The bowl of the sky was being filled. Jordan could see stars only near the horizon; the rest of the firmament was taken up by the dark mass of a vagabond moon. He had never seen one so low to the ground before—had never realized how big it was, like a thunderhead. It seemed ready to drop on him at any moment.
From a distance the moons seemed featureless, but up close he could make out tiny patterns in its dark skin, like the veins of a leaf. And directly above him, in the center of the bowled-in sky the moon made, he saw a deeply black star-shaped opening appear, and motes of light drifted silently down from it.
The Heaven hooks. He could see them among the lights now: black filaments, like spider’s thread, with the lights strung along them like paper lanterns at a fair. Everyone knew the hooks rode on vagabond moons, reaching down through clouds like the hands of a god to scoop up entire fields. He had never seen them before—no one he knew had. But he knew the stories.
The entrance to the manor was only a hundred meters away. Jordan put his head down, and ran for the doors.
*
Linden Boros picked up Axel Chan’s sword. The blade was covered in blood. The lord turned it over in his hands thoughtfully. “Foreign make,” he said. “Could be Iapysian?” A fresh commotion was breaking out in the hallway outside Yuri’s bed chamber. The whole estate, it seemed, was erupting with noise.
“What does it matter,” said the lieutenant at his side. “We know Brendan Sheia is behind this.”
“Is that so?”
Silence fell like a cloak across the room. Calandria stood on her tiptoes to see what had happened.
Brendan Sheia stood in the doorway. He had one hand on the pommel of his sword, otherwise he appeared calm. “Is it wise to jump to such conclusions, brother?”
“I’m not your brother!” Linden paced up to him. “It was very stupid of you to come here, Brendan. I suppose, though, it saves you the humiliation of being run to ground.”
“You’re too quick to jump to conclusions,” Brendan said. He went to Marice, and gravely bowed. “My lady, I don’t know what to say. This is terrible.” Again, Marice turned away.
Brendan Sheia wheeled about like an actor on stage. He knew he had the attention of every person in the room. He was a hulking man with a square face, black hair and beetle brows. He wore a house coat embroidered with the family crest, and simple grey breeches, a doubtless calculated attempt to look like he had come from his own bed chamber, which the sword spoiled.
He would have had to be insane to enter this room without the weapon, judging from the way people were looking at him.
“What is that?” He nodded at the sword Linden held. “The murder weapon?”
“Yes,” said Linden, “and as soon we find which of your men it belongs to, we’ll pin him to the south wall with it—just ahead of you.”
“One of my men?” Sheia frowned. “Not likely. That belongs to one of our other guests… the tawny fellow, you know, the irritating one.”
“Sir Chan,” said Linden’s lieutenant.
“Yes, that’s the one. Where is he during all this commotion?”
Linden looked at Calandria. She had nothing to say, but simply shook her head.
“Perhaps you do need to tell us the reason for your travelling clothes,” Linden said to her.
“Well then.” Sheia crossed his arms and glowered at Calandria. “It seems straightforward.”
“Not necessarily,” said Linden. “They have no motive. Quite the contrary.”
“Maybe they were hired by Sheia,” said the lieutenant.
Sheia guffawed. “They’re agents of Ravenon, by their own admission. By this one stroke they’ve sown disorder in both Memnonis and Iapysia. Considering the troubles Ravenon’s having, they’d love us to squabble within ourselves. If you don’t see that, Linden, you’re an idiot.”
Linden stepped toward him, white-faced. Sheia ignored him, turning instead to Calandria. “So Lady May was taking the servants’ stairs, was she?”
“If the assassin got away,” Calandria said, pitching her voice clear and steady, “why did he leave his sword? That seems like a rather large oversight.”
“Perhaps he was overwhelmed by what he had done. Or, maybe he was hurt?” Sheia appeared to consider that idea. “It looks like quite a fight happened here. That being the case, brother,” said Sheia, “wouldn’t you agree we should be hunting for Chan?”
Linden appeared to have regained his poise. He snapped his fingers at two sergeants, who came to attention and hurried from the room. “There,” he said. “Now let us get back to the question at hand: namely their connection to you.” He nodded to two more men. They moved forward to flank Brendan Sheia.
