Calandria poured some wine and handed Jordan the cup. He accepted it gratefully, and hunched further under the blanket next to the fire Axel had lit in the fireplace. Axel now paced angrily at the doorway to their tower room. He had barred the door. Several times people had knocked, but he’d shouted that things were under control, Jordan was fine.
It seemed he’d disgraced them at the banquet. Jordan could still taste vomit faintly; he gulped at the wine to mask it. His hands shook, and he stared at them dumbly.
“What’s wrong with him?” Axel demanded.
“He seems to be becoming more attuned to the implant. He was only able to receive when he was asleep before. Jordan, can you hear me?”
He drew himself closer to the fire. Reluctantly, he said, “Yeah.”
Her fingers alighted on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He drained the wine, facing into the fire.
“This is too much for him,” Axel said. “We should stop.”
“We don’t know where he is yet!” she retorted. “The avatar is a threat until we find him and neutralize him. You know how the gods are. We have no way of knowing whether 3340 hid a resurrection seed in Armiger. If it did, and the seed sprouts… then, everything we’ve done is threatened.”
“There are other ways to find him.”
“No!” They both turned their heads. Jordan glared at them. At that moment the two of them reminded him of his parents, ineffectually mouthing words instead of acting. “We have to do something now! He’s hurting people.”
Calandria came to sit next to him. “What do you mean?”
“We have to find out where he is right now,” Jordan insisted. “You promised you would take the visions away when I’d told you where Armiger is. Well, let’s do it. I thought after the manse that things would get easier, since you said you knew what was happening and I thought you could do something about it. But you didn’t expect what happened tonight, and it’s getting worse!” He hunkered himself down, trying to pin her with the reproach of his gaze.
Calandria and Axel exchanged looks. Axel shrugged, appearing almost amused. “There are three of us in on this venture now, Cal. He’s got a point.”
“Where’s the wisdom you were going to trade me for telling you where Armiger is?” Jordan pointed out. “I haven’t got anything out of this. You kidnapped me, and put visions in my head till I’m almost crazy!” He was mildly astonished at his own outburst. Of course, he’d had a few cups of wine tonight, but really enough was enough. An echo of the force that had driven him into the night after Emmy drove him to speak now.
“You seem like the Winds sometimes,” he said, “but you haven’t done anything for me. You said you would.”
Calandria stood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I promise to make it up to you. And I realize I made a mistake in bringing you to the banquet. I didn’t think you would find it so stressful.”
“Wait a second,” said Axel. “So he was under extreme stress tonight. And started having visions. Is stress the trigger?”
She nodded, and sighed. “Sorry, Axel. I wasn’t sure of it before, so I didn’t mention it. But the banquet proves it. There’s a correlation between stress and his receptivity.”
“Maybe if he can control his stress reactions, he can control the visions,” said Axel. Jordan looked up again at this.
Calandria looked pained. “Yes, but we don’t want to eliminate them entirely. On the other hand, he won’t be able to learn to control himself fast enough to prevent us learning what we need to know.”
“We can at least teach him how to avoid the sort of thing that just happened.” Axel nodded, his arms crossed and his eyes on Jordan. “Teach him some of your tricks. Relaxation games. Mind control. We owe him that much, and you’d said we’d pay him in wisdom. So let’s start paying.”
Calandria looked from Axel to Jordan, and nodded wearily. “All right.” She sat down again. “Jordan, we will start your education right now, if you want.”
“Yes!” He turned to face her. Finally.
“This will take time, and a lot of practise. It might not even work for the first while, but with practise you’ll start to get it. Okay? Good. The first thing you must learn is that you cannot do anything if you cannot control your own mind—your emotions and your reactions. So, that is the first thing you will learn. Beginning with how to relax.”
Jordan forgot the heat at his back and the wine in his cup, and listened.
*
Two anxious days passed. Armiger wasn’t moving, so Jordan had nothing new to report to Calandria. He knew she was frustrated by the delay; they went over his previous visions time and again, but he could provide nothing new for her. He often saw her meditating with her eyes closed, and often after these sessions she had new questions for him about the landscapes he had glimpsed: “was there a tall rounded hill in the distance? Did the forest extend in three tongues near the horizon?” He had no answers.
