Queen of Candesce

Withering fire from below prevented the Lirisians from getting near the things. They were forced to crouch a few feet back and poke at them with their pikes.

A third ladder appeared, and suddenly men were swarming onto the roof. The Lirisians stood up. Venera saw Eilen raise a rusted old sword as a figure in red-painted iron armor reared above her.

Venera raised her pistol and fired. She walked toward Eilen, firing steadily until the man who’d threatened her friend fell. He wasn’t dead—his armor was so thick that the bullets probably hadn’t penetrated—but she’d rattled his skull for sure.

She was five feet away when her pistol clicked empty. This was the gun Cori

She tripped Eilen, and when the woman had fallen behind her, Venera stepped between her and the two men. She drop-kicked the leader and he windmilled his arms for a moment before falling back. The force of her kick had propelled Venera back ten feet. She landed badly, located Eilen, and shouted, “Come on!”

Moss straight-armed a pike into the helmet of the other man. Beside him Odess shoved a lighted torch at a third who was stepping off the ladder. Gunfire sounded and somebody fell, but she couldn’t see who through the press of bodies.

She grabbed Eilen’s arm. “We need guns! Are there more in the lockers?”

Eilen shook her head. “We barely had enough for the soldiers. There’s that.” She pointed.

Around the corner of the courtyard shaft, the ancient, filigreed morning gun still sat on a tripod under its little canopy. Venera started to laugh, but the sound died in her throat. “Come on!”

The two women wrestled the weapon off its stand. It was a massive thing, and though it weighed little in this gravity, it was difficult to maneuver. “Do we have shells?” Venera asked.

“Bullets, no shells,” said Eilen. “There’s black powder in that bin.”

Venera opened the gun’s breach. It was of a pointlessly primitive design. You poured black powder into it and then inserted the bullet and closed the breach. It had a spark wheel instead of a percussion trigger. “Well, then, come on.” Eilen grabbed up the box of bullets and a sack of powder, and they ran along the i

One bullet spun on the flagstones at Venera’s feet. Cradling the gun, she bent to pick up the metal slug. A wave of cold prickles swept over her shoulders and up her neck.

This bullet was identical to the one that nestled inside her jacket—identical save for the fact that it had never been fired.

She couldn’t believe it. The bullet she carried—that had sailed a thousand miles through the airs and clouds of Virga, avoiding cities and farms, adeptly swerving to avoid fish and rocks and oceanic balls of water, this bullet that had lined up on Slipstream and the city of Rush and the window in the admiralty where Venera stood so i

Venera had fantasized about this moment many times. She had rehearsed what she would say to the owner of the gun when she finally found him. It was a high, grand, and glorious speech that, in her imagination, always ended with her putting a bullet in the villain. Cradling this picture of revenge to herself had gotten her through many nights, many cocktail parties where out of the corner of her eye she could see the ladies of the admiralty pointing to her scar and murmuring to one another behind their fans.

“Huh,” she said.

“Venera? Are you all right?”

Venera shook her head violently. “Powder. Quick!” She held out the gun, and Eilen filled it. Then she jammed the clean new bullet into the breach and closed it. She lofted the gun and spun the wheel.

“Everybody down!” Nobody heard her, but luckily a gap opened in the line at the last second. The gun made a huge noise and nearly blew Venera off the roof. When the vast plume of smoke cleared she saw nearly everybody in sight recovering from having ducked.

It might not be powerful or accurate, but the thing was loud. That fact might just save them.

She ran toward the Lirisians. “The ca

“But we lost the rest of the bullets.”

“We’ve got one.” She reached into her jacket pocket. There it was, its contours familiar from years of touching. She brought out her bullet. Her fingers trembled now as she held it up to the red flare light.

“Damn you anyway,” she whispered to it.

Eilen glanced up, said, “Oh,” and held up the gun. There was no time for ceremony; Venera slid the hated slug into the breach and it fit perfectly. She clicked it shut.

“Out of my way!” She crossed the roof in great bounding steps, dodging between fighting men to reach the battlement where the ladders jutted up. The gunfire from below had stopped; the snipers didn’t want to hit their own men as they topped the wall. Venera hopped up onto a crenel and sighted nearly straight down. She saw the startled eyes of a Sacrus soldier between her feet, and half a dozen heads below his. She spun the spark wheel.

The explosion lifted her off her feet. Everything disappeared behind a ball of smoke. When she staggered to her feet some yards away, Venera found herself surrounded by cheering people. Several of Sacrus’s soldiers were being thrown off the roof, and for the moment no more were appearing. As the smoke cleared she saw that the top of the ladder she’d fired down was missing.

“Keep filling it,” she said, thrusting the gun at Eilen. “Bullets don’t matter—as long as it’s bright and loud.”

Moss’s gri

She nodded. Sacrus didn’t have so many people that they could afford to sacrifice them in wave attacks. The darkness and confusion would help; and though they had probably heard it every day of their lives, the thunderous sound of the morning gun at this close range would give pause to the men holding the ladders.

“It’s not going to keep them at bay for long, though,” she said. “Where are the rest of our people?”

Now Moss frowned. “T-trapped, I fear. Guinevera l-led them into an ambush. Now they have their backs to the open air.” He pointed toward the edge of the world and the night skies beyond.

Venera hopped up on the edge of the elevator platform and took a quick look around. Sacrus’s people were spread in a thin line around two of the approaches to Liris. On their third side, ragged girders and scoured metal jutted off the end of the world. And on the fourth—behind her—a jumble of brambles, thorn-bushes, and broken masonry formed a natural barrier that Sacrus wasn’t bothering to police.

In the darkness beyond, hundreds of torches lit the contours of an army small by Venera’s standards, but huge for Spyre. There might be no more than a thousand men there, but that was all the forces that opposed Sacrus on this world.

Spreading away behind that army was the maze of estates that made up Greater Spyre. Somewhere out there was the long low building where the hollowed bomb hung, with its promise of escape.

She turned to Moss. “You need to break through Sacrus’s lines. Otherwise, they’ll overwhelm us, and then they can turn and face our army with a secure fortress behind them.”