“Before you make an ugly mistake,” Sheia said, “consider your options. Who are you going to put to the question here? I did not kill Yuri. With him gone, the family needs us united—it is imperative to our survival. If my men hear you’ve imprisoned me, there’ll be a bloodbath, and nobody wants that. You can find out for sure who killed Yuri. Ask her.”
Linden laughed humorlessly. “We will. But you’re not going anywhere until we’re done. Bring her.” He turned to leave.
“Wait!” August jumped between Calandria and the Boros’. “She is no assassin. I can vouch for her.”
“And bring him too!” Linden cried. He flipped his cloak about himself angrily as he stepped from the room. Sheia laughed richly as he followed.
“Wait!” August shouted. A soldier clouted him on the side of the head, and he went down on his knees. Another man took Calandria’s arm and pushed her roughly toward the doors.
She had just turned to snap something rude at the man, when the ceiling caved in.
*
Turcaret laughed spitefully. “You are too late. The Heaven hooks have come, to take your young apprentice. Doubtless they will take you, too.”
Axel stared at the sky. “Oh, shit,” he whispered.
The biggest aerostat he had ever seen was hovering over the manor house. They were a common enough sight in the skies of Ventus, and very similar to the aerostat cities he had seen on gas giants and dense-atmosphere planets. The thing was just a hollow geodesic sphere about two kilometers in diameter. It didn’t much matter what you built one with; at that size it would remain airborne despite its mass because, due to its high surface-to-volume ratio, sunlight would trap enough heat inside to create buoyancy. On other worlds entire cities lived in the bases of the things; here on Ventus, Axel had been told, they served as bulk transport for minerals and other terraforming supplies. No human had ever entered one and come out again, of course—they were purely tools of the Winds.
The belly of this aerostat had opened out like the petals of a flower—or more ominously, like the beaked mouth of a octopus. Hundreds of cables woven round with gantries and buttresses tumbled into the high air from this opening. He could see them spiralling down at him in glimpses highlit by Diadem, the world’s one true moon.
“They will take you, Chan!” Turcaret shouted. “It was going to happen, if you lived. Somehow you and yours have offended the Winds. They have taken notice of you! My killing you was an act of kindness, don’t you see? I would have spared you this!”
“Shut up,” Axel said distractedly. What the hell was the thing doing here? This couldn’t be some random event; his briefings on Ventus had never mentioned an attack like this. But the Winds treated any technology not of their own creation as a pathology to be removed. Axel had thought he and Calandria had succeeded in hiding their nano and implants from the rulers of Ventus. Maybe it hadn’t worked.
Axel had to get to Calandria, and Turcaret happened to be standing on the only door. “Out of the way, you bastard,” Axel said. Turcaret’s face was lost in darkness, but Axel could see he was shaking his head.
“I will deliver you to them,” said the controller. “It will be my pleasure.” He shouted something into the sky in some old language. Past his dark outline, Axel saw a thing like a caged claw, big as a house, fall straight at them. Just before it hit, great lamps like eyes blazed into life from its crossbeams.
The roof disappeared with a great slap Axel felt in his bones. Dust and scraps of shingle and wooden beams shot into the air, and he was airborne too before he knew it. He landed on his side on the roof, which swayed and pitched like the deck of a ship. Something bright as the sun, and howling like a million saws, planted itself in the roof next to him and twisted this way and that. He smelled hot iron and ozone.
Axel rolled onto his stomach. Turcaret was crouched two meters away, also looking up. Axel willed himself to stand up, but his strength momentarily failed him. As he was struggling onto his elbows, Turcaret sent him a silent, contemptuous glare, and hopped down through the hole in the roof.
A metal tower reaching all the way to heaven was heaving its base back and forth through the ruins of the manor. Only part of one wing had collapsed, so far, but the thing had hundreds of arms, and these pounced out and down into corridor and chamber, and through the dust he could see some of these arms passing struggling human forms inward to the thing’s central cage. Horrified, he rolled away from the sight.
He came up against the door, which had popped open. The stairs leading down appeared quite unscathed. A last glance back showed Axel that other giant arms had landed on the grounds and by the stables, in a rough circle around the main building. They were eating the trees.
Axel wailed and fell through the open door.
*
Calandria sorted herself out of the tangle of lead triangles and glass flinders on which she had landed. She had never read of, seen or VR’d someone jumping through a leaded glass window before; it had turned out to be a lot more difficult than she had expected.
