Jacoby nearly dropped his own fork this time, and damn her, she noticed. "What's that?" he said irritably.
"I overheard a couple of clerks talking," she said. "One said that Loll had come from some kind of city that was two hundred miles from the Site."
Jacoby tried to act nonchalant as he dug through the papers, but he was sure his eagerness must be obvious as he brought out a different picture. "Look at this one," he said, tossing it down in front of her. Argyre snatched it up.
While she examined the picture, he scowled at the flamboyantly lit towers of Sere. "There's a certain kind of self-delusion particular to people who've lived in peace for too long," he said, half to himself. "Right up until the day that the enemy swoops in to torch their wheel, they think that their problems are the biggest problems in the world, and their power the biggest power. I've spent my whole life looking into the eyes of those people after I had taken away everything they had ... and then, quite suddenly, I lost my homeland in exactly the same way. Spyre, Sacrus, and even Virga itself ... they're just pawns in a larger conflict, aren't they? I know that now. You know. But who else really understands? It seems to me that Leal Maspeth does--or did."
Argyre held up the photo. "This is some city somewhere? What's the connection?"
He nodded. "The ancient city of Serenity. A dead place now, choked with icebergs, frozen into the outer wall of Virga like a corpse in winter ... and right at the edge of that mysterious warm circle." The image showed dark towers on a flat plain, ensnared by rivers of ice. "In fact, it's precisely two hundred miles from the Site."
"Aha! So maybe this is the real place, then--the monster's home..." She stopped as she saw Jacoby shaking his head.
"My people have cruised by the place several times. There's no ships docked there, no signs of life at all. The Guard haven't gone near Serenity. It may be that they don't even know it's there, it may be that they're just distracted by whatever it is they've found at the center of the circle."
"Maybe they're about to become interested," she said.
"You'd think. It's strange, though--my men spent much of the morning watching the rest of the Abyssal fleet set sail. Their trajectory will take them straight to what you've called the Site--the center of the circle. If this cabinet minister came from Serenity, why aren't they going there?"
"How many men do you have, anyway?" she asked with a little smile.
"Oh, a few."
She snorted, then turned her attention back to the photo. "We could speculate about this all day," she pointed out. "Or we could go to this city of Serenity, and find out."
Jacoby picked up the photos and shuffled them and the rest of the papers back into the file folder. "There, you see?" he said. "It turns out our interests align after all."
6
KEIR SAT IN his room, hands folded in his lap. His knapsack lay on the bed, but he'd pulled the clothes and rations out of it. With no means of escape other than walking, it just seemed pathetic to keep it ready to go.
Maerta had spoken to the Edisonians and forbidden them to evolve any kind of vehicle or personal transportation device for him. She didn't trust him, clearly--and he didn't blame her. The need for escape burned so brightly in him that he could no longer think about anything else.
And yet ... he could have done what Eustace Loll actually did; he could have taken the ornithopter himself and flown away. There'd been no guard on it, only his promise to Maerta that he wouldn't use it. If he wanted to get away so badly, why had he given her his word that he wouldn't; and why had he kept it?
Maybe for the same reason that, until today, he hadn't delved through his own scry to look at his memories from more than six months ago.
Because there weren't any. He remembered school. He remembered a mounting anxiety, a feeling that these happy days with the other kids, the lessons, the comfort of elders in the morning and evening--that these were a mask of some kind, covering ...
He stood up and started to pace to the door, but caught himself, and sat down again. That was how it had been: whenever he'd actually started to think about his situation, terror had bubbled up overwhelmingly, and escape became the only option. So he'd walked the dark corridors of the city, explored it end to end, and fantasized about being anywhere else. It had worked to stave off the panic, but only because it was a distraction.
And then, Maerta had said the name Sita.
There was no one in the Renaissance named Sita. His scry couldn't locate any reference to her, and when he'd asked the Edisonians they'd simply sat there like dumb blocks of stone. Yet Maerta thought he should know the name.
He looked down at his hands, where two of his dragonflies perched, then up at the forlorn knapsack. What he should have done was go after Maerta, demand that she explain. Or he should have talked to the others. That was something, in fact, that he should have been doing from the start. Why hadn't he cornered another of the adults, forced them to tell him what had happened? Surely they all knew.
The panic was rising in him again. He couldn't help himself; he had to stand and leave the room. This time, though, he swore, he wouldn't take one of those dark archways and disappear into avoidance and solitude.
His mouth set in a determined line, he headed for the plaza where the new airship was being built.
He passed Gallard on the way down the stairs. "You were supposed to be in workshop this morning," Gallard commented, though not in a scolding tone.
"Not now," said Keir, and he kept going.
As he reached the bottom of the steps a nagging little voice in the back of his mind said, Why didn't you confront Gallard? Gallard was something of a friend; at least, Keir trusted him.
But something had been done to Keir, and Maerta had promised someone that she would not tell him what that was. Who was that someone? Could it be Gallard? It could be anybody. Anybody in the Renaissance.
He picked up the pace a bit until he reached the entrance to the plaza.
Maerta was taking a walk around the airship with Leal Maspeth. An Edisonian remote was lumbering beside them, trying to explain in its halting way how the ship worked. Leal was shaking her head.
He shouldn't interrupt them. Of course; he'd wait until they were done and then speak to Maerta alone.
No. No, he wouldn't.
She was right there. Yet he knew he couldn't do it. The panic had taken over, and he stumbled back into the shadow of the archway, covering his eyes with his hands.
He could still see through his dragonflies, and they had fanned out into the plaza; so that's why he once again became the one to see something no one else was looking for.
In the featureless, unchanging black sky above the plaza, a little orange spark had appeared. His misery kept Keir from wondering about it until it had grown into a dot with a truncated tail--and then it came to him that it was moving fast.
"Look out!" He didn't know why he was running into the plaza, but as Maerta and Leal turned, he shouted, "Up there!"
Maspeth turned to look, and her eyes widened in shock. She grabbed Maerta's arm and began to run for the colonnade at the plaza's edge.
Maerta pulled back. "What is--"
"Missile!" Leal pulled all the harder, and now Keir took Maerta's other arm. The Edisonian took a ponderous step, then aimed its blocklike head at the spear of fire. "Perchlorate oxidizer," it observed. "Evidence of a conical gas expansion device to exploit law of equal and opposite reaction."
"Run, you stupid..." Keir had no word for it. Anyway, they'd reached the colonnade and fell together behind one of its vast, dark pillars.
The Edisonian reached up as if to catch the missile, and the orange streak hit it with an overwhelming flash. What followed wasn't sound, but a hammer blow that picked Keir up and flung him against the wall.