The lean, cadaverous general from Carasthant made a violent shushing gesture that made everyone turn to stare at him. “What can little guppies like us do?” he said in a buzzing voice that seemed to emanate from his bobbing Adam’s apple. “Begging your pardon, Madam Buridan, Mister Preservationist sir. Do you propose we take down a shark by worrying at its gills?”
His compatriot from Scoman waggled his head in agreement. The thousand and one tiny clocks built into his armor all clicked ahead a second. “Sacrus is bounded by high walls and barbed wire,” he said over the quiet snicking of his clothing, “and they have sniper towers and machine-gun positions. Even if we fought our way in, what would we do? Piss on their lawn?”
That was an expression Venera had never heard before.
Venera had thought long and hard about what to say when this question came up. These men and women were gathered here because their homes had all been injured or insulted by Sacrus—but were they here merely to vent their indignation? Would they back down in the face of actual action?
She didn’t want to tell them that she knew what Sacrus was up to. The key to Candesce was a prize worth betraying old friends for. If they knew Sacrus had it, half these people would defect to Sacrus’s side immediately, and the other half would proceed to plan how to get it themselves. It might turn into a night of long knives inside Buridan Tower.
“Sacrus’s primary assets lie inside the Gray Infirmary,” she said. “Whatever it is that they manufacture and sell, that is its origin. At the very least, we need to know what we’re up against, what they’re planning to do. I propose that we invade the Gray Infirmary.”
There was a momentary, stunned silence from the new arrivals. Princess Corinne’s broad sunburnt face was squinched up in a failed attempt to hide a smile. Then Thinblood, the Carasthant general, and two of the minor house representatives all started talking at once.
“Impossible!” she heard, and “suicide!” through the general babble. Venera let it run on for a minute or so, then held up her hand.
“Consider the benefits if it could be done,” she said. “We could rescue my man Flance, assuming he’s there. We could find out what Sacrus trades in—though I think we all know—but in any case find out what its tools and devices are. We might be able to seize their records. Certainly we can find out what it is they’re doing.
“If we want, we can blow up the tower.
“And it can be done,” she said. “I admit I was pretty hopeless myself until last night. We’d talked through all sorts of plans, from sneaking over the walls to shimmying down ropes from Lesser Spyre. All our scenarios ended up with us being machine-gunned, either on the way in or on the way out. Then I had a long talk with Princess Corinne, here.”
Corinne nodded violently; her hair followed her head’s motion a fraction of a second late. “We can get into the Gray Infirmary,” she brayed. “And out again safely.”
There was another chorus of protests and again Venera held up her hand. “I could tell you,” she said, “but it might be more convincing to show you. Come.” And she headed for the doors.
The roar from the airfall was more visceral than audible here in the lowest of Buridan’s pipes. Bryce’s people had lowered ladders down here when they came to cut away the maddening random organ that had been accidentally created in Buridan’s destruction. The corroded metal surface gleamed wetly and as Venera stepped off the ladder, she slipped and almost fell. She stared up at the ring of faces twenty feet above her.
“Well, come on,” she said. “If I’m brave enough to come down here, you can be too.”
Thinblood ignored the ladder and vaulted down, landing beside her with a smug thump. Instantly, the surface under their feet began swaying, and little flakes of rust showered down. “The ladder’s here to save the pipe, not your feet,” Venera said loudly. Thinblood looked abashed; the others clambered down the ladder meekly.
The ladder descended the vertical part of the pipe and they now stood where it bent into a horizontal direction. This tunnel was ten feet wide and who knew what it might originally have carried? Horse manure, Venera suspected. Whatever the case, it now ended twenty feet away. Late afternoon sunlight hurried shadows across the jagged circle of torn metal. It was from there that the roar originated.
“Come.” Without hesitation Venera walked to within five feet of the opening, then went down on one knee. She pointed. “There! Sacrus!”
They could barely have heard her over the roar of the thin air; it didn’t matter. It was clear what she was pointing at.
The pipe they stood in thrust forty or fifty feet into the airstream below the curve of Spyre’s hull. Luckily, this opening faced away from the headwind, though suction pulled at Venera relentlessly and the air was so thin she was starting to pant already. The pipe hung low enough to provide a vantage point from which a long stretch of Spyre’s hull was visible—miles of it, in fact. Way out there, near the little world’s upside-down horizon, a cluster of pipes much like this one—but intact—jutted into the airflow. Nestled among them was a glassed-in machine-gun blister, similar to the one Venera had first visited underneath Garth Diamandis’s hovel.
“That’s the underside of the Gray Infirmary,” she yelled at the motley collection of generals and revolutionaries crowding at her shoulder. Someone cupped hand to ear and looked quizzical. “Infirmary! In! Firm!” She jabbed her finger at the distant pipes. The quizzical person smiled and nodded.
Venera backed up cautiously, and the others scuttled ahead of her. At the pipe’s bend, where breathing was a bit easier and the noise and vibration not so mind-numbing, she braced her rump against the wall and her feet in the mulch of rust lining the bottom of the pipe. “We brought down telescopes and checked out that machine-gun post. It’s abandoned, like most of the hull positions. The entrance is probably bricked up, most likely forgotten. It’s been hundreds of years since anybody tried to assault Spyre from the outside.”
She could barely make out the buzzing words of Carasthant’s general. “You propose to get in through that? How? By jumping off the world and grabbing the pipes as they pass?”
Venera nodded. When they all stared back uncomprehending, she sighed and turned to Princess Corinne. “Show them,” she said.
Corinne was carrying a bulky backpack. She wrestled this off and plunked it down in the rust. “This,” she said with a dramatic flourish, “is how we will get to Sacrus.
“It is called a parachute.”
She had to focus on her jaw. Venera’s face was buried in the voluminous shoulder of her leather coat; her hands clutched the rope that twisted and shuddered in her grip. In the chattering roar of a four-hundred mile per hour wind there was no room for distractions, or even thought.
Her teeth were clenched around a mouthpiece of Fin design. A rubber hose led from this to a metal bottle that, Corinne had explained, held a large quantity of squashed air. It was that ingredient of the air the Rook’s engineers had called oxygen; Venera’s first breath of it had made her giddy.
Every now and then the wind flipped her over or dragged her head to the side and Venera saw where she was: wrapped in leathers, goggled and masked, and hanging from a thin rope inches below the underside of Spyre.
All she had to do was keep her body arrow-straight and keep that mouthpiece in. Venera was tied to the line, which was being let out quite rapidly from the edge of the airfall. Ten soldiers had already gone this way before her, so it must be possible.