On the third day, on one of his infrequent breaks, Jordan went to the roof to stretch. The Boros estate sprawled out below. People went to and fro about duties that were all familiar to him. He could tell what was happening by watching the servants, though the purposes of the Boros’ themselves were impossible to read.
Though politics as such was beyond him, Jordan could read the story of the Boros family home from its very stones—could tell what was added when, and in what style. If you went by the boasts of the visiting family members, the clan had always been prominent. But this tower was ancient, and the manor house new, and in between were traces of buildings and walls in styles from various periods. Jordan could imagine each in turn, and he saw large gaps between the apparent razing of one set of buildings and the growth of the manor. If this were the Boros’ ancestral home, it had lain unoccupied for up to a century at a time.
This exercise was a good way to take his mind off things. And, he had to admit, he was starting to relax despite himself. Over the past days he had constantly practiced the skills Calandria May had taught him. He’d never known he should breathe from the belly, not the chest—or that his body carried tension in tight muscles even when his mind was relaxed. He scanned his body every minute or two, and every time he did, he found some part of it had tightened up, usually his shoulders. He would concentrate for a second, relax them, and go back to what he was doing. The feeling of being pursued that had plagued him was receding.
Best of all, the visitations by Armiger were no longer arbitrary and uncontrollable. He still dreamed about the demigod, but in daylight he could tell when a vision fit was creeping up on him. Using the relaxation exercises Calandria had taught him, he could usually stop it dead. Calandria encouraged him to think of the visions as a talent he could master, and not as some alien intrusion.
He knew this worked to her ends, but was prepared to go along because, at last, her ends paralleled his own. He was able to think about the visions with some objectivity, and report what he saw and heard in detail to her.
Most importantly, what he saw and heard had changed. Armiger lay in bed in a cabin somewhere to the south. He was being nursed by a solitary woman, a widow who lived alone in the woods. In his convalescence Armiger seemed like an ordinary man. His terrible wounds were healing, and the small snatches of dialogue between him and his benefactor that Jordan caught were mundane, awkward, almost shy. Armiger had not eaten her, nor did he order her about. He accepted her help, and thanked her graciously for it. His voice was no longer a choked rasp, but a mellow tenor.
Jordan didn’t doubt Armiger’s capacity for evil. He was not human. But what Jordan saw was no longer nightmarish, and that, too, was a relief.
“Hey, there you are!” Axel Chan’s head poked up from the open trapdoor of the tower’s roof. He emerged, dusted himself off, and came to join Jordan at the battlement. “What are you doing up here? The gardens are fine today. Soaking up the sun?”
Jordan nodded. “I like it up here. I can see all the buildings.” Gardens didn’t interest him; they were the provenance of gardeners, not stoneworkers like him.
He hesitated, then asked something that had been on his mind. “We’re not staying here, are we?”
“We’ll be leaving as soon as we have a fix on Armiger.” Axel leaned out carefully, and spat. “Hm. Twenty meters down.” He looked slyly at Jordan. “You wouldn’t be hiding from Calandria up here, would you?”
“No.” It was the truth, though Jordan did know what Axel meant. “She works me pretty hard.” If she had her way, Jordan would spent sixteen hours a day on his exercises.
Axel shrugged. “She’s trying to pack as much information into you as she can in a short time.”
“But she won’t answer all my questions.”
“Really? Like what?”
“I asked her what the Winds are. She said I probably wouldn’t understand.”
“Ah. No, you probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell you,” added Axel with a grin. “You want to know? The unabridged version?”
“Yes!”
“Okay.” Axel steepled his hands, looking out over the estate. “Has she told you what gods are?”
“Primal spirits,” Jordan said. “Superior to the Winds.”
Axel scowled. “You see, here’s one of those places where the questions will go on forever. Okay, first of all, the gods aren’t spirits, they’re mortal. Second, humans existed before the gods. Thirdly, we made the first gods, centuries ago. They were experiments in creating consciousness in mechanisms. Nobody knows where 3340 came from, but He was the same kind of thing as the Winds, and just as out of control.”
“How could a god be a mechanism?”
