Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga by Schroeder Karl

Author:Schroeder, Karl [Schroeder, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

JACOBY SARTO CLOSED the door to his hotel room, and then had to lean on it heavily as a wave of pain and nausea overtook him. He looked up and down the hall, but there was no one to see his weakness. With a muted curse he walked carefully to the stairs, keeping his head high despite the almost overwhelming urge to simply lie down and curl around his maimed hand.

She had left his hotel room half an hour before. Theirs had not been a romantic rendezvous. The least of it had been the interrogation she’d subjected him to. He’d expected that, of course; how could she know he could be trusted, since she didn’t even know where he’d been and what he’d been up to since they had parted ways.

That had been humiliating, but nothing compared with what had happened next. Inshiri still didn’t trust him; she needed a guarantee of his loyalty.

“Fool,” he muttered to himself as he leaned on the doorjamb to the stairwell. As Sacrus’s representative on Spyre’s grand council, he’d had a legitimate claim to all of Sacrus’s remaining assets after the destruction of Spyre. He could have fought Inshiri for them—should have taken it down to a contest of loyalties and cunning then, when she was vulnerable. He had all of Sacrus’s foreign operations in his hand, since he’d been able to act days before any of the surviving members of the ruling families thought to try it themselves.

But with the reins of true power in his hands at last, Jacoby Sarto had lost his nerve. Now he looked at the blood-soaked bandages wrapped around his left hand and said, “You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Jacoby.”

Unused to wielding power for his own sake, he’d found he had no idea what to do with the resources he’d acquired. He would never admit it to anyone else, but he’d been terrified to be saddled with the responsibility it all came with.

Inshiri Ferance hadn’t had to threaten him. At the first opportunity he’d turned the foreign services back over to her, and he’d flown away from his chance at real power with haste and a terribly unmanning relief.

Inshiri knew he’d blinked, and though she’d allowed him back into her inner circle, she treated him with contempt. The guarantee she’d taken from him tonight was minor for her, but calculated to make him aware, every day for the rest of his life, that he was and would always remain a servant.

He put his good hand on the railing and stared down the stairwell, which seemed to be tipping slowly over—whether due to this wheel’s rotation, or the delirium of pain he was in, he couldn’t have said.

“Sane people put their docks up top,” he said, then laughed at himself. He was talking to no one! Anyway, it was true; at the axis of a wheel there was no gravity and you could moor or unmoor at leisure. The engineers at Kaleidogig were stupid barbarians, though, and they liked to live dangerously.

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