QUEEN OF CANDESCE Virga 02 Karl Schroeder
Being literally thrown into an unfamiliar environment forces a person to adaptand familiar ways of doing that may not be enough.
Prologue
The balcony swayed under him; distant trees wavered in the hot afternoon air though there was no breeze. A twist of little clouds pirouetted far overhead, just beneath the glitter and darkness of the city that had exiled Gareth to this place so many years ago. Well below the city, only a thousand feet up at this point, a single human form had appeared out of the light.
She rotated up out of Garth's view and he had to wait several minutes for her to come back around. Then, there she was: gliding with supernatural grace over the tall, ragged wall that rimmed the world at its nearer end. Behind her, infinite air beckoned, forever out of reach of Garth and the others like him. Ahead of the silent woman, a likely tumble into quickly moving trees, broken limbs and death. If she wasn't dead already.
Someone tried to escape , he thoughtan act that always ended in gunshots or bloody thrashing beneath a swarm of piranhawks. This one must have been shot cleanly by the day watch for she was spiraling across the sky alone, not attended by a retinue of blood droplets. And now the spin-gale was teasing the fringes of her outlandish garment, slowing her; bringing her down.
Garth frowned, for a moment forgetting the aches and pains that bedeviled him all day and all night. The hovering woman's clothes had been too bright and fluttered too easily to be made of the traditional leather and metal of Spyre.
As the world turned the woman receded into the distance, frustrating Garth's attempt to see more. The ground under his perch was rotating up and away along with the whole cylindrical world; the black-haired woman was not moving with it but rather sailing in majestically from one of the world's open ends. But Spyre made its own winds as it turned, and those winds would pull her to its surface before she had a chance to drift out the other side.
She would have sped up by that time, but not enough to match Spyre's rotation. Garth well knew what happened when someone began clipping the treetops and towers at several hundred miles per hour. He'd be finding pieces of her for weeks.
The ground undulated again. Frantic horns began echoing in the distancean urgent conversation between the inner surface of Spyre and the city above.
Watching the woman had been an idle pastime, since it looked as though she was going to come down along the rail line. People with more firepower and muscle than Garth owned that; they would see her in a few moments and bring her down. Her valuable possessions and clothes would not be his.
But the horns were insistent. Something was wrong with the very fabric of Spyre, an oscillation building. He could see it in the far distance now: the land heaved minutely up and down. The slow ripple was making its way in his direction; he'd better get off this parapet.
The archway opening onto the balcony had empty air behind it and a twenty-foot drop to tumbled stones. Garth hopped over the rail without hesitation, counting as he fell. One pilot, two pilot, three He landed among upthrusts of stabbing weed and the cloud-like brambles that had taken over this ancient mansion. Three seconds? Well, gravity hadn't changed, at least not noticeably.
His muscles creaked as he stood up, but climbing and jumping were part of his daily constitutional, a grim routine aimed at convincing himself he was still a man.
He stalked over the crackling grit that painted a tiled dance floor. Railway ties were laid callously across the fine pallasite stones; the line cleaved the former Nation of Arbath like a whip-mark. Garth stepped onto the track daringly and stared down it. The great family of Arbath had not reached an accommodation with the preservationists and had been displaced or killed, he couldn't remember which. Rubble, ruins, and new walls sided the tracks; at one spot an abandoned sniper tower loomed above the strip. It swayed now uneasily.
The tracks converged in perspective but also rose with the land itself, a long graceful curve that became vertical if he followed it far enough. He didn't look that far, but focused on a scramble of activity taking place about a mile distant.
The Preservation
of yards, and by now she was too low. Air resistance was yanking her down, and in moments she would be tumbled to pieces on the ground.
Here she came. Garth wiped sweat out of his eyes and pulled with bloody hands. At that moment the shriek of a steam whistle sounded from the preservationist camp. The rusted engine was on the move.
The mysterious woman arrowed in just above the highest trees. Garth thought for sure she was going to miss his net. Then, just as the rusted engine sailed by on the trackshe caught snapshot glimpses of surprised preservationist faces and open mouthsshe hit the net and yanked it off the cable.
A twirling screw hit Garth in the nose and he sat down. Sparks shot from screaming brakes on the tracks, and the black tangling form of the falling woman passed between the Y-uprights of a jagged tree, the trailing net catching branches and snapping them as she bounced with astonishing gentleness into a bed of weeds.