“Hmmf. Look at it this way. Once long ago two kinds of work converged. We’d figured out how to make machines that could make more machines. And we’d figured out how to get machines to… not exactly think, but do something very much like it. So one day some people built a machine which knew how to build a machine smarter than itself. That built another, and that another, and soon they were building stuff the men who made the first machine didn’t even recognize. Some of these things became known as mecha, which is the third order of life here on Ventus. Mecha’s as subtle as biological life, but constructed totally differently.
“And, some of the mechal things kept developing, with tremendous speed, and became more subtle than life. Smarter than humans. Conscious of more. And, sometimes, more ambitious. We had little choice but to label them gods after we saw what they could do—namely, anything.
“Most of the time gods go on about their own concerns. 3340 decided its concern was us. Luckily we—humans—know how to create things of equal power that serve us. The Winds were intended to be your slaves, not your masters. Apparently there’s stories here to that effect.”
Jordan nodded.
“The exact design of the Winds has been lost,” Axel said, “since they were a one-shot project of the European Union, and the university that oversaw the project was nuked along with Hamburg in 2078. Anyway, the Winds were created and given the task of turning Ventus from a lifeless wasteland into a paradise where people could live. They did so—except that when the colonists arrived, the Winds didn’t recognize you.
“It seems there was no way to communicate with them. One of the things we don’t know to this day is what the chain of command within the Winds was supposed to be. There seems to be no central ‘brain’ which rules the planet. And communications between the Winds seems spotty and confused. It’s as if they’ve all gone their own ways.
“A lot of people think this is what happened. The Winds all concern themselves with the ecology of the planet, but at different levels. The vagabond moons worry about the overall distribution of minerals and soil nutrients, so they scoop here and dump there; they want to do in centuries what evolution and tectonics would take billions of years to accomplish. The mecha embedded in the grass are advocates of the grass, and they may object to the moons’ dumping crap on them, say. There’s no central brain telling both it’s a good idea. But maybe there was originally supposed to be a central plan, that they would all have access to. Knowing this plan, the grass would acquiesce to its death by salting, or drowning in a new lake made by the desals. So, though none of the Winds were to be answerable to any of the others, they would all be answerable to the Plan, because that was the only way to guarantee the proper terraforming of Ventus.
“Humans don’t seem to be mentioned in the programming of the Winds. We were supposed to be the apex of the Plan, represented as its ultimate purpose. That’s what went wrong—no Plan, no accommodation for the arrival of the colonists.
“So a strange double-world has developed on your planet. Each object seems to have its resident spirit—the microscopic mecha, or what we call ‘nano’, that coordinate that object’s place in the ecology. Originally these resident spirits were supposed to have a common goal over and above the survival of their hosts. They were to put themselves at our disposal—be our tools. But now, it’s anarchy. War in the spirit world. The only ones aloof from this war are the greatest Winds, the Diadem swans, the Heaven hooks and the like.”
Jordan had only understood a little of this speech. “But some people do speak to the Winds,” he said. “That’s how the inspectors and controllers know what crop yields should be, or where they can build a waterwheel. The Winds tell them what’s allowed.”
“Hm…” Axel raised an eyebrow. “I’d heard that from other people here too. Up there,” he jerked a thumb at the clouds, “people don’t believe it. They say your inspectors are a bunch of charlatans, holding onto power by pretending they can talk to the Winds.”
Jordan crossed his arms. “I don’t know. I just know how we do things.”
“Right. That’s fair.”
“So what is Calandria May?” asked Jordan. “Is she a Wind, or a thing like Armiger? Or just a person?”
“She’s… just a person. But a person with special skills, and enhancements to her body, such as the armor under her skin. I’ve got that too,” he said, rubbing his wrist. “And I’m still human, aren’t I?” He grinned.
“So how did you get here? I know you followed Armiger, but…” Jordan had too many questions; he didn’t know where to start.
Axel frowned down at the distant gardens. “We were at war against 3340—all humanity was. It wanted us all as slaves. It had all its godly powers; we had our super-mecha. And a few agents who were more than human, but less than gods, like Calandria May. Last year she infiltrated a world called Hsing, which 3340 had enslaved, to try to find a way to turn the population against their unchosen god. She found 3340 had been changing ordinary people into demigods—Diadem swans or morphs, if you will—by infecting them with mecha that ate them from within, replacing all their biology with mechalogy. 3340 enslaved these much more brutally than even the humans. Cal found a way to turn them against 3340, and she did that during our attack six months ago.”
