Garth took a deep breath and committed the name to speech for the first time in twenty years. “Her name is Selene. Selene Diamandis…”

12

Spyre was awe-inspiring even at a distance of ten miles. Venera held onto netting in a rear-facing doorway of the passenger liner Glorious Dawn and watched the vast blued circle recede in the distance. First one cloud shot by to obscure a quadrant of her view, then another, then a small team of them that whirled slowly in the ship’s wake. They chopped Spyre up into fragmented images: a curve of green trees here, a glint of window in some tower (Liris?). Then, instead of clouds, it was blockhouses and barbed wire flicking by. They were passing the perimeter. She was free.

She turned, facing into the interior of the ship. The velvet-walled galleries were crowded with passengers, mostly visiting delegations returning from the Fair. But a few of the men and women were dressed in the iron and leather of a major nation: Buridan. Her retainers, maids, the Buridan trade delegation… she wasn’t free yet, not until she had found a way to evade all of them.

Now that she was undisputed head of the Nation of Buridan, Venera had new rights. The right to travel freely, for example; it had only taken a simple request and a travel visa had been delivered to her the next day. Of course she couldn’t simply wave goodbye and leave. Nobody was fully convinced that she was who she said she was. So, it had been necessary for her to invent a pointless trade tour of the principalities to justify this trip. And that in turn meant that she could not be traveling alone.

Still—after weeks of running, of being captured by Liris and made chattel; after run-ins with bombers and bombs, hostile nobility and mad botanists—after all of that, she had simply boarded a ship and left. Life was never like you imagined it would be.

And she could just keep going, she knew—all the way back to her home in Rush. The idea was tempting, but it wasn’t why she had undertaken this expedition. It was too soon to return home. She didn’t yet have enough power to undertake the revenge she planned against the Pilot of Slipstream. If she left now it would be as a thief, with only what she could carry to see her home. No, when she finally did leave Spyre, it must be with power at her back.

The only way to get that power was to increase her holdings here, as well as the faith of the people in her. So, like Liris and all the other nations of Spyre, Buridan would visit the outer world to find customers.

Her smile faltered as the last of the barbed wire and mines swept by to vanish among the clouds. True, if she just kept going she wouldn’t miss anything of Spyre, she mused. Yet even as she thought this Venera experienced a little flash of memory: of Garth Diamandis laughing in sunlight; then of Eilen leaning on a wall after drinking too much at the party.

Last night Venera too had drunk too much wine, with Garth Diamandis. Sitting in a lounge that smelled of fresh paint and plaster, they had listened to the night noises of the house and talked.

“You’re not kidding either of us,” he’d said. “You’re leaving for good. I know that. So let me tell you now, while I can, that you’ve stripped many years off my shoulders, Lady Venera Fanning. I hope you find your home intact and waiting for you.” He toasted her then.

“I’ll prove you wrong about me yet,” she’d said. “But what about you?” she asked. “When all of this really is finished with, what are you going to do? Fade into the alleys of the town wheels? Return to your life as a gigolo?”

He shook his head with a smile. “The past is the past. I’m interested in the future. Venera… I found her.”

Venera had smiled, genuinely happy for him. “Ah. Your mysterious woman. Your prime mover. Well, I’m glad.”

He’d nodded vigorously. “She’s sent me a letter, telling where and when we can meet. In the morning, you’ll head for the docks and your destiny, and I’ll be off to the city and mine. So you see, we’ve both won.”

They toasted one another, and Spyre, and eventually the whole world before the night became a happy blur.

She kicked off from the ship’s netting, almost colliding with one of the crew, and began hauling her way up the corridor to the bow of the ship. One of her new maids fell into formation next to her.

“Is there something wrong, lady?” The maid, Brydda, wrung her hands. Her normally sour face looked even more prudish as she frowned. “Is it leaving Spyre that’s upset you so?”

Venera barked a laugh. “It couldn’t happen soon enough. No.” She kept hand-walking up the rope that led to the bow.

“Can I do anything for you?”

She shot Brydda an appraising look. “You’ve traveled before, haven’t you? You were put onto my staff by the council, I’ll bet. To watch me.”

“Madam!”

“Oh, don’t deny it. Just come with. I need a… distraction. You can point out the sights as we go.”

“Yes, madam.”

They arrived at a forward observation lounge in time for the ship to exit the cloud banks. The Glorious Dawn was a typical passenger vessel: a spindle-shaped wooden shell one hundred fifty feet long and forty wide, its surface punctuated with rows of windows and open wicker-work galleries. Big jet nacelles were mounted on short arms at the stern, their whine subdued right now as the ship made a scant fifteen miles per hour through the thinning clouds. The ship’s interior was subdivided into staterooms and common areas and contained two big exercise centrifuges. With the engine sound a constant undertone, Venera could easily hear the clink of glassware in the kitchens, muted conversations, and somewhere, a string quartet tuning up. The lounge smelled of coffee and fresh air.

Such a contrast to the Rook, the last ship she had flown on. When she’d left it the Slipstream cruiser had stunk of unwashed men, stale air, and rocket exhaust. Its hull had been peppered with bullet holes and scorched by explosions. The engines’ roar would pierce your dreams as you slept and the only voices were those of arguing, cursing airmen.

The Glorious Dawn was just like every vessel she had ever traveled on prior to the Rook. Its luxuries and details were appropriate to one of Venera’s station in life; she should be able to put the ship on like a favorite glove. In the normal course of affairs she would never have set foot on a ship like the Rook, much less would she have seen it through battle and boarding, pursuit and silent running.

Yet the quiet comforts of the Glorious Dawn annoyed her. Venera went right up to the main window of the lounge and peered out. “Tell me where we are,” she commanded the maid.

There was distraction to be found in this view. Candesce lay directly ahead, its brilliance too intense to be looked at directly. Venera well knew that light, it had burned her as she’d fled from its embrace. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked past it.

She saw the principalities of Candesce. Although she had spent a week in a charcoal-harvester’s cabin perched on a burnt arm of the sargasso of Leaf’s Choir, that place had been too close to Candesce; the white air cradling the sun of suns washed out any details that lay past it. Here, for the first time, she had a clear view of the nations that surrounded that biggest of Virga’s artificial lights. And the sight was breathtaking.

Candesce lay at the center of the world, a beacon and a heart to Virga. Anything within a hundred miles of the sun of suns simply vanished in flame, a fact that the principalities exploited to dispose of trash, industrial wastes, and the bodies of their dead. This forbidden zone was completely empty, so Venera could see the whole inner surface of the two-hundred-mile-diameter bubble formed by it. On the far side of Candesce that surface was just a smooth speckled blue-green; in the middle distances Venera could make out dots and glitter, and individual beads of leaf color. As she turned to follow the curve of the material toward her the dots became buildings and the glints became the mirrored surfaces of house-sized spheres of water. The beads of green grew filigreed detail and became forests—dozens or hundreds of trees at a time, with their roots intertwined around some buried ball of dirt and rocks.