Queen of Candesce

“Lower your guns,” Selene was shouting. Venera caught a confused glimpse of men and women stepping out of the way as she and Margit tumbled to the edge of the roof by the courtyard. Nobody moved to help her—if anyone laid a hand on either her or Margit, everyone would start shooting.

Margit elbowed Venera in the face and her head snapped back. She had an upside-down view of the courtyard below; it was an inferno.

“That red looks good on the trees, don’t you think?” Margit muttered. She struck Venera again. Dazed, Venera couldn’t recover fast enough and suddenly found Margit standing over her, pistol aimed at her.

“The key,” she said, “or you die.”

A shadow flickered from overhead. Margit glanced up, said, “What—” and then Moss collided with her and the two of them sailed off the roof. In the blink of an eye they were gone, disappearing silently into the smoke.

No one spoke. On her knees, gazing into the fire, Venera realized that she was waiting like everyone else for the end: a scream, a crash, or some other evidence that Margit and Moss had landed. It didn’t come. There was only the dry crackle of the flames. Someone coughed and the spell was broken. Venera took a proffered arm and stood up.

It was Samson Odess who had helped her to her feet. A short distance away Garth Diamandis was hugging his daughter fiercely as the remaining Sacrus troops climbed down from the platform. The building was swaying, its stones cracking and grinding now. The whole landscape of Spyre was transforming as trees fell and buildings quivered on the verge of collapse. Soldiers and officers of both sides looked at one another in wonder and terror. Their alliances suddenly didn’t matter.

Odess pointed to the grandly spi

Venera followed his gaze, then looked around. The little elevator platform might hold twelve or fifteen people; she could save her friends. Then what? Repeat the stand-off she’d just undergone, this time at the docks? Sacrus’s leaders were there. They probably held the entire city by now.

“Who are you going to save, Samson?” she asked him. “These are your people now. You’re the senior official in Liris—you’re the new botanist now, do you understand? These people are your responsibility.”

She saw the realization hit him, but the result wasn’t what she might have expected. Samson seemed to stand a little taller. His eyes, which had always darted around nervously, were now steady. He walked over to where Eilen lay crumpled. Kneeling, he arranged her limbs and closed her eyes, so that it looked like she was sleeping with her cheek and the palm of one hand pressed against the stones of Liris. Then he looked up at Venera. “We have to save them all,” he said.

It seemed hopeless, if the very fabric of Spyre was about to come apart around them. Even burying the dead in the thin earth of their ancestral home seemed pointless. In hours or minutes they would be emptied into the airs of Virga. The alternative for the living was to rise to the city, to probably become prisoners in Lesser Spyre.

The air…

“I know what to do,” Venera said. “Gather all your people. We might just make it if we go now.”

“Where?” he asked. “If the whole world’s coming apart—”

“Fin,” she shouted as she ran to the edge of the roof. “We have to get to Fin!”

She mounted her horse and led them at a walk. At first only a trickle of people followed, just those who had been on the rooftop, but soon soldiers of Liris and Sacrus threw down their weapons and joined the crowd. Their officers trailed them. Guinevera and Anseratte appeared, but they were silent when anyone asked them what to do.

As they passed the roundhouse Bryce emerged with some of his own followers. They fell into step next to Venera’s horse but, while their eyes met, they exchanged no words. Both knew that their time together had ended, as certainly as Spyre’s.

In the clear daylight, Venera was able to behold the intricacies of Greater Spyre’s estates for the first and last time. Always before she had skulked past them at night or raced along the few awning-covered roads that were tolerated by this paranoid civilization. Now, astride a ten-foot-tall beast walking the narrow strip of no-man’s land ru

The work of untold ages, of countless lives, had gone into the making of Spyre. There was not a square inch of it that was untouched by some lifetime of contemplation and pla

Now the staggered rows of hedge and wall were toppling. From the half-hidden buildings lurking beyond came the sound of glass shattering as pillars shifted. Doors unopened for centuries suddenly gaped revealing blackness or sights that seared themselves into memory but not the understanding—glimpses, as they were, of cultures and rituals gone so insular and self-referential as to be forever opaque to outsiders.

And now the people were visible, ru

As a many-verandaed manor collapsed in on itself Venera caught a glimpse of the people still inside: the very old, parchment hands crossed over their laps as they sat unmoved beneath their collapsing ceilings; and the panicked who stood staring wide eyed at open fields where walls had been. The building’s floors came down one atop the other, pancaking in a wallop of dust, and they were all gone.

“Liris’s cable has snapped,” someone said. Venera didn’t look around. She felt strangely calm; after all, what lay ahead of them all but a return to the skies of Virga? She knew those skies, had flown in them many times. There, of course, lay the irony: for those who fell into the air with the cascading pieces of the great wheel, this would not be the end, but a begi

And for her? She had saved herself from her scheming sisters and her father’s homicidal court by marrying a dashing admiral. In the end, he had lived up to her expectations, but he had also died. Venera had been taught exactly one way to deal with such crises, which was through vengeance. Now she patted the front of her jacket, where the key to Candesce nestled once again in its i