Contents
Title Page
Map
Prologue
Part 1: The Offer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part 2: The Cheetah and the Tree
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part 3: The Choice
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Tor Books by Karl Schroeder
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
DARKNESS, AND A rope road.
"Champagne?" asked the flight attendant. Antaea Argyre raised her hand to wave him away, then turned the motion into acceptance of the helix glass. It wasn't as if she was on duty, after all. She sipped the tart wine from one end of the glass coil that surface tension held it to, and watched the undulating rope ravel by outside the window.
None of the other passengers were watching. In knots of two or three or five, they preened and posed, drank and laughed at one another's jokes. The gaslights of this passenger ship's lounge lit the space brightly, highlighting the gold filigree around the doorjambs and the deep mazelike patterns in the velvet of the cushioned pillars. Everything held sumptuous color and texture, except the floor-to-ceiling window that took up one entire wall. This was black, like the uniform Antaea wore. She was the only passenger close enough to touch the cold glass; the only one looking out.
The last hour had somehow managed to be tedious and nerve-racking at the same time. The lounge was full of diplomats, military commanders, politicians, and newspaper reporters. They were all attentive to one another, and all were adept at negotiating today's social minefield.
They had all stopped talking when Antaea entered the room.
Even now she felt eyes on her back, though of course, nobody would have the courage to actually approach her.
She took a bigger drink of the champagne, and was just regretting not having started in on it earlier when the doors to the lounge opened and a new knot of officials sailed in. They caught various discreet straps and guide ropes and glided to a unified halt just as the distant drone of the ship's engines changed in tone.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said a bright young thing in a sequined corset and diaphanous harem pants, "we've arrived."
There was a murmur and polite applause; Antaea turned back to the window. As her hand felt for the railing, it fell on someone else's. "Oh!"
"Excuse me." The voice was a deep, commanding rumble. It came from a man with the craggy features of an elder statesman and silver hair tied back in a short tail. He was dressed in a silk suit of a red so dark it was almost black. He seemed quite relaxed in the company of so many powerful people; but his accent pegged him as a foreigner.
He'd shifted his grip and she put her hand on the rail next to his. Only then did she notice that they were still the only ones at the window; everyone else was listening attentively to the government delegation. Of course they were. They couldn't very well ignore their hosts.
The rope that their ship had been following through the weightless air of Virga ended at a beacon about a mile ahead. This was a heavy cement cylinder with flashing lamps on its ends. Right now their flickering light was highlighting the rounded shapes of clouds that would otherwise have been invisible in the permanent darkness. Without the rope and the beacon, it would have been impossible for any ship to find this particular spot in the thousands of cubic kilometers of darkness that made up Virga's sunless reaches.
"We thank you all for coming with us today," the young thing was saying breathily. "We know the rumors have been intense and widespread. There've been stories of monsters, of ancient powers awakened in the dark old corners of Virga. We're here today to help put any anxieties you might have to rest."
"There." The man beside her raised one hand and pressed his index finger against the glass. For a second she was distracted by the halo of condensation that instantly fogged into existence around his fingertip. Then she looked past and into the blackness.
She saw nothing there but the ghostly curve of a cloud bank.
"For some months last year, our nation of Abyss felt itself to be under siege," the spokeswoman continued. "There were reports of attacks on outlying towns. Rumors began to circulate of a vast voice crying in the dark. Ah! I see by the expression on some faces that some of our visitors from the warm interior of the world have already figured out the mystery. Don't tell! You must understand how traumatic it was for us, who live here in the permanent dark and cold near the wall of the world. Many of the things you take for granted in the principalities are never seen out here. Maybe that makes us provincials, I don't know; but we had no reason to expect the kind of attack that really did happen."
The man next to Antaea removed his finger from the glass, leaving a little oval of frost behind. "You don't see it, do you?" he asked in obvious amusement.
She shrugged in irritation. "Behind that cloud?"
"So you think that's a cloud?"
Startled, she looked again.
"The crisis culminated in an attack on the city of Sere," the spokeswoman said. "There was panic and confusion, and people claimed to have seen all manner of things. The hysteria of crowds is well known, and mass hallucination is not uncommon in such circumstances. Of course, the stories and reports immediately spread far beyond Sere--to your own countries, and I daresay beyond. A deluge of concern came back to us--inquiries about our safety, our loyalties, the stability of our trade agreements. It's become a big mess--especially because we long since sorted out the cause of the problem, and it's been dealt with."
The officials from the Abyssal government moved to the window, not too far from where Antaea and the stranger perched. "Behold," said the spokeswoman, "the Crier in the Dark!"
She gestured dramatically, and floodlights on the outside of the ship snapped on. The thing Antaea had at first taken to be a vast cloud blinked into view; at least, part of it did.
There were shouts of surprise, and relieved laughter; then, applause. "A capital bug!" someone shouted.
The spokeswoman bowed; behind her, the (entirely male) group of officials were smiling and nodding in obvious relief at the crowd's reaction. Their backdrop was a cavern of light carved by the floodlights out of an infinite ocean of night. The lights barely reached the gray skin of the city-sized beast that hung motionless and dormant in the icy air. Antaea could see a rank of tower-sized horns jutting from beyond the horizon of its back. In a live bug those horns would be blaring the notes of a chord so loudly that no ordinary form of life could survive within a mile of the thing.
Everybody was talking now, and the reporters were throwing questions at the Abyssals: When did you discover it was a capital bug? Why is it silent now? How did you save the city from it? The stranger next to Antaea shook his head minutely and his lips quirked into a faint smile.
"The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me," he murmured.
Antaea realized that she'd bought this explanation, too, and frowned now in confusion. "You think it's a lie?" she asked quietly.
He gave her a pointed once-over--taking in, she assumed, her uniform, though not without a slight pause here and there. "You tell me," he said. "I'm sure the Abyssal government doesn't tie its collective shoes without the permission of the Virga Home Guard."
Rather than answer that, she pointed to the obvious. "They do have a bug, don't they? Capital bugs aren't native to this part of Virga. It's too cold for them. So if one strayed this deep..."