The horses had found a road, and Jordan had let them take it. Now he faced the consequences of that decision.
Spreading out below them lay a shallow valley where yellow grain stalks still jutted in regular patterns from sand. The dunes were reclaiming this oasis, and it was just as well, he thought. No one would want to live here now, not among the sad wreckage of so many lives.
This must have been one of the experimental towns. He glanced sidelong at Tamsin, but her face was impassive. Was this collection of burned, broken walls, filled with the wind-tumbled remnants of broken household items, her town?
The scent of charcoal still hung over the place. It didn’t help that the sky was leaden grey, had been for days now, and the air cold. Back home, it was probably snowing.
“They didn’t even bury them,” said Tamsin. She pointed, and he could see that what he had thought was a pile of old clothing, actually had yellowed hands and feet jutting from it. And those rounded shapes… His stomach lurched, and he looked away.
“This was Integer,” she said. “The scholar’s town. It was entirely self-sufficient, they didn’t have to burn it.”
“I don’t think they did this because they had to,” said Jordan.
“I grew up here,” said Tamsin, so quietly that Jordan almost didn’t hear her.
He looked over quickly. “In this town?”
“No. Another, nearby. I lived there my whole life. And then Parliament burnt it to the ground. They burned them all, I guess.”
“But why?”
“The queen,” she said, her mouth twisting bitterly. “Queen Galas is a sorceress; she commanded the desals, and the desals made water sprout in the dunes. In those places, she made towns. She offered people land and seed if they settled there. My parents went. A lot of people did—but once you went you couldn’t leave. And every town was different. Different rules, and nobody was allowed to travel between them or even know what the other towns’ rules were. She used soldiers to move stuff between the towns, like wood and grain and livestock. And the soldiers wouldn’t talk to you.
“Uncle used to visit, when I was small. He used to bring me presents. I remember fruit, and little pieces of jewelry mother disapproved of. He was the only person who visited anyone in Callen. Father said it was because he was important to the queen that they let him do it.
“I liked Callen, my town. I didn’t think there was anything horrible about it. We worked, we had festivals. Boys and girls went to school. But then one day all these strangers came—people from the other towns. They were fleeing the army. We put some of them up in our house. They were strange… married, but men to men and women to women. Though they had children too. They said the soldiers had burned their town and killed everyone else. We didn’t know why.
“I asked my father about it,” continued Tamsin. “What had we done that was so wrong? He said it was all the history he’d made me learn, about people being prisoners of the Winds. That they’re our enemies.” She watched Jordan warily as she said this.
Jordan nodded slowly. Some of the things Armiger and the queen had talked about were starting to make sense. The queen wanted to change the world. That was why her parliament had revolted.
“One day,” said Tamsin, “I was hoeing the garden. It’s on the edge of town, by the dunes. Suddenly uncle was there. He said I had to follow him quickly, run. We ran into the dunes, and he had a horse there. We rode away to a nearby hill, and there we stopped to look back. The soldiers had come. They looked like ants overruning Callen. I could hear screams, people were running about. Then the houses started to burn.”
For a while she stared off into space, knotting her hands together. Her eyes were dry, but her mouth was a hard line.
“I wanted to go back,” she said finally. “I couldn’t see my parents anywhere. But uncle said we would die too. So we rode away. The next day we came to another oasis, where there was this wagon. And we drove north. That was three months ago.” She glanced at him, looked down, and winced. She didn’t look up again.
Jordan thought about the story. There was nothing good he could say. “Your uncle brought the soldiers,”
She nodded, still not looking at him. “Or at least he knew exactly when they were coming. And he didn’t warn anyone. He just came and snatched me away. I tried to tell myself he had no chance to warn the others. I tried and tried… I let myself believe he had saved me because he was a good man.
She shuddered. “After all, he’s just a merchant trying to get back his shop, isn’t he? And the soldiers who murdered everyone in this town? After this is all over,” she said, “they’ll all go back to their farms and shops too, won’t they? And they’ll live long happy lives, and no one will be the wiser about what they did here.”
“We will,” was all Jordan could think of to say.
Tamsin flicked the reins, and guided her horse off the road. She didn’t want to go down there, he saw with relief. He couldn’t have prevented her without using force.