It had taken two tries, but she was on the ground now. Poor August was still upstairs, but there was only so much she could do. She rolled to her feet, rubbing blood out of her eyes.
Madness had fallen from the sky. She had a perfect view of the grounds from here in the bushes by the front steps of the manor. People were running back and forth, trying in equal numbers to get into and out of the house. An aerostat hovered over the estate, visible in the light of fires that were springing up all over. Calandria stared at it for a moment, then shook her head to clear the muddle of half-thoughts that filled it. Bits of glass flew from her hair.
A deep crash sounded from inside the manor; the front doors flew open, and a waft of dust blew out. There was no going back in there—but she had to find Axel. She bounced on the balls of her feet for a moment, debating whether to use radio to contact him.
A huge metal arm plowed into the earth a hundred meters away. Its end flopped there for a second or two, then split into a hundred bright threads, which coiled outward. Each thread—which must be a motile cable as thick as her body—bent and probed the ground ahead of itself as it moved. She realized suddenly that this thing might be able to smell her out from the radio waves, and her scalp crawled with sudden fear. She had been about to contact Axel. Its cables continued to unravel and lengthen, and some were heading towards her.
With a terrible rending crash, one wall of the manor fell outward. Calandria screamed as the air around her was filled with flying stone. At least ten people had been hurrying across the patch of ground the wall had hit.
She stood back and cupped her hands around her mouth. .“Axel!” Twenty meters away, a gleaming metal snake reared into the air, its mandibled tip quivering. It slid deliberately in her direction.
A hand fell on her shoulder. It was Axel, coughing and covered head to foot in blood and grey dust.
“You’re hurt!” She gingerly peeled his sticky shirt aside.
“It’s superficial. You look a bit rough yourself. You okay?” he said.
“So far. Look at that!” She pointed at the questing snake.
He glanced at it briefly. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
“Which way?”
“We need our supplies. Where’s your stuff?”
“August’s got it. He’s… well, we got separated. How about yours?”
Axel pointed wordlessly at the heap of rubble even now being picked through by metal scavengers.
“Inside!” She went to grab his arm, and thought better of it; she didn’t know where all his wounds were. “Oh, Axel, what happened?” She gestured for him to follow her up the pillared steps. The snakelike thing was only a few meters away now.
“Can’t we just run for it?” He stood swaying slightly, staring at it.
“Come on!” Abandoning care, she hauled him inside. The foyer of the manor was a chaos of screaming people. One staircase had collapsed; a weeping woman dug frantically at the wreckage, screaming “Hold on! I’m coming!” Some soldiers with their swords in their hands stood in a knot, staring hectically at the shadowed ceiling. Men were hauling injured people and corpses in from one of the side corridors.
“There’s nowhere else to go,” said Axel.
“What’s happening?” She pulled Axel to face her; his expression was lost in darkness, since the only light came from a couple of oil lamps, and from fires burning outside.
“Turcaret says they’re after Jordan,” said Axel. “I guess his implants set them off somehow. The bastard did this to me,” he said, raising his arms then wincing. “Tried to set me up for the murder of Yuri.”
She shrugged angrily. “Yes, I saw the result. Where’s Jordan?”
“No idea.” One of the front doors fell off its hinges. With everything else that was happening, this didn’t seem momentous. But harsh cones of electric light pierced the dust from outside. Calandria heard a loud whirring sound, accompanied by undulating movements in the doorway.
“What do we do now?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, staring into the light.
“Not nothing!” She let her breath out in a rush, coughed on dust, and said, “We shoot down the aerostat.”
Axel’s eyes widened. “With what?”
“Call the Desert Voice. Land her here. Have her take out the aerostat on the way.”
“But Jordan—”
“Axel, we’re done here! We need to get Armiger and get out of here. Axel—” she couldn’t prevent her voice from rising as she spoke—“they’re killing everyone here! Because of Armiger!”
Axel’s lips were drawn in a tight grimace. He clenched his fists and glared at her while around them people screamed. “All right!” he said finally. “Do it!”
Calandria closed her eyes and opened the link.
*
Turcaret ducked involuntarily as something nearby fell with a crash. The manor was coming down around him, but he couldn’t leave it until he had taken care of his people.
He fought his way past running servants to his people’s quarters. The maids and footmen were clustered at the windows, staring outside in disbelief. “Run!” he barked at them. “Quickly now. Get outside before the rest comes down.”
