Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

He grabbed the bristly, tightly wound rigging and waggled it. 'Mm, w-well, not much,' he said doubtfully. 'Wouldn't be t-too much of a backlash. Might toss you a few dozen feet if you held on and cut it below you.' He looked over his glasses at her. 'Th-that is what you had in mind, isn't it?'

'I don't want the backlash.' She rounded on Jacoby again, leveling the pistol at his nose. 'Are these moored at the top, or counterbalanced?'

Jacoby was curious to see where she was going with this, so he said, 'Counterbalanced.'

'Great,' she said, and turned away. 'Take those suicide charges and set them to cut these. We're going to drop the street.'

Panic erupted among the hostages as they realized the soldiers were about to cut loose the decking they were standing on. They made a stampede for the gangways, but nobody shot at them. They were still valuable, and Jacoby still had plenty of men in the city with which to round them up later. 'Let's test this,' she said as the bomb expert tied a charge to one of the suspension ropes.

Bullet holes stitched a line across the canvas ceiling. 'Give up!' one of Jacoby's men shouted from a nearby rooftop. The soldiers Venera herself had stationed on other rooftops and gangways began to make their way in under cover of intense fire, as, humming, Venera's bomber made his connections. He finished, and he and everybody else stood back as Fanning aimed her pistol at the charge.

'This is insane,' said Jacoby. 'It'll never--'

Bang-blam! The charge went off and the rope parted. Instantly it snapped upward-- but only twenty or thirty feet high before the pent-up tension in the rope was used up, and it fell slack again.

The entire street creaked, groaned, and dipped a foot.

'Well, that's disappointing,' said Venera, hands on her hips.

'No, no, your grasp of Newtonian physics is sound, m'lady,' said the bomb expert as he hurried to lash a charge to another rope. 'All these ropes conjoin about two hundred feet above us. We'll have to cut away most of the street before the counterweight takes over.'

'Ah. Get going, then.' But he was already rushing to the next line, accompanied by two soldiers who startled him every few seconds by firing over his head.

'Mount up!' she commanded. A soldier boosted her up one of the ropes and she twined her legs and inched her way up farther. 'Tie the prisoner's hands on the other side of it,' she told her men, and Jacoby was towed over to the rope next to hers and his hands lashed on the other side of it. He found himself nose-to-nose with one of the explosive charges, and judiciously took the aid of one of the soldiers to clamber up past it.

Gunfire from the surrounding rooftops was intensifying. One of the Slipstreamers fell, limp as a rag doll, and his companions cursed and sprayed gunfire indiscriminately into the city.

'Keep it together!' Venera yelled at them. 'And get up here!' Without another word, she lowered her pistol and shot the charge below her.

Her rope--and her and the five other people clinging to it--rebounded into the air as all of them held on desperately. One of the men let go and tumbled spinning into the air.

'Pick me up later!' he shouted as he pawed at the foot-fins slung over his back. Jacoby watched in astonishment as he twisted to avoid guy-wires, sewage pipes, and catwalks. If he could do it for just a few more seconds, he'd exit the bottom of the city and be in clear air ...

Blam! The charge on Jacoby's own rope had gone off and the rope whipped him in the face. Stunned, he let go and it slithered over his forearms and neck. Then he hit another man, who grunted. Jacoby grabbed at the rope again as the soldier swore at him.

They were twirling into the air, and now coming down to swing in a wide arc out over the bottomless canyons of the city. Somewhere, Venera Fanning was whooping.

'Just a couple more, boys!'

Everybody seemed to be shooting now--Jacoby's men in their sheltered windows, Venera's men on the ropes-- and as his rope swung him around again Jacoby saw that the street was missing too many ropes now, listing and toppling tables, chairs, boxes, and bodies into the abyss. He watched a travel chest impact a conical roof a hundred feet below and burst like a sudden flower, shirts and trousers its petals.

The street groaned and lost its shape, becoming a U that shed planks like water. Fanning's soldiers shot out two more of the ropes and the rest snapped. Twisting like some tormented worm, the street sprawled over rooftops and nipped gangways and ladders in its death throes. It tumbled, split apart, and in deadly showers of lumber and coiling nooses of rope, left the city.

'How could she do that! How could she--' It was one of Jacoby's men, hanging off a nearby rope.

Jacoby swung by him, laughing a bit crazily. 'How could she? She's the one who destroyed Spyre!'

'You said I didn't!' shouted Venera; then the ropes were hauling them upward faster and faster past bell-like houses and can-shaped shops. Whatever these lines were anchored to on the other side of the city, it was crashing down with as much enthusiasm as the street just had.

'Foot-fins, everyone,' shouted Venera. 'And see to the prisoner!' Pain was pounding through Jacoby's left hand and he was about to lose his grip with it entirely; but the upward pull was slackening, and gravity falling away. The last rooftops whipped by and then they were in the vertical forest of cables that reached up to the axle of the wheelless necklace city. They rose hundreds of feet and hanging on got easier. Jacoby was abruptly seized by the soldiers who bracketed him on the rope, and they untied his hands and retied them behind his back.

He nodded to the man next to him. 'You're from Liris,' he said. This man wore the ancient, outlandish armor of the tiny building-sized country Venera had been adopted into when she first landed in Spyre. The man grinned at Jacoby, and then they shared a sorrowful glance at the empty sky where Spyre had once been. Meanwhile, Fracas, below them, was turning from a town into an arc of toy-sized roofs.

'We're taking the yacht, ma'am?' called a soldier.

'Yes. You'll like it.'