The horses objected to entering the sand. Both animals were tired and seemed sick, though from no cause Jordan or Tamsin could discern. They rolled their eyes now and blew, but as the wind changed and they caught the scent coming from the valley, they accepted the new path.
“If this was Integer, that means we’re close,” said Tamsin at length. “The desal should be a half-day’s journey that way.” She pointed southeast.
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “The towns are all built around a low plateau; it’s almost invisible unless you know what to look for. See what looks like walls out there?” She pointed into the heart of the desert, where he did indeed see some reddish lines near the horizon. “The land steps up and up for a while in little man-high clifflets like that. In the center is the desal.”
“Good. We could be there by nightfall.” He tried to bring an optimistic tone back to his voice.
“They should all die.”
He kneed his horse to bring it next to hers. The animal wheezed and made a half-hearted attempt to buck, then complied.
Tamsin was crying. “They should all be hung,” she said. “But they won’t be. They’ll get away with it. They’ll laugh about it and then when they’re old they’ll tell their children how noble they were.”
“Tamsin—”
“They killed my, my parents—” She buried her face in her hands. Awkward, he rode alongside her, scratching his neck and scowling at the sands. He might have said something sharp—Jordan had his own miseries, after all, which Tamsin seldom acknowledged—except that he sensed something different in her tears today.
Eventually she said, “It’s true. I didn’t want to believe it, all this time. I just let Uncle drag me around, and I said to myself, wait, wait, it’ll end soon. Like I’d be back home at the end of the adventure, with mom and dad and everything okay again. But it won’t end. They burned Callen to the ground like they burned Integer. And I saw it, I remember looking back and seeing smoke coming up over the dunes, and I didn’t believe it. Like I didn’t believe Uncle knew what was going to happen.”
She hesitated, looked away, and said, “I’m a fool.”
“A victim,” he insisted. “They’re the fools.”
He thought of the pile of bodies they had seen. Fools, or monsters? For a long moment Jordan felt lost—real men had done that, they were out there still. If men could do that… were the Winds any worse? Maybe their rule was more just than Man’s would be.
He closed his eyes, and pictured the queen of Iapysia, standing lost within the fine clutter of her library. But I had to try, she had appealed, to end this long night that has swallowed the whole world.
Tamsin continued to weep, and there were no words he could have said to take away her pain. Some things, once broken, could never be healed.
End this long night…
In an age of miracles, would men still massacre their neighbors? Maybe they would just do it on a far greater scale, once they could command the oceans to drown continents or the earth to swallow cities.
It seemed it must be true since the powerful, who wanted of nothing, were the very ones who commanded these massacres.
The thought filled him with fury—the same fury that had made him run into the night after Emmy, that had made him taunt the Heaven hooks into leaving their destruction of the Boros mansion to chase him. He would not accept this truth. Let them kill him, let the whole world come crashing down when he told Armiger the secrets of the desals. Despite all evidence, he would never accept that such miseries were destined to happen forever.
A short, vertical line wavered on the horizon. The spire of the desal? He would find out soon enough. Then, he would demand that the Winds answer for the burned towns, the sundered families, all his and everyone’s miseries in all this long age of night.
*
Jordan would not have known he was on a plateau had Tamsin not told him. The ground became less sandy as they went, and now and then they took little climbs up tumbled rock slopes. Eventually they had to dismount and lead the horses, because the beasts both breathed laboriously, their mouths foaming. The belly of Jordan’s horse seemed swollen, and it trembled when he touched it. Jordan and Tamsin finally had to carry most of the supplies they had scrounged, while the horses walked painfully beside them.
“What’s wrong with them?” Tamsin tried to soothe her mare; it nuzzled her hand and shivered.
“I don’t know,” said Jordan. His voice had a whining tone to it, he realized. “Ka?”
The little Wind could not diagnose the horses’ ailment. Ka was a spy, not a doctor.
“Is there water at the desal?”