“What’s happening?” wailed one. “Is it the war?”
He shook his head. “Just go.”
They made for the door.
He sighed. Duty was satisfied; now to find Jordan Mason.
He had no idea whether the assassination of Yuri had gone off successfully, but that seemed unimportant now. The Heaven hooks were in a rage. He could hear them, a deep sussurating chorus in his mind.
Never in his life had Turcaret been in the presence of such powerful Winds. He had heard voices as a child, and long before he met anyone who could explain them, had decided they were Winds. Little things spoke to him, trees and stones, and sometimes he could reply. They generally rambled about subjects he didn’t understand, but every now and then they brought news of the Hooks, or the Diadem Swans, and once or twice had told him of the activities of the desals. He clearly remembered the day he learned that the desals had chosen to put the lady Galas on the throne of Iapysia. She was blessed by the Winds; it was this fact that finally made him throw in with Brendan Sheia, because she had somehow angered the desals, and he feared what the Winds might do if that happened.
Now the voices discussed their search for a man. The Winds were acting to eliminate a threat—but how could that be? In all his years, Turcaret had never heard the Winds speak of any sort of danger to themselves or the world. They were all-powerful.
Sometimes when the Winds were very near, Turcaret could see secrets within things. That was happening now, but on a scale he could never have imagined. Everywhere he looked, ghostly words and images seemed to hover in front of objects—the chairs, walls, casements and jittering chandeliers each had its orbiting retinue of tiny visions. He knew if he had time to stop and examine them, each would reveal some secret about the object behind it. You could learn all the crafts, from masonry to bookbinding this way.
He had always felt exalted by such gifts. They were proof that he was special, destined in some way to be a great leader and master over both Man and Nature. When he heard whispers of the coming of the Heaven hooks last night, Turcaret had assumed they knew of his plot with Brendan Sheia, and were preparing to marshal the forces of heaven itself behind their attempt to wrest control of the Boros family. Sheia didn’t believe him when Turcaret told him, so they had continued with the conservative approach: framing the visiting imposters for the assassination. But Turcaret had suspected such detail work would prove unnecessary in the face of what was to come.
Now the Winds had arrived, and they were destroying the estate! He would have thought they disapproved of Yuri’s assassination, were it not that he could hear plainly they wanted only one thing: Jordan Mason.
Turcaret himself meant nothing to them. That knowledge came as a deep blow, worse than anything Chan had inflicted.
At the foot of the stairs, people were spilling into the courtyard. He could see Linden Boros trying to organize his men among tilting statues. The terrifying arms of the Hooks reared overhead.
Turcaret ignored them; they were no threat to him. He scanned the faces in the courtyard. He had seen Mason once, being hoisted aloft in Castor’s courtyard for some minor victory. And indeed, there he was coming out of the front hall. He looked more boy than man, his dark hair tousled, eyes wide.
“Give me your sword,” Turcaret demanded of a passing soldier. Dazed though he was, the man hurried to comply. Turcaret hefted the blade and walked through the mob, eyes fixed on Mason.
What was this boy to the Winds? He was nothing but a loutish tradesman, and yet the Heaven hooks were willing to kill everyone on the estate to get at him. “You!” Turcaret levelled his sword at Mason. “What did you do to anger them?”
“I don’t know!” shouted the boy. He shook himself and glared at Turcaret. “And who are you to accuse me?”
Anger always calmed Turcaret; it gave him focus. He smiled now at the boy. “You’ve spent too long with Chan. Answer me! What have you done to offend the Winds?”
Uncertainty crept into Mason’s eyes again. He was lit in intermittent flashes of lightning, making him seem to shift in place. If he tried to run, Turcaret was prepared to kill him.
“I don’t know why they’re doing it,” Mason said simply. He seemed guileless; whatever he had done, he was probably too stupid to remember or connect it to tonight’s events.
The Heaven hooks would keep tearing the estate apart until they found Mason. He was the cancer at the heart of the night, and only his removal would restore the correct order to things.
Killing him would also surely make the Winds notice Turcaret at last.
“Stand still,” he instructed the youth. He stepped forward and raised the sword.
Lightning flashed again, and Turcaret caught a glimpse of Mason’s eyes. In them Turcaret saw something he had never believed he would see.
