Queen of Candesce (7 page)

One slender figure with a hawk's face stood at the foot of a gold-chased pillar, her backdrop a blue trompe l'oeil vista of wheeling towns. She watched the dancers alertly, aware of the deep strains of paranoia and deceit that must run through Spyre for it to have developed this custom. For this filigreed and gleaming ballroom and its whirling dancers was the Great Fair itself.

True, there were display rooms. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Odess emerging from the doorway that led to Liris's. He was alone, and doubtless his errand had been to check on the disposition of the glass cases and lights there. No customers had passed that door since she had been here.

Venera had spent some hours in the display room, helping the others set up. A solitary cherry tree dominated the marbled parlor; it sat in a broad stone bowl, the glow of its pink blossoms the first sight that greeted a visitor. It was a fake, made of silk and common woods.

While Liris's soldiers played cards behind a screen in the display rooms, the rest of the delegation danced. The music was loud, the dances fast and close; so conversation consisted of quick whispers in your partner's ear, quips at arm's length, or brief nose-to-nose exchanges. Eavesdropping was impossible in these circumstances—and the soldiers of Spyre watched carefully for any sign of it. Venera had been told that visitors were carefully screened, and the penalty for revealing secrets here was death. Ironically, the whole setup seemed designed for cheating, for who could tell what any two dancers were telling one another?

She had heard that the dances were occasionally interrupted by spontaneous duels.

The denizens of Spyre took their masque very seriously. Not all the visitors did; most eschewed disguises, and so Venera was able to tell how many principalities were represented here. She even recognized one or two of the national costumes they wore.

A gavotte ended and the dancers broke up. Gorgon-headed Eilen headed Venera's way. A waiting footman handed her a drink as she paused, panting. “Is it always like this?” Venera asked her. “Interested customers seem a bit thin on the ground.”

“We have our regulars,” said Eilen. “It's not the season for any of them. Oh, this gravity! It pulls at my stomach.”

Venera sighed. These people were so immersed in their traditions that they couldn't see the insanity of it all. In the brief pause between dances, some of the customers had drifted off with outlandishly masked delegates—salesmen, really. Venera had been keeping track of who went through which doorways. Many of the portals around the vast chamber had never opened. They might be locked or even bricked up on the other side, for all she knew.

She couldn't figure out the architecture of the fair. It seemed that the sprawling, multiwinged building had been renovated, rebuilt, and reimagined so many times over the centuries that it had lost any sense of its original logic. Corridors ran into blank walls; stairwells led nowhere; elevator shafts opened onto roaring air where lower floors had once been. Behind the public walls countless narrow passages twisted their ways to the offices, storage lockers, and panic rooms of the trade delegations. Liris's domain extended several floors above and below their public showroom; Venera had glimpsed in passing a huge chamber, like a collapsing ballroom, its dripping casements lost in gloomy shadows. Eilen had told her that this was where they met customers back when their cherries were a state secret. The ballroom was on one of the high-security levels of the Fair; Liris still owned title to it but had no use for it now.

Venera had scoffed at this. “Has no one had the courage to drill spy holes in the walls to find out what your neighbors are up to?” Odess had sent her one of his disapproving, frightened looks, but nobody had said anything.

—Oh, something was happening—Capri, Eilen's apprentice, was leading four people in rich clothes toward the Liris door. The little surge of excitement was absurd, and Venera nearly laughed at herself. Now Odess was bowing to them. He was opening the door. Venera imagined cheering.

“Who are they?” she asked Eilen.

“Oh! Success! That's…let's see…the delegates from Tracoune.”

Venera ransacked her memory; why was that word familiar? Ah, that was it. It was only a couple of weeks ago that Venera and her husband had attended a soiree in the capital of Gehellen. The event had been unremarkable up until the shooting started, but she did remember a long conversation with a red-faced admiral of the local navy. He had mentioned Tracoune.

“Excuse me, I'd like to watch this,” she said to Eilen. The woman shrugged and turned back to the dance. Venera threaded her way around the outskirts of the ball and pushed open the door to the Liris showroom. It was at the end of a long hallway, seventy feet at least in length. Random words echoed back at her as Venera walked down it.

