The lantern had been a hundred feet across, clenched together out of rusted girders and huge, bowed sheets of glass. Those glossy panes were dark; once this lamp might have been visible a hundred miles away. From one of its corners, thick cables twisted away into the dark. It was moored to the skin of the world somewhere, but if the photos from Jacoby's magic telescope were right, it was just an outrigger. Once, she imagined, the city the lantern pointed to had been its own beacon, a glittering jewel nestled in a forest of bergs on the world's wall. All lost to the dark now.
The cables had kept the lantern pointed in one direction. That heading had confirmed Jacoby's inertial map, and so they had followed the dark lamp's lead. The Page had eventually come to another lantern, then another.
Antaea's feet left the deck. She grabbed some rigging to stabilize herself as the ceiling of the second hull lowered over her. By splitting the hull of the spindle-shaped Page down its midline they could let the two pieces out and spin them around a common axis. The result looked a bit like two ancient gravity-bound ships of the sea, attached mast-to-mast and pinwheeling together through the sky. In this way, they had enjoyed gravity throughout most of the journey. Now, with a set of muffled thuds, the Page's two halves closed over one another and what had been exposed decks were now the inside walls of a single hull.
Antaea watched as Mauven, the first mate, took reports from the men in the other hull. To her surprise, she felt a sigh of relief escape her at being enclosed by the hulls--cut off, finally, from the necessity of having to feel the wintry airs of Virga's outer reaches.
She'd hoped never to have to come here again. This place was the realm of the Virga Home Guard--of precipice moths, and strange beasts like the eaners; of icebergs that coated the world's wall like stucco; of myths and darkness and dreams. It had also been her home as a child, and for much of her adult life with the Guard.
She remembered this darkness lit with fire. Battles had been fought here in the days following an incident now referred to as the outage: a brief time when Candesce's shield against the monsters of the outside world had failed. Antaea and her sister, Telen, had been members of the Home Guard then, and they had joined ranks with the fearsome precipice moths to beat back an incursion that followed the start of the outage so closely that the two must have been coordinated somehow. Scheduled.
Antaea herself had been an "extraction specialist"; she specialized in rescuing people from sticky situations such as jail and imminent execution. Ironic, then, that she had ended up in a Guard prison herself after the events following the outage.
She'd become caught up in circumstances beyond her control, forced to kidnap Admiral Chaison Fanning of Slipstream under the threat that Telen would be killed if she did not. Antaea had been emotionally shattered by the discovery that her sister had died long before, and after the triumphant return of Fanning and the fall of Slipstream's pilot, she had left civilization entirely. For months she had flown through the near-infinite depths of Virga's skies, visiting countries she'd never heard of and basking in the light of nuclear-fusion suns glowing in every color of the spectrum. She'd been running as much from herself as from the Guard; but in the end, the Guard had found her.
She waited now for a few minutes until the warmth of the ship drove away the memory of ice. Then she flew to Jacoby Sarto's cabin and knocked. "Come," he said curtly.
He had taken off his jacket, and the white linen shirt emphasized his barrel chest. He held a helix glass of amber liquid, and as he saw it was her he gently lofted it over to her. Antaea took a cautious sip, and as the liquid slipped into her mouth, she almost coughed. It was rum, and very strong.
"Good, eh?" he said with a quick grin.
He'd found all sorts of ways to divert her attention over the past few days: with preparations, with plans, with the details of sailing the Page. Antaea had begun to relax around him, and he, it seemed, around her. She decided it was time to be blunt. "When I first asked you how an exile like yourself could afford this ship, you told me that you'd taken over Sacrus's international network after the fall of Spyre."
"Yes," he said. "What of it?"
"Your crewmen," she nodded at the door, "are little more than pirates. They're the cheapest of a bad lot. Hard to imagine you'd be buying men at bargain rates if you really had access to your country's assets."
He wound some liquor from a small cask into another glass. "I didn't lie to you," he said before taking a sip. "I did take over the network. Briefly. Long enough to extract those men who were loyal to me--and a goodly amount of money, to boot."
"What happened?"
Jacoby tilted his head, frowning at her. He was obviously considering how much truth to tell her--so Antaea said in exasperation, "I can hardly run out on you now. We're at the walls of the world."
He grunted, and looked down. "The Sartos were one of two great ruling families in Sacrus. The other was the Ferances, and they were in charge when Spyre broke up. My cousin, Inshiri Ferance, was the ruler of Sacrus--and never was born a more vicious, morally distorted human being."
Antaea raised an eyebrow. "Worse than Venera Fanning?"
"Venera's a good person." He shook his head. "Inshiri has ... hobbies. That you wouldn't want me to describe. Sacrus's product--what we traded to the world--was expertise in the art of manipulating people, and nobody's better at it than Inshiri. One of her proteges was her niece, Margit, who had a little run-in with Venera and came out the worse for it. Venera got the better of Margit--but Inshiri would eat Venera alive. Maybe literally."
He said this so matter-of-factly that Antaea couldn't doubt it was true. "You're afraid of her," she observed.
"That's because I know her. And, because I know her, I didn't try to fight when she demanded that I give back control of the network. I cut my losses and ran."
"I get it," she said, nodding. "This expedition we're on--you're doing this because it's the furthest thing from your cousin's interests you could find. You're staying out of her way."
Now Jacoby sighed heavily. "Oh, if only that were true. I'd be able to sleep a lot better if it were."
"What do you mean?"
"Before Spyre fell, Inshiri made a political pact with an outsider--and by outsider, I mean an ambassador from beyond Virga. The same people--if you can call them people--who killed your sister, and who've been trying to take down Virga's defenses ... they're supporting Inshiri now."
"Supporting--! Why didn't you tell me this before?"
He laughed. "You wouldn't have signed up if you thought I had any connection at all with Artificial Nature."
"Do you?"
He shrugged. "I met one of their ambassadors once. He made Inshiri look like an amateur, not because he enjoys torment and terror the way she does, but because he doesn't seem to consider human beings as, well, human at all. But I don't know how much involvement he and his kind have with Inshiri. All I know is that she has plans."
"To do what?"
"I don't know!" He glowered at her. "All I know is that this friend of yours, Leal Maspeth, has Inshiri and her friends running scared for some reason. They're so afraid of her that they're stretching the network to its breaking point, sending spies and diplomats and courtesans to all the great nations. They're proposing alliances ... making friends. Getting ready for something."
Antaea thought about this for a long while, and Jacoby watched her. The creak of the hull, the rumble of the Page's jets, and the distant murmur of the crew were the only sounds.
"When were you going to tell me this?" she asked finally.