Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

10

"WHAT ARE YOU doing?"

Keir had to turn his head to see who'd spoken. It was Leal Maspeth, but she seemed somehow transformed--younger. Part of that was freefall, he knew, which took years off you. But she seemed radiant from some other cause as well. A glance around was all it took to know what that was.

He shifted his position slightly, allowing her to climb onto the mast beside him. "I feel less blind out here," he said in answer to her question. He'd been riding on the outside of the ship for the past hour, as light slowly emerged from the dark sky ahead of them.

He opened his hands to show her what he'd been cupping in the ship's headwind. "A dragonfly?" she asked.

He nodded.

Inside the ship he was constantly reminded of the vision he now lacked. He kept hitting his head on unexpected obstacles, and rapping his knuckles on invisible objects in the dimness. It was upsetting. So he'd come out here.

He pointed past the gray prow of the ship, to where a triangle of mauve and peach-colored sky beckoned past flocks of black cloud. "What is that?"

"That," she said, obviously savoring the sight, "is a country."

"Your country?"

She shook her head. "My country has no sun. No--that should be Slipstream, in the Hadley cell called Meridian."

Keir realized he'd been waiting for something to happen--waiting for his scry to update him on her recent activities; her alliances and distances within the group. But the intricate small-group politics of the Renaissance didn't exist in Virga. Some other kind of complexity did, and he couldn't figure out how it worked.

"So ... how are you?"

His question sounded utterly inane to his own ears, and it must have to her as well, because she simply smiled and said, "Antaea said this was yours."

She handed him the gun he'd given Argyre. As he took it from Leal she gripped the spar between her feet and casually, gracefully back-flipped through the ship's open hatch and out of sight.

"Oh, but I--" Don't need it. He sat there dumbly holding the weapon for a few seconds. There was no helpful advice from his scry about what she'd really wanted, or what he should do. After an awkward pause he clipped the gun onto his belt and turned back to the view.

Had he not been half-blind already, he surely would have retreated inside soon after, because as the light welled up the terrifying scale of this ocean of air became visible. Keir couldn't remember much about his life before Brink, but he knew he'd grown up on a planet. He was used to skies that had, if not a visible boundary, at least some end to their cloudscapes. He was used to sky being framed by ground. In Virga there was only an infinity of cloudscapes spreading to all directions--tolerable, when it was dark, but a staggering assault on the imagination when its vast depths were sketched by light. It was exhilarating, magnificent, and far too big to take in no matter how much he stared.

The ship wove its way between mountain-sized clouds, making a steady sixty or eighty kilometers per hour. As it did the light from ahead brightened, becoming a broad region of canary-yellow sky cupping an intense red dot at its center. Though it must be hundreds of kilometers away, that red dot was the visible radiance of a man-made sun, a nuclear-fusion reactor of mightily primitive but practical design. This eternally falling drop of air, this world of Virga, was clouded with such suns--hundreds of them. Keir had never seen one with his own eyes, for bright as they were, the devices could only carve small spheres of day out of the dark. --With one exception, of course. Candesce, the sun of suns, immolated the whole middle space of Virga, and dozens of civilizations orbited it like birds wheeling around a lighthouse.

Far to the right was another crimson dot, this one smaller--another nation, remote, half-eclipsed by its neighbor.

Long minutes passed and Leal didn't return. Keir watched the dawn open like a flower, a sun not rising but emerging. And with it, at last, came details.

First to become clear were this nation's heavy industries. They skimmed the shell of the spherical domain carved by the light: factories, complicated snarls of metal like vast seashells gouting smoke and grit and poisonous clouds into the dark. Any farther out, and these places stood to lose sight of their sun altogether--and could thus be doomed to wander the blackness unless by luck they found another country. Any further in, and they would pollute the agricultural spheres.