Words and images flickered like heat lightning in those eyes. Somehow, this youth was both Man and Wind. The whispering voices of nature spoke from within him. All the people on this estate—all people everywhere—appeared to Turcaret as absences, silhouettes against the glow of the Winds. All except Mason, who shone like nature itself.
Mason glanced up at the sky. Suddenly everyone in the courtyard was screaming.
Mason jumped back. People were running for the walls, so finally Turcaret tore his gaze away from the youth.
He just had time to count the claws on the giant hand before it fell on him, took him, and crushed out his life.
*
Jordan met August Ostler in a cellar hallway choked with dust and swarming with terrified people. The soldier looked stunned, and Jordan had to take him by the shoulders and shout in his face to get his attention.
August blinked at him. Despite the warm red light of the torches, August’s face was deadly pale. “The Heaven hooks have come,” he said.
“I know,” Jordan said impatiently. “Where’s my lady?”
A series of scraping thuds sounded overhead, like the foosteps of a bewildered giant. The crowd grew suddenly silent; their gleaming eyes rolled and glanced to and fro.
Jordan felt curiously detached. He knew he would be in the same state as these people, if he didn’t know who the Heaven hooks wanted. But they wanted him; knowing that made his mind wonderfully clear. He was sure he was as afraid as anyone here, but his fear was focussed and sharp. He knew the thudding steps above were the gropings of a god which was determined to take the manor apart stone by stone until it found him.
August stammered. “Last I saw, she was being held by Linden’s men. They suspect her of killing Yuri!”
“Killing Yuri? That makes no sense!”
A giant roaring collapse took place somewhere above. It shook dust from the ceiling. People had begun to talk again, and this silenced them.
Jordan strove to compose himself. It seemed everything that went wrong in his life did so when he lost control. He folded his arms across his chest, closed his eyes, and tried his breathing exercises. With an effort he began mentally reciting one of the nonsense mantras Calandria had taught him.
He would have to leave the building. The Heaven hooks would get him for sure, but it sounded like it was just a matter of minutes anyway before they dug down to where he was now.
Once he came to this decision, he felt calmer. He opened his eyes.
August stood near him, eyes downcast. Only now did Jordan notice the bags he was carrying.
“These are Calandria’s!” He fingered the strap of one.
“Yes, I was carrying them because… well, never mind.”
“Give them to me!”
August did so without complaint. He seemed relieved, in fact, to be free of the responsibility.
Jordan sat down on the cold flagstones and began rooting through the bags. His mind was racing, spinning between the terrible feeling that he was somehow responsible for this disaster, and a hope that he might be able to set it right.
“August, what do the Heaven hooks look like to you?”
August shook his head dumbly.
“Come on! What do they look like? Animals?”
“No.”
“Trees?”
“Almost… no. They are what they are, Jordan.”
“Do they look like mechanisms?”
August frowned, then nodded.
Jordan had found what he was looking for. “Listen, August, when Calandria and I were on our way here, we stopped one night in a manse of the Winds. We slept there, unmolested.”
“Impossible.”
“I thought so too. I didn’t want to go in.” Jordan half-rose, and poked August in the spot where the man had been run through. “Remember this? The wound that nearly killed you last night? That’s now gone? Calandria May has more tricks than that. One of them is this.” He held up the gauze they had used to avoid the mecha in the manse, and told August how they had used it.
He had the man’s attention now. “I swear to you,” Jordan said, “the Heaven hooks are after me! I’m not Calandria’s servant, or Axel’s apprentice. I’m just a workman. But I’ve been cursed, and the Winds are after me. They’re tearing the manor house apart because I’m down here! If I leave, they’ll stop.”
“If that’s true…” August didn’t finish, but Jordan knew what he was thinking. August believed him. It was best for Jordan to go out there, and if he wouldn’t go voluntarily, he should be forced. And yet, from the look on August’s face, he had no love for the idea.
Could it be that August felt some sort of loyalty to Jordan, because he had saved the man’s life? Ridiculous. Other people were worthy of such admiration, but Jordan knew he was not.
He had no time to think about that now. Renewed crashings sounded above them, and deep thuds which seemed to be coming nearer. “Listen,” he shouted over the din, “Lady May says mecha are a kind of machine. If the Heaven hooks are like the mecha, maybe this will hide me from them.”
“Then they will go berserk for sure,” said August. “But anyway, the Winds are different from live things, and different from machines.”
