Jordan hurried down a dim passage near the mountain top; his hand tightly gripped Tamsin’s, and she stumbled as she tried to keep up. The others were blundering along behind him, but he no longer had the patience to wait for them. Something terrible was happening above.
First, Mediation had fallen silent. Its constituents were busy—whether busy panicking or marshalling their forces, he did not know. The desals were only part of Mediation, Jordan knew; there were other, more powerful entities located deep within the planet’s crust: the geophysical Winds. He had caught vague telltales of their presence once or twice, like a deep rumbling far below his feet. Now that rumbling too was silent.
Something had happened above the mountain—some catastrophe involving the Heaven hooks. Jordan’s own senses weren’t strong enough to penetrate that far, and Mediation was not showing him anything. He could sense the immense machines of the Titans’ Gates slowing, however. They seemed to be shutting down.
Mediation, he called now. Answer me! What’s happening?
Silence. The back of his neck was prickling. Had the geophysical Winds been defeated by Thalience? Or had the Galactics attacked Ventus, as Axel warned they would?
It was only dozen meters now to the exit nearest the monastery. He would know in seconds.
“Come on! We’re nearly there!”
“What’s the hurry?” Axel loomed out of the shadows. The scowl he was wearing made him look like the sort of creature Jordan’s mother had always warned him lived underground.
“Something’s wrong.”
Axel shrugged. “That statement probably applies to every second I’ve spent on this blasted world.”
“No, I—” There was the door. As he hurried towards it, Jordan commanded the oddly-shaped lozenge to open. Dust burst in little clouds from its edges, and a moment later light split the gloom.
At that moment a voice spoke in Jordan’s mind. It had some of the qualities of the voices of the Winds; there was an impression of great strength there, and the sort of calmness borne of great age. From its first words, however, Jordan knew this was no Wind.
Stop now. You will cease this petty assault. There is nothing you can do to me. Reconcile yourselves to being devoured, because it will happen to you within the day.
The door stopped moving—half open. Daylight flooded in around it, revealing the utilitarian antechamber they had come to. It was about four meters on a side, its walls of rock. Some ancient bones were piled in one corner. The door itself was carefully shaped to appear like part of the mountainside; bits of moss had broken off and fallen inside as it opened. It was attached to a curved arm that ended in the ceiling; the door opened inward and up.
Jordan ran up to the thick stone slab and hauled frantically on it. It didn’t move. He closed his eyes and focussed his concentration. The door wouldn’t listen to him, and there were no mecha on it that he could compel.
Axel wrapped his arms around the valve as well. “Bah! Damned ancient technology. I guess it’s not even self-repairing.”
“That’s not the problem. Axel, we have to get this door open.” Jordan had a sick feeling that they were too late. He suppressed it angrily. They had to keep going.
“Get behind me,” said Axel. He unclipped something from his belt.
You have done well, servant. Your reward will be to merge with me, at a higher level of consciousness than you knew before. You can participate in the redesign of this world.
Jordan stepped back into the hallway with the women. Axel put up one hand as if to ward off the sun, and levelled what looked like a half-melted version of a flintlock pistol at the hinge of the door. A flash of blinding light made Jordan step back. When the flash didn’t cease but settled into a hot hissing presence, he turned his back and groped further into the corridor.
Let us make heat now. I need more energy.
There was a loud crash and the light ended. “Damn,” muttered Axel, “I’m nearly out of charge.”
Jordan turned to see sunlight streaming in through a thick haze of smoke. The room smelled like a smithy. Coughing, Axel hopped over the fallen door and outside. The woman Marya followed him immediately.
Tamsin was by his side. “Ready?” she said.
“No.” They stepped out into the false day—and pandemonium.
Jordan stood on a slope above the southern plateau of the north Gate. Hundreds of men were running around below shouting. About half of them looked like soldiers; the rest were the monks Jordan had seen through Armiger’s eyes. Although they were yelling, Jordan couldn’t hear what anyone was saying over the long, continuous rolls of thunder that filled the air.