These came next as the Page sailed on--as the light became brighter, Keir saw that some of the clouds around him were not white, but green. On an individual basis those specks were potato and corn, rice and millet and oats; gathered together in wave upon wave of ever-greater scale, they became cirrus and cumulus, nimbus and stratus--entire clouds of life.

The Page passed a streamer of tomatoes. Keir watched a small knot of them sail by, five plants with their roots tangled around a common clod of dirt. Aphids and midges swarmed around the little world, and some sort of songbird trilled from inside the foliage.

They passed schools of giant, fire-colored fish that showed obvious signs of being genetically engineered: their fins were huge, like diaphanous wings, and they had eyelids; one flew next to Keir for a long minute, blinking at him dumbly, before turning back to its fellows.

He'd heard that many of the people who lived in Virga were unaware their world was artificial. He found this hard to believe.

In the agricultural sphere, the sky shaded from deep blue behind the ship to bright yellow ahead; the predominant color was a kind of mauve. Here were the first wheeled towns he'd seen, and they were as pretty and delicate as he'd imagined they would be. They appeared first as faint circles drawn on the sky, then gradually resolved into wood-and-rope hoops, very thin and fragile, their narrow inside surfaces crowded with buildings. Like the tomato plants, they were surrounded by swarming life, in this case, ships, winged human figures, and drifting cargo nets. He saw flights of saddled dolphins, these not genetically engineered but wearing fin extenders.

Inside the thick shell of farming communities was another volume of sky, this one speckled with towns and private dwellings in all shapes and sizes. Here the air was blue, the clouds white and the sunlight yellow. The Page passed double-hulled, majestically spinning yacht-houses that defied definition as either building or vehicle.

Now that the agricultural clouds no longer occluded the view, Keir could see something strange about the sky ahead. Contrails pierced the vista like the threads of some gigantic spiderweb. Some converged on the sun whose light now felt hot on Keir's face--but the vast majority drew lines at right angles to it. Squinting, he saw that dozens--maybe hundreds--of giant ships were jetting in the direction of that other sun he'd spotted earlier. Alerted to the movement, he could now see that some of the town wheels were inching in that direction, too--rolling, as it were, through the sky. He squinted, holding up his hand to block the light, and thus caught his first glimpse of the city of Rush.

Rush's iron town wheels spun in quartets, each mile-wide circle bannered like a twirling paper lantern. The city hovered in the long shadow cast by a forested asteroid, in white, water-saturated air that trembled with heat. Here the ships and jets and flying contraptions flocked in the thousands, contrails and rope roads stitched the air, and the mansions of the wealthy and powerful flocked as thickly as the fish had earlier.

He heard a banging sound and turned to see a hatch opening on the Page's hull. Leal Maspeth's people started boiling out, laughing and turning their faces to the light with grins of relief and pleasure; and when one of them swore, pointed, and shouted something to the others, they suddenly began cheering as one.

Maspeth's head poked out after them. She appeared as puzzled as Keir by the vision of her men shrieking and howling. One of them bounced right off the hull in his excitement and only the quick reflexes of a friend kept him from sailing off into the sky.

Keir hand-walked toward them along the netting draped on the side of the ship. Maspeth's friend Piero Harper had appeared now, and he, too, was grinning like a fool.

Keir stopped next to Leal, who nodded coolly at him, as if this were their first meeting today. One of her eyebrows was cocked in bemusement. "They're happy to be home?" asked Keir.

"This isn't their home," she said. "These men are from Aerie; this country is Slipstream."

"It's today! It's today!" one of the airmen was shouting. Another was weeping openly, his tears flicking away like jewels in the ship's headwind. "We made it in time!"

Harper laughed. "Freedom Day!" he shouted. "We did it!"

Leal's eyes lit with understanding. "Oh! Look!" Keir followed her pointing finger.

Now he saw that there were two colors of banner and crest on the airships and town wheels. Those of Rush were gold and red. On the ships that were now arrowing toward that distant second sun, the crests were green.

