Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

'They claim not,' said Inshiri dryly. 'But in any case, there's always the possibility that my allies,' and she smiled at Jacoby, 'will suffer some sort of accident that prevents them from getting inside Candesce. Now we would never want that to happen, but Heaven forbid if it should, it would be good if they were not the only ones who knew how to control Candesce.'

Venera glanced at Jacoby. He kept his expression neutral.

'Where are your little friends, anyway?' Venera asked. She peered into the darkness. 'I see no great fleet massed out there. Could it be that they no longer need you, now that events are in motion?' She turned to Jacoby. 'They are in motion, aren't they?'

He gave a microscopic nod.

'Oh, they still need me, I've made sure of that. As to this place...' Inshiri smiled. 'They don't know about it. Here! Let me show you.' She reached out to grab Venera's arm; Jacoby saw her flinch at the touch. Inshiri flapped her wings and drew Venera over to the focal point of the giant, curved mirror. Jacoby narrowed his eyes and in the scarlet brilliance Venera did the same. As her eyes adjusted she slowly opened them, then they went wide and she said, 'Oh!'

Venera hung at the focal point of a gigantic telescope aimed at Slipstream. She would be seeing the grandly rotating, metal town wheels of Rush, rendered in red and gold because the intervening air scattered out the blue end of the spectrum. The image wavered and was fuzzy, but was still good enough to show the inside surfaces of those cylinders, all papered with rooftops and streets and strolling people. --And more, it would be showing her the entire fleet her husband was amassing: their numbers, the types of their ships, the national crests painted on their sides, and their armament.

She looked impressed. 'You're spying on us from here?'

'Not just you,' said the heir of Sacrus. 'We can point this telescope anywhere in Virga, though if we were to aim it at the world's heart and even just glimpse the sun of suns, you and I would light up like matches. This particular instrument works best when you aim it toward the darker corners of the world. But it works well for Slipstream, wouldn't you say? I can see your husband's whole plan unfolding, and when his fleet leaves, I'll be able to track its movements with utter precision.'

'You're to remain a spectator here, then?' Venera inquired in a polite tone.

'Of course not. I intend to be there when you open Candesce's doors with the key the Home Guard so conveniently found for us.' Inshiri waved a hand. 'But we can talk about this later. For now, I want you to think about whose hands you would prefer to be on those controls when we finally penetrate the mystery of mysteries. Ours? --Yours and mine, I mean; or theirs.' And she nodded to the darkness.

Venera scowled at Inshiri, who casually pushed her in Jacoby's direction. 'Lord Sarto, put her somewhere that's not overly comfortable.' He took Venera's hand and kicked down to flap his wings. They left Inshiri of Sacrus lofting like a blood-soaked angel in the fire of her giant spyglass.

* * *

VENERA AIMED HER gaze down her arm at him. 'What happened to your hand?'

He grimaced. 'Inshiri took my little finger as proof of my loyalty. She likes hostages, as I'm sure you've noticed.'

'So she's promised to give it back later?' she asked lightly.

'Not exactly.'

There was a brief pause as they sailed slowly through the sky. Then Venera said: 'I really do have to pee.'

'Posthaste, then.

'My apologies, by the way, for the manner in which you were brought here,' said Jacoby after a silence in which he had become uncomfortably aware that he was holding her hand.

She thought about that. 'Where are we, anyway?'

'It's called Kaleidogig. And I really am sorry. My plan was to capture you for my own purposes, not to hand you over to her.'

'Was it also your plan to get sent home with a whipping after that foolish attack on Serenity?'

He growled.

'Two for two, then.'

'Maybe,' he said, 'but there's still one vital piece in play.'

She twisted her hand in his and spun slowly to look at the ungainly galaxy of giant mirrors and steaming, brightly lit boilers. 'If we were near the principalities, the whole sky would be lit up. So where are we--in winter?'

He nodded. 'On the same latitude as Meridian, but a thousand miles from the nearest sun.'

'And yet,' she mused, 'there's light.'

Kaleidogig burned like a string of giant's lanterns. Its jumbled scaffolding cupped a dozen or more curving mirrors, each hundreds of feet across, which mostly lit nets and balls of water filled with floating plants. The mirrors were fairly easy to make, Jacoby had learned--you waited for calm air and then blew a vast bubble from a seed of liquid resin; when it dried you cut it into bowl-shaped sections and silvered them and there were your mirrors.

Days away, nuclear-fusion lamps carved sunlit spheres of air out of the darkness, and nations swarmed around them like moths around a candle. Each fusion lamp lit a few hundred miles of air in every direction--but Virga was five thousand miles across. Most of its interior was dark, hence unsuitable for settlement.

'I always thought it would be totally dark out here,' he told Venera. 'But there's a very faint glow from the suns, and you can concentrate it. Which they do. All the blue gets filtered out by the time it gets here, but the red turns out to be perfect for plants. They also concentrate some of it until it's hot enough to melt iron; they have industries. It's really quite ingenious.'