out on your own.
She too leaned out to touch the cylinders flank.
So youll go home, will you? he asked, with seeming innocence.
Venera snatched her fingers back. She crossed her arms and looked away.
The people who ran this place, she said after a while. It was one of the great nations, wasnt it? One of the ones that specialize in building weapons. Like Sacrus?
He laughed. Not Sacrus. Their export is leverage. Means of political control, ranging from blackmail to torture and extortion. They have advisors in the throne rooms of half the principalities.
They sell torturers?
Thats one of the skills they export, yes. Almost nobody in Spyre deals with them anymoretheyre too dangerous. Keep pulling coups, trying to dominate the Council. The preservationists are still hurting from their own run-in with them. You met one of theirs in Liris? She nodded.
Diamandis sighed. Yet one more reason for you to leave, then. Once youre marked in their ledgers, youre never safe again. Come on, Ill give you a boost up.
Wait. She stared at the black opening in the metal thing. The thought came to her: this wont work . She could not return to Slipstream and pretend that things that had been done had not been done. She could not in silence retire as the shunned wife of a disgraced admiral. Not when the man responsible for Chaisons deaththe Pilot of Slipstreamstill sat like a spider at the center of Slipstream affairs.
Thinking this made her fury catch like dry tinder. A spasm of pain shot up her jaw, and she shook her head. Venera turned and walked back along the catwalk.
Diamandis hurried after her. What are you doing?
Venera struggled to catch her breath. She would need resources. If she was to avenge Chaison, she would need power. Yesterday you said something about a fourth choice, Garth. She rattled down the steps and headed for the door.
Tell me about that choice.
The great estates dwindled as they threaded their way through Diamandiss secret ways; even the preservationists avoided this sector of the great wheel. Ruins dotted the landscape and strange trees lay nearly prone like supplicants.
The ground shook, a constant wavering shudder. The motion reminded her with every step that she stood on thin metal sheeting above an abyss of air. She began to see patches of speed ivy atop broken cornices and walls. And the loose soil thinned until they walked atop the metal of the wheel itself.
Wind pushed at her from behind; Venera had to consciously set her feet down, grinding them into the grit to prevent herself starting to run. Giving into that run would be fatal, Diamandis assured her. The reason why emerged slowly, horribly, from around the collapsed walls and tangled groves of once-great estates.
She clapped Diamandis on the shoulder and pointed. How long ago?
He nodded and leaned in so that she could hear him over the roar. A question important to our enterprise. It happened generations ago, in a time of great unrest in the principalities. Back when the great nations of Spyre still traveledbefore they began to hide in their fortresses.
A hundred yards or so of slick decking extended past the last broken stones, then the first tears and gaps appeared. Long sheets of humming metal extended out, following the lines of the girders that underlay Spyres upper skin. Soon even they disappeared, leaving only bright shreds and the girders themselves. A latticework of metal beams was all the ground there was for the next mile.
Below the plain of girders dark clouds shot past with dizzying speed. Propelled by Spyres centrifugal force, a ceaseless hurricane roared in and down and through the empty windows of the broken ruins and leaped off the edges of the world.
Behold the airfall! Diamandis gestured dramatically; but there was no need. Venera stood awestruck at the sheer savagery of the permanent storm that warred about her. If she lifted one foot or straightened her back she might be caught and yanked out and then down, and shot out of Spyre through this screaming, gouting wound.
Thisthis is insane! She hunkered down, clutching a boulder. Her leathers flapped up around her ears. Am I expected to run into that?
No,
not run! Crawl. Because up theredo you see it? There is your fourth alternative! She squinted where he pointed and at first didnt see anything. Then she blinked and looked again.
The skin of Spyre had been stripped away for at least a mile in every direction. The hole must have unbalanced the whole wheeltowers, farms, factories, and even perhaps whole towns being sucked out and flung into the depths of Virga in a catastrophe that threatened to destroy the entire wheel. For some reason the peeling and collapse had propagated only so far and then stoppedbut the standing cyclone of exiting air must have shaken Spyre so much as to threaten its immediate destruction.
This, if anything, explained the preservationists and the fierce war they had fought to lay their tracks around Spyre. The unstable wobble of the wheel could only be fixed by moving massive weights around the rim to balance it. There was no patching this hole.