Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

aircraft, because stealing feedstock was risky and anyway, he'd thought it was ready. But there was another potential source of the stuff here ...

He waited for his dragonflies to catch up and when their eyesight supplemented his, he could see what he was after in one corner of the room. He hunkered down and shuffled toward it.

A tiny pinprick of light suddenly glowed there, then another, then a dozen. Little gleaming midges flew up from the experiment he'd begun here a week ago. A pipsqueak voice sounded in his head: 'I am the mighty Brick! Tremble before me, mortal!'

'That's okay, it's okay,' he said in a soothing tone as he reached slowly for the half-open bag of feedstock lying next to the brick. His fingers were almost touching it when the little midges dove at his hand. 'Ow!'

The air was suddenly full of dragonflies, and little dogfight battles erupted all over the room, complete with the pittering sound of minuscule machine guns firing and tiny smoking death spirals. 'Do not defy the mighty Brick!' cried the brick. Keir ducked under the aerial battle and snagged the bag of feedstock. Then he ran from the room before the brick was able to bring its little howitzers to bear on him.

He'd had some compelling reason for making a minitech AI think that it was the brick. It had been some sort of reminder to himself, he knew that. But the details ... they were gone, like so much of what he'd done and intended lately. All he had left was a terrible feeling of apprehension, a certainty that if he didn't get out of this place, and soon, something terrible was going to happen.

Shakily, he went out to the balcony again and dumped the bag of feedstock in front of the ornithopter. As it eagerly scarfed down the mixture of metals, silicates, and rare earth elements, Keir leaned on the balustrade, looked out, and sighed.

This world had suns--dozens of them--but they were too far away to provide even a hint of radiance to the sky. The city was as invisible as it ever was, its cornered intricacies lost in permanent shadow. Only that one ring of windows in one high tower betrayed habitation.

Brink crested above that and over itself, in wave after frozen wave whose dark caps faded into obscurity in the heights. The near-infinite wall to which the city clung rose at an eighty-degree angle. Farther down, the angle decreased to a mythically distant, sunlit plain, while above it steepened to the vertical so far away that all gravity would cease by the time you got there.

Giant knuckled slabs of glacier and stone were the city's only companions at this height. Paths wove from one patch of scree to another, avoiding the perilously slick black skin of the world's wall whenever possible. Eyeless goats brayed from their rock perches, and fungi and meatshrooms blossomed from cracks in the stone. He could hear booming sounds from distant avalanches; those had increased in frequency lately, sometimes shaking Complication Hall with the power of their passage.

He'd thought about just walking off down that slope, but if he were to try it he'd surely be killed by icefall before he got ten kilometers; and anyway, down led only to the realm of the oaks, who had filled Aethyr with grasslands and forests that were prowled by strange predators, and sometimes by the oaks themselves. He'd hoped his ornithopter would take him high enough that they'd become weightless, and then it would have been easy to cross Aethyr to the wild but free worlds of the arena. Wild, free--and in their own way, far more dangerous than any encounter with the oaks.

If he and the ornithopter sailed off to the arena right now, no one would see him go. Of course, there would be no one to see him crash on the steep slopes below the city, break a leg or a collarbone, and slowly freeze to death. Even if they noticed his absence right away, they wouldn't know where to look for him.

He should have tried the other door, the one that led to the one world he knew would be safe for his kind. The door to it wasn't even closed. --No, not closed, merely guarded by monsters.

Keir hugged himself, feeling miserable. He scowled down at the darkness, and one of his dragonflies soared away from the miniature battle in the room, spiraled into the air over his head, and spotted something.

In the dark below the city, a cluster of lights wavered.

They were fantastically small pinpricks, hovering on the very edge of visibility, but now the rest of his dragonflies could see them, too. Kilometers down the gradually decreasing curve of the world's wall, something had carved a little cave of illumination out of the dark.

'Hey,' he said to the ornithopter, 'are you ready to carry me yet?'

'Need to digest,' it said. 'Two hours.'

'Hmmpf.' He stared at the little lights. Who could that possibly be? Nobody from the Renaissance ever went out on the slopes; the constant avalanches made it too dangerous. There was nothing down there but blind goats and unstable scree, anyway. Visitors came to Brink occasionally--but they only ever came by air.

Whatever those lights were, he had other priorities.

--Although, if somebody had wanted to sneak up on the city, coming up from below like that would certainly be the way to do it.

'Not my problem,' he said to the ornithopter. It turned its camera eyes to him, then resumed munching the feedstock.

'The grown-ups can take care of it,' he continued.

It said nothing.

He stood for a while looking down at the faint lights.

'Could you fly down there and back?'

'Yes,' it said. It didn't move.

Keir opened his mouth, closed it, then, cursing his own curiosity, ordered one of his dragonflies to clamp itself to the ornithopter's foot. 'Go on, then,' he said. The mechanical bird dropped the feedstock bag, bunched up its wings, and leaped awkwardly into the air. Startlingly graceful once aloft, it swooped away and disappeared into the gloom.

A minute later it returned, and as it collapsed in some sort of mechanical relief onto the flagstones at his feet, Keir received a download of images from the dragonfly that had ridden with it.