"I think it's over," he said.
* * *
"YOU'RE A TERRIBLE pilot," Jacoby muttered as yet another body thudded into the sloop's windshield. Venera didn't smile, and he instantly regretted his gallows humor. Hunched at the controls, Venera guided the sloop into the wreckage of the greatest battle Virga had ever seen.
"She'll be all right," he said. "That blockhouse has the best medical facilities in the world. All automated. She'd have to go to Brink to find better."
A bullet or something starred the windshield. Venera jerked, then fingered her jaw, and returned her attention to the controls. "... Can't see a damned thing," she said.
"Just point us at any sun," he said. "Like that one." He nodded at an orange smear behind a bank of indigo clouds, but Venera shook her head.
"We have to find the Surgeon," she said.
For a moment he thought she was still talking about Antaea, and then he realized she meant her husband's flagship.
"He'll be fine, Venera. For God's sake, he's inside a battleship. If he's not safe there, what are we going to do for him?"
She'd grabbed a new pistol from the armory as they'd entered the sloop. She pointed it at him. "The Surgeon," she said levelly. "We'll not be separated again."
He raised his good hand. "The Surgeon it is."
While she piloted, he went back and found the tarpaulin that had been used to cover the water tanks. The tank where he'd hidden the knife-ball egg was gone; Antaea must have tried to dispose of it. He dragged the tarp to the sloop's main hatch and draped it outside. It wasn't much as white flags went, but it would have to do.
They sailed on through darkness and smoke, but everywhere signs of life and humanity were beginning to reassert themselves. Cruisers and cutters from a hundred navies were nosing through the wreckage, netting injured men from the air and tossing ropes to disabled ships to allow their crews on board. He saw one giant vessel that was so festooned with men they hung from every surface and clustered on its hull like flies. This was all the more amazing since the ship had a terrible wound in its flank that had nearly cut it in two.
It rotated into faint amber light and Jacoby saw the colors of Slipstream and the lettering on its prow: Surgeon.
With a smile he turned to tell Venera--then paused. Nearly all the fires of the battle were out, smothered in their own exhaust. Most of the principalities' suns were obscured by clouds. How had he been able to read the lettering on that ship's prow?
He climbed around the Thistle's hull to look back at the sun of suns. Deep red lights glowed there, and they were brightening. As he watched, something like a metal flower began to open behind the vast crystalline spikes that marked Candesce's perimeter. Instead of a stamen and pistil, this flower cradled fire in its heart, and that fire, too, began to brighten.
He swung into the sloop. "Dawn! Dawn's coming! We have to get out of here!"
Venera turned. Her hands were white on the controls, and the expression on her face was terrible.
To his own surprise, Jacoby heard himself say, "The Surgeon's right over there." He pointed to starboard.
She simply said, "Thank you," and banked the Thistle.
The air was choppy now, and they could feel the heat rising through the glass. Outside, the growing radiance illuminated clouds of bodies and shattered ships, and the contorted forms of strange, crablike machines, each one a hundred feet long or more. These had frozen in midgesture and now cast nightmarish shadows across the receding vistas of smoke and the intricate details of aerial carnage.
All the ships that had power were turning away now, racing to escape the exclusion zone before full daylight. Many pilots were having to make agonizing decisions not to try to reach airmen who were waving frantically at them from stranded ships. Chaison Fanning's battleship was powering up its engines, too, but it would take it a while to get up to speed. The Thistle caught up to it easily.
Venera threw a line to some airmen standing in the wreckage of the Surgeon's hangar, and climbed across to join a growing mob of refugees who were all scrambling to get inside before the sun came on.
The heat was becoming intense. Jacoby shaded his eyes and looked back to behold the funeral rites of the principalities writ large: ship by ship, body by body, the radiance of the sun of suns was reaching out to engulf all that remained behind. Whatever was closest to Candesce was already aflame, though the fires were barely visible against the greater light behind them. Thousands upon thousands of silhouetted human figures patterned this sky, and one by one the light reached out to them, and they vanished.
Venera grabbed the arm of a Slipstream officer. "I have to get to the bridge."
He shook his head. "Crew only, ma'am. Besides, it's not safe crossing that." He indicated the twisted girders and shorn bulkheads of the Surgeon's giant wound.
Venera looked him in the eye. "My name is Venera Fanning, and I have to get to the bridge."
"Oh!" He waved at another man. "We need an escort! And semaphore the admiral! Tell him we found his wife."
"Don't," she said; and then she smiled impishly. "I'd prefer to surprise him."
Escorted by four tough airmen, she began climbing up the rigging that stretched across the wreckage. After a moment she paused, and squinted back at Jacoby. "Coming?"
He shook his head. "This is your moment. Besides, if I show my face I'll just be arrested."
"Oh, pfft." But she smiled again. "See you, then, Jacoby."
He watched her climb out of sight. Then he braced his feet under the edge of the buckled hull to watch new upwelling clouds rise from the inferno of Candesce: clouds of ash from a pyre big as the sky. His shoulder throbbed; his left hand pulsed back. He'd come to the end of his strength, and there was no going back from here. In the end, all his guile and violence had been insufficient to prevent a holocaust, and now, he finally felt his age, and knew how little his own epitaph would say.
Jacoby put his head in his hands, and wept.
Epilogue
ROWAN WHEEL CUTS into a cloud, and rain chutes along the copper streets of the city. Dark-coated pedestrians turn up their collars and hurry from doorway to doorway--each portico or glass-doored entrance a gaslit altar in the eternal night. At certain angles the streets gleam like beaten gold, runnels of water making them waver like a hallucination of treasure.
People gather under the eaves and canopies to wait out the storm. The warm orange windows are smudged and faded to sepia by the incoming mist. Conversations start, pause, punctuated by distant rumbles of thunder and the murmuring of the rain; start again.
There's a curfew checkpoint being dismantled about a block away. The soldiers keep working through the rain, faces impassive ovals on a velvet backdrop. Someone comments that it's such a relief the danger is over. No one looks up past the perches of the spokesmen, to where faintly gleam the running lights of new visitors from outside the world.
She will imagine that these streets still bear old impressions of her shoes, an added layer to the map-upon-map that is the history of Sere. Certainly, her ghosts will always walk here: her parents, Easley Fencher, Brun Mafin, old William. Somewhere, shrouded by darkness and rain, Seana also walks, dear sad Porril hurries into his house, and Uthor pauses to glance out the obsidian square of a window as he prepares a meal for his latest client.
She will write to Seana when she's ready. It will be so easy, now that communications systems can reach instantly across the world.
When she's ready--but not yet.