“You’ll have to pardon me if I seem a bit out of sorts,” said Armiger as he sat down opposite General Matthias. “I was chatting with one of your men on the battlements when a rock from one of Parliament’s steam cannon took his head off.”
Matthias grimaced. “I heard about that. Happened this morning. Lavin’s a devil, a positive devil. And the queen admires him! That’s the damndest part. Listen, I’ve got a little beer here from our emergency stock. Care for a cup?”
Armiger nodded. He had talked briefly with Matthias twice, but the man was understandably busy—and, it seemed, wary. It was that wariness that had made Armiger ask for this meeting; he needed Matthias on his side.
They sat in Matthias’ tiny office in one of the palace’s outbuildings. Outside the single small window a dismal drizzle fell on the tents of the refugees. It was oppressively quiet today.
Matthias poured two pints of pale beer and they both tasted it. Armiger noticed that his hands were shaking slightly; the incident on the wall had shocked him more than he would have believed possible. It was only a man who had been destroyed, after all. And while Armiger might have lost his own head had he been standing a meter closer, he could have grown another one, given enough time. He had no rational reason to be upset. But he was. He was.
“Lavin’s an upstart,” said Matthias. “Young, bright, ambitious. He’s had subtle help from the queen throughout his career. And now he’s turned on her. I’d take him to be an opportunist, but Galas disagrees. She says he’s an arch-traditionalist.”
“Have you tried to use that against him?” asked Armiger.
Matthias nodded. “Had some success too. He detests dealing with morale issues. You can trip him up if you can scare his men. He’s a quick learner though—I’m afraid I taught him to press the way he is with the cannon. Never lets us sleep. You saw the result yourself.”
Armiger nodded.
Matthias was watching him. “I have to say, Armiger, that you’ve got steady nerves. I got that impression when we were following reports of your war in the northeast. You were doing a magnificent job. Then we heard you were dead, and you turn up here. Sounded to me like you ran. Why?”
“Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?” asked Armiger with a smile. “Because you think I’m a deserter?”
“No, not a deserter. A mercenary.” Matthias grimaced. “You show up here, offering your services to the queen… for how much?”
Armiger sat up straight. “First of all, if I were a mercenary you’d think Ravenon would have paid me. They didn’t pay me—at least not in money.”
“What do you mean? What did they pay you in?”
“Information. It was their mail and spy networks I was interested in using. I showed up here with nothing but the clothes on my back, you know that. And how am I expected to get away with my payment if Galas is paying me now?”
“Simple,” said Matthias. “You’ve cut a deal with Lavin.”
Armiger laughed harshly. “Your suspicion is well-founded and sound. You think I’m a Trojan horse, is that it?”
“A what horse?”
Armiger took a deep drink of his beer. “Lavin doesn’t need my help to take this palace, you know that,” he said. “Besides, I haven’t exactly offered my services to the queen as a military commander.”
“Oh? Then as what?”
“Priest. Confessor.” Armiger saw the expression on Matthias’ face and laughed. “Look, that man who had his head knocked off today—I’ve had it with that kind of thing. Why do you think I left the war in Ravenon? The Winds wiped out two divisions of my men. I stood by helpless and watched it happen. At the time I thought I didn’t care; but I did. And I do. So I’m not here to fight, Matthias, you needn’t worry about that.”
The old general sat back in his chair, nodding slowly. “You’re an odd one. And if you’d said anything other than what you just did, I wouldn’t have taken you seriously. Priest? Confessor? I don’t know about that. But I understand a man who lays down his sword. Men who don’t have that urge now and then make bad commanders. Galas tells me Lavin has no stomach for war either—but see how good he is at it.”
An adjutant knocked politely on the door. Matthias nodded and stood up.
“Now that I know where your heart lies, Armiger, I may just call up on your talents. After all, there’s no better man to end a war quickly and cleanly than one who hates war.”
*
Jordan surged to his feet with shout. He was not going to let this happen again.
He shook his head and forced himself to breathe deeply, and look around himself. He was in a small cell in the basement of Brendan Sheia’ home. A single window-slit let in the wan sunset, and a trickle of cold air that teased at him, making him shiver now that he had noticed it.
They had taken his possessions, including Calandria’s golden gauze. He was irrevocably visible to the Winds now.
The sights and sounds of Armiger’s experience began to recede. He willed them away entirely. It didn’t matter how compelling them were. It didn’t matter that he wanted to fall into Armiger like a refuge, the way he had on his long walk south from the disaster of the Heaven hooks. He wished so much that he could be somewhere else right now—be some_one_ else.