"Slipstream invaded and conquered Aerie a decade ago," Leal said to Keir. "They destroyed Aerie's sun so that Aerie's people would become utterly dependent on them. It was the Pilot of Slipstream who gave the orders, and no one could oppose him at the time.

"These men," she gestured at Harper and the others, "built a new sun for Aerie; you can see it burning there." She pointed at the distant second point of light. "They gave Aerie a new sun, and with the Pilot dead, Slipstream has given the citizens of Aerie their freedom. But even though they lit the new sun two years ago, most people haven't moved into its light yet. It's been going through testing and safety trials."

"And now," shouted Harper, "they're done! Our sun's been proven stable. We can all go home!"

Freedom Day. Keir pictured two Virgan nations: each was defined by a vast sphere of light inside of which were all its agriculture, its towns, factories, and mansions. A country could be destroyed if its sun was snuffed out. Its people would become refugees, desperately fleeing to whatever lit airs they could find. Even worse, one nation could simply move into the space occupied by another, assimilating its sun and cities and people directly, like one amoeba swallowing another. Evidently Aerie had proven too tough a foe for this latter strategy, but with their sun gone, they'd been helpless. Slipstream had swallowed all their towns and farms, making them all dependent on Slipstream's own sun.

The great iron wheels of Rush surrounded the Page now. Keir could clearly make out the rooftops, chimneys, and streets that paved their inside surfaces. Also visible were clouds of people swarming around a wheel whose inner surface was one continuous building--a sumptuous place of gardens and balconies, towers and towering halls, all wrapped into a ring and spun like a giant's toy. The crowds--men and women and children flapping spring-loaded wings or pedaling saddled propeller-fans--were gathering at the central space around which this beautiful building turned.

Harper nodded at it. "The Pilot's palace," he said. "Hey, look!" he added, turning to his men. "Whose face is that?" He laughed.

Keir could see that some of the biggest banners had been printed with the image of a man's face. He seemed young, with angular features and pale eyes. Now Harper and the others began pumping their fists in the air and chanting, "Sun lighter! Sun lighter! Sun lighter!"

The crowd and the banners formed a rough arc around a crimson disk that hovered in the air next to the palace. Huge mirrors aimed sunlight at this, and as Keir watched, a small group of people (little more than dots at this distance) began drifting into the focus of the light.

"Who's that?" he wondered aloud.

Leal Maspeth crossed her arms on the edge of the hatch, and smiled in self-satisfaction. "I believe those are the very people we've come to talk to."

"Really? And what are we here to talk about?"

Now she laughed. "Why, we've come to tell them the whereabouts of the one man who's missing this party--the man responsible for building Aerie's new sun."

"And who would that be?"

She pointed at the image on the distant banners.

"Hayden Griffin. The sun lighter!"

* * *

TO EVERYONE'S SURPRISE, when they hove to at a mooring station high on the axle of one of the grand cylinders, Jacoby Sarto refused to dock the ship. "Belay that!" he'd shouted at the crewman who was about to toss a rope to a boy waiting at the metal lip of the docking cylinder. "We're unloading passengers only."

They'd all been gathered at the open door of the ship's little hold anyway, and now Antaea turned to Sarto. "Why?" she asked.

He laughed brusquely. "You ask me that? What do you think she'll do to you when she finds out you're here?" He shook his head. "Don't get me wrong, give her my best when you see her," he added to Leal. "But I intend to be over the border before she knows I've been here."

Nobody argued; they all knew who she was, either personally or by reputation. So, Leal found herself admiring Antaea's courage when, two hours later, they stood in an outer office of the Slipstream admiralty, and Argyre said calmly, "Oh, he'll know me," to the uniformed secretary.

Leal glanced around the austere office, idly wondering if this wasn't a more dangerous gambit than taking her message to the Guard. If so, it was far too late for second choices.