Jordan shook his head. “Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, I’ve got no intention of just disappearing.” He told August his plan.
*
Thousands of kilometers above Ventus, a thing like a bird sculpted in liquid metal heard Calandria’s call. The Desert Voice was named for the voice of conscience that had driven Calandria from the employ of the men who had trained her. The Voice knew the origin of her name, and was proud of it and of her mistress. When she heard Calandria’s call she was nearly over the horizon, following her orbit; she instantly reversed thrust. A bright star appeared in the skies over Ventus.
The Voice had been sailing a very quiet sky. There was no radio traffic from the surface of Ventus, except for localized tight beams between the vagabond moons and the Diadem Swans. The Swans themselves were invisible, wrapped in radar-proof cloaks. They knew the Voice was there, but the starship had been discreet after dropping Calandria and Axel off.
They were about to become very interested in the Desert Voice.
She broke orbit entirely and dropped to hover directly over the Boros estate at an altitude of two hundred kilometers. The fire from her exhaust pierced the ionosphere and created an auroral spike visible over the horizon. To the survivors huddled in the ruins of the Boros estate, the vagabond moon that eclipsed the sky glowed faintly for a moment.
“She’s here,” said Calandria.
The Voice assessed the situation. The aerostat between her and her mistress was a big one: two kilometers in diameter, comprised of a thin carbon-filament skeleton covered with quasi-biological skin. It was surrounded by a haze of ionized air, which it created and directed around itself to control its movement. It was completely empty except for a ring of storage tanks and gantries in its belly, which was of insignificant mass compared to the lift the sun-warmed air inside it gave.
It stood five hundred meters above Calandria’s position. The Voice could see it straining to maintain its place: lightning shot from its waist, and a vast electrical potential roved its skin, pulling the air about. It was creating its own weather, and it would have to lift soon or the instabilities would drag it into the ground.
The Voice reviewed her options. Eliminating the aerostat without having it fall on Calandria was going to be tricky. She could send a nuke into the center of the thing and blow it to smithereens, but a lot of the debris would fall on the mistress. Better to blow a hole in its side—but a quick calculation told her that the aerostat could stay on station for many minutes despite huge structural damage, simply because it would take a while for the warm air inside to be replaced by outside air.
She could nuke a spot some miles above the aerostat. The updraft would loft it into the stratosphere… but might also tear it in half.
Her thoughts were interrupted as, all across the sky, the Diadem Swans threw aside their cloaks and came for her.
*
“Goodbye, August,” said Jordan. They shook hands. August looked grim.
“I think I’ll see you again, Jordan,” he said. “You’re a mad fool, and such people have a way of surviving.”
Jordan laughed. His heart was hammering. “I hope you’re right!” He turned and stepped out the servant’s door.
The grounds of the estate were lit by fires and the savage beams of lantern light cast by the Hooks. Jordan ran with Calandria’s magic gauze wrapped about himself, and though he passed close to several of the vast armatures, none moved in his direction. They continued pounding at the ruins of the manor. He could see very few people. Only here and there survivors huddled under the shelter of trees, or in archways. They watched the approach of the metal arms of the Hooks with increasing apathy.
Jordan tripped through deep gouges, and ran around uprooted trees and fallen blocks until he reached the middle of the field, where he had first stopped to look up at the Hooks. There was rubble all the way out here, a hundred meters from the house.
He didn’t give himself time to think, just threw aside the gauze and screamed at the sky, “Here I am, you bastards!”
For a moment nothing happened. Then he saw the great arms that had buried themselves in the manor were lifting up and out. And above him, a pinpoint of light began to grow into a beacon, as something new fell towards him.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered. He had been hoping he was wrong, that the Hooks were here to avenge someone else’s transgression.
A wind blew up suddenly, carrying with it a strong smell like air after a thunderstorm. Dust and smoke swirled up, and began to wrap around the base of the vagabond moon.
Certain he had their attention, Jordan wrapped himself in the gauze again, and ran for the trees.
A big metal crane slammed into the spot where he had been standing. The impact threw Jordan off his feet, but he was up and running again in a second. He heard the thing thrashing and digging behind him, but though his shoulders itched with expectation, nothing grabbed him. He made it to the edge of the forest, and paused to look back.
