you could swivel the post and aim the light here and there, but there was no way to illuminate your entire surroundings at any point. The floors were muffled under deep crimson carpeting. You could sneak up on anybody here. There were no signs, doors were hidden behind the drapery, and all the corridors looked alike.
It reminded Venera unpleasantly of the palace at Hale. Her father’s own madness had been deepening in the days before she succeeded in escaping to a life with Chaison. The Pilot had all the paintings in the palace covered, the mirrors likewise. He took to walking the hallways at night, a sword in his hand, convinced as he was that conspirators waited around every corner. These nocturnal strolls were great for the actual conspirators, who knew exactly where he was and so could avoid him easily. Those conspirators—almost entirely comprising members of his own family—would bring him down one day soon. Venera had not received any letters bragging of his downfall while she lived in Rush; but there could well be one waiting when or if she ever returned to Slipstream.
That was the madness of one man. Sacrus, though, had done more than generalize such paranoia: it had institutionalized it. The Grey Infirmary was a monument to suspicion and a testament to the idea that distrust was to be encouraged. “Don’t pull on the curtains to look for doors,” Venera cautioned the men as they rounded a corner and lost sight of the stairs to the basement. “They may be rigged to an alarm.”
Thinblood scoffed. “Why do something like that?”
“So only the people who know where the doors are can find them,” she said. “People trying to escape—or interlopers like us—set off the bells. Luckily there’s another way to find them.” She pointed at the carpet. “Look for worn patches. They signify higher traffic.”
The corridor they were in seemed to circle some large inner area. Opposite the basement stairs they found the broad steps of an exit, and next to it stairs going up. It wasn’t until they had nearly circled back to the basement stairs that they found a door letting into the interior. Next to a patch of slightly worn carpet, Venera eased the curtains to the side and laid her hand on a cold iron door with a simple latch. She eased the door open a crack—it made no sound—and peered in.
The room was as big as an auditorium, but there was no stage. Instead, dozens of long glass tanks stood on tables under small electric lights. The lights flickered slightly, their power no doubt influenced by the jamming signal that emanated from Candesce.
Each tank was filled with water, and lying prone in them were men—handcuffed, blindfolded, and with their noses and mouths just poking out of the water. Next to each tank was a stool and perched on several of these were women who appeared to be reading books.
“What is it?” Thinblood was asking. Venera waved at him impatiently and tried to get a better sense of what was going on here. After a moment she realized that the women’s lips were moving. They were reading to the men in the tanks.
“. . . I am the angel that fills your sky. Can you see me? I come to you naked, my breasts are full and straining for your touch.”
Bryce put a hand on her shoulder and his head above hers. “What are they doing?”
“They seem to be reading pornography,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“. . . Touch me, oh touch me, exalted one. I need you. You are my only hope.
“Yet who am I, this trembling bird in your hand. I am more than one woman, I am a multitude, all dependent on you. . . . I am Falcon Formation, and I need you in all ways that a man can be needed . . .”
Venera fell back, landing on her elbows on the deep carpet. “Shut it!” Bryce raised an eyebrow at her reaction but eased the door closed. He twitched the curtain back into place.
“What was that all about?” asked Thinblood.
Venera got to her feet. “I just found out who one of Sacrus’s clients is,” she said. She felt nauseated.
“Can we seal off this door?” she asked. “Prevent anyone getting out and coming at us from behind?”
Bryce frowned. “That presents its own dangers. We could as easily trap ourselves.”
She shrugged. “But we have grenades, and we’re not afraid to use them.” She squinted at him. “Are we?”