“How?”
“She had to briefly become one of them herself. You or I couldn’t have done it, but Calandria was able to leave her humanity behind. She became a goddess, only for a day or so. And she killed 3340.”
“If she became a goddess, why didn’t she stay that way?”
Axel shook his head. “Don’t know. She could have kept fabulous powers; she would have lived for thousands of years if she wanted. She didn’t want to. I think she was crazy to give that up. Don’t understand. I really don’t.”
Jordan was thinking. “So after 3340 died, you came here. To kill his servant, Armiger.”
“Exactly.” Axel leaned against the battlement, and squinted at the sun. “What does all of this imply about the Winds, now?”
Jordan hesitated. What came to mind was impossible.
Axel nodded smugly. “You’re smart. Isn’t it clear? The Winds are made of the same stuff as the mecha. They are alive. And they, too, are mortal.”
Jordan turned away. “Crazy talk. If the Winds are mortal, then everything could be. —The sky, or the sun, or the earth itself.”
“You’re beginning to understand,” Axel said. “Now understand this: what is mortal can be murdered.”
*
The door to their tower room was bolted; the fire was lit and candles sat on the table. Jordan, Calandria and Axel sat in imitation of some domestic scene, each bent over an evening task. Except that Calandria was not darning, but poring over a map on the table top; and Axel was not repairing tools or his boots, but polishing the steel of a wicked sword; and Jordan was not playing games or cleaning, but sat cross-legged in the center of the floor, hands on his knees, eyelids fluttering. He was trying to count to three, one digit per breath, without allowing any stray thoughts to intrude on the way. Tonight he felt he was finally starting to get the hang of it.
At two-and-a-half breaths, he caught himself thinking hey, I can do this! Stop. Back to one.
“Shit.” He slapped himself on the forehead. Calandria laughed.
“You’re doing well,” she said. “You can rest now.”
“But I had it once or twice!”
“Good. Don’t push it, or you’ll get worse rather than better.”
He unwove his legs and stood. Two deep breaths, just as she had taught. Jordan felt great, relaxed and able to deal with things. He’d never really felt like this before… oh, maybe when he was really young, and didn’t know what the world was like. All his cares and worries seemed distant, and he was able to pay attention to the here-and-now. He smiled, and plunked himself down on the edge of the bed.
“Axel tells me you have quite a mind,” Calandria said. “He told me you figured out your own history of the Boros clan by reading their architecture.”
“Yeah,” he said suspiciously. He and Axel had moved on to talk about that this afternoon, after their conversation about the Winds and 3340 had ended in impasse. Axel had been quite unaware of the contradiction between the Boros’ official history and what the stones suggested.
“Do you want to move on to a new study? You must continue to practise what I’ve taught you, of course.”
“Sure!” He felt ready for anything. “What do we do?”
Calandria folded her map and put it aside. “We can build on what you’ve already learned. If you can relax, you can concentrate. If you can concentrate, you can do marvels.”
“Like what?”
“Perfect memory, for instance. Or perfect control of your body, even your heartbeat. Tonight, I’ll show you something to help you control your visions.”
“I thought that was what I was learning.”
“You’ve been learning how to stop them. Now you’ll learn how to make them happen.”
Axel looked up, surprise written on his mobile face. “Do we know that?”
“Everything’s consistent,” she said. “I’d be very surprised if this doesn’t work.” She motioned for Jordan to sit on the floor, and seated herself in front of him. “Now, close your eyes.”
Jordan wasn’t sure he wanted to be able to make the visions happen—he was happy that they were going away. But he obeyed. Armiger was not so frightening any more, and if he could stop a vision once it started, the prospect was less daunting.
“Now,” Calandria said, “without actually doing it, imagine you are raising your hand in front of your face.” He did so. “Examine your imaginary hand. Turn it back and forth. Make a fist.” He obeyed. “Look closely at your hand. Picture it as clearly as you can.”
Jordan did his best. “Do you keep losing the image?” she asked. He nodded. “Do you get little flashes of other images?”
