Queen of Candesce (5 page)

“What?” She glared at him. He had something like a belaying pin tied to his head; it wobbled when he moved. “Isn't all this humiliating enough?”

“We m-must put p-p-pressure on the s-spine. For l-long-term health.”

“Oh, all right.” She hunted through a cache of ridiculous alternatives, ranging from flowerpots with chin straps to a glass fishbowl, currently empty but encrusted with rime. Finally she settled on the least offensive piece, a chrome helmet with earflaps and crow's wings mounted behind the temples.

With all of this on her, Venera's feet made a satisfactory smack when they hit the ground. She could feel the weight and it was indeed nearly normal, but spread all over her surface instead of internally. And she quickly discovered that it took a good hard push to start walking and that turning or stopping were not operations to be taken lightly. She had a quarter-ton of inertia now. After walking into several walls and doorjambs she started to get the hang of it.

“N-now,” said Moss in evident satisfaction, “you are f-fit to see the b-b-botanist.”

“The what?” He threaded his way among the pillars without further comment. Venera nodded and smiled at the men and women who were putting down their work to openly stare as she passed. She tried to unobtrusively discern what they were working on, but the light here was too uneven. Shadow and glare thwarted her.

Sunlight reflecting off the polished floor washed out whatever was ahead. Venera glanced back one more time before entering the lit area. Blackness and curving arches framed a dozen white ovals—faces—all turned toward her. On those faces she read every emotion: amazement, curiosity, anger, fear. None avoided her gaze. They goggled at her as though they'd never seen a stranger before.

Maybe they hadn't. Venera's scalp prickled, but Moss was waving her ahead. Blinking, she stepped from the dark gallery into the courtyard of Liris.

For a moment it seemed as if she'd entered one of the paintings on the ceiling of her father's chapel. This one came complete with scented pink clouds. She reached out a hand to touch one of these and heard the sharp click of a weapon being cocked. Venera froze.

“It would be very unwise of you to complete that gesture,” drawled a voice from somewhere ahead. Slowly, Venera retracted her hand. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness she saw the barrels of three antique-looking rifles aimed her way. Grim men in iron held them.

The soldiers made a shocking contrast to their setting. The entire courtyard was full of trees, all of one type, all in full flower. The scent and color of the millions of blossoms was overwhelming. It took Venera a moment to notice that the branches of many of the trees were hung with jewels, and gold rings encircled some of the trunks. It took her another moment to realize that a throne sat in the sole bare patch at the center of the courtyard. The woman lounging there was watching her with obvious amusement.

Her gown was of gold, silver, and platinum; on her head was a crown touched with gems of all shades that flashed in the concentrated light of Candesce. She appeared to be in early middle age, but was still beautiful; a cascade of hair dyed the same color as the blossoms wound down her shoulders.

“You seem reluctant to step into sunlight,” she said with evident amusement. “I can see why.” She tapped her own cheeks, eyes twinkling.

Venera eyed the soldiers, thought about it, and walked over. Since this was evidently a throne room of sorts, she bowed deeply. “Your…majesty?”

“Oh. Oh no.” The woman chuckled. “I am no queen.” She waved a hand dismissively. “We are a meritocracy in Liris. You'll learn. My name is Margit, and I am Liris's resident botanist.”

“Botanist…” Venera straightened and looked around at the trees. “This is your crop.”

“Please.” The lady Margit frowned. “We don't refer to the treasure of Liris in such prosaic terms. These beings
are
Liris. They sustain us, they give us meaning. They are our soul.”

“Pardon, m'lady,” said Venera with another bow. “But…what exactly
are
they?”

“Of course.” Margit's eyes grew wide. “You would never have seen one before. You are so lucky to gaze upon them for the first time when they are in flower. These, Citizen Fanning, are
cherry
trees.”

Why was that word so familiar? There'd been a ball once, and her beloved uncle had approached her with something in his hand…. A treat.

“What are cherries?” she asked as guilelessly as she could.