“Too bad,” he said angrily. Jordan was furious with Brendan Sheia—just furious enough, for now, not to be afraid. He was also angry with himself, though, and right now that was worse.
After all, there had been a moment in his life when he thought he was going to put aside all the habits of denial and retreat that he had despised in his father. When Emmy ran into the night, Jordan had lain in bed for long moments, waiting for someone else to act responsibly and follow her. He still remembered those few seconds; something had broken in him, setting him free. And so he thought afterwards that he would never fall back into those family patterns again.
He’d been fooling himself. He felt now as if he’d been a leaf in a river these past weeks. Calandria’s abduction, his terror of the visions, the whirlwind visit to the Boros where intrigue, murder and disguise were daily companions—these events had all given him excuses to feel helpless. He had let Calandria lead him, had accepted her stories; he had let Suneil lull him into complacency. He was a blank page on which others had signed their names, and that was just the way his father lived.
It was shameful—but if he wallowed in his misery, he would just be playing the lost boy again. When Galas’ mother died, the future queen had foresworn playing roles dictated by others. There was a lesson in that.
He had been in this cell for a day now. Someone had slid some food under the door that morning; otherwise, he might have been completely alone in the building.
This Boros domicile was not so grand as the manor house the Hooks had destroyed. It stood in the Rhiene high street, squeezed between two even grander mansions. There were no grounds, only a cobbled courtyard in front with a high wall and a gate. The building was tall, he knew, but he wasn’t sure how many storeys it was since his only view of it had been upsidedown as he was yanked off the horse yesterday evening. Four, five storeys? It didn’t matter, there was only one cellar and he was in it.
In the stories he used to read, bad people always had dungeons in their castles. Emmy had scared him for years by spinning tales of a secret level underneath Castor’s manor. There was no such thing there, of course, any more than there was here. He was in some kind of disused storage room. They’d tossed a cot, a blanket and a bucket in after him, and let him set them up himself, in his own dungeon style.
Jordan wasn’t quite sure what Brendan Sheia meant to do to him. Certainly the man had power, maybe enough to make an innocent traveller disappear without investigation.
He shivered again. First on the agenda was to find a way to block that draft.
They’d left him his cloak, so he bundled that up and stepped on a jutting stone in the wall to stuff it in the window. As he did so he heard footsteps passing in the hall outside.
“Hey, let me out!” he shouted.
“Quiet in there.” The footsteps receded.
“I didn’t do a damn thing, you stupid bastards!” He jumped down and gave the door a sound kick.
It felt good, and the crash was satisfactorily loud, so he kicked again. Tamsin would have a suitable insult for an occasion like this, he was sure. All he could think of was the one she’d used earlier today: “Trotting swine!”
He went to kick again but the door suddenly swung wide with a shriek of rusty hinges, and in its place was a huge scowling man with a long stick in his hand.
Before Jordan could react the man butted him in the stomach. Pain exploded in his belly, and he went down.
He curled up instinctively and thus avoided the worst of the kicks that followed. Then the man spat on him and left.
“Bastards,” whimpered Jordan, as he unwrapped shaking hands from his head. “Bastards bastards bastards,” all of them, Calandria, Armiger and Axel, Suneil and the whole stinking Boros clan. “Bastards.”
—And then he was in the flow of Vision, hearing the burr of Armiger’s voice in his own chest, and an overlay of chorusing identities in the walls, in the sullenly firm door and the very earth under his shoulder. It was like he’d fallen in a snake pit, with a thousand heads rising hissing all about him. Jordan grabbed his head and doubled up again with a cry.
He concentrated. This is my hand; he brought it up to his eyes. This is my sight. I am here, not in the palace, not in the walls: here.
Jordan rolled to his knees, gasping. The powers whispered and danced around him, but he had carved out a bubble for himself in their center. He could see and hear, and act. With some difficulty, he got to his feet.
Cold air lapped at his throat. He almost laughed. “You’re cruel,” he said to the Winds. “Now you’re going to listen to me for a change.”
He sat on the cot and wrapped the cloak around his shoulders. There was no need to take deep breaths to enter the visionary trance now; he closed his eyes and summoned it.
First he had to know where he was. He could see the mansion around him in translucent outline. The basement was indeed extensive, and he was next to a place with convoluted shelves that must be a wine cellar. There were several stairs leading up, and he instinctively chose the narrow servants’ way as his goal. That led from the back of the wine cellar, predictably enough.