Tamsin shook her head. They could see it now, a small collection of upthrust spikes on the horizon. Between it and them lay a blasted russet landscape of sand and scattered plates of stone. Nothing grew here; the wind blew fitfully, raising an intermittent hiss from sand sliding over rock. Over it all brooded clouds that threatened rain but never seemed to deliver it. Jordan felt exposed here, more than anywhere he had yet been. Maybe it was because the horizon seemed so impossibly far away; the eyes of Hooks or Swans might easily pick him out against the ruined ground, and he would have nowhere to run to when they came.
Nothing moved, no force for good or ill appeared to interrupt their slow progress across the plateau. Now and then dust devils swept past, and he could see the inevitable mecha swept up in them, busy gnats in a garden of dust. The desal must see them coming, but he could not bring himself to imagine it as a living, aware thing. It looked like nothing more than an abandoned, half-built tower.
Tamsin fretted over her horse; it seemed a good distraction from her own grief. Her tears had brought back memories of home to Jordan, and brooding on whether he would ever reconcile, or even see his family again had him depressed. He didn’t know what he was doing here, in the middle of nowhere, about to expose himself to the very forces that had pursued him all these months. He was out of ideas, he had to admit. If this didn’t work, he saw no future.
The prospect of losing the horses didn’t bother him all that much. He didn’t think it likely they would need them.
Finally they reached a flat table of rock about two kilometers across. The desal rose in the center of it. This desal had five sentinel spires set in an even star around the middle spike. This spike was possibly the highest spire Jordan had ever seen; it was at least sixty meters tall. All the spires tapered to very sharp points, and as the travellers approached Jordan could see that the stone around their bases was buckled and cracked, as though the desal had grown up through the bedrock itself. Jordan expected that was true, and it actually made the thing easier to comprehend, since he knew mecha ate rock. The desal seemed like the visible irruption of an underground body, a sort of mechal mushroom.
When they were equidistant to the two nearest sentinel spires, Jordan closed his eyes and cast out his Wind senses to the thing. He could see abundant mecha thriving in the dust. It made the spires visible in outline, like any structure. He could not see into them, however, nor could he hear anything other than the whisper of the rocks telling themselves their names.
“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” said Tamsin. She looked startled, as though she had just come to her senses after a dream-filled night. “Let’s go back.”
“The horses… I don’t know if they can go any further.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
He looked at the panting horses. “Let’s make camp. Then we’ll see.”
They made a circuit of the area around the desal, and discovered that at some time in the past, someone or something had gathered some of the plates of rock that had tumbled loose when the desal grew, and leaned them on one another to make several crude shelters. Jordan would have preferred to camp outside the desal’s perimeter, but these lean-tos were actually fairly far up the slope of the main spire. It made him uncomfortable since he remembered Galas’ tales of poison gases and other subtle deaths coming from these things… but he was going to confront it anyway. What was one small reckless act against that larger one?
There was nothing to burn, but he found a hollow in front of their lean-to and filled it with sand, which he commanded to produce heat. He had discovered that he could do this trick with anything that had mecha in it; after a few minutes to an hour, depending on the concentration of mecha in the substance, it would cool down and have to be replaced. The act constituted suicide for the microscopic creatures, but they happily did it for someone they considered to be a Wind.
He half-expected the desal to rouse when he began ordering the mecha about, but it didn’t happen. Indeed, he got no sense of life from it at all.
While Tamsin hunkered disconsolately in front of the hot mound of dirt, he watered the horses with the last of their supply. His mare’s face seemed puffy, her eyes red and fevered. She could barely drink, and refused the oats he offered her. Tamsin’s horse was no better. Both had swollen bellies; their legs were bowing as though they could no longer carry their own weight.
Jordan slid his hand along the belly of his mare. He felt a faint trembling under the stiff hair, then a movement, like a kick from inside. He snatched his hand back.
“Tamsin, I think my horse is pregnant?” He backed away. The mare stared at him, and he could see death in its eyes. Whatever was happening to it, it was not pregnancy.
Upset, he walked up the slope of the desal. The sun was setting, red and exhausted. Its light outlined faint octagons and squares on the side of the spire. Kneeling, he touched its surface, which was like worn ceramic, and white with a faintly pink tinge.
He closed his eyes and focussed his concentration. I am here. Speak to me.