Several arms now hunted over the grass. None were coming after him. Better yet, those limbs that had been demolishing the manor were gone, lifted back up into the belly of the moon. The thunderstorm smell was stronger, though, and fierce, conflicing gusts of wind blew across the treetops. The moon seemed to be hanging lower and lower in the sky.
Jordan had run for the screen of trees that separated the road from the grounds. He stood at the entrance to a pathway that he knew led to the stone trough at the side of the road.
He unwound the gauze. “Hey!” he shouted, waving his arms over his head. “Over here!”
The questing arms rose into the air, and silently swung in his direction.
He covered up and stepped into the shelter of the trees.
*
“It’s moving away,” Axel observed. He and Calandria stood with some others watching the departure of the arms that had harried the manor. In the sudden silence he could hear the shouts and screams of trapped and injured people. Blocks of stone still fell from the sky at intervals, so everyone’s attention was directed upwards; few people were moving to help the injured.
It did seem like the aerostat was moving away, and the strong winds were probably the reason. Along with the smoke Axel smelled ozone. Electrostatic propulsion? Probably.
“Think the Voice scared it?”
Calandria shook her head. “I doubt it. Anyway, we’ve seen no sign, except that one faint flash. Maybe it decapitated the aerostat, though; we might not know until it hit the ground. As soon as it’s far enough away I’ll call the Voice and check.”
Axel nodded. He returned his attention to ground level. A shame. A real shame. “Our first priority is to help these people,” he said. “There’s still some trapped in the rubble.”
“I’ll dig,” she said. “You’d better sit down.”
He looked down at himself. He was covered in blood, with open cuts up and down his torso. He hurt all over, too.
“Yes,” he said as he lowered himself onto a stone. “I think I’d better.”
*
Jordan made it to the highway. He was out of breath and covered in sweat, but the Hooks hadn’t caught him yet. From here on the countryside was open, which could pose a problem; but he remembered the golden monster in the manse reaching around him to pick up shattered wood after he had merely raised the gauze in front of it. It had not seen him even though he was right in front of it. By now he was fairly sure the Hooks would not spot him even in open country, as long as he had this protection.
He would make for the forest. It was a day or two’s travel away, but he wouldn’t feel he could rest until he was under the trees, gauze or no gauze. And then, if he survived, he would try to find his way home.
Or would he? He had started walking, and paused now. He might lose the Heaven hooks for a while, but something else would come after him in time. The Winds were everywhere. He had only delayed the inevitable—unless he were to wear this accursed cloth for the rest of his life, and shun any community that the Hooks might dismantle to reach him.
Jordan realized that if he survived, it was going to be as an outcast, unless he was willing to risk everyone around him. Was that how he was going to end his days? Hiding from god and man alike in the forest?
He lowered his head, and wept as he ran.
*
A few minutes later there was a brilliant flash of light in the sky, like sheet lightning but as bright as the sun. A few seconds later, a violent bang and grumble of thunder sounded.
The vagabond moon had lit up like a lantern in the flash. In the aftermath of the thunder, Calandria and Axel stood from their digging to watch as the moon dipped lower, until its base disappeared behind the trees. Then it seemed to crumple like the finest tissue, even as it continued to move east. Over the next few minutes it spent itself across the fields, in a trail of girders and torn skin many miles long. There were no fires, no explosions, and only faint distant rumblings as it fell.
It came down closer to Jordan, and he saw the bottom ring with its mouth full of hooks touch the earth and shatter, spilling stone blocks, trees and human figures. Many of those figures lived, and struggled free of the wreckage; the moon had not fallen straight down, but glided slowly into the earth at an angle. Most of those alive when it hit were still alive afterward.
Jordan saw this, but he could not stop, because he could not be sure some new horror would not follow. He continued walking, nursing a stitch in his side. If he could not go home because of the voices in his head; and if Calandria May was wrong about Armiger, as he had begun to suspect; and if even she could not prevent the Heaven hooks from coming after him; then he would have to find help elsewhere.
He was no longer walking east. His goal now lay to the southwest.
*
When the aerostat had finished falling, Calandria May knelt down, closed her eyes, and signaled her ship. Axel watched as her brows knit, and she frowned. She remained kneeling for longer than he thought should be necessary. When she opened her eyes, she looked at him with an expression of tired acceptance.
“The Desert Voice doesn’t answer,” she said. “I’m afraid, Axel, that we may be stranded.”