Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

pictures around with one finger. Argyre showed no sign of recognizing the name, so he tamped down on his irritated pride and explained: 'Spyre was one of the ancient places, a metal cylinder twelve kilometers across and twenty long. Open at the ends, of course; it flew in the airs near Candesce, at the center of the world. Its inner surface was sown with countries like Sacrus--some small as a building, some miles in extent. All of them thousands of years old. Older than any of these places.' He waved contemptuously at the rust- and verdigris-rimmed wheels of Sere.

'One day,' he continued, 'a woman from this outside world drifted in and miraculously survived her fall onto Spyre's inner surface.' His fingers continued to move the pictures, but he was no longer looking at them. 'Shortly after Venera Fanning's arrival--' He pretended not to notice as Argyre started at the name, nearly spilling her drink. '--Spyre fell apart. Literally. Sacrus, its ancient neighbors and rivals, all of them were ripped asunder and scattered to the six winds.'

Antaea Argyre leaned back, obviously considering what to say. 'From what I've heard of Venera Fanning, that doesn't surprise me in the least.'

'I lost my home--my whole nation,' Jacoby went on. 'I'm an exile now, forced to make my living by means that are, frankly, sordid compared to what I once was.'

'If it's revenge you're after,' said Argyre, 'all I can say is that I have no way of getting you close to Fanning.'

Sarto crossed his arms and glowered at the photos. 'I was born and raised to believe in the sanctity, not to mention the necessity, of revenge,' he admitted. 'But revenge against whom? Or, in this case, what?'

'Ah.'

'Venera Fanning trampled all our traditions and values, and then blew up the world,' said Jacoby as he handed some of the pictures to her. 'But I'd be lying if I said those traditions and values didn't heartily deserve to be trampled. The world's a better place now that Sacrus is gone, and that's probably true for the rest of Spyre, too. --What do you see?' he said of the photos.

Jacoby watched Argyre's mounting puzzlement as she shuffled through the images. 'What is this: an eye?' She held up a photo that showed nothing but a white circle surrounded by black.

'That,' said Jacoby, 'would be entirely visible from where you're sitting, if this godforsaken country had a sun to light it. It's a photograph of the outer skin of Virga, an area only a hundred miles or so away from this very spot. The picture was taken through a telescope by ... a friend of mine. That circle is a span of Virga's outer wall. This picture was shot in infrared, so the cold parts are black.'

'Then...' She frowned in confusion. 'This circle is an area of the world's skin that is warm?'

He nodded. 'It's hundreds of miles across. And in the past few months, practically the entire Home Guard fleet has converged on a spot right at its center.'

She blinked at him rapidly--a disconcerting sight given her huge eyes. 'Really.' She turned the other pictures over. 'This?' Blurred and speckled with distance was an image of square blockhouses encircling a ragged black patch. 'Is this ... a hole?'

'I wouldn't speculate on that,' he said. 'But that's what's at the very center of the circle. You can see there's ships clustering around that spot like flies on--'

'Yes, I can see that,' she said. 'But--' Her fabulous eyes widened even further. 'The Site,' she muttered. 'He said he'd come from the Site...' She glanced up guiltily, but it was plain he'd heard her. Jacoby watched her struggle with a decision.

'A local cabinet minister went missing a while ago,' she said. 'During the monster scare. Now he's back. Back from somewhere on the other side of 'the Site.''

'Ah...' Jacoby smiled as the waiter set down their appetizers. 'I came here because I'm chasing the ones who are ultimately responsible for the destruction of Spyre. Care to tell me why you're here?'

She bit her lip, but they both knew there was no going back now--and he already thought he knew, from the research his spies had done on her.

'I'm looking for a friend of mine,' she said. 'Her name is Leal Maspeth; she was being groomed to become dean of the university's history department when she suddenly disappeared. The official reports say she defied the government over something to do with the monster. She supposedly stole state secrets and--this is utterly unbelievable--burned one of her coworkers to death in his own home. Then she fled into the arms of the monster itself. Well, maybe it's true. Maybe she went somewhere...' She paused, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth, and gazed at the photo lying between them. 'Two hundred miles...'

Jacoby nearly dropped his own fork this time, and damn her, she noticed. 'What's that?' he said irritably.

'I overheard a couple of clerks talking,' she said. 'One said that Loll had come from some kind of city that was two hundred miles from the Site.'

Jacoby tried to act nonchalant as he dug through the papers, but he was sure his eagerness must be obvious as he brought out a different picture. 'Look at this one,' he said, tossing it down in front of her. Argyre snatched it up.

While she examined the picture, he scowled at the flamboyantly lit towers of Sere. 'There's a certain kind of self-delusion particular to people who've lived in peace for too long,' he said, half to himself. 'Right up until the day that the enemy swoops in to torch their wheel, they think that their problems are the biggest problems in the world, and their power the biggest power. I've spent my whole life looking into the eyes of those people after I had taken away everything they had ... and then, quite suddenly, I lost my homeland in exactly the same way. Spyre, Sacrus, and even Virga itself ... they're just pawns in a larger conflict, aren't they? I know that now. You know. But who else really understands? It seems to me that Leal Maspeth does--or did.'

Argyre held up the photo. 'This is some city somewhere? What's the connection?'

He nodded. 'The ancient city of Serenity. A dead place now, choked with icebergs, frozen into the outer wall of Virga like a corpse in winter ... and right at the edge of that mysterious warm circle.' The image showed dark towers on a flat plain, ensnared by rivers of ice. 'In fact, it's precisely two hundred miles from the Site.'

'Aha! So maybe this is the real place, then--the monster's home...' She stopped as she saw Jacoby shaking his head.