While Odess sputtered and tried to explain why tradition demanded that they rise to Lesser Spyre in full ceremonial gear, Venera watched the soldiers deposit their precious cargo on the platform. After the rest of the delegation was on board, they flipped up railings on all sides (to her relief) and one bent to examine the archaic engine. This was what really interested her.
"If we're all ready, we will sing the Hymn of Ascension,” said Odess, portentously.
Venera looked around. “The what?"
He looked as though he'd been slapped—but Eilen put a hand on his arm. “We didn't tell her about it, so how would she know?"
"Anyone in Spyre could see us arise, hear the…” He realized his mistake. “Ah yes. A true foreigner.” Shaking himself, he put both hands on the rail and puffed out his cheeks. “Listen, then, and learn the ways of a civilized society."
While they sang their little ditty, Venera watched the soldier spark the hulking rotary engine into life. Its chattering roar immediately drowned out the miniature choir, who didn't seem to notice. The wheel turned, gripping the cable, and the platform inched slowly into the air.
The purpose of the railings soon became clear. Only a few yards above the rooftop they caught the edge of the howling gale that swept toward the open end of Spyre. This steady hurricane was produced by the rotation of the great cylinder, Venera knew; she'd seen its like in smaller wheels like those of Rush. A wind came in at the cylinder's axis of rotation and shot out again along the rim. If she simply jumped off the platform at this point, she would be propelled out of Spyre entirely, and at goodly force.
The four soldiers were here to shoot anyone who tried that. And now that they were higher up she could see other guarantors of obedience: gun emplacements were suspended in the middle air by more cables, and some of them were visibly manned. Hanging in the sunny clouds beyond the wheel were more bunkers and turrets. It seemed a miracle now that she had, unconscious, threaded her way between them all to land here.
"Father would love this place,” she muttered.
Chaison Fanning, her missing husband, would probably consider Spyre a moral obscenity, and would want to blow it up.
They rose some miles, through filigrees of cloud, puffballs that hovered like anxious angels between the incoming and outblowing gales; past houses and pillboxes bolted to other cables, whose glittering windows revealed nothing of what might be taking place inside them. The lands of Greater Spyre widened and widened below Venera, their patchwork estates becoming a mesmerizing labyrinth: the blockhouses of a dozen, a hundred and more Nations of Liris, it seemed, painted the inside of the cylinder. Slicing through these, leaving ruin and wildflowers on their sidings, were the railways of the preservationists.
All the while, Lesser Spyre came closer.
Venera had seen a geared town once before—in the dead hollow heart of Leaf's Choir, Chaison Fanning's ships had moored next to the asphyxiated city of Carlinth. But Carlinth's pale grandeur couldn't match the wonder of Lesser Spyre because that other city had been motionless in death, and Lesser Spyre lived. Its great wheel-shaped habitats, each a half mile or more in diameter, turned edge to angled edge like the meshwork of a vast clock. The citizen of one wheel could stroll to its edge and simply step onto the surface of another as their rims came within touching distance. The wheels were kept in configuration by a lattice of giant spars and thick cables, from which black banners fluttered.
For all this cunning and motion, Lesser Spyre did not look inviting. There were some houses and streeets, but most of the wheels were dominated on their inside surface by one or two sprawling buildings. The Admiralty at Rush had been like that, as had the Pilot's palace. But also in Rush there were wheels weeded with taverns, towers, and twisting streets, as organic and inviting as a party.
Lesser Spyre was monolithic, self-contained, and controlled. Almost nothing stuck out.
The cable car eluded gravity entirely after a while, and its passengers clipped their metal costumes to the railing and waited until their destination hove into sight. The cable terminated in a knot of dozens of others, at a complicated cagework that threaded the axle of a town-wheel. Venera could see other people embarking and disembarking there. They moved in small groups that gave one another a wide berth.
She saw something else, though, that gave her hope for the first time in days: ships were berthed here. Sleek yachts, for the most part, of many different designs and flying diverse colors—but all foreign. They signaled the possibility of escape, real escape, for the first time since her arrival.
She tapped Odess's tin shoulder and pointed. “Our customers?"
He nodded. “Pilgrims from all the principalities of Candesce come to us, hoping to leave again with some trinket or token of ours. Do you recognize any of those ships?"
Venera nodded. “That one is from Gehellen.” It was the only one she knew, but Odess was obviously impressed. “I know that we'll trade them cherries,” she went on. “But what do the rest of Spyre's countries sell?"
He laughed, and just then the platform came to rest at its terminus. As they clambered over to the axle like so many iron spiders, Odess said, “What do they trade? You ask that with refreshing innocence. If we knew what half our neighbors traded, we might arrange some extra advantage for Liris. The fame of many of Spyre's commodities is spread far and wide—but not all. There are sections of the fair no stranger can enter without providing a guarantee of circumspection."
"A what?"
"A hostage, sometimes,” said Eilen. They had entered a long cylindrical chamber with many small doors spiraling up its interior. Odess found one of these and, producing a massive key, unlocked it. Inside was a slot-shaped locker, its walls encrusted with rust and cobwebs, with one incongruously bright mirror at the far end. Odess and the others proceeded to strip off their metal shells, trading them for ornately tooled leather equivalents—except that in place of veils, each costume came with an elaborate mask. Odess passed a kit to Venera, and she turned her back modestly to change. Her mask had a falcon's beak.
"There are nations,” Odess said, “that average one customer every ten years. Whatever it is they trade, it is so fabulously valuable that the whole country lives off the sale for a generation. That's an extreme example, but there are many others who guard the nature of their produce with their lives. Liris used to be one such. Now everyone knows what we produce, but that's actually worked to our advantage."
"But what can those others be selling?” Venera shook her head in incomprehension. She was stretching a black jacket over a silver-traced vest, admiring the effect in the mirror. With the mask in place she looked intimidating. She liked the effect.
"She is from one of them.” It was one of the soldiers who said it. He didn't have to say who she was; Venera knew he meant the botanist.
Venera raised an eyebrow. “She wasn't born in Liris?"
The soldier shook his head, glancing uneasily at Odess. “Our previous botanist… the trees were languishing, m'lady. They were dying, until she came.” Odess was scowling in obvious warning, but the soldier shrugged. “Five years now, she's brought them back to health."
"And you don't know anything about where she came from?"
"Of course we do!” Odess laughed loudly. “She's a lady of the Nation of Sacrus. We know who she is… even if we don't know what it is that Sacrus does."
"You need better spies,” said Venera. Nobody laughed, but the thought intrigued her. Spyre, it seemed, was an investigator's playground. She would love to develop a network here, the way she had in secret in her adopted home of Slipstream.