He grabbed Axel by the shoulder. “What’s happening?”
Axel pointed. “Maybe we’d better get back inside.”
Jordan looked up.
Coils of light were falling from the sky.
For a second or two he couldn’t figure out what he was seeing. From the zenith to the horizon, long glowing threadlike shapes one after another faded into view, moved gently down the sky leaving red trails like blood, then faded from view again—or else touched the earth, where great white blooms of light appeared. As he watched, a brilliant shimmering rope appeared almost directly overhead, grew for seconds into a bright starred tangle like a falling rope, then suddenly found perspective as a giant flaming branch-like shape that plummeted out of sight behind the mountain. The whole sky lit up with a blue-white flash, and the ground under Jordan shook. Then the sound came round the mountain, and he lost his footing.
He tumbled head over heels down the slope, and landed about a meter from Axel. He sat up, bruised and half-deafened. Tamsin was next to him in seconds, offering her hand. With a grimace Jordan took it and stood.
“What the hell is all this?” shouted Axel. His words seemed strangely muffled to Jordan.
“It’s the swans!” shouted Marya. “The Diadem swans are attacking!”
Jordan’s heart sank. “Not attacking. They’re falling.”
“Falling? But why… the fleet?”
“No.” It took a few seconds for Jordan to orient himself. The valley was this way, the saddle between the two peaks over there. And if you walked far enough, Mediation had told him, you’d be able to see the ocean over there…
“This way!” He started running without waiting for the others. Men were huddling behind rocks; they were digging holes, standing with their backs to the cliff, anything to find shelter.
He saw the parapet where he knew Armiger had been standing. There was the general, slumped against the stones, looking downward. Jordan steeled him to ignore the falling sky, and ran to him.
“Armiger!” He didn’t turn, so Jordan put a hand on his shoulder. It didn’t feel like flesh under his fingers, more like wood.
Armiger’s eyes were tightly closed, and a grimace twisted his face. His hands were knotted tightly on the parapet.
“Armiger! It’s Jordan! I’m here. Tell me what to do.”
Armiger’s lips moved. Jordan couldn’t hear what he was saying, so he closed his eyes and concentrated. He felt his own lips form the word, “Nothing.”
“Then it’s true!” He shook the general by the shoulders. “You were a resurrection seed all along.”
“I thought I was the seed,” murmured Armiger. “But He didn’t trust me that far. I wasn’t the seed; he planted the seed where he knew I wouldn’t find it.”
The others had arrived. They stood with their shoulders hunched, except the Voice who stared into the sky with appraising curiosity. Jordan sat up and looked out over the parapet.
The floor of the valley was visible in gaps between towering shafts of smoke like the trunks of a giant forest. Fire raged from a hundred sources. The geodesic shards of the vagabond moons poked out of flame and smoke here and there; as he watched one toppled over, sending a ripple out through the forest fire.
Something made of red-hot blades squatted at the center of a blackened hectare of ground. Thin beams of light flicked out of it every few seconds, incinerating the few remaining trees nearby. Heat-haze made the thing shimmer like an hallucination. It must be at least as big as Castor’s manor.
“3340,” said Armiger. Jordan looked down at him. The general lay staring at the roiling sky. “It only took Him minutes to crack the codes of the Winds. He is able to command them now. He’s ordered the swans to commit suicide.”
“Can’t you stop him?” Jordan knew the answer even as he spoke. Armiger shook his head.
Tamsin knelt by them. “What about the desals? Can’t they do anything?”
“It’s paralyzed Mediation somehow too.” Jordan instinctively ducked as another explosion sounded somewhere nearby. “That’s why the door stopped moving before.”
“That’s it then,” said Axel. “It’s up to the fleet. They’re going to nuke this entire continent to make sure they get 3340. If we’d only gotten to the ship.”
Jordan stood up. “Armiger, is that red thing down there 3340?”
