Six wooden platforms had been lowered over the top of the stone cube and were being winched down. Each was crowded with men in tall steel helmets and outlandish spiked armor. They clutched pikes and rifles with barrels longer than they were tall. Several were pointing at her excitedly.
Venera swore and took off up the rubble-strewn slope. The wind was at her back, and it became stronger the closer she got to the edge. Several gusts lifted her off her feet. Venera noticed that the metal skin of Spyre was completely exposed in the final yards leading up to the edge. Only fair-sized rocks inhabited the area behind it. As she watched, a stone the size of her foot rolled up the metal and spun off into the air. A few more yards and the wind would take her, too.
Her foot sank into the slope and Venera fell in ridiculous slow-motion. As she pried herself upright again she saw that the metal plate bent by her foot was vibrating madly in the square hole it had made. Then with a loud pop it disappeared and suddenly a hurricane was howling into the bright aperture it had left.
Venera was sucked down and slid forward until she was right over the hole. She reached out and braced her hands on either side while the air screamed past her. It was trying to escape Spyre with even more passion than hers. For a few seconds she could only stare down and see what faced her if she made it to the edge and jumped.
Many long flagpole-like beams thrust out below the edge of the world. They trailed wire nets into the furious wind; anyone caught on those nets would suffocate before they could be pulled up. Far beneath the nets, where scudding clouds spun past, Venera glimpsed thousands of black specks and grayish veins in the air. Mines? More razor wire? Diamandis had not been lying, after all.
"Damn! Shit!” She tried to scream more curses—every one she could think of—but the air was being pulled out of her lungs. She was about to faint into the hole and die.
Strong hands took her by the arms and legs and hauled her back. Venera was hoisted onto someone's back and unceremoniously toted back down the slope. With every jolting step escape, and home, and Chaison receded past the frame of her grasping fingers.
3
Although he was her favorite uncle, Venera never saw much of Prince Albard. He was a mysterious figure on the periphery of the court, sweeping into Hale in his yacht to regale her with tales of strange cities and the outlandish women he'd met there (always sighing when he talked of them). His face was split down the center by a saber scar, putting his lips into a permanent twist that made it look like he was smirking. Unlike most of the people who encountered him, Venera knew that he was smirking—laughing inside at all the pointless desperation and petty recrimination of life. In that regard he was the polar opposite of her father, a man with a mind focused by a single lens of suspicion; maybe that was why she clung to Albard's knees when he did appear, and treasured the odd-shaped dolls and toys he brought.
They recognized each other, this vagabond prince in his motley and the pouting princess in clothes she systematically tattered as soon as she was in them. So maybe it was natural that when the time came, it was in her bedroom that Albard barricaded himself.
He only noticed her after he had dragged her wardrobe across the door and piled some chairs and tables around it. “Damn, girl, what are you doing here?"
Venera had cocked her head and squinted at him. “This is my room."
"I know it's your room, dammit. Shouldn't you be at lessons?"
"I bit the tutor.” Banished and bored, she had (not out of anger but a more scientific impulse) been beheading some of her dolls when Albard swept in. Venera had assumed that he was there to talk to her and had politely waited, limp headless body in one hand, while he proceeded to move all the furniture. So he wasn't there to see her? What, then, was this all about?
"Oh, never mind,” he said irritably, “just stay out of sight. This could get ugly."
Now she could hear shouting outside, sounds of people running. “What did you do?” she asked.
He was leaning back against the pile of furniture as though trying to propel it out the room. “I bit someone, too,” he said. “Or, rather, I was about to, and they found out."
Venera came and sat down on the fuchsia carpet near him. “My father, right?"
His eyebrows rose comically. “How did you guess?"
Venera thought about this for a while. Then she said, “Does that mean that everybody who makes Father mad has to come to this room?"
Albard laughed. “Niece, if that were true, the whole damn kingdom would be in here with us."
"Oh.” She was slightly reassured.
"Give it up, Albard!” someone shouted from outside. It sounded like her father. There was some sort of mumbling discussion, then: “Is, uh… is Venera in there with you?"
"No!” The prince put a finger to his lips and knelt next to her. “The one thing I absolutely will not do,” he said gently, “is use you as a bargaining chip. If you want to leave, I will tear down this barricade and let you go."
"What will they do to you?"
"Put me in chains, take me away… then it all depends on your father's mood. There's a black cloud behind his eyes lately, have you seen it?” She nodded vigorously. “It's getting bigger and bigger, that cloud, and I think it's starting to crowd out everything else. That worries me."
"I know what you mean."
"I daresay you do.” There followed a long interval during which Albard negotiated with the people on the other side of the furniture. Venera retreated to the window, but she was far from bored now. At last Albard blew out his cheeks and turned to her.
"Things are not going well,” he said. “Do you have a pen and some writing material?” She pointed to the desk that perched on top of the barricade. “Ah. Much obliged."
He clambered up and retrieved a pen and some paper. Then, frowning, he dropped the paper. He went to his knees and began hunting around for something, while Venera watched closely. He came up with one of her dolls, a favorite that had a porcelain head and cloth body.
"Do you mind if I borrow this for a minute?” he asked her. She shrugged.
Albard rubbed the doll's face against the stone floor for a while, while crashing sounds started from the hallway. The barricade shook. Holding the doll up critically, the prince grunted in satisfaction. Then he hunched over and began delicately pressing the pen against its face.
He was standing in the center of the room with his hands behind his back when the barricade finally fell. A dozen solders came in, and they marched him out; he only had time to look back and wink at Venera before he was gone.
After they'd taken him away, some members of the secret police ransacked her room. (That it looked substantially the same when they left as before Albard had arrived was a testament to her own habits.) They seized everything that could write or be written on, even prying the plaster off the wall where she'd scribbled on it. Venera herself was frisked several times, and then they swirled out, all clinking metal and bandoliers, leaving her sitting in the exact spot where he had been standing.
Neither she, nor anyone she would later meet, ever saw Albard again.
Eventually, she moved over to the window and picked up a particular doll. Its tunic was ripped where the secret policemen had cut it open looking for hidden notes. Venera held it up to the window and frowned.
So that was what he'd been doing. Albard had rubbed its eyebrows off against the stone. Then, in meticulous tiny lines and curls, he had repainted them. From a distance of more than a few inches they seemed normal. Up close, though, she could see what they were made of:
Letters.