Queen of Candesce

He nodded. “But all our leaders are't-trapped.”

“Well, not all.” She strode across the roof to the battlements that overlooked the bramble-choked acres. He came to stand at her side. Together they gazed out at the army that lay tantalizingly out of reach.

“If the semaphore were working—” She stopped, remembering Bryce. Moss shook his head anyway.

“S-Sacrus has encircled the't-tower. They would read every letter.”

“But we need to coordinate an attack—from outside and inside at the same time. To break through…”

He shrugged. “Simple matter. If we c-can get one p-person through the lines.”

She speculated. If she showed up there among the brambles, would the generals of that army have her arrested? How far had news of her deceptions spread?

“Get them ready,” she said. “Everyone into armor, everyone armed. I’ll be back in two minutes.” She headed for the stairs.

“Where are you g-going?”

She shot him a grim smile. “To check in on our bargaining chip.”

Venera ran through empty halls to the old prison on the main floor.

As she’d suspected, the guards had deserted their posts when the roof was attacked. The main door was ajar; Venera slowed when she saw this. Warily, she toed it open and aimed her pistol through. There was nobody in the antechamber. She sidled in.

“Hello?” That was Jacoby Sarto’s voice. Venera had never heard him sound worried, but he was clearly rattled by what was happening. He’s never been in a battle before, she realized—nor had any of these people. It was shocking to think that she was the veteran here.

Venera went on her tiptoes to look through the door’s little window into the green-walled reception room. Sarto was the sole occupant of a bench designed to seat thirty; he sat in the very center of a room that could have held a hundred. He squinted at the door, then said, “Fa

She threw open the door and stepped in. “Did you tell them?”

He appeared puzzled. “Tell who what?”

She showed him her pistol; he wouldn’t know it was empty. “Don’t play games, Sarto. Someone told Guinevera who I really am. Was it you?”

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, outgu

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.