There was a cistern down here, and a long room with a high arched ceiling. Castor’s manor had an exercise room and archery range in the basement, which was probably what this was. All these rooms opened off the same corridor as Jordan’s cell. In addition there were several side halls that ran to lockers of various sizes.
The problem with this way of seeing was that it didn’t seem to show people. Jordan knew there was a dog on the main floor, almost exactly above his head; he could see it. The rest of the rooms on that level were visible too, though in a jumble of perspective as if he were standing at the base of a huge glass model. He had to sort out what he was seeing, and if he had not had ample experience reading architects’ plans at Castor’s, he might not have been able to sort out hall from room, chimney from garderobe.
It only took a few minutes to work out the shortest route from here to the tradesman’s entrance. Night was falling; in a few hours the area would be quiet. Then he could make his escape—provided the next parts of his plan worked.
He needed to see more than just the outlines of the place. When the Heaven hooks descended on the Boros manor, Jordan’s vision had briefly expanded to include distant places. He had been able to see what was happening inside the manor, even though he was hundred of meters away. Try as he might, however, he had ben unable to repeat that experience.
There was something else he could try. Jordan focussed his mind on one name, and hurled it into an imagined sky with all his might:
“Ka!”
He waited. There was no response, and he could see nothing as he scanned the vague landscape that opened out beyond the manor.
“Ka! Come here!”
Nothing. He waited a long while, but the little Wind must be too far away to hear him. All right; on to the next idea.
Careful not to break his concentration, he rose and moved to the door. He ran his fingertip around the keyhole on the large iron lock plate. He could actually see inside the lock if he concentrated; the mechanism was simple. All he needed was something with which to manipulate the tumblers.
There was another thing he wanted to try. He had nothing to lose now, where before he had been afraid of alerting the Winds to his presence by experimenting. Jordan returned to the cot, gathering his cloak on the way; it was getting quite chilly in here.
For some time now he had known he could communicate with the mecha. He had been reluctant, however, to ask himself the next logical question:
Could he command the mecha, as the Winds did?
As he sat by the lakeside and poured water from bucket to cup and back again, Jordan had discovered something he had at the time been afraid to test. Each and every object in the world knew its name; all, that is, save for the humans who lived here, because they had no dusting of mecha within them.
The waves on the lake had known their identity as waves, but as they lapped against the shore they disappeared as individuals. Jordan had found by experimenting that when you changed an object into something else, its mecha noticed and altered its name to suit.
That had got him wondering: could you command an object to change its name; and if you changed an object’s name, would the object itself change to match it?
The cot was a plain wooden frame with thin interwoven slats to lie on. He pried one of these up and held it out in front of him. “What are you?” he asked it.
“Cedar wood. Wood splinter…”
“You are now kindling, hear?”
“Consistent,” said the splinter.
“So, burn!”
He held his breath. After a moment the splinter said, “Ignition of this mass will exhaust all mechal reserves. Further transformations will not be possible without infusion of new essence.”
“Just do it.”
He opened his eyes to watch. Nothing happened… then the splinter began to smoke. “Ow!” He dropped it, whipping his fingers to cool them. For some reason Jordan had assumed the thing would neatly sprout a flame from one end. Instead, the entire splinter was afire.
“Splinter: douse yourself.”
It didn’t answer. Well… it had said something about exhausting reserves. Maybe the mecha in it had died in setting it afire. He closed his eyes and examined it with his inner vision, and indeed the small flame was a dark spot in the mechal landscape.
Jordan restrained the urge to leap to his feet and shout. He would only bring down the guard—but then, couldn’t he just command the guard’s clothes to burst into flame too? Was there anything he couldn’t do now?
He sat there for a while, giddy with the possibilities. He picked up another splinter, and said to it, fly.
That is not possible for this object, said the splinter.
Hmm. Well, at least he knew he wouldn’t freeze now. He picked up a rock and tried to convince it to become a knife, but it demurred, listing off a dozen conditions he needed to fulfill for it to transform: heat, presence of carbon and significant iron deposits, etc.
So the mecha were limited. It wasn’t really a surprise—and he could hardly complain! He should be able to get out of this room, at least, if he could pick the lock. He might even be able to defeat the guard if he was clever—but it would be better to sneak past him, if possible.
He pried a good splinter off the bed, and said to it, “Can you become harder?”
“At an exhaustion rate of 50% it is possible to—”
“Just do it.”
The splinter seemed to shrink a little in his hand. He bent down, closed his eyes, and applied it to the lock.
“Ka,” said a voice like a chime.
