And Margit was right: she could still turn away. The key was hers and with it, untold power and riches if she chose to exercise it. True, she would have to move immediately to secure her own safety, else the council would try to take it from her. But she was sure she could do that, with Sarto’s help and Bryce’s. Maybe Spyre would survive, if they spun its rotation down in time and repaired it under lesser gravity. She could still have Buridan, her place on the council, and power. All she had to do was give up the prisoners who stood watching her now.
The Venera Fanning who had woken in Garth Diamandis’s bed those scant weeks ago could have done that.
She reached slowly into her jacket and brought out the slim white wand that had caused so much grief—and doubtless would be the cause of much more. Step by step she closed the distance between herself and Margit’s outstretched hand. Venera raised her hand and Margit leaned forward, but Venera would not look her in the eye.
Selene Diamandis put her foot in Margit’s lower back and pushed.
As the former botanist sprawled onto Venera, bringing them both down, Selene pulled her own pistol and aimed it at the face of the man whose gun was touching Garth’s ear. “Father, jump!” she cried.
Margit snarled and punched Venera in the chin. The explosion of pain was nothing compared to the spasms she usually got there so Venera didn’t even blink. She grabbed Margit’s wrist and the two rolled over and away from the platform.
“Lower your guns,” Selene was shouting. Venera caught a confused glimpse of men and women stepping out of the way as she and Margit tumbled to the edge of the roof by the courtyard. Nobody moved to help her—if anyone laid a hand on either her or Margit, everyone would start shooting.
Margit elbowed Venera in the face and her head snapped back. She had an upside-down view of the courtyard below; it was an inferno.
“That red looks good on the trees, don’t you think?” Margit muttered. She struck Venera again. Dazed, Venera couldn’t recover fast enough and suddenly found Margit standing over her, pistol aimed at her.
“The key,” she said, “or you die.”
A shadow flickered from overhead. Margit glanced up, said, “What—” and then Moss collided with her and the two of them sailed off the roof. In the blink of an eye they were gone, disappearing silently into the smoke.
No one spoke. On her knees, gazing into the fire, Venera realized that she was waiting like everyone else for the end: a scream, a crash, or some other evidence that Margit and Moss had landed. It didn’t come. There was only the dry crackle of the flames. Someone coughed and the spell was broken. Venera took a proffered arm and stood up.
It was Samson Odess who had helped her to her feet. A short distance away Garth Diamandis was hugging his daughter fiercely as the remaining Sacrus troops climbed down from the platform. The building was swaying, its stones cracking and grinding now. The whole landscape of Spyre was transforming as trees fell and buildings quivered on the verge of collapse. Soldiers and officers of both sides looked at one another in wonder and terror. Their alliances suddenly didn’t matter.
Odess pointed to the grandly spinning town-wheels miles overhead. “Come on,” he said. “Lesser Spyre will survive when the world comes apart. It’ll all fall away from the town-wheels.”
Venera followed his gaze, then looked around. The little elevator platform might hold twelve or fifteen people; she could save her friends. Then what? Repeat the stand-off she’d just undergone, this time at the docks? Sacrus’s leaders were there. They probably held the entire city by now.
“Who are you going to save, Samson?” she asked him. “These are your people now. You’re the senior official in Liris—you’re the new botanist now, do you understand? These people are your responsibility.”
She saw the realization hit him, but the result wasn’t what she might have expected. Samson seemed to stand a little taller. His eyes, which had always darted around nervously, were now steady. He walked over to where Eilen lay crumpled. Kneeling, he arranged her limbs and closed her eyes, so that it looked like she was sleeping with her cheek and the palm of one hand pressed against the stones of Liris. Then he looked up at Venera. “We have to save them all,” he said.
It seemed hopeless, if the very fabric of Spyre was about to come apart around them. Even burying the dead in the thin earth of their ancestral home seemed pointless. In hours or minutes they would be emptied into the airs of Virga. The alternative for the living was to rise to the city, to probably become prisoners in Lesser Spyre.
The air…
“I know what to do,” Venera said. “Gather all your people. We might just make it if we go now.”
“Where?” he asked. “If the whole world’s coming apart—”
“Fin,” she shouted as she ran to the edge of the roof. “We have to get to Fin!”
She mounted her horse and led them at a walk. At first only a trickle of people followed, just those who had been on the rooftop, but soon soldiers of Liris and Sacrus threw down their weapons and joined the crowd. Their officers trailed them. Guinevera and Anseratte appeared, but they were silent when anyone asked them what to do.
As they passed the roundhouse Bryce emerged with some of his own followers. They fell into step next to Venera’s horse but, while their eyes met, they exchanged no words. Both knew that their time together had ended, as certainly as Spyre’s.
In the clear daylight, Venera was able to behold the intricacies of Greater Spyre’s estates for the first and last time. Always before she had skulked past them at night or raced along the few awning-covered roads that were tolerated by this paranoid civilization. Now, astride a ten-foot-tall beast walking the narrow strip of no-man’s land running between the walls, she could see it all. She was glad she had never known before what lay here.
The work of untold ages, of countless lives, had gone into the making of Spyre. There was not a square inch of it that was untouched by some lifetime of contemplation and planning. Any garden corner or low stone wall could tell a thousand tales of lovers who’d met there, children who built forts or cried alone, of petty disputes with neighbors settled there with blood or marriage. Time had never stopped in Spyre, but it had slowed like the sluggish blood of some fantastically old beast, and now for generations the people had lived nearly identical lives. Their hopes and dreams were channeled by the walls under which they walked—influenced by the same storybooks, paintings, and music as their ancestors—until they had become gray copies of their parents or grandparents. Each had added perhaps one small item to Spyre’s vast stockpile of bric-a-brac, unknowingly placing one more barrier before any thoughts of flight their own children might nurture. Strange languages never spoken by more than a dozen people thrived. Venera had been told how the lightless inner rooms of some estates had become bizarre shrines as beloved patriarchs died and because of tradition or fear no one could touch the body. More than one nation had died, too, as its own mausoleum ate it from the inside, its last inhabitants living out their lives in an ivy-strangled gatehouse without once stepping beyond the walls.
Now the staggered rows of hedge and wall were toppling. From the half-hidden buildings lurking beyond came the sound of glass shattering as pillars shifted. Doors unopened for centuries suddenly gaped revealing blackness or sights that seared themselves into memory but not the understanding—glimpses, as they were, of cultures and rituals gone so insular and self-referential as to be forever opaque to outsiders.