Garth smiled. Ah, the naivete of youth! Edict 1 had been passed so long ago that most citizens of Spyre didn’t even know it existed, nor would they have understood its significance if it were described to them. The hotheaded youth of Spyre were still political, it seemed, and still as incompetent at promoting their politics as in his day. Witness that appalling bomb attack yesterday.
The memory chased all sentimentality out of Garth’s mind. His mouth set in a stoic frown, he continued on down the street, digging his hands deep in his coat pockets and avoiding the glances of the few women who frequented the walkway. His aching feet carried him to stairs and more stairs, and his knees and hips began to protest at the labor. The last time he’d gone this way he’d been able to run all the way up.
Hundreds of feet above the official street level of Hammerlong, a bridge had been thrown between two buildings back in the carefree Reconstructionist period. Culture and art had flourished here before the time of the preservationists, even before the insular paranoia that had swallowed all the great nations.
The bridge was two stories tall and faced with leaded glass windows that caught the light of Candesce. It wasn’t used by occupants of either tower; the forges of one had little use for the paper-making enterprise in the other. For decades, the lofting, sunlit spaces of the bridge had been used by bohemian artists—and the agitators and revolutionaries who loved them.
Garth’s heart was pounding as he took the last few steps up a wrought-iron fire escape at the center of the span. He paused to catch his breath next to the wrought-iron curlicues of the door, and listened to the scratchy gramophone music that emanated from it. Then he rapped on the door.
The gramophone stopped. He heard scrambling noises, muffled voices. Then the door cracked open an inch. “Yes?” a man said belligerently.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Garth said with a broad smile. “I’m looking for someone.”
“Well, they’re not here.” The door started to close.
Garth laughed richly. “I’m not with the secret police, young pup. I used to live here.”
The door hesitated. “I painted this iron about… oh, twenty years ago,” Garth said, tracing his finger along the curves of metal. “It was rusting out, just like the one in the back bathroom. Do the pipes still knock when you run the water?”
“What do you want?” The voice held a little less harshness.
Garth withdrew his hand from the remembered metal. With difficulty he brought his attention back to the present. “I know she doesn’t live here now,” he said. “Too much time has passed. But I had to start somewhere and this was the last place we were together. I don’t suppose you know… any of the former occupants of the place?”
“Just a minute.” The door closed, then opened again, widely this time. “Come in.” Garth stepped into the sunlit space and was overwhelmed by memory.
The factory planks paving the floor had proven perfect for dancing. He remembered stepping into and out of that parallelogram of sunlight—though there had been a table next to it and he’d banged his hip—while she sang along with the gramophone. That same gramophone sat on a windowsill now, guarded by twin potted orange trees. A mobile of candles and wire turned slowly in the dusty sunlight, entangling his view of the loft behind it. Where he’d slept, and made love, and played his dulcimer for years…
“Who are you after?” A young woman with cropped black hair stood before him. She wore a man’s clothing and held a tattoo needle loosely in one hand. Another woman sat at the table behind her, shoulder bared and bleeding.
Garth took a deep breath and committed the name to speech for the first time in twenty years. “Her name is Selene. Selene Diamandis…”
12
Spyre was awe-inspiring even at a distance of ten miles. Venera held onto netting in a rear-facing doorway of the passenger liner Glorious Dawn and watched the vast blued circle recede in the distance. First one cloud shot by to obscure a quadrant of her view, then another, then a small team of them that whirled slowly in the ship’s wake. They chopped Spyre up into fragmented images: a curve of green trees here, a glint of window in some tower (Liris?). Then, instead of clouds, it was blockhouses and barbed wire flicking by. They were passing the perimeter. She was free.
She turned, facing into the interior of the ship. The velvet-walled galleries were crowded with passengers, mostly visiting delegations returning from the Fair. But a few of the men and women were dressed in the iron and leather of a major nation: Buridan. Her retainers, maids, the Buridan trade delegation… she wasn’t free yet, not until she had found a way to evade all of them.
Now that she was undisputed head of the Nation of Buridan, Venera had new rights. The right to travel freely, for example; it had only taken a simple request and a travel visa had been delivered to her the next day. Of course she couldn’t simply wave goodbye and leave. Nobody was fully convinced that she was who she said she was. So, it had been necessary for her to invent a pointless trade tour of the principalities to justify this trip. And that in turn meant that she could not be traveling alone.
Still—after weeks of running, of being captured by Liris and made chattel; after run-ins with bombers and bombs, hostile nobility and mad botanists—after all of that, she had simply boarded a ship and left. Life was never like you imagined it would be.
And she could just keep going, she knew—all the way back to her home in Rush. The idea was tempting, but it wasn’t why she had undertaken this expedition. It was too soon to return home. She didn’t yet have enough power to undertake the revenge she planned against the Pilot of Slipstream. If she left now it would be as a thief, with only what she could carry to see her home. No, when she finally did leave Spyre, it must be with power at her back.
The only way to get that power was to increase her holdings here, as well as the faith of the people in her. So, like Liris and all the other nations of Spyre, Buridan would visit the outer world to find customers.
Her smile faltered as the last of the barbed wire and mines swept by to vanish among the clouds. True, if she just kept going she wouldn’t miss anything of Spyre, she mused. Yet even as she thought this Venera experienced a little flash of memory: of Garth Diamandis laughing in sunlight; then of Eilen leaning on a wall after drinking too much at the party.
Last night Venera too had drunk too much wine, with Garth Diamandis. Sitting in a lounge that smelled of fresh paint and plaster, they had listened to the night noises of the house and talked.
“You’re not kidding either of us,” he’d said. “You’re leaving for good. I know that. So let me tell you now, while I can, that you’ve stripped many years off my shoulders, Lady Venera Fanning. I hope you find your home intact and waiting for you.” He toasted her then.
“I’ll prove you wrong about me yet,” she’d said. “But what about you?” she asked. “When all of this really is finished with, what are you going to do? Fade into the alleys of the town wheels? Return to your life as a gigolo?”
He shook his head with a smile. “The past is the past. I’m interested in the future. Venera… I found her.”
Venera had smiled, genuinely happy for him. “Ah. Your mysterious woman. Your prime mover. Well, I’m glad.”
He’d nodded vigorously. “She’s sent me a letter, telling where and when we can meet. In the morning, you’ll head for the docks and your destiny, and I’ll be off to the city and mine. So you see, we’ve both won.”