Puzzled, he sat for a while. Then he realized what she meant: the hand was replaced for a split-second here and there by pictures of inconsequential things, like the washbasin in the corner, or a vista of trees he couldn’t identify. “I see it,” he said.
“This is what goes on behind everybody’s eyes,” she said. “A constant flicker of visions. As you practise the counting exercise and your concentration improves, you’ll be able to damp them down, and see what you want to see for longer and longer.
“Now, as you’ve imagined your hand, imagine you can see your entire body. Keep your eyes closed, and look down at yourself.” He moved his head, imagining his bent knees and bare feet against the flagstones. “Good. Now, keep your eyes closed, and don’t move. Imagine this second body of yours is your own, and stand up in it.”
He did. “Look around.” Jordan pretended he was standing and looking around the room. It was hard to maintain the images; they kept sliding away. He said so.
“That’s okay. Now pretend to turn around. Do you see the bench where Axel’s sitting?”
He concentrated. “Yes…” He kept seeing it as a memory, from the position of the bed where he’d sat earlier. He tried to imagine seeing it as if he were standing in the center of the room.
“See his pack on the floor next to it?”
“Yes.”
“Go over to the pack. Open it up. Look inside. What do you see?”
He pretended to do as she said. “There’s… a knife, a book, a glass liquor bottle.”
“How full is the bottle?”
Jordan pretended to hold it up. It seemed to be a quarter full. “A quarter.” That was just a fancy, of course; he had no idea what was in Axel’s pack.
Calandria said, “Axel, open your pack. Is there a bottle in it?”
“Yeah.”
“How full is it?”
“A quarter full, but hey this is just a memory trick. I was drinking from it earlier, you both saw me.”
“Jordan, do you remember seeing Axel drink from the bottle earlier?”
“I… I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Maybe. But you’re not sure. And yet you see the bottle, and you know how full it is, and where it is. How strange, hmm?”
A strong exultation gripped Jordan. He had seen it! What he saw with his imagination was somehow real.
“Parlor trick,” muttered Axel.
“Be silent!” she commanded. “Now try this. Sit your body down again where your real body sits. Close your imaginary eyes.” He did so. “Imagine blackness. Now…”
Her hand touched his shoulder. Jordan struggled to keep his eyes closed. “Practise your deep breathing. Calm yourself, and see deeper and deeper black.” He felt the center of his consciousness dropping through his body, to rest finally in his belly, where great strength drove slow breaths in and out.
Calandria’s voice had taken on its most hypnotic lilt. “You will open your inner eyes again, but this time, the hand you see before you will not be yours, but rather Armiger’s. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Open those eyes.”
He did so.
*
The ceiling was low, and beamed. He could see the cross-pattern of thatch crooks flickering above that in the firelight.
Armiger sat up. The effort was easier this time. He looked around, fingers opening and closing on the soft cloth which was draped over his naked body.
The woman sat near the fire. Megan, she had called herself. She held a cloth sack draped across her knees, and was just positioning the second of two buckets at her feet. It was probably the scraping sound of the buckets that had woken him.
All Megan’s possessions were visible within the one room of this cabin. She had three chairs, a full set of pots, cooking, and fire implements, two hatchets by the door, and a spinning wheel. Chests were wedged into the corners. Dried herbs and kindling hung from the rafters. Everything was roughhewn, except three items of furniture: the posted bed Armiger now sat in, a fine oaken dining table and, at the wall behind Megan, a wooden cupboard with inlaid patterns of leaves. Yesterday he had lain for a while, too exhausted to move, and examined the pattern on that cupboard from his position here.
Megan was in her thirties. Her hair was grey, her face lined and wind-burnt. She was very strong, though, and still slim under the red peasant dress she wore. Now she plunged her hand into one of the buckets, and brought out a fistful of brown and white feathers. She began riffling through the mass with her other hand.
“What are you doing?” he asked. His voice sounded stronger.
Megan looked up quickly, and smiled. “How are you?”
“Better.” He rolled his head, surprising himself when his neck cracked. It never used to do that. He fingered the underside of his jaw. The scar was almost gone. “I’d like to try to walk today.”
“Tomorrow. It’s evening.”