Odess was showing them the tree. Now he was opening a lacquered box to reveal the cherries. Capri hovered nervously in the background.

The visitors didn't seem too impressed. One of the four—a woman—wandered away from the others to stare idly at the paintings on the walls. They seemed to be marking time here, perhaps taking a break from dancing. Even Venera, with no experience in sales, could tell that.

She approached the woman. “Excuse me…,” said Venera. She deliberately did not stand or move the way Odess and Capri were—clasping their hands in front of them, darting hesitantly like servants. Instead, Venera bowed like an equal.

“Yes?” The customer looked surprised, but not displeased, at being approached in this way.

“Do I have the pleasure of addressing a citizen of Tracoune?”

The woman nodded.

“I had the most illuminating conversation recently,” Venera continued, “at a party in Gehellen. We talked about Tracoune.”

An edge of calculation came into the woman's gaze. “Oh, really? Who were you talking to?”

“An admiral in the Gehellen navy, as it happens.” Venera saw Odess notice that she had accosted a customer (his expression said, “The new one's loose!”) and then he started trying to make eye contact with her while pretending to give his full attention to his own people.

Venera smiled. “I'm so sorry that you've had to cancel the Feast of St. Jackson this year,” she said to her prospect. “The Gehellenese are speculating that you won't be able to afford to feed your own people this time next year. Gauche of them, really.”

“They said that?” The woman's face darkened in anger. “The Incident at Tibo was hardly that serious!”

“Ah, we thought not,” said Venera in a conspiratorial way. “It's just that appearance is so important to international relations, isn't it?”

Ten minutes later the visitors were signing on the dotted line. Venera stood behind the astounded trade delegation of Liris, her arms crossed, inscrutable behind her beaked mask.

Odess stepped back to whisper furiously to her. “How did you do it? These people have never been customers before!”

She shrugged. “You just have to know people's weaknesses. In a few weeks Tracoune will throw some minor party for visiting officials, and among other things they'll give away a few cherries…as if they could afford boatloads of them. A very discreet message, on a channel so private that almost no one on either side will know why when the Gehellens decide
not
to call in their outstanding loans to Tracoune…. Which they've been thinking of doing.”

He glared at her. “But how could—”

She nodded. “The levers of diplomacy are very small. The art lies in knowing where to pry.”

Venera chatted with the clients while a soldier loaded a carrying case with dry ice and Odess measured out the pithed cherries. “…Speaking of Gehellen,” Venera said after a while, “we heard about some sort of commotion there a couple of weeks ago.”

The head of the Tracoune expedition laughed. “Oh, that! They're the laughing stock of the principalities!”

“But what happened?”

He grinned. “Visitors from one of the savage nations…Oh, what was the name?”

“Slipstream,” said the woman Venera had first dealt with.

“Slipstream, that was it. Seems an admiral of Slipstream went mad and took to piracy with some of his captains. They fought a pitched battle with the Gehellen navy in the very capital itself! Smashed their way out of the palace and escaped into Leaf's Choir, where it's rumored they found and made off with the hoard of Anetene itself!”

“But that part's too preposterous, of course,” said the woman. “If they'd found the hoard, they would have a key to Candesce as well—the last one is supposed to be the centerpiece of the hoard. With that they could have ruled all of Virga from the Sun of Suns itself!”

“Well.” The man shrugged.

“What happened to them?” asked Venera. “Did they escape?”

“Oh, they evaded the Gehellen navy right enough,” he said with another laugh. “Only to be cut to ribbons in some barbarous nation near the edge of the world. None escaped, I hear.”

“None…” Venera's pulse was racing, but she chose not to believe this man. His story had too many of the facets of rumor.

“Oh, no, I've been following this one,” said the woman with evident enjoyment. “It seems the Slipstreamers ran afoul of a place called Falcon Formation. The admiral suicidally rammed his flagship into some sort of dreadnaught of Falcon's. Both ships were obliterated in the explosion. Of his six other ships, only one got away.”

“Its name?” Venera put her hand out to steady herself. Her fingers met the false bark of the fake cherry tree.

“What name?”

“The…the ship that escaped. Did you hear which one escaped?”