“An indulgence of the powerful,” said Margit with a smile. “A delicacy so rare that it evidently never made it to your father's court.”

“About that,” said Venera. “The court, I mean. My family are fantastically rich. Why make me a…citizen of this place, when you could just ransom me back? You could get a boatload of treasure for me.”

Margit scoffed. “If you were the princess of a true nation then perhaps we would consider it. But you're not even from the principalities! By your own admission during the interviews, you come from the windswept wastes of Outer Virga. There's nothing there, and I find it hard to believe your people could own anything that would be of interest to us.”

Venera narrowed her eyes. “Not even a fleet of battle cruisers capable of reducing this place to kindling from twenty miles away?”

Not only Margit laughed at this; the soldiers did as well. “Nobody threatens Spyre, young lady. We're impregnable.” Margit said this so smugly that Venera swore she would find a way to throw her words back at her.

Margit snapped her fingers and Moss stepped forward. “Acquaint her with her new duties,” said the botanist.

Moss stared at her, slack-jawed. “W-what are those?”

“She knows the languages and cultures of other places. She'll be an interpreter for the trade delegation. Go introduce her.” Margit turned away, lifting her chin with her eyes closed so that a beam of sunlight flooded her face.

 

On her seventeenth birthday, Venera snuck out of the palace for the first time, acquired the means to blackmail her father, killed her first person, and met the man she was destined to marry. She would later tell people that “it all just sort of happened.”

The capital of Hale was a collection of six town-wheels—spinning rings, each two thousand feet in diameter—surrounded by an ever-shifting cloud of weightless buildings and smaller rings. The main sound in the city was the rumbling of jet engines, as various rings and large municipal structures struggled to keep their spin and to avoid colliding. The scent of kerosene hung in the air; underlying it were other industrial and biological odors, just as under the rumbling of the engines you could hear shouts, horns, and the laughter of dolphins.

Venera had grown up watching the city life from afar. When she traveled between the town-wheels it was usually in a closed taxi. Sometimes one or another of the nobility hosted weightless balls; then, she and the other ingenues donned fabulous wings that were powered by stirrups, and flew intricate dances in the warm evening air. But that flight always took place within careful limits. Nobody strayed.

She was of marriageable age now—and had recently come to realize that in Hale, marriageable also meant murderable. Venera had three sisters and had once had three brothers. Now she had two of those, and the once-close girls of the family were starting to actively plot against one another. With the boys, it was all about succession; with the girls, marriage.

Someone had used a marvelous word at a dinner party just a few days before:
leverage.
Leverage was what she needed, Venera had decided. And so her thoughts had turned to old family tragedies and the mysteries that had consumed her as a girl.

Today she was dressed in the brown blouse and pantaloons of a servant girl and the wings on her back were not butterfly orange or feathered pink, but beige canvas. Her hair was tied down with a drab cloth and she soared the air of the city barefoot. In her waist bag she carried some money, a pistol, and a porcelain-headed doll. She knew where she was going.

The bad neighborhoods started remarkably close to the palace. This fact might have had something to do with the royal habit of simply dumping waste off the palace wheel without regard to trajectory or velocity. The upper classes couldn't be entirely blamed for the stench that wafted at Venera as she flapped toward her destination, however. She wasn't disgusted; on the contrary the smell and the sound of arguing, shouting people made her heart pound with excitement. Since she was little she'd sat for hours with her eye glued to a telescope, watching these citizens and this neighborhood roll by as the palace turned past it. She knew the place—she had simply never been here.

What Venera approached looked like nothing so much as an explosion frozen in time. Even the smoke (of which there was plenty) was motionless, or rather it moved only as quickly as the air that oozed slowly between the hundreds of cubes, balls, and disheveled shapes that counted as buildings here. Anything not tied down hung in the air and drifted gradually, and that meant trash, animal hair, balls of dirty water, splinters, and scraps of cloth all contributed to the cloud. When the doldrums of summer broke and a stiff wind finally did snake through the place, half the mass of the neighborhood was going to simply blow away, like chaff. For now it roiled around Venera as she ducked and dove toward the gray blockhouse that was her destination.