The wind sighed, and the stones sang their nonsense tunes: feldspar, gypsum, igneous granite, feldspar, sandstone, I am lichen, gypsum gypsum… He imagined the desal would have filled the sky with its voice. It said nothing.
He kicked at pebbles as he walked back to the lean-to. He couldn’t see Tamsin’s face in the dimness, only her hunched figure. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and was gazing out at the failing light along the horizon. He sat down next to her, grateful for the warmth from his “fire”.
They said nothing for a long time, and gradually it became dark. The clouds had moved on, and the stars began to come out one by one. This was not a good sign: it would be a cold night. The chill padded in along the ground, inexorable and silent. Still, Jordan lay for a while watching the emerging stars. Now and then small flashes of light appeared, as if the sun were glittering off bright things way up there in the heavens. Doubtless it was, but he had no idea what they might be, and was past all wondering by now.
“Are you all right?” whispered Tamsin. He rolled on his side. She leaned forward to put more dirt in the dust bowl, which had cooled. “Could you make some more heat for us?”
“All right.” He moved next to her, and she brought her blanket up to cover both of them. With a silent command, he made the new soil in the bowl blossom with heat. It wasn’t lasting long tonight; they would sleep in bitter cold.
*
One timeless moment he lay in the grip of merciless cold, dozing, waking and shivering, dimly aware that Tamsin had wrapped herself around him; the next, he was painfully wrenched into the cold air by a manacle-like grip on his arm.
Jordan cried out; the stars wheeled around and he hit the ground painfully. A black silhouette loomed over him, and the reek of fresh blood filled his nostrils. His arm tingled where he had been touched.
“You are the are,” said a voice like grating stone.
Tamsin screamed.
Jordan rolled backwards—pebbles embedding themselves in his spine, cold air on his neck—and came to his feet to find himself facing two dark man-shapes outlined against a sky full of aurora light and moving stars. One of the shapes batted at the dark triangle of the stone lean-to, where Tamsin screamed again.
The one in front of him feinted, and he kicked at it. His foot connected with slick skin. The thing grunted, then vomited without bending. Black liquid spattered on the stones.
“Found you rightly,” said the morph. “You are the link. You come with us.”
It lunged and he leapt away. The adrenaline had Jordan seeing visions again, but he was able to press Armiger’s consciousness back. The landscape glowed with mecha, as did the morphs. The one closing with him had three eyes in its ravaged face, and he could see them as radiant orbs in a translucent skull. Its body was full of tangled lines of light, like a complete veinous system for the stuff Calandria had called nanotech.
The thing feinted and then jumped, and this time it had him. They rolled on the cold ground, but it couldn’t get a grip since it was covered with… water? Something darker. For a second it had him pinned and the fingers of its right hand scrabbled in his hair as if looking for a door there; then he sat up past its pressing chest and wrapped his arms around its torso. Jordan yanked while kicking at the dust with his feet, and lost his grip but not before he had come to a crouch and the morph was on its hands and knees.
No time for subtlety. He grabbed a rock the size of his fist and when the thing rounded on him again he cuffed it on the side of the head. It fell back, groaning.
“Tamsin!”
She shrieked again, and he saw her—a dark human-shape in the field of mechal light, clutching a blanket as the other morph dragged her along the ground by one leg.
He staggered his with the rock, then again when it came back for more. The thing didn’t seem to feel any pain. It was going to keep coming, he realized, until it had him or he crippled it. If he could—he’d heard tales of morphs growing new limbs to replace severed ones. At that moment he believed the stories.
Jordan pitched the rock at it, missed, and turned and ran after the other one. There was something wrong with the sky, a swirling in the stars, but he didn’t have time to think about that. He screamed, “Run!” and tackled the other morph.
Tamsin rolled to her feet. “Run where?”
“Up the slope! Get on the surface of the desal. Quick!”
Both morphs faced him now. Jordan backed away.
“Give us your light,” said the first morph.
“You shall ascend,” said the second.
Jordan closed his eyes and opened his arms. “Stones, rocks, sand and dust! Hear me!”
The earth roared a reply.
“Burn!” he cried. “Burn beneath the feet of the morphs!”
Then he turned and sprinted up the slope.
Tamsin crouched panting on the smooth white flank of the desal. “What’ll we do?” she said as he put his hand on her shoulder and drew her up.
