Venera narrowed her eyes. Not even a fleet of battle cruisers capable of reducing this place to kindling from twenty miles away?"
Not only Margit laughed at this; the soldiers did as well. Nobody threatens Spyre, young lady. We're impregnable. Margit said this so smugly that Venera swore she would find a way to throw her words back at her.
Margit snapped her fingers, and Moss stepped forward. Acquaint her with her new duties, said the botanist.
Moss stared at her, slack jawed. W-what are those?"
"She knows the languages and cultures of other places. She'll be an interpreter for the trade delegation. Go introduce her. Margit turned away, lifting her chin with her eyes closed so that a beam of sunlight flooded her face.
The capital of Hale was a collection of six town-wheelsspinning rings, each two thousand feet in diametersurrounded by an ever-shifting cloud of weightless buildings and smaller rings. The main sound in the city was the rumbling of jet engines, as various rings and large municipal structures struggled to keep their spin and to avoid colliding. The scent of kerosene hung in the air; underlying it were other industrial and biological odors, just as under the rumbling of the engines you could hear shouts, horns, and the laughter of dolphins.
Venera had grown up watching the city life from afar. When she traveled between the town-wheels it was usually in a closed taxi. Sometimes one or another of the nobility hosted weightless balls; then she and the other ingenues donned fabulous wings that were powered by stirrups, and flew intricate dances in the warm evening air. But that flight always took place within careful limits. Nobody strayed.
She was of marriageable age nowand had recently come to realize that in Hale, marriageable also meant murderable. Venera had three sisters and had once had three brothers. Now she had two of those, and the once-close girls of the family were starting to actively plot against one another. With the boys, it was all about succession; with the girls, marriage.
Someone had used a marvelous word at a dinner
party just a few days before: leverage . Leverage was what she needed, Venera had decided. And so her thoughts had turned to old family tragedies, and the mysteries that had consumed her as a girl.
Today she was dressed in the brown blouse and pantaloons of a servant-girl, and the wings on her back were not butterfly orange or feathered pink, but beige canvas. Her hair was tied down with a drab cloth, and she soared the air of the city barefoot. In her waist bag she carried some money, a pistol, and a porcelain-headed doll. She knew where she was going.
The bad neighborhoods started remarkably close to the palace. This fact might have had something to do with the royal habit of simply dumping waste off the palace-wheel without regard to trajectory or velocity. The upper classes couldn't be entirely blamed for the stench that wafted at Venera as she flapped toward her destination, however. She wasn't disgusted; on the contrary, the smell and the sound of arguing, shouting people made her heart pound with excitement. Since she was little she'd sat for hours with her eye glued to a telescope, watching these citizens and this neighborhood roll by as the palace turned past it. She knew the placeshe had simply never been here.
What Venera approached looked like nothing so much as an explosion frozen in time. Even the smoke (of which there was plenty) was motionless or rather, it moved only as quickly as the air that oozed slowly between the hundreds of cubes, balls, and disheveled shapes that counted as buildings here. Anything not tied down hung in the air and drifted gradually, and that meant trash, animal hair, balls of dirty water, splinters, and scraps of cloth all contributed to the cloud. When the doldrums of summer broke and a stiff wind finally did snake through the place, half the mass of the neighborhood was going to simply blow away, like chaff. For now it roiled around Venera as she ducked and dove toward the gray blockhouse that was her destination.
Her business in the building was brief, but every detail of the transaction seemed etched in extraordinary detailfor here were people who didn't know who she was. It was marvelous to be treated as servants and ordinary folk treated one another, for a changemarvelous and eye opening. Nobody opened the door to the place for her; she had to do it herself. Nobody announced her presence, she had to clear her throat and ask the man behind the counter to help her. And she had to pay , with her own money!
"The contents of locker six sixty-four, she said, holding out the sheet of paper she'd written the information on. The paper was for his benefit, not hers, for she'd memorized the brief string of letters and numbers years ago. Deciphering the letters Uncle Albard had penned on her doll's forehead had been one of her primary motivations to learn to read.
The keeper of the storage lockers merely grunted and said, Get em yourself. If you've got the combination, you get in, that's the rule. He pointed to a doorway at the end of the counter.