Her business in the building was brief, but every detail of the transaction seemed etched in extraordinary detail—for here were people who didn't know who she was. It was marvelous to be treated like servants and ordinary folk treated one another, for a change—marvelous and eye-opening. Nobody opened the door to the place for her; she had to do it herself. Nobody announced her presence, she had to clear her throat and ask the man behind the counter to help her. And she had to
pay,
with her own money!

“The contents of locker six-sixty-four,” she said, holding out the sheet of paper she'd written the information on. The paper was for his benefit, not hers, for she'd memorized the brief string of letters and numbers years ago. Deciphering the letters Uncle Albard had penned on her doll's forehead had been one of her primary motivations to learn to read.

The keeper of the storage lockers merely grunted and said, “Get 'em yourself. If you've got the combination, you get in, that's the rule.” He pointed to a doorway at the end of the counter.

She made to go that way and he said, “Back pay's owing on that one. Six hundred.” He grinned like a shark. “We were about to clear it out.”

Venera opened her bag, letting him see the pistol as she rummaged for the cash. He took it without comment and waved her through the door.

The only thing in the dingy locker was a water-stained file folder. As she stood in the half-light flipping through it, Venera decided it was all she needed. The documents were from the College of Succession at the University of Candesce, two thousand miles away. They included DNA analyses that proved her father was not of the royal line.

She barely saw the tumbled buildings as she left the blockhouse; maybe that was why she got turned around. But suddenly Venera snapped to attention and realized she was in a narrow chute formed by five clapboard structures, on her way down, not up toward the palace. Frowning, she grabbed a handy rope to steady herself and turned to go back the way she'd come.

“Don't.” The voice was quiet, and came from above and to the left. Venera flipped over to orient herself to the speaker. In the gray reflected light from shingle and tar paper she saw a youth—perhaps no older than herself—with tangled red hair and the long bones of someone raised in too little gravity. He smiled toothily at her and said, “Bad men coming behind you. Keep going and take your first hard right, and you'll be safe.”

She hesitated, and he scowled. “Not shittin' ya. Get going if you know what's good for you.”

Venera flipped again, planted her feet on the rope, and kicked off down the chute. As she reached the corner the boy had indicated she heard voices coming from the far end of the chute—opposite the way he'd said the bad men were coming from.

This side way led quickly to well-traveled airspace and had no niches or doors out of which someone could spring. Feeling momentarily safe, Venera peeked around the corner of the chute. Three men were flying slowly up from the left.

“I really think you've gotten us lost this time,” said the one in the lead. He was in his late twenties and obviously noble or rich from his dress and demeanor. One of his companions was similarly dressed, but the third man looked like a commoner. She couldn't see much more in the dim light. “The palace is definitely not this way,” continued the leader. “My appointment is at two o'clock. I can't afford to be late.”

Two o'clock? She remembered one of the courtiers telling her that an admiral from some neighboring country would be calling on her father in the early afternoon. Was this the man?

Suddenly one of the other men shouted, “Hey!” He had barely writhed out of the way of a sword that had suddenly appeared in the third one's hand. “Chaison, it's a trap!”

Four men shot down the chute from the right. They were rough-looking, the sort of thugs Venera had watched roaming the neighborhood through her spyglass and sometimes fantasized about. All had drawn swords and none spoke as they set upon their two victims.

The one named Chaison whirled his cloak into the air between himself and the attackers and drew his sword as his friend parried a thrust from their erstwhile guide. After the initial warning from Chaison's friend, nobody spoke.

In a free-fall swordfight, the blade was as much propulsion as weapon. Each of the men found purchase in wall or rope or opponent with hand, foot, shoulder, or blade as they could. Each impact sent them in a new direction and they tumbled and spun as they slashed at one another. Venera had watched men practice with swords and had even witnessed duels, but this was totally different. There was nothing mannered about it; the fight was swift and brutal. The men's movements were beautiful, viscerally thrilling, and almost too fast to take in.