She and Antaea had argued long and hard about this choice; oddly, it was Piero Harper who had been the deciding factor. "Hayden's from Aerie," he'd pointed out, "and we left him trapped on the plains of Aethyr. He's Aerie's native son, our hero. Take us to the new Aerie government, they'll fall all over themselves to get him back."

They might, she'd agreed; yet Aerie's government was still a government-in-exile, located in the city of Rush while they awaited the shakedown of Aerie's new sun. All power in the region still rested with Slipstream. It was Slipstream that had the navy, Slipstream the disciplined intelligence network, the money and resources to mount a rescue effort. And more: it was Slipstream that had the international clout to make agreements and alliances stick, right now.

"We're taking our message to Slipstream," she had insisted.

This little office was not in the palace wheel. That vast edifice was visible outside the window to the secretary's left. Currently, the fireworks there were causing banging echoes to rebound throughout the city. The Torn Page of Fate was arrowing for the border as Sarto had promised, but most of Piero Harper's men had gone straight from the docks to the independence ceremony--and part of her longed to be there, too, writing it all down, as it was indeed a historic day.

She would have to content herself with simply saying that she was here for it--later, when she wrote her memoirs. The rebirth of a nation and the division of two peoples like the fissioning of a cell would have to be footnotes to a chapter dealing with this smaller place; this room, and the meeting that was about to start.

The secretary went into the inner office and could be heard speaking to someone. Beside Leal, Antaea cleared her throat and shifted from foot to foot. She half-wished that Jacoby Sarto had come with them, because without even opening his mouth, he had a way of attracting attention and deference like a magnet. The doormen and lackeys who'd only reluctantly let Leal's party through would have leaped to their feet when they saw him coming, even though they had no idea who he was. He simply looked important. It still seemed odd that he'd fled from the wrath of Venera Fanning.

The secretary slid around the door to the inner office and quickly shut it behind himself. "The admiral has appointments today," he said in an arch tone. "He's aware of your petition, and will contact you at your hotel," he glanced down at the paper Leal had given him, "when you actually have one."

Leal felt her stomach flip over in an old familiar way: she was being shunted aside again. The feeling lasted for just a second, and then she laughed.

"What are the odds," she said to Antaea, "that Admiral Chaison Fanning would put off seeing you?"

She turned to the secretary. "All right," she said with a nod. He went to sit down, and as soon as he'd rounded his desk, she stalked over to the inner door and yanked it open. "Hey!" he shouted as Leal walked through.

The old man wobbling on a rolling ladder next to the bookcase said "Oh my goodness!" and would have fallen had she not steadied him. He blinked at her over oval pince-nez glasses, then smiled. "What can we do for you, my dear?"

"I'm looking for the..." Leal forgot the rest of the sentence as she saw the state of the small room. If it even was a small room--it seemed perfectly possible that architecturally, the place was much larger, but had become the repository of so many books, charts, and blueprint tubes that its original walls were hidden, perhaps yards behind the new facades of paper. There was one desk, mounded with paper and parchment with one tiny clear corner (this open space obviously made possible by the growing pile on the floor beside the desk).

It was breathtaking.

"A-Admiral Chaison Fanning?" Leal asked the old man. He laughed.

"Oh my heavens, no." He put a finger to his lips. "I'm not even supposed to be here." He turned and finished jamming a book into the bookshelf--a futile gesture considering that the tomes themselves had become shelves for volumes resting atop them, squeezed in around them, and even (in some cases) hanging off the shelf by opened covers pinned under them.

"Please leave!" the secretary was saying. "Do you know where you are? I can have a dozen naval officers in here in a minute and simply have you thrown off the wheel."

"No doubt," Antaea said dryly.

"Have you seen the admiral?" Leal asked the old man brightly.

He waved at another wall, and after some peering Leal realized there was a door there, half-hidden behind some hanging charts.

"Now don't you tell him I'm in here," he said as Leal picked her way through the maze of books. "Just, sometimes, I have to tidy up a bit."

