Jacoby Sarto laughed. It was an ugly, contemptuous sound, delivered by a man who had spent decades using his voice to wither other men’s courage. The commander glared at him. “I fail to see the humor in any of this, Lord Sarto.”
“Forgivable,” said Sarto dryly, “as you’re not aware of Sacrus’s objectives. They want Liris, not your management. They haven’t crushed the soldiers pinned down at the world’s edge because they’re dangling them as bait.”
“What could they possibly want with Liris?”
“Me,” said Venera, “because they surely think I’m still there—and the elevator cable. They need to cut it. All they have to do is capture me or make it impossible for me to leave Greater Spyre. Then they’ve won. It will just be a matter of time.”
Now it was the commander’s turn to laugh. “I think you vastly overrate your own value, and underrate the potential of this army,” he said, sweeping his arm to indicate the paltry hundreds gathered in the cavernous shed. “You alone can’t hold this alliance together, Lady Thrace-Guiles. And I said it before, the elevator cables are of little strategic interest.”
Venera was furious. She wanted to tell him that she’d seen more men gathered at circuses in Rush than he had in his vaunted army. But, remembering how she had thrown a lighted lamp at Garth in anger and his gentle chiding after, she bit back on what she wanted to say, and instead said, “You’ll change your mind once you know the true strategic situation. Sacrus wants—” She stopped as Sarto touched her arm.
He was shaking his head. “This is not the right audience,” he said quietly.
“Um.” In an instant her understanding of the situation flipped around. When she had walked in here she had seen this knot of officers in one corner of the roundhouse and assumed that they were debating their plan of attack. But that wasn’t what they were doing at all. They had been huddling here, as far as possible from the men they must command. They weren’t planning; they were hesitating.
“Hmmm…” She quirked a transparently false smile at the commander. “If you men will excuse me for a few minutes?” He looked puzzled, then annoyed, then amused. Venera took Sarto’s arm and led him away from the table.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
She stopped in an area of blank floor stained over the decades by engine oil and grease. At first Venera didn’t meet Sarto’s eyes. She was looking around at the towering wrought-iron pillars, the tessellated windows in the ceiling, the smoky beams of light that intersected on the black backs of the locomotives. A deep knot of some kind, loosened when she cried in Eilen’s arms, was unraveling.
“They talk about places as being our homes,” she mused. “It’s not the place, really, but the people.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said. His dry irony had no effect on Venera. She merely shrugged.
“You were right,” she said. He cocked his head to one side, crossing his arms, and waited. “After the confirmation, when you said I was still Sacrus’s,” she went on. “And in the council chamber, even when we talked in your cell earlier tonight. Even now. As long as I wanted to leave Spyre, I was theirs. As long as they’ve known what to dangle in front of me, there was nothing I could do but what they wanted me to do.”
“Haven’t I said that repeatedly?” He sounded annoyed.
“All along, there’s been a way to break their hold on me,” she said. “I just haven’t had the courage to do it.”
He grumbled, “I’d like to think I made the right choice by throwing in with you. Takes you long enough to come to a decision, though.”
Venera laughed. “All right. Let’s do this.” She started to walk toward the locomotives.
“There you are!” Venera stumbled, cursed, and then flung out her arms.
“Bryce!” He hugged her, but hesitantly—and she knew not to display too much enthusiasm herself. No one knew they were lovers; that knowledge would be one more piece of leverage against them. So she disengaged from him quickly and stepped back. “What happened? I saw the semaphore station blown up. We all assumed you were…”
He shook his head. In the second-hand light he did look a bit disheveled and soot stained. “A bunch of us got knocked off the roof, but none of us were hurt.” He laughed. “We landed in the brambles and then had to claw our way through with Sacrus’s boys firing at our arses all the way. Damn near got shot by our own side as well, before we convinced them who we were.”
Now she did hug him and damn the consequences. “Have you been able to contact any of our—your people?”
He nodded. “There’s a semaphore station on the roof. The whole Buridan network’s in contact. Do you have orders?”
As Venera realized what was possible, she grinned. “Yes!” She took Bryce by one arm and Sarto by the other and dragged them across the floor. “I think I know a way to break the siege and save the other commanders. You need to get up there and get Buridan to send us something. Jacoby, you get up there too. You need to convince Sacrus that I’m ready to double-cross my people.” She pushed them both away.
“And what are you going to do?” asked Bryce.
She smiled past the throbbing in her jaw. “What I do best,” she said. “I’ll set the ball rolling.”
Venera stalked over to the black, bedewed snout of a locomotive and pulled herself up to stand in front of its headlamp. She was drenched in light from it and the overhead spots, aware that her pale face and hands must be as bright as lantern flames against the dark metal surrounding her. She raised her arms.
“It is tüüüme!”
She screamed it with all her might, squeezed all the anger and the pain from her twisted family and poisonous intrigues of her youth, the indifferent bullet and her loss of her husband Chaison, the blood on her hands after she stabbed Aubri Mahallan, the smoke from her pistols as she shot men and women alike, all of it into that one word. As the echoes subsided everyone in the roundhouse came to their feet. All eyes were on her and that was exactly right, exactly how it should be.
“Today the old debts will be settled! Two hundred years and more the truth has waited in Buridan tower—the truth of what Sacrus is and what they have done! Nearly too late, but not too late, because you, here today, will be the ones to settle those debts and at the same time, prevent Sacrus from ever committing such atrocities again!
“Let me describe my home. Let me describe Buridan tower!” Out of the corner of her eye she saw the army commanders running from their map table, but they had to shoulder their way through hundreds of soldiers to reach her, and the soldiers were raptly attentive to her alone. “Like a vast musical instrument, a flute thrust into the sky and played on by the ceaseless hurricane winds of the airfall. Cold, its corridors decorated with grit and wavering, torn ribbons that once were tapestries. Wet, with nothing to burn except the feathers of birds. Never silent, never still as the beams it stands on sway under the onslaught of air. A roaring tomb, that is Buridan tower! That is what Sacrus made. It is what they promise to make of your homes as well, make no mistake.
“That’s right,” she nodded. “You’re fighting for far more than you may know. This isn’t just a matter of historical grudges, nor is it a skirmish over Sacrus’s kidnapping and torture of your women and children. This is about your future. Do you want all of Spyre to become like Buridan, an empty tomb, a capricious playground for the winds? Because that is what Sacrus has planned for Spyre.”