Queen of Candesce Read Online Free

the other—Venera slipped her hand in to touch the scuffed white cylinder that she and her husband had fought their way across half the world to collect. It didn’t look like it was worth anything, so Diamandis had apparently ignored it. Venera left it where it was and straightened to find Diamandis watching her.
    â€œConsider those trinkets to be payment for my rescuing you,” he said. “I can live for years on what you had in your pockets.”
    â€œSo could I,” she said levelly. “In fact, I was counting on using those valuables to barter my way home, if I had to.”
    â€œI’ve left you a pair of earrings and a bracelet,” he said, pointing. There they were, sitting on the table next to her toeless deck shoes. “The rest is hidden, so don’t bother looking.”
    Seething but too tired to fight, Venera leaned back, carefully draping the moist sheet over herself. “If I felt better, old man, I’d whip you for your impudence.”
    He laughed out loud. “Spoken like a true aristocrat! I knew you were a woman of quality by the softness of your hands. So what were you doing floating alone in the skies of Virga? Was your ship beset by pirates? Or did you fall overboard?”
    She grimaced. “Either one makes a good story. Take your pick. Oh, don’t look at me like that, I’ll tell you, but first you have to tell me where we are. What is Spyre? How could such a place exist? From the heat outside I’d say we’re still near the sun of suns. Is this place one of the principalities of Candesce?”
    Diamandis shrugged. He bent over his dinner pot for a minute, then straightened and said, “Spyre’s the whole world to those of us who live here. I’m told there’s no other place like it in all of Virga. We were here at the founding of the world, and most people think we’ll be here at its end. But I’ve also heard that once, there were dozens of Spyres, and that all the rest crumbled and spun apart over the ages…. So I believe we live in a mortalworld. Like me, Spyre is showing its age.”
    He brought two plates. Venera was impressed: he’d added some cooked roots and a handful of boiled grains and made a passable meal of the bird. She was ravenous and dug in; he watched in amusement.
    â€œAs to what Spyre is…” He thought for a moment. “In the cold-blooded language of the engineers, you could say that we live on an open-ended rotating cylinder made of metal and miraculously strong cables. About six miles from here there’s a giant engine that powers the electric jets. It is the same kind of engine that runs the suns. Once, we had hundreds of jets to keep us spinning, and Spyre’s outer skin was smooth and didn’t catch the wind. Gravity was stronger then. The jets are failing, one by one, and wind resistance pulls at the skin like the fingers of a demon. The old aristocrats refuse to see the decay that surrounds them, even when pieces of Spyre fall away and the whole world becomes unbalanced in its turning. When that happens, the Preservationist Society’s rail engines start up and they haul as many tons as needed around the circle of the world to reestablish the balance.
    â€œThe nobles fought a civil war against the creation of the Preservation Society. That was a hundred years ago, but some of them are still fighting. The rest have been hunkered down on their estates for five centuries now, slowly breeding heritable insanities in the quiet of their shuttered parlors. They’re so isolated that they hardly speak the same language anymore. They’ll shoot anyone who crosses their land, yet they continue to live, because they can export objects and creatures that can only be made here.”
    Venera frowned at him. “You must not be one of them. You’re making sense as far as I can tell.”
    â€œMe? I’m from the city.” He pointed upward. “Up