Jordan turned. Hovering in the narrow window slit was the wraith-like butterfly from the market. It had heard him after all!
“Greetings, little Wind,” he said respectfully. “Can you help me?”
*
Ka drifted from room to room, reporting what it saw. Its habit was to hover at least a meter above the heads of the empty ones, because a randomly swung arm could smash it. This had happened to more than one of its previous bodies. Ka was in its own way proud that it had survived in this one for thirty years now.
Desal 463 did not mind Ka’s servitude to the magician. Neither did Ka. Its patrol was the market anyway, where it hunted for ecological deviations. The entire city hovered on the edge of abomination, but the empty ones had learned scrupulous cleanliness over the centuries. Every now and then, however, some visitor imported something outside the terraforming mandate —petroleum, crude electric devices, most recently some cheerfully glowing radioactives stolen from a fallen aerostat—and it was Ka’s job to find the offending substance. Then other agents of the desal would act, recovering the deviation and generally killing any empty ones associated with it. Empty ones made good fertilizer when they died; it neatly balanced the equation.
The being who had called it forth from the market was something else entirely. Its voice had the power to compel in a way the magician’s could not. As far as Ka was concerned, it was a Wind.
“Tell me what you see,” it said now.
“I can relay the information directly to your sensorium, if you wish,” said Ka.
“What? What do you mean? Show me.”
Ka beamed an image of the corridor to the waiting Wind.
“Ah! Stop it!”
“As you wish.”
“Um… can you do that with hearing? Can I hear what’s going on around you?”
“Yes.” Ka began to relay sound as it travelled.
It drifted from room to room, pausing to eavesdrop on conversations, then moving on.
“…Don’t know why I’m forbidden to go into the cellars tonight. He’s up to something bad, I just know it…”
Down the hall from that room: “…I don’t think this meat is cooked through…”
Elsewhere on the same floor: “He could be useful to us, but obviously we can’t trust a turncoat like that. Especially one who’s spent his career with the Perverts. How do we know what he wants, in the end?”
“So he’s a pawn?”
“We’ll play him out a little. He could be a competent bureaucrat. When the time comes, we’ll trade him for something more valuable.”
“And Mason?”
“Mason is going to save us. There’s grumbling that our house is cursed. Cursed! —Because of what happened at Yuri’s. You and I know it wasn’t our fault. We have to convince the rest of the world that we’re innocent victims. If Turcaret was right, and the Heaven hooks were after Mason, then all we need to do is stake him out in a field in full view of the town, and wait for the Winds to come. The sooner the better; we can’t let the courts get ahold of this, they’ll tie us up in years of wrangling. No. Tomorrow, we put the word out, then the day after we put him out, and if anyone objects we put a sword to their throat. It’ll be done before anyone can mount an organized resistance. And after the Winds come down, no one is going to question why we did it. We’ll be seen as having done the Winds’ bidding. It could end up in our favor.”
Someone entered the room, and the voices turned toward a discussion of food. Ka drifted on, up the grand stairway, and towards the back of the house. There were voices coming from behind one door there, and it was made to pause and listen again.
“It’s called the Great Game, niece, and you have to play it to survive.”
“So it was a game you were playing when you led the soldiers to our town.”
“No, you misunderstand me—”
“Ha! You could have saved them. You lied to me. And I believed you!”
“You do what you have to in order to survive, niece. And you can’t get emotional about it. That’s the beginning and the end of it. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead now. I saved you—”
“You killed them! You killed them!”
“Silence!”
“No! I won’t be silent anymore. I won’t be anything for you anymore.”
“You will. Yes, you will. Listen, do you think your life has any value in this country if people find out what you really are? Where you’re from? They won’t look at you and see a young woman full of promise, as I do, Tamsin—they’ll see a monster, born of monsters. At best a curiosity, at worst an abomination to be stoned. Now you have two choices, young lady. You can do as I tell you, learn your lines and your dance steps, and become the proper young lady in society here at Rhiene. Or, if you won’t do that, I can still get something of my investment back if I turn you in to the high court as a renegade Pervert. If that’s what you want, then that’s the way we’ll do it. Believe me, I don’t care either way at this point.”
There was no reply to this; only silence, drawn out until at last Ka was ordered to withdraw.
*
The lock made a very loud click as it turned over. Jordan held his breath past a tight grin. Had the guard heard? Apparently not. He pushed the door open slowly.
The brawny man who had hit him earlier was sitting at a table in the hall outside. He was industriously carving leaf designs into the capital of what was obviously going to be a chair leg. Three other half-completed legs lay on the table next to him.
