He smiled with a trace of his usual arrogance. He stood up and adjusted the sleeves of the formal shirt he still wore. “Things not going your way out there?”
“Two points,” said Venera, holding up two fingers. “First: I’m holding a gun on you. Second: you’re rapidly becoming expendable.”
“All right, all right,” he said irritably. “Don’t be so prickly. After all, I came here of my own free will.”
“And that’s supposed to impress me?” She leaned on the doorjamb and crossed her arms.
“Think about it,” he said. “What do I have to gain from revealing who you are?”
“I don’t know. Suppose you tell me?”
Now he scowled at her, as if she were some common servant girl who’d had the temerity to interrupt him while he was talking. “I have spent thirty-two years learning the ins and outs of council politics. All that time, becoming an expert—maybe the expert—on Spyre, learning who is beholden to whom, who’s ambitious and who just wants to keep their heads down. I have been the public face of Sacrus for much of that time, their most important operative, because for all those years, Spyre’s politics was all that mattered. But look at what’s happening.” He waved a hand to indicate the siege and battle going on beyond Liris’s thick walls. “Everything that made me valuable is being swept away.”
This was not what Venera had been expecting to hear from him. She came into the room and sat down on a bench facing Sarto. He looked at her levelly and said, “Change is inconceivable to most people in Spyre; to them a catastrophe is a tree falling across their fence. A vast political upheaval would be somebody snubbing somebody else at a party. That’s the system I was bred and trained to work in. But my masters have always known that there’s much bigger game out there. They’ve been biding their time, lo these many centuries. Now they finally have in their grasp a tool with which to conquer the world—the real world, not just this squalid imitation we’re standing in. On the scale of Sacrus’s new ambitions, all of my accomplishments count for nothing.”
Venera nodded slowly. “Spyre is having all its borders redrawn around you. Even if they never get the key from me, Sacrus will be facing a new Spyre once the fighting stops. I’ll bet they’ve been grooming someone young and malleable to take your place in that new world.”
He grimaced. “No one likes to be discarded. I could see it coming, though. It was inevitable, really, unless…”
“Unless you could prove your continuing usefulness to your masters,” she said. “Say, by personally bringing them the key?”
He shrugged. “Yesterday’s council meeting would otherwise have been my last public performance. At least here, as your, uh, guest, I might have the opportunity to act as Sacrus’s negotiator. Think about it—you’re surrounded, outgunned, you’re approaching the point where you have to admit you’re going to lose. But I can tell you the semaphore codes to signal our commanders that we’ve reached an accommodation. As long as you had power here, you could have functioned as the perfect traitor. A few bad orders, your forces ordered into a trap, then it’s over the wall for you and I, the key safely into my master’s hands, you on your way home to wherever it is you came from.”
Venera tamped down on her anger. Sarto was used to dealing in cold political equations; so was she, for that matter. What he was proposing shouldn’t shock her. “But if I’m disgraced, I can’t betray my people.”
“Your usefulness plummets,” he said with a nod. “So, no, I didn’t tattle on you. You’re hardly of any value now, are you? All you’ve got is the key. If your own side’s turned against you, your only remaining option is to throw yourself on the mercy of Sacrus. Which might win me some points if I’m the one who brings you in, but not as much, and—”
“—And I have no reason to expect good treatment from them,” she finished. “So why should I do it?”
He stood up—slowly, mindful of her gun—and walked a little distance away. He gazed up at the room’s little windows. “What other option do you have?” he asked.
She thought at first that he’d said this rhetorically, but something about his tone… It had sounded like a genuine question.
Venera sat there for a while, thinking. She went over the incident with the council members on the roof; who could have outted her? Everything depended on that—and on when it had happened. Sarto said nothing, merely waited patiently with his arms crossed, staring idly up at the little window.
Finally she nodded and stood up. “All right,” she said. “Jacoby, I think we can still come to an… accommodation. Here’s what I’m thinking…”
19
As sometimes happened at the worst of moments, Venera lost her sense of gravity just before she hit the ground. The upthrusting spears of brush and stunted trees flipped around and became abstract decorations on a vast wall she was approaching. Her feet dangled over sideways buildings and the pikes of soldiers. Then the wall hit her, and she bounced and tumbled like a rag doll. Strangely, it didn’t hurt at all—perhaps not so strangely, granted that she was swaddled in armor.
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.