She unscrewed her helmet and looked up into a couple of dozen gun barrels. They were all different, like a museum display taken down and offered to her; in her dazed state she almost reached to grab one. But there were hands holding them tightly and grim men behind the hands.
When she and Sarto had reached the rooftop of Liris, they found a theatrical jumble of bodies, torn tenting, and brazier fires surrounded by huddling men in outlandish armor. At the center of it all, the thick metal cable that rose up and out of sight into the turbulent mists; that cable glowed gold now as distant Candesce awoke.
She had spotted Moss and headed over, keeping her head down in case there were snipers. He looked up, lines of exhaustion apparent around his eyes. Glancing past her, he spotted Sarto. “What’s this?”
“We need to break this siege. I’m going over the wall, and Sarto is coming with me.”
Moss blinked, but his permanently shocked expression revealed none of his thoughts. “What for?”
“I don’t know whether the commanders of our encircling force have been told that I’m an imposter and traitor. I need to bring Jacoby Sarto in case I need a… ticket, I suppose you could call it… into their good graces.”
He nodded reluctantly. “And how do you p-propose to reach our force? S-Sacrus is between us and them.”
Now she grinned. “Well, you couldn’t do this with all of us, but I propose that we jump.”
Of course they’d had help from an ancient catapult that Liris had once used to fire mail and parcels over an enemy nation to an ally some three miles away. Venera had seen it on her second day here; with a little effort, it had been refitted to seat two people. But nobody, least of all her, knew whether it would still work. Her only consolation had been the low gravity in Spyre.
Now Venera had two possible scripts she could follow, one if these were soldiers of the Council Alliance, one if they owed their allegiance to Sacrus. But which were they? The fall had been so disorienting that she couldn’t tell where they’d ended up. So she merely put up her hands and smiled and said, “Hello.”
Beside her Jacoby Sarto groaned and rolled over. Instantly another dozen guns aimed at him. “I think we’re not that much of a threat,” Venera said mildly. She received a kick in the back (which she barely felt through the metal) for her humor.
A throb of pain shot through her jaw—and an odd thing happened. Such spasms of pain had plagued her for years, ever since the day she woke up in Rush’s military infirmary, her head bandaged like a delicate vase about to be shipped via the postal system. Each stab of pain had come with its own little thought, whose content varied somewhat but always translated roughly to either I’m all alone or I’m going to kill them. Fear and fury, they stabbed her repeatedly throughout each day. The fierce headaches that often built over the hours just added to her meanness.
But she’d taken the bullet that struck her jaw and blown it back out the very same gun that had shot her. So, when her jaw cramped this time, instead of her usual misery, Venera had a flash of memory: the morning gun going off with a tremendous explosion in her hands, bucking and kicking and sending her flying backward into the Lirisians. She had no idea what the feeling accompanying that had been, but she liked it.
So she grinned crookedly and stood up. Dusting herself off, she said with dignity, “I am Amandera Thrace-Guiles, and this is Jacoby Sarto of the Spyre Council. We need to talk to your commanders.”
“You have a reputation for being foolhardy,” said the army commander, his gray mustaches waggling. “But that was ridiculous.”
It turned out that they’d nearly overshot both Sacrus and Council Alliance positions. Luckily, several hundred pairs of eyes had tracked their progress across the rolled-up sky of Spyre and it was her army that had gotten to Venera and Jacoby first. Sarto didn’t seem too upset about the outcome, which was telling. What was even more significant was that everyone was calling her “Lady Thrace-Guiles,” which meant that word of her deceptions hadn’t made it out of Liris. Here, Venera was still a respected leader.
She preened at the commander’s backhanded compliment. He stood with his back to a brick wall, a swaying lamp nodding shadows across the buttons of his jacket. Aides and colonels bustled about, some shoving little counters across the map board, others reading or writing dispatches.
Venera smelled engine oil and wet cement. The alliance army had set up its headquarters in a preservationist roundhouse about a mile from Liris; these walls were thick enough to stop anything Sacrus had so far fired. For the first time in days, Venera felt a little safe.
“I wouldn’t have had to be foolhardy if the situation weren’t so dire,” she said. It was tempting to upbraid this man for hesitating to send his forces to relieve Liris; but Venera found herself uninterested anymore in taking such familiar pleasures. She merely said, “Tell me what’s been happening out here.”
The commander leaned over the board and began pointing at the little wooden counters. “There’ve been engagements all across Greater Spyre,” he said. “Sacrus has won most of them.”
“So what are they doing? Conquering countries?”
“In one or two cases, yes. Mostly they’ve been cutting the preservationist’s railway lines. And they’ve taken or severed all the elevator cables.”
“Severed?” Even to an outsider like her this was a startling development.
One of the aides shrugged. “Easy enough to do. They just use them for target practice—except for the ones at the edge of the world, like Liris. The winds around those lines deflect the bullets.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Why don’t they just use more high-powered guns on them?” The aide shook his head.
“Ancient treaty. Places limits on muzzle velocities. It’s to prevent accidental punctures of the world’s skin.”
“—Not significant, anyway,” said the commander with an impatient gesture. “The war will be decided here on Greater Spyre. The city will just have to wait it out.”
“No, it can’t wait,” she said. “That’s what this is all about. Not the city, but the docks.”
“The docks?” The commander stared at her. “That’s the last thing we’re going to worry about.”
“I know, and Sacrus is counting on that.” She glared at him. “Everything that’s happening down here is a diversion from their real target. Everything except…” She nodded at Liris.
Now they were looking at each other with faintly embarrassed unease. “Lady Thrace-Guiles,” said the commander, “war is a very particular art. Perhaps you should leave such details to those who’ve made it their careers.”
Venera opened her mouth to yell at him, thought better, and took a deep breath instead. “Can we at least be agreed that we need to break Sacrus’s hold on Liris?”
“Yes,” he said with a vigorous nod. “We need to ensure the safety of our leadership. For that purpose,” he pointed at the table, “I am advocating a direct assault along the innermost wall.”
A moment of great temptation made Venera hesitate. The commander was proposing to go straight for the walls and leave the group trapped at the world’s edge to its fate. He didn’t know that his objective was actually there. They’d made themselves her enemies and Venera could just… forget to tell him. Leave Guinevera and the others to Sacrus’s mercy now that she had the army.