The knife he was carving with was very large.
What would Armiger do? Jordan asked himself. The general knew when to attack, and when to be discrete. This was a time to be discrete.
It was interesting that Ka had been able to move sound from upstairs down to Jordan’s waiting ear. That implied all kinds of things about sound that he hadn’t thought before—that it was a substance, that it could be packaged and carried around. Maybe you could also choose not to carry it?
He focussed his attention on the hinges of the door, each in turn, and said, “make no sound,” with his inner voice.
Each hinge acknowledged his command, but he had no idea if they would obey. Gingerly, he pushed the door open. He could feel a faint vibration under his fingers, as if the rusty hinges were grating—but he heard nothing.
Once outside, he slowly closed the door again. Holding a torrent of Vision at bay, Jordan stepped into the earth-floored cellar behind the guard, and backed his way slowly to the stone steps that led up. His heart was in his mouth. When he got to the steps he let out the breath he had been holding, but still went up them one at a time, pausing after each to look back at the broad back of the man with the knife. He knew he wouldn’t just get a beating if he was found this time.
Upstairs, he ducked into a niche as two servants passed carrying a heap of linen. He poked his head out after they’d gone; there was the back entrance, in plain sight not five meters away. All he had to do was walk out the door, and he was free.
Except that he couldn’t do it. The conversation Ka had relayed from upstairs had been chillingly familiar to Jordan, if not in its details, in its thrust. Just as Jordan’s father had ordered Emmy to acquiesce to Turcaret’s attentions, so Tamsin’s uncle was ordering her to become his thing—bait, perhaps, to dangle in front of some high born household’s son. And though Jordan didn’t understand what threat Suneil was holding in reserve, it was obviously dire.
He owed Tamsin nothing, really. Jordan knew, though, that he would no more be able to live with himself if he left her in this situation than he would have if he had stayed in bed, those many nights ago, and let Emmy run.
*
Tamsin was drowning.
There was no water here. She could breathe, her heart still beat, she could walk and sit and even eat. Still, she was drowning.
The thing shaped like her uncle moved across the room. He was talking, but she couldn’t make sense of the words anymore. They came to her like sounds underwater, distorted and harsh.
What was drowning her was the horror she felt every time she looked at him—knowing that inside that familiar body was a soul that had helped her, sheltered her and cared for her, laughed with her and murdered her parents.
“—Get ready for bed,” he said now. “Tomorrow’s another day, niece.”
For her own survival, she needed to be silent now—but inside she was screaming at him: “You knew the soldiers were coming! You knew and you didn’t tell anyone, you didn’t tell dad you let them die you let them die…”
The worst thing was that she had known these things all along, somewhere deep in a part of her that she had told, every morning to sleep, look away.
Thinking that she had known and had gone along with this monster, her inner voice simply died out. She sat mutely, and nodded without heat, and rose to go to her sleeping closet.
As she walked she drowned a little more.
“Tamsin.” His voice held an old note of concern that she had once (yesterday?) believed was genuine and defined family. She looked back at him, knowing her face was slack, unable to raise an expression.
“Sometimes—” He had looked her in the eye; now he kept his gaze on the floor as he said, “Sometimes, you have to block out the here and now, and not think about what you’re doing. For your own future good.”
She could picture herself laughing at him, or screaming, hitting… she couldn’t summon the energy to do more than nod again. Then she knelt to open her night chest.
“Don’t scream,” said a voice from nowhere.
She froze. The voice was strange, tiny, like a whispering mouse.
“It’s me, Jordan. I’m free, and I’m leaving. Tamsin, I don’t know what you feel about me. I hope you won’t betray me.”
She looked behind the chest, up the wall, along it. There was no one here.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
“Outside the door.” Yet the door was across the room, and she heard the voice here.
“Who are you talking to?” asked her uncle. He had come up behind her. She whirled, hands behind her on the chest.
“Nobody,” she said. Her voice sounded strained to her own ears.
Her uncle’s eyes narrowed. He eyed the door, then walked over to it.
No. It all broke in her like a dam, and before she knew what she was doing Tamsin grabbed a brass vase from the table and ran at her uncle. She swung the vase up at his head with all her strength; it made a satisfying crunch, and he fell over without a sound.
She flung the door open and practically fell through it—into Jordan’s arms. “Let’s get out of here,” he said simply, and closed the door behind her.
There was only one lifeline for her now, and Tamsin took it. She grabbed Jordan’s hand tightly, and ran with him.