There was no proof that the Crier in the Dark had been destroyed, the broadsheets went on. No proof at all. If the government remained incompetent to deal with the clearly still-existent threat, then it should be replaced.
That made her smile, and then, after a glance around, she walked away from the taxi stand. Two blocks up the curve of the wheel she paused again, under the velvet-draped entrance of a grand hotel she could never have afforded to stay in, even when she did work for the Guard. The doorman scowled at her as she brought out the card she'd been thumbing in her pocket for days. As she made up her mind and walked up to the door, he put his arm out to block her.
"Are you sure you have business here?" he asked in an all-too-familiar tone.
"Is this the Stormburl Hotel?" she asked sweetly.
"It is, but--"
"Then I have business here." She pushed past him and into the building.
"I'm sorry, miss, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to--"
"It's all right," said a voice behind them. "She's expected."
The clerk ducked his head; and Antaea turned, and there stood the man she'd met on the airship.
Jacoby Sarto smiled and put out his hand for her to shake. "I was just on my way to dinner. Would you like to join me?"
* * *
THE RESTAURANT WAS located about a mile from Sere's biggest town wheel. It was an ornately carved wooden centrifuge about a hundred feet across. It rotated slowly to produce just enough gravity to make dining pleasant in the gaslit gardens that paved its inner surface. You could watch the kitchen workers pick and clean your fabulously expensive vegetables and herbs; if the duck Jacoby ordered was killed on the spot, too, they did it somewhere out of sight. It was the greens that mattered, because in a sunless country like Abyss, most vegetables were imported.
He watched Antaea watch the city. She was beautiful in a striking and unsettling way; he'd been unable to keep himself from glancing surreptitiously at her as they flew here. Her ears, nose, and chin were tiny, but her eyes were huge. Jacoby had heard of winter wraiths, those members of a genetically engineered offshoot of humanity whose features were designed to mesmerize ordinary humans. Antaea Argyre was certainly mesmerizing, but he had done his research since their meeting at the capital bug; he knew she was a capable and ruthless killer.
Now she turned back to him. "I'm not really sure why I'm here," she admitted.
"You're here because you think I may know things," he said with a mild shrug. "Maybe I do, and maybe I'm willing to share. How's that for a start?"
She eyed him warily. "But what's the price?"
"Well, there may not be one," he admitted, "if your interests are as aligned with mine as I think they are."
"Explain."
He suppressed a smile at her imperious tone. He was used to dealing with people who assumed command the way she was attempting to. His reply was to lean forward and spill a sheaf of photographs and reports onto the tabletop.
"I was born, raised, and spent almost my entire life in the nation of Sacrus, on Spyre," he said as he slid the pictures around with one finger. Argyre showed no sign of recognizing the name, so he tamped down on his irritated pride and explained: "Spyre was one of the ancient places, a metal cylinder twelve kilometers across and twenty long. Open at the ends, of course; it flew in the airs near Candesce, at the center of the world. Its inner surface was sown with countries like Sacrus--some small as a building, some miles in extent. All of them thousands of years old. Older than any of these places." He waved contemptuously at the rust- and verdigris-rimmed wheels of Sere.
"One day," he continued, "a woman from this outside world drifted in and miraculously survived her fall onto Spyre's inner surface." His fingers continued to move the pictures, but he was no longer looking at them. "Shortly after Venera Fanning's arrival--" He pretended not to notice as Argyre started at the name, nearly spilling her drink. "--Spyre fell apart. Literally. Sacrus, its ancient neighbors and rivals, all of them were ripped asunder and scattered to the six winds."
Antaea Argyre leaned back, obviously considering what to say. "From what I've heard of Venera Fanning, that doesn't surprise me in the least."
"I lost my home--my whole nation," Jacoby went on. "I'm an exile now, forced to make my living by means that are, frankly, sordid compared to what I once was."
"If it's revenge you're after," said Argyre, "all I can say is that I have no way of getting you close to Fanning."
Sarto crossed his arms and glowered at the photos. "I was born and raised to believe in the sanctity, not to mention the necessity, of revenge," he admitted. "But revenge against whom? Or, in this case, what?"
"Ah."
"Venera Fanning trampled all our traditions and values, and then blew up the world," said Jacoby as he handed some of the pictures to her. "But I'd be lying if I said those traditions and values didn't heartily deserve to be trampled. The world's a better place now that Sacrus is gone, and that's probably true for the rest of Spyre, too. --What do you see?" he said of the photos.
Jacoby watched Argyre's mounting puzzlement as she shuffled through the images. "What is this: an eye?" She held up a photo that showed nothing but a white circle surrounded by black.
"That," said Jacoby, "would be entirely visible from where you're sitting, if this godforsaken country had a sun to light it. It's a photograph of the outer skin of Virga, an area only a hundred miles or so away from this very spot. The picture was taken through a telescope by ... a friend of mine. That circle is a span of Virga's outer wall. This picture was shot in infrared, so the cold parts are black."
"Then..." She frowned in confusion. "This circle is an area of the world's skin that is warm?"
He nodded. "It's hundreds of miles across. And in the past few months, practically the entire Home Guard fleet has converged on a spot right at its center."
She blinked at him rapidly--a disconcerting sight given her huge eyes. "Really." She turned the other pictures over. "This?" Blurred and speckled with distance was an image of square blockhouses encircling a ragged black patch. "Is this ... a hole?"
"I wouldn't speculate on that," he said. "But that's what's at the very center of the circle. You can see there's ships clustering around that spot like flies on--"
"Yes, I can see that," she said. "But--" Her fabulous eyes widened even further. "The Site," she muttered. "He said he'd come from the Site..." She glanced up guiltily, but it was plain he'd heard her. Jacoby watched her struggle with a decision.
"A local cabinet minister went missing a while ago," she said. "During the monster scare. Now he's back. Back from somewhere on the other side of 'the Site.'"
"Ah..." Jacoby smiled as the waiter set down their appetizers. "I came here because I'm chasing the ones who are ultimately responsible for the destruction of Spyre. Care to tell me why you're here?"
She bit her lip, but they both knew there was no going back now--and he already thought he knew, from the research his spies had done on her.
"I'm looking for a friend of mine," she said. "Her name is Leal Maspeth; she was being groomed to become dean of the university's history department when she suddenly disappeared. The official reports say she defied the government over something to do with the monster. She supposedly stole state secrets and--this is utterly unbelievable--burned one of her coworkers to death in his own home. Then she fled into the arms of the monster itself. Well, maybe it's true. Maybe she went somewhere..." She paused, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth, and gazed at the photo lying between them. "Two hundred miles..."