The woman looked affronted. “I didn't follow the story
that
closely.” Now it was her turn to laugh. “But they foolishly ran for home, and the Pilot of Slipstream had them arrested the instant they came into port. For treason! What foolishness of them to even try to go home.”

Venera was glad of the mask she wore. It felt like her heart was slowing and would stop at any second. It was all she could do to keep up appearances until the Tracoune delegation left with their first consignment of cherries. Then she rushed back to the screened alcove, ignoring the jubilant congratulations the others were lavishing on her.

Even though the mask would have hid them, she shed no tears. Venera had learned many years ago never to do that in the presence of another human being.

That evening there was a celebration in a gallery overlooking the cherry trees. Amber light poured into the blued central shaft, glinting off windows and outlining shutters and balconies above and below, while small gusts of air still warm from Candesce's light teased the diaphanous drapes. Like everywhere else in Liris, the party room was small, crammed with memorabilia and eccentric furnishings, and reachable only through a labyrinth of stairs and corridors. It reminded Venera of her childhood bedroom.

She had not wanted to come. All she wanted to do was sit alone in her closet. But Eilen insisted. “Why so gloomy?” she asked as she leaned hipshot in Venera's doorway. “You did great service to your country today!” Venera didn't speak as they walked; and she did her best to be the ghost at the wedding for the remainder of the night.

Her sorrow wasn't catching. Most of Liris turned out for the event, and a dizzying parade of strange and neurotic characters passed in front of Venera as she systematically drank herself into a stupor. There were the hereditary soldiers with their peaked helmets and blunderbusses; the gray sanitation men who spoke in monotones and huddled together near the drinks table; the seamstresses and chandlers, carpenters, and cleaners who all spoke a secret language they had developed together in their childhood. And there were children too—grave, wide-eyed gamins who skirted around Venera as though she had stepped out of one of their fantasy books.

She watched them all go by, numb.
I knew that this might happen,
she told herself.
That he might die.
Yet she had gone ahead with her plan, dragging Chaison reluctantly into it. It had been necessary if they were to save Slipstream; she knew that. But the decision still felt like a betrayal.

“It's so
electric,
” said Eilen now, “having a new face in our world!” Quite drunk, she balanced on one foot near Venera, waving excitedly at people she had seen every day of her life. Of those people, a few had approached and introduced themselves, halting and stammering; most stayed back, muttering together and eyeing Venera. Foreigner. Strange beast. New darling of the botanist.

And yes, the botanist was here too. She glided through the celebrants as though on rails, nodding here and there, speaking strategic words on the outskirts of discussions, the same mysterious smile as always hovering just behind her lips. Eventually she made her way over to Venera. She hove to just this side of Eilen. Eilen herself moved away, suddenly quiet.

“I've always said that it pays to know your customers,” the botanist said. “I judged your potential rightly.”

Venera eyed her. “Is that what you feel you do? Judge people's potential? Like the buds of flowers that might bloom or whither?”

“How apt. Yes, that's exactly right,” said the botanist. “Some are to be encouraged, others cut from the branch. You nod as though you understand.”

“I've done a certain amount of…pruning…in my day,” said Venera. “So I've achieved a great victory for your tiny nation. Now what?”

“Now,” said the botanist in a breathless sort of sisterly way, “we talk about what to do next. You see, you've vindicated my methods. I believe Liris needs to be more open to the outside world. We need to send our delegates farther, even outside Spyre itself.”

The fog of Venera's sorrow lifted just a bit. “Leave Spyre? What do you mean?”

“I would like to send a trade mission to one of the principalities,” said the botanist. “You, of course, would lead it.”

“I'd be honored,” said Venera with a straight face. “But isn't it Odess's job to arrange such things?”

“Odess?” The botanist waved her hand dismissively. “Prattling whiner. Take him if you'd like, but I can't see what good he'll do you. No, I picture you, perhaps Eilen, and one or two loyal soldiers. And a consignment of our treasure to tempt potential customers.”

“That sounds reasonable.” Venera couldn't believe what she was hearing. Did the woman seriously believe she would come back if she got out of this place? But then, everyone in Spyre seemed dangerously naive.

“Good. Say nothing of this to the others,” instructed the botanist severely. “It won't do to let old wounds fester.”