“Oh.” She began stuffing feathers into the open end of the sack, and he realized she was making a pillow. “I’ve been using your bed. I…” He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. Thank her for that? But he had been ailing. It was a human thing for her to do, he knew; not that any of his men would have willingly done the same. “Where have you been sleeping?”
“Oh, I slept there with you the first night,” she said, looking down at her work. Her hair hid her face. “You were so cold, I thought you might not survive till morning. The last few times, I’ve used the table. With some quilts on it, it’s quite fine. The bed’s mattress is only straw, anyway.”
Armiger imagined her lying on the table, like a body in state. He pushed the image deliberately out of his mind.
“I’m sorry to be a burden to you,” he said stiffly.
Megan frowned. “Don’t talk like that. It’s no trouble, all else I have to take care of is me. And I am fine. Anyway… what else could I do?”
“I was dying,” he said, wondering at the thought. “You saved me.”
“I’ve tended the dying before,” she said. “Last time, with no hope he’d recover. I had not that hope this time, either. So I am happy, you see, if I could save someone.” Her face fell as she thought of something. “At least this time…”
“You lost someone close to you?” He looked around, noticing the fine wooden table and bed-frame. “Your husband.”
Megan nodded as she reached for more down. “You see I know about losing things. And about trying to keep them.” She looked at him, almost fiercely. “You always lose it in the end—what you want to keep. The harder you try to keep it the more it goes. So now I know how to keep things right.”
“How is that?”
“You can never keep a whole thing. But you can keep a part of anything.” She looked sadly at the wooden cupboard. “Be it only a piece of furniture. And if you can learn to be content with that, then you can let anything go.” Megan stood and walked to the cupboard. She smoothed her hand over the fine wood grain. “I would sit and watch him as he made this. He spent so much time on it. We were in love. When you lose your husband, you think you’ve lost everything—nothing has any value any more. Funny, how long it took to know that this was still here, and other little things. The parts of him I could keep.”
She shrugged, and turned to Armiger. “And what have you lost?”
He felt a surge of rage at the mindless presumption of the question. As if she could comprehend what he’d lost! Well, maybe to her, losing her husband was the equivalent of his own disaster. “I lost my army,” he said.
Megan laughed. “And nearly your life. But soldiers don’t worry about that sort of thing, do they? I admire that.”
He scratched absently at the back of his arm. “Good lady, soldiers worry about nothing else.”
She came and sat down on the edge of the bed. He smelled pungent chicken feathers. “Now,” she said seriously, “maybe I do believe that. Because you’ve lost something. More than your way.”
Armiger stared at her. There was no way he could talk about this—words could not encompass it, they were too small. The part of him he had communed with had been beyond words, or any of a human’s five senses; it had invented senses, and sense, to suit its intimacies.
He wanted to speak to her in thunder, in torn ground and shocked air. Would have, had he only the strength.
Reminded that she had given him what strength he did have, he looked down.
“I think… I did die,” he said. It was the only human analogue he could think of. “I died when… She died.” She was completely wrong to describe his higher Self; but Megan’s people thought their souls were feminine. He struggled to find words, wrapping his arms around himself, glaring past her. “More than a wife. More than a queen. My god died, who gave meaning to more than just my life, who infused everything, the stones, the air, with it.”
Megan nodded. “I knew. From things you said in your sleep. From the look of you.” She sighed. “Yes, you see, we are together in that.”
“No. Not like you.” He sat up angrily, feeling sharp stabs of pain in his side. Megan stared at him, patient and undaunted.
He wanted to pierce her calmness, her certainty that her own pain was as great as his. “She wasn’t a human being,” he said. She was… a Wind.”
Megan blinked. Her brow wrinkled, then cleared. “Much is made clear,” she said. It was his turn to look surprised. Megan reached out, slowly, and touched the healing scar under his chin. “I know the rites of death,” she said. “I have had to perform them myself.”
Armiger sat back. His anger was deflated. For some reason, he felt unfulfilled, as if he had lied to her, and not merely told her what she would understand.
Everything was greying out. “Sleep,” she said. “My morph.”
He lay back, listening to her move about the cabin. Just before he drifted off again, he heard her say, maybe to herself, “And what part of this are you going to keep?”