To her advantage was the fact that the paranoid societies of Spyre rarely communicated. “Sacrus won’t want anyone to know they had you,” Diamandis had pointed out one evening as they sat huddled in the tower, an ornate chair burning merrily in the fireplace. “If they choose to unmask you, it’s at the expense of admitting they have connections with the outside world—and more importantly, they won’t want to hint that they have the Key to Candesce. I don’t think we’ll hear a peep out of them, at least not overtly.”

The workmen finished knocking down the last bricks and stepped aside just as Diamandis stuck his head around the corner of the archway. “The door is there, ma’am. And the lock.”

“Ah, good.” Venera stalked past the workers, trying to keep from nervously twisting the ring on her finger. This was the proverbial moment of truth. If the key didn’t work…

The brick wall had been built across an entryway that extended fifteen feet and ended in a large iron-bound door similar to the one at Buridan Tower. The ministers crowded in behind Venera, watching like hawks as she dusted off the lockbox with her glove. “Gentlemen,” she said acidly, “there is only so much air in here—though I suppose you have some natural skepticism about my authenticity. Put that out of your minds.” She held up the signet ring. “I am my own proof—but if you need crass symbols, perhaps this one will do.” She jammed the key against the inset impression in the lockbox.

Nothing happened.

“Pardon.” Diamandis was looking alarmed and Venera quashed the urge to make some sort of joke. She must not lose her air of confidence, not even for a second. Bending to examine the lock, she saw that it had been overgrown with grit over the years. “Brush, please,” she said in a bored tone, holding out one hand. After a long minute someone placed a hairbrush in her palm. She scrubbed the lock industriously for a while, then blew on it and tried the ring again.

This time there was a deep click and then a set of ratcheting thumps from behind the wall. The door ground open slowly.

“You are the council for… infrastructure, was it not?” she asked, fixing the ministers with a cold eye. Aday nodded. “Hmm,” she said. “Well.” She turned, preparing to sweep like the spoiled princess she had once been, through the opened door into blackness.

A loud bang and fall of dust from the ceiling made her stumble. There was sudden pandemonium in the gallery. The ministers were milling in confusion while screams and shouts followed the echoes of the explosion into the air. Past Aday’s shoulder Venera saw a curling pillar of smoke or dust that hadn’t been there a second ago.

With her foot hovering over the threshold of the estate, Venera found herself momentarily forgotten. Sirens were sounding throughout the wheel and she heard the clatter of soldiers’ boots on the flagstones. In the courtyard, someone was crying; somebody else was screaming for help.

Expressionless, she walked back to the gallery and peered over Aday’s shoulder. “Somebody bombed the crowd,” she said.

“It’s terrible, terrible,” moaned Aday, wringing his hands.

“This can’t have been planned,” she said reasonably. “So who would be walking around on a morning like this just carrying a bomb?”

“It’s the rebels,” said Aday furiously. “Bombers, assassins… This is terrible!”

Someone burst into the courtyard below and ran toward the most injured people. With a start Venera realized it was Garth Diamandis. He shouted commands to some stunned but otherwise intact victims; slowly they moved to obey, fanning out to examine the fallen.

It hadn’t occurred to Venera until this moment that she could also be helping. She felt a momentary stab of surprise, then… was it anger? She must be angry at Diamandis, that was it. But she remembered the mayhem of battle aboard the Rook when the pirates attacked, and the aftermath. Such fear and anguish, and in those moments the smallest gesture meant so much to men who were in pain. The airmen had given of themselves without a moment’s thought—given aid, bandages, and blood.

She turned to look for the stairs, but it was too late: the medics had arrived. Frowning, Venera watched their white uniforms fan out through the blackened rubble. Then she lit her lantern and stalked back to the archway.

“When my manservant is done, send him to me,” she said quietly. She strode alone into the long-sealed estate of Buridan.

In an abandoned bedchamber of the windswept tower, while the floor swayed and sighs moaned through the huge pipes that underlay the place, Diamandis had told Venera histories of Buridan, and more.

“They were the horse masters,” he said. “Theirs was the ultimate in impractical products—a being that required buckets of food and endless space to run, that couldn’t live a day in freefall. But a creature so beautiful that visitors to Spyre routinely fell in love with them. To have a horse was the ultimate sign of power, because it meant you had gravity to waste.”

“But that must have been centuries ago,” she’d said. Venera was having trouble hearing Diamandis, even though the room’s door was tightly closed and there were no windows in this chamber. The tower was awash with sound, from the creaking of the beams and the roaring of the wind to the basso-profundo chorus of drones that reverberated through every surface. Even before her eyes had adjusted to the darkness inside the building, before she could take in the clean-stripped smell of chambers and corridors scoured by centuries of wind, the full-throated scream of Buridan had nearly driven her outside again.

It had taken them an hour to discover the source of that basso cry: the nest of huge pipes that jutted from the bottom of Buridan Tower acted like a giant wind instrument. It hummed and keened, moaned and ululated unceasingly.

Diamandis slapped the wall. This octagonal chamber was filled with jumbled pots, pans and other kitchen utensils; but it was quiet compared to the bedchambers and lounges of the former inhabitants. “Buridan’s heyday was very long ago,” he said. He looked almost apologetic, his features lit from below by the oil lamp they’d brought. “But the people of Spyre have long memories. Our records go all the way back to the creation of the world.”

He told her stories about Spyre’s ancient glories that night as they bedded down, and the next day as they prowled the jumbled chaos of the tower. Later, Venera would always find those memories entwined within her: the tales he told her accompanied by images of the empty, forlorn chambers of the tower. Grandeur, age, and despair were the setting for his voice; grandeur, age and despair henceforth defined her impressions of ancient Virga.

He told her tales of vast machines, bigger than cities, that had once built the very walls of Virga itself. Those engines were alive and conscious, according to Diamandis, and their offspring included both machines and humans. They had settled the cold black spaces of a star’s outskirts, having sailed for centuries from their home.

“Preposterous!” Venera had exclaimed. “Tell me more.”

So he told her of the first generations of men and women who had lived in Virga. The world was their toy, but they shared it with beings far more powerful and wiser than themselves. It was simple for them to build places like Spyre—but in doing so, they used up much of Virga’s raw materials. The machines objected. There was a war of inconceivable ferocity; Virga rang like a bell, its skin glowed with heat, and the precarious life forms the humans had seeded inside it were annihilated.

“Ridiculous!” she said. “You can do better than that.”

Spyre was the fortress of the human faction, he told her. From here, the campaign was launched that defeated the machines. Sulking, they left to create their own settlement on the farside of the sun—but some remained. In faraway, frozen, and sunless corners of the world, forgotten soldiers slept. Having accumulated dust and fungus over the centuries, they could easily be mistaken for asteroids. Some hung like frozen bats from the skin of the world, icebergs with sightless eyes. If you could waken them, you might receive powers and gifts beyond mortal desire; or you could unleash death and ruin on the whole world.