Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder

Author:Karl Schroeder [Schroeder, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, SteamPunk, General, Science Fiction, Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9780765354549
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

12

Spyre was awe-inspiring even at a distance of ten miles. Venera held onto netting in a rear-facing doorway of the passenger liner Glorious Dawn and watched the vast blued circle recede in the distance. First one cloud shot by to obscure a quadrant of her view, then another, then a small team of them that whirled slowly in the ship’s wake. They chopped Spyre up into fragmented images: a curve of green trees here, a glint of window in some tower (Liris?). Then, instead of clouds, it was blockhouses and barbed wire flicking by. They were passing the perimeter. She was free.

She turned, facing into the interior of the ship. The velvet-walled galleries were crowded with passengers, mostly visiting delegations returning from the Fair. But a few of the men and women were dressed in the iron and leather of a major nation: Buridan. Her retainers, maids, the Buridan trade delegation… she wasn’t free yet, not until she had found a way to evade all of them.

Now that she was undisputed head of the Nation of Buridan, Venera had new rights. The right to travel freely, for example; it had only taken a simple request and a travel visa had been delivered to her the next day. Of course she couldn’t simply wave goodbye and leave. Nobody was fully convinced that she was who she said she was. So, it had been necessary for her to invent a pointless trade tour of the principalities to justify this trip. And that in turn meant that she could not be traveling alone.

Still—after weeks of running, of being captured by Liris and made chattel; after run-ins with bombers and bombs, hostile nobility and mad botanists—after all of that, she had simply boarded a ship and left. Life was never like you imagined it would be.

And she could just keep going, she knew—all the way back to her home in Rush. The idea was tempting, but it wasn’t why she had undertaken this expedition. It was too soon to return home. She didn’t yet have enough power to undertake the revenge she planned against the Pilot of Slipstream. If she left now it would be as a thief, with only what she could carry to see her home. No, when she finally did leave Spyre, it must be with power at her back.

The only way to get that power was to increase her holdings here, as well as the faith of the people in her. So, like Liris and all the other nations of Spyre, Buridan would visit the outer world to find customers.

Her smile faltered as the last of the barbed wire and mines swept by to vanish among the clouds. True, if she just kept going she wouldn’t miss anything of Spyre, she mused. Yet even as she thought this Venera experienced a little flash of memory: of Garth Diamandis laughing in sunlight; then of Eilen leaning on a wall after drinking too much at the party.

Last night Venera too had drunk too much wine, with Garth Diamandis.

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