“If this doesn’t work then I don’t know.” He enfolded her in his arms and watched as the morphs loped toward them.
Suddenly the footsteps of the morphs began sprouting smoke. The morphs stopped walking and one hopped from foot to foot. Very distinctly, Jordan heard the other issue some command in an inhuman tongue. The first sprinted forward, then stopped, confused, and tried to sidestep away. Jordan saw a tongue of flame lick up its calf.
“Come on.” He raced back to the lean-to. They bent to bundle up their meagre supplies, watching the morphs all the while. The first morph, who had not moved, seemed unhurt. It continued to speak in the Wind tongue, and the earth around its feet was no longer smoking.
The second morph’s legs were on fire. As they watched it staggered, fell to its knees in a black cloud. Its hands caught fire when they touched the earth. It scrabbled in the smoke for a few seconds, then fell and began to roll, turning into a fireball as it did.
“Where are the horses?” shouted Tamsin.
“I don’t know. Ka! Where are they?”
“There are no horses nearby,” said the little Wind.
“Come on.” Jordan ran around the long slope of the desal. Maybe the horses were on the other side.
“Look at the sky!”
He looked up, and staggered. The sky was a tangle of brilliant lines that were longer towards the horizon, foreshortened directly overhead. A mauve aurora pulsed there.
Tamsin sprinted ahead, wailing. Jordan put his head down and followed.
A low dark shape appeared as they rounded the far side of the desal. The horse was still on its feet, but only because its legs were locked. Its back was swayed and its belly hung low and trembled like a drop of dew about to fall from a leaf. Tamsin and Jordan slowed to a walk as they approached it.
Tamsin made a clucking sound, which normally would have made it prick up its ears. Jordan wasn’t sure which end was which, because it must have lowered its head; in any case, he saw no sign that it had heard her.
He stopped three meters away, when he realized that neither end of the creature had a head any longer.
Tamsin stopped too, and her hand crept to her face as she began to swear, quiet and urgently.
There was a withered thing hanging down one end of it, and a smaller withered thing on the other end. One of those might once have been its neck and head, but all flesh and liquid had been drained from it to fill the swelling belly. The skin had split in a dozen places there, and blood dripped steadily onto the sand under it.
Blood… Jordan raised his hands, and in the strange auroral light saw that they were smeared with dark stains. He sniffed his palms.
“Oh, shit.” He grabbed Tamsin’s shoulder. “Run. Now!”
As she turned away, the belly of what had once been a horse split like an overripe fruit. In a gush of blood and half-digested organs, two newborn morphs slid to the ground.
The four locked legs of the horse now held up nothing but an empty bag of skin, like some bizarre tent over the coughing morphs. One after the other they crawled out of the entrails and steaming offal, and opened new eyes that hunted the darkness until they found Jordan.
He ran. Panic clamored at him, but he knew if he gave in to it now both he and Tamsin would die. The sky was opening, with a light like the coming of dawn. The morphs would keep coming, and he knew they would not be tricked by the burning ground again.
“Ka! Call the desal! We need shelter! Please!”
Tamsin was halfway up the slope of the desal. She seemed intent on getting as high as she could, or maybe she was just running. He followed, trying not to listen to the wet sounds of the morphs coming after him.
When the slope got too steep, Tamsin stopped and fell back, swaying. He reached her side and panted, “There! See that door?” About five meters away, lower on the slope, faint lines formed a square. “We have to get the desal to open it. Ka!”
“I shall ask.”
They ran down to the square, and now he could see the morph he had stranded in burning ground earlier had found its way out, and was coming round from the other side. Behind the two new ones had learned to walk, in a manner of speaking, and were closing in as well.
“Ka! Ask now!”
“I am doing so.”
“Stand on it.” He stepped onto the square. They were at quite a height here, and the slope was nearly forty-five degrees. He had to crouch to keep his footing. Tamsin edged down next to him.
“What are we doing?” she said, her voice rising in panic.
“Nothing, I guess,” he said as the first morph stepped onto the square with them.
Then he was falling, and for a second he glimpsed towers of fire standing among the stars, before blackness enfolded them.