What did that mean? Venera thought about it as the botanist strolled away; but then Eilen returned and spilled her drink on Venera's shoes. The evening went downhill from there, and so she didn't really ponder the botanist's unlikely offer until she got back to her closet, near dawn.

She had just closed the ill-fitting door and was about to climb under the covers when there was a polite knock on the jamb. Venera cracked the door an inch.

Moss leaned like a decapitated tree outside her door. “Citizen F-F-Fanning,” he said. “I j-just wanted to give you th-th-these.”

In the faint lamplight of the hallway, she could just make out a tiny bouquet of posies in his hand.

The juxtaposition of his chiseled features with the emptiness of his eyes made her skin crawl. Venera slipped her hand out to snatch the little bundle of flowers from his nerveless fingers. “Thanks. You're not in love with me, are you?”

“I'm s-s-sorry you're so s-sad,” he murmured. “T-t-try not to be so s-s-sad.”

Venera gaped at him. His words had been so quiet, but they seemed to echo on and on in the silent corridor. “Sad? Why do you think I'm sad?”

Nobody else had noticed—not even Eilen, who had been watching Venera like a mother hawk all evening. Venera narrowed her eyes. “I didn't see you at the party. Where were you?”

“I w-w-was there. In the c-corner.”

Present yet absent. That seemed to sum Moss up. “Well.” Venera looked down at Moss's present. Somehow she had clenched her fist and had crushed the little white blossoms.

“Thank you,” she said. Moss turned away with a muted clattering noise. “Moss,” she said quickly. He looked back.

“I don't want you to be sad either,” said Venera.

He shambled away and Venera closed the door softly. Once alone, she let loose one long shuddering sigh, and tumbled face-first onto the bed.

 

The next morning, Venera wore the half-crushed posies on the breast of her jacket. If anybody noticed they said nothing. She ate her breakfast with the members of the delegation in their designated dining room—a roofed-over air shaft lined floor to invisible ceiling with stuffed animals—and followed them silently to their offices. She had discerned the routine by
now: they would sit around for the rest of the day, occasionally engaging in desultory, short-lived dialogs, have lunch and then supper, and turn in.

If she had to live like this for more than a couple of days, Venera knew she would snap. So, at ten o'clock, she said, “Can't we at least play cards?”

One of the soldiers glanced over, then shook his head mournfully. “Odess always wins.”

“But I'm here now,” said Venera. “What if I were to win?”

Slowly, they roused into a state resembling the attentive. With much cajoling and brow-beating, Venera got them to reveal the location of the cards, and once she had these she energetically pulled a table and some chairs into the center of the room. “Sit,” she commanded, “and learn.”

This was her opportunity to grill her compatriots properly—the party last night had been too hectic and strange, with everyone playing pal in transparent ways—and Venera made the best of it. After ten minutes Odess emerged from his office, looking bleary and cross, but his eyes lit up when he saw her shuffling the cards. Venera grinned sloppily at him and he drew up a chair.

“So,” she said as the others examined their cards. “Tell me about the botanist.”

 

The pantry war had been dragging on for five years. Liris and the Duchy of Vatoris both claimed a five- by seven-foot room off one of the twisting corridors of the fair. The titles went back a hundred years, and the wording was ambiguous. Neither side would back down.

“War?” said Venera as she peered over her cards. “Don't you mean feud?”

The other players all shook their heads. No, explained Odess, a feud was a family thing. This was a conflict between professional soldiers, and it took the form of pitched battles.—Even if those battles were between a dozen or so soldiers on either side, which was all the manpower the tiny nations could muster. After years of ambushes, raids, firefights, and all manner of other mayhem, it had settled into a war of attrition. Barricades had been thrown up in the disputed corridor; a no-man's-land of broken furniture and cracked tile stretched for thirty feet between them. The entrance to the closet beckoned only yards away, and either side could capture it in seconds. The trick was to hold it.

The two sides dug in. The barricades were ramified and reinforced, then backed up with cannon and rifles. Days might pass without a shot fired, but the other tenants of the Fair got used to sudden flurries of gunfire. Rarely was anyone actually hurt. The loss of a single man would constitute a disaster.