She put her hand on the half-hidden doorknob, paused, looked back, and asked, "Does he ever notice?"

"All right, I'm calling security," said the secretary, and Leal pushed through this door, too, with her companions behind her. She found herself in a long, wood-paneled hallway with infrequent doors leading off it. Starting to feel a bit ridiculous, she hurried down it.

"Ah!" That had been a woman's voice. Leal stopped.

"Heh heh," chuckled a man. The voices were coming from behind one of the doors. He seemed to be panting, she thought--laboring at something.

Her voice: "Huh-huh-huh-huh!"

He growled in response.

Leal crossed her arms and looked back at Antaea, who suddenly seemed profoundly embarrassed. "Maybe we should come back," said the former Home Guard extraction expert.

Leal thought about everything she'd gone through to reach this spot. "No," she said. She rapped loudly on the door and opened it.

The chamber was large, brightly lit by tall windows, and floored in golden lacquered wood; it looked like a dance floor except that large geometric shapes had been painted on it.

A man and a woman circled each other in the center of the room. He was compact and wiry, with a face that, while somewhat weather-beaten, still managed to convey the mild impression of a civil servant or clerk. He wore naval dress clothes, without the jacket. The woman had raven-colored hair and pale skin, and was dressed in courtly silks that were entirely inappropriate for what she was doing.

"That's a yellow card," the man was saying. "This is sabre: there is a right of way."

She sneered at him. "Advance!" he snapped, and raised his sword.

She seemed to begin a lunge but instead stamped one foot on the floor loudly; he'd twitched, starting a defensive move, and now she skipped in place and then hopped forward. She sent a vicious cut at his head and he dropped onto his hand while his sword arm shot out, placing his blade right at her sternum.

"Appel!" he said as he straightened up.

"--And passata-sotto," added Antaea, clapping slowly. "Nicely done."

The woman snarled in frustration and turned. "Who--" She stopped, gaping at Antaea. Simultaneously, the man noticed the women and almost fumbled his own blade.

"You!" they said as one.

Antaea nodded coolly. "Chaison."

At that moment there was a clattering at the door as six or eight soldiers made their presence known. "Admiral," came the secretary's voice from somewhere behind them, "they barged past me before I could stop them--"

"It's all right, Idosh," Chaison Fanning called out. "They're friends."

As the soldiers backed away, he turned to the visitors and crossed his arms. Venera Fanning came to stand beside him, looking Antaea Argyre up and down as she did. "Ah, Chaison, it's your little friend from before. Antaea, isn't it?" Antaea's momentary cockiness had vanished; now she just nodded guardedly, and Venera gave her another once-over. "I must say, I like your clothes. Where did you get those flying leathers?"

"The principalities," blurted Antaea. "It's a little shop in Gehellen--"

"We don't like Gehellen," interrupted Venera. "Or, at any rate, Gehellen doesn't like us."

Leal cleared her throat impatiently. "My lord, my lady, I am Leal Maspeth of the nation of Abyss. I've come to you with important news, and I've brought this woman, whom you know, to testify on my behalf."

Chaison looked down his nose at her; it was a rather priggish motion, but the sabre hadn't moved. "The last time I met Antaea Argyre, she trussed me up like a festival bird ready for the oven."

Patience, patience. The sun lighter Hayden Griffin had only praise for this admiral, Leal reminded herself--and he had told her that Venera Fanning was one of the most dangerous people he'd ever met. Coming from a man who had spent his adolescence among pirates, that was a recommendation to be borne in mind.

"My name is Leal Hieronyma Maspeth," she repeated. "I am a historian from Abyss, which is one of the sunless countries. Recently I spent some time outside of Virga, and the ... people I visited have news and an offer of an alliance for the people of Virga."

She'd said it all matter-of-factly, but how else was she going to do it? Months of rehearsal had yielded no better words.

