The four soldiers were here to shoot anyone who tried that. And now that they were higher up she could see other guarantors of obedience: gun emplacements were suspended in the middle air by more cables, and some of them were visibly manned. Hanging in the sunny clouds beyond the wheel were more bunkers and turrets. It seemed a miracle now that she had, unconscious, threaded her way between them all to land here.
"Father would love this place, she muttered.
Chaison Fanning, her missing husband, would probably consider Spyre a moral obscenity, and would want to blow it up.
They rose some miles, through filigrees of cloud, puffballs that hovered like anxious angels between the incoming and outblowing gales; past houses and pillboxes bolted to other cables, whose glittering windows revealed nothing of what might be taking place inside them. The lands of Greater Spyre widened and widened below Venera, their patchwork estates becoming a mesmerizing labyrinth: the blockhouses of a dozen, a hundred and more Nations of Liris, it seemed, painted the inside of the cylinder. Slicing through these, leaving ruin and wildflowers on their sidings, were the railways of the preservationists.
All the while, Lesser Spyre came closer.
Venera had seen a geared
town once beforein the dead hollow heart of Leaf's Choir, Chaison Fanning's ships had moored next to the asphyxiated city of Carlinth. But Carlinth's pale grandeur couldn't match the wonder of Lesser Spyre because that other city had been motionless in death, and Lesser Spyre lived. Its great wheel-shaped habitats, each a half mile or more in diameter, turned edge to angled edge like the meshwork of a vast clock. The citizen of one wheel could stroll to its edge and simply step onto the surface of another as their rims came within touching distance. The wheels were kept in configuration by a lattice of giant spars and thick cables, from which black banners fluttered.
For all this cunning and motion, Lesser Spyre did not look inviting. There were some houses and streeets, but most of the wheels were dominated on their inside surface by one or two sprawling buildings. The Admiralty at Rush had been like that, as had the Pilot's palace. But also in Rush there were wheels weeded with taverns, towers, and twisting streets, as organic and inviting as a party.
Lesser Spyre was monolithic, self-contained, and controlled. Almost nothing stuck out.
The cable car eluded gravity entirely after a while, and its passengers clipped their metal costumes to the railing and waited until their destination hove into sight. The cable terminated in a knot of dozens of others, at a complicated cagework that threaded the axle of a town-wheel. Venera could see other people embarking and disembarking there. They moved in small groups that gave one another a wide berth.
She saw something else, though, that gave her hope for the first time in days: ships were berthed here. Sleek yachts, for the most part, of many different designs and flying diverse colorsbut all foreign. They signaled the possibility of escape, real escape, for the first time since her arrival.
She tapped Odess's tin shoulder and pointed. Our customers?"
He nodded. Pilgrims from all the principalities of Candesce come to us, hoping to leave again with some trinket or token of ours. Do you recognize any of those ships?"
Venera nodded. That one is from Gehellen. It was the only one she knew, but Odess was obviously impressed. I know that we'll trade them cherries, she went on. But what do the rest of Spyre's countries sell?"
He laughed, and just then the platform came to rest at its terminus. As they clambered over to the axle like so many iron spiders, Odess said, What do they trade? You ask that with refreshing innocence. If we knew what half our neighbors traded, we might arrange some extra advantage for Liris. The fame of many of Spyre's commodities is spread far and widebut not all. There are sections of the fair no stranger can enter without providing a guarantee of circumspection."
"A what?"
"A hostage, sometimes, said Eilen. They had entered a long cylindrical chamber with many small doors spiraling up its interior. Odess found one of these and, producing a massive key, unlocked it. Inside was a slot-shaped locker, its walls encrusted with rust and cobwebs, with one incongruously bright mirror at the far end. Odess and the others proceeded to strip off their metal shells, trading them for ornately tooled leather equivalentsexcept that in place of veils, each costume came with an elaborate mask. Odess passed a kit to Venera, and she turned her back modestly to change. Her mask had a falcon's beak.
"There are nations, Odess said, that average one customer every ten years. Whatever it is they trade, it is so fabulously valuable that the whole country lives off the sale for a generation. That's an extreme example, but there are many others who guard the nature of their produce with their lives. Liris used to be one such. Now everyone knows what we produce, but that's actually worked to our advantage."