These things happened. Even now, the Fair was riddled with strange tensions—empty passages paved in dust where no one had walked in generations because of just such disputes as this; neighbors who would think nothing of murdering one another in quiet corners if they had the chance; victims walled up in alcoves; and everywhere, conspiracies.

It was a random bullet that had changed everything. The walls around the disputed hallway had never been strong, but the combatants had hired a neutral third party to shore them up at regular intervals. Perhaps it was inevitable, though, that chinks and cracks should develop. One day, a bullet fired from the Vatoris barricade slipped through such a crack, ricocheted sixty feet down an abandoned air shaft, and killed the heir of a major nation as he stood at a punch bowl.

Venera rubbed her jaw. “I can imagine the reaction.”

“I'm not sure you can,” said Odess portentously. The nation in question was the mysterious Land of Sacrus, a country of “vast size,” according to Eilen.

“How vast?”

“Fully three square miles!”

Sacrus traded in power—but exactly how, no one was quite sure. They were one of the most secretive of countries, their fields being dotted with windowless factories, the perimeter patrolled by guards with dogs and guns. Small airships bristling with guns bobbed above the main complex. The Sacrans emerged from their smoke-wreathed towers only once or twice a year, and then they spoke almost exclusively to their customers. They were one of the few nations that had withstood the full force of the preservationists—in fact, nobody in the preservationist camp would talk about just how badly that particular battle had gone.

Sacrus was enraged at the death of their heir. Three days after the incident, the Vatoris barricade fell silent. The soldiers of Liris fired a few shots and got no response. When they cautiously advanced on the Vatoris position, they found it abandoned.

Discreet inquiries were made. No one had seen any of the Vatorins since the day of the fateful gunshot. In a moment of supreme daring, Liris sent its troops directly to the Vatoris apartments. They were empty.

At this point, rumors of a great stench rising from Vatoris itself reached Odess's ears. “I was sitting in our showroom,” he said. “I remember it like it was yesterday. One of the scions of a minor nation entered and told me that his people were walking up and down along the border with Vatoris, sniffing the air and exchanging rumors. The smell was the smell of death.”

Odess returned home that night to warn his people. “But it was too late. As I lay down to sleep that evening, I heard it—we all did.” A hissing sound filled the chambers of Liris. It was faint, but for someone like Odess who had lived behind these walls his whole life, it had the effect of a siren.

“I stood, tried to run to the door. I fell down.” The others related similar experiences, of sudden paralysis, landings behind desks or next to wavering doors. “We lay there helpless, all of us, unable to even focus our eyes. And we
listened.
”

What they heard, after an hour or so, was a single set of footsteps. They moved smoothly from room to room, up stairs and down, not as if seeking anything, but as though whoever walked were taking inventory—committing every passage and chamber of Liris to memory. Eventually, they came to a stop. Silence returned.

The paralysis faded near dawn. Odess rose, retched miserably for a few minutes, and then—trembling—crept in the direction those footsteps had taken. As he went he saw others emerging from their rooms, or rising from where they had fallen in mid-walk. They converged on the place where the footsteps had halted: in the cherry tree courtyard.

“And there she sat,” said Odess, “exactly as she sits these days, with the same damned smile and the same damned air of superiority. The botanist. Our conqueror.”

 

“And no one has challenged her?” Venera barked a laugh of disbelief. “You fear reprisals, is that it?”

Odess shrugged. “She ended the war, and under her leadership the cherries bloom. Who else are we going to have lead us?”

Venera scowled at her cards. A pulse of pain shot up her jaw. “I thought you were a meritocracy.”

“And so we are. And she is the best botanist we have ever had.”

“What happened to the one she replaced?”

They exchanged glances. “We don't know,” confessed Eilen. “He disappeared the day Margit came.”

Venera discarded one card and took another from the deck. The others did the same, then she fanned out her hand. “I win.”

Odess grimaced and began to shuffle.

“She came to me last night,” said Venera. She had decided that she needed information more than discretion at this point. “Margit was pleased with the work I did.” Odess snorted; Venera ignored him and continued. “She had a proposal.”

She told them about Margit's idea of an extended trade expedition into the principalities. As she did, Venera watched all movement around the table stop. Even Odess's practiced hand ceased its fanning of the cards. They were all staring at her.