Queen of Candesce Read Online Free PDF Page B

think and thinking led to feeling, which was seldom good.
    She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around her shins. It came to her that if they took away Diamandis and she couldn’t get out of here, she would die and no one would ever know what had happened to her. Few would care, either, and some would rejoice. Venera knew she wasn’t well liked.
    More stomping up above. She shivered. How far away was her home in Slipstream? Three thousand miles? Four? An ocean of air separated her from her husband and in that ocean gyred the nations of enemies, rising, lowering, drifting with the unpredictable airs of Virga. Awaiting her out there were the freezing abysses of winter, full of feathered sharks and pirates. Before the Sun of Suns had roasted her into unconsciousness, she had been determined and sure of her own ability to cross those daunting distances alone. She had leaped from the cargo nets of Hayden Griffin’s jet and soared for a time like a solitary eagle in the skies of Virga. But the sun had caught up to her and now she was here, trapped and in pain hardly any distance from where she’d started.
    She climbed off the chair, fighting a wave of nausea. Better to surrender herself to whoever waited above than die here alone, she thought—and she almost ran up the steps and surrendered. It was a pulse of pain through her jaw that stopped her. Venera drew her fingertips across the scar that adorned her chin, and then she backed away from the steps.
    Her heel caught the edge of a box she’d dropped, and she stumbled back against the icy windows. Cursing, she straightened up, but as she did she noticed a gleam of light welling up through the glass. She put her cheek to it—which dampened the pain a bit—and squinted.
    The windows were covered with a long-leafed form of ivy. The stuff was vibrating with uncanny speed—so quickly that the leaves’ edges were blurred. Diamandis had said that Spyre rotated very fast; was she looking into the air outside?
    Of course. This oval chamber stuck out of the bottom of the world. It was an aerodynamic blister on the outside of the rotating cylinder, and that chair might have once fronted the controls of a heavy machine gun or artillery piece mounted outside. It still might. Frowning, Venera clambered over the mounds of junk back to the metal seat and examined it.
    There was indeed a set of handles and levers below the chair, and more between the windows. She didn’t touch them but peered out through the glass there, as light continued to well through the close-set leaves.
    Candesce was waking up. The Sun of Suns lit a zone hundreds of miles in diameter here at the center of Virga. Past the trembling leaves Venera could see a carousel of mauve and peachpainted cloud tumbling past with disorienting speed; but she could also see more.
    The oval blister was mounted into a ceiling of riveted metal, as she’d expected. That ceiling was the hull of Spyre, and a few feet above it was soil, trees, and the foundations of the buildings she had seen yesterday. Covering this surface in long runnels and triangles was the strange ivy. Its leaves were like knives, sharp and long, and they all aligned in the flow of the wind. Venera had heard of something called speed ivy; maybe that was what this was.
    The ivy seemed to prefer growing on things that projected into the airstream. Sheets of metal skin were missing here and there—in fact, there were outright holes everywhere—and the ivy clustered on the leading and trailing edges of these, smoothing the airflow in those places. Maybe that was what it was for.
    This view of Spyre was not reassuring. The place was showing its age—dangling sheets of titanium whirred in the wind and huge I-beams thrust down into the dawn-tinted air, whole sagging acres just waiting to peel off the bottom of the world. It was amazing that the place kept itself together.
    Next to the blister, a rusted machine gun was