And they seemed to have taken hold: Chaison Fanning was staring at her, his blade quite forgotten, and his wife was frowning, looking from Leal to Antaea and back again.

"Who are these people and what is this offer?" The admiral walked to a side table and poured himself a glass of water. He did not offer his guests anything, a tiny but pointed warning.

"There is a force that we sometimes call 'Artificial Nature,'" said Leal. "One of its factions is trying to gain access to Virga--actually, it's trying to get to Candesce at Virga's center. Lord and Lady Fanning, you have both had direct experience of its tactics and amoral nature." Chaison Fanning had been kidnapped and tortured by an agent from A.N.--a being that had taken up residence in the body of Antaea's sister, Telen. Venera Fanning had fought against another agent of A.N. inside the sun of suns itself and had later been pursued through the principalities by others. Neither could know--no one in Virga seemed to know--that there were factions within A.N. The emissary's claim that it was the virtuals who were responsible for the attempted incursions would be news to the Fannings, and vitally important news.

"The virtuals are preparing an all-out assault on Virga," Leal continued. "As long as Virga keeps A.N. out, our world stands as an example to others who resist final assimilation by their system. Those resisters have banded together, and they want to ally with the humans of Virga to defeat the virtuals, or at least to push them back."

Fanning squinted at her. "Interesting..."

"Not to mention preposterous. And why tell us?" Venera was swishing her sabre at her side in an unconscious but dangerous way. "Isn't this a message for the Home Guard?"

"It would be, yes," said Leal. "That would be why we're here."

Chaison put down his glass and walked up to Antaea. "Would that be why you're here?" he asked her.

She nodded. "The Guard has been deceived by the virtuals. It's not the first time--"

"How do we know it's not you who's been deceived? You come to us with offers of an alliance--with who? If they're friendly, why are they sending messengers instead of coming to us themselves?"

"The morphonts did come to us," said Leal. "Virga proved to be too toxic for them to survive here. That's why I had to leave, to visit them in their own airs. Anyway, if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Hayden Griffin?"

The Fannings exchanged a glance. "How's he involved in this?"

"He can confirm my story," said Leal, "he and a few top-ranking members of the Guard he's currently trapped with. Even if I'm wrong, I'm offering you the chance to rescue Griffin, which alone would be a feat with great propaganda value to Slipstream.... Considering your new relationship with Griffin's country, Aerie."

Antaea tilted her head, looking puzzled. "Which begs a question. Why are you two here, and not at the big party?"

"We'd be a bad memory," said the admiral with a shrug. "Can't say I disagree.... What do you mean, rescue Griffin? Trapped? How's he trapped?"

"That's a very long story," said Leal.

"Let's hear it."

Venera tapped Chaison's ankle with her sabre.

"Well," said Leal, "I suppose it all started the day a great voice began crying in the darkness beyond the city lights..."

Venera rapped Chaison's shin again. She made to do it a third time, but his blade was suddenly in the way.

"Dear," said Venera sweetly, "why don't we invite the nice people over for dinner? I think that would be the best time for lengthy stories, don't you?"

"No," he said, "I want to hear this now--"

Venera's sabre slid along his and nearly disarmed him.

The Fannings took a step away from each other as their swords came up.

"Really," said Chaison, "if this is as important as it sounds--"

She lunged and he bounced away. "Venera..."

"They've come a long way," she said, punctuating her words with casual cuts at his head, "and they're very tired. It would be impolite not to offer them some food and refreshments." She broke off, turned to Leal, and said, "Shall we say six o'clock? The admiralty staff can direct you to our apartments."

"Six o'clock would be fine," said Leal as she, too, backed away.

"Now really--" Chaison moved to intercept Leal, and Venera interposed herself, blade up. The two began to circle one another warily.

"Until six, then..." Leal waved for Antaea to follow her--Argyre was staring at Chaison Fanning--and she drew her out into the hall and closed the door even as the sound of clashing blades started up in earnest.