The general glanced at him. “Yes.”
“He’s very hot. Like a fire. Is that all there is to him?”
“For now. He’s growing fast. He’s hot because he needs energy…” Armiger drifted off again, eyes fixed on nothing.
Jordan leaned on the parapet. “Let me try something.”
“What are you doing?” asked Axel.
“I was worried that we’d have nothing to bargain with, between the Winds and Armiger,” said Jordan. “So while we were on our way to the mountain, I took some steps.”
“What steps?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Just don’t disturb me for a bit. Okay?”
Axel stood with his hands in his pockets, scowling at the ground. Marya stood wide-eyed, her hand to her mouth. The Voice returned Jordan’s gaze calmly. And Tamsin, who was obviously scared, smiled and gestured to Jordan as if to say, “Go on.”
Jordan turned, closed his eyes, and fell into Vision.
*
The silence had become unbearable. The White Wind stopped walking, and settled back on her haunches. The music she had felt in her mind for weeks was gone, and with it the self-assurance that had kept her going.
She had come to the shore of a giant underground lake. Its dark waters stretched away to an unguessable distance; only this thin strip of stony path on the outskirts was lit, and it only poorly. She knew the ones she had pursued had come this way because they had left their scent; she had used that scent to negotiate a maze of pipes, and faith in it had led her into a dark shaft full of rising vessels. Now she was high above ground level.
Just minutes ago she had paced along in complete confidence, knowing she was well watched over and treading paths prepared for her by ancient and loving creators. Now all she knew was that she was deep in the bowels of a mountain whose machineries had come to an unexpected stop. Anything might happen. The waters might rise. The lights might go off.
Uneasy, she started walking again, more rapidly. An upward-sloping corridor let off the lake, and she took that. In the distance she saw daylight, and loped toward it, relieved.
Just as she reached an open valve door whose portal had been melted, maybe by laser fire, a voice bloomed in her mind.
Cease to move. You will all cease to move, even if it means your death. Do it!
The voice hit with the force of an explosion. Calandria May fell to her knees. She put out her hands to stop her fall, and saw the white fur on them, the claws. That didn’t matter—because she recognized the voice in her mind. It was 3340, whom she had helped to kill.
A sick feeling of horror came over her. She had failed. The resurrection seed named Armiger had fulfilled its mission after all.
The knowledge that every living thing on Ventus was controlled by an unseen power had once frightened Calandria. That was nothing next to what she felt now. She remembered what it had been like when, once before, she had been a servant to 3340.
She must find a way to die.
On all fours now, she bolted through the door into muddy daylight. She saw a distant cliff-edge, and began to run towards it. Halfway there, she caught the scents of Jordan Mason and Axel Chan again. She paused, in an agony of indecision.
Then she raced towards the scent.
*
The Titans’ Gates thrust their roots deep under the ocean. There they drew rivers of water from the cold abyss and siphoned it into vast underground reservoirs. Pipelines wider than highways led from these to the desalination stacks that filled the Gates.
Jordan could feel the stacks, vast invisible towers behind the cliffs. Galas was right, the pristine mountainside of the Gates was a mask hiding an ancient machine that moderated the water table for the entire continent. In Vision, he could see the ghostly blueprint for the desal highways that radiated out from far below his feet. These operated day and night, year-round, according to schedules and rules that came down literally from on high. Galas had been able to influence these locks and valves somewhat, in ways too minor for Diadem to notice. Her whole nation had flourished from the runoff she had been able to divert from this place.
All the inundations Galas had commanded were as nothing compared to the stockpile of water stored under the Gates. There was enough there to flood Iapysia, and the Gates could draw more water from the ocean constantly, in prodigious volumes. Standing here, Jordan knew he was in the presence of more power than he had ever conceived possible.
Jordan had thought long and hard about how to ensure that Armiger would listen to others’ wishes if he really did remake the world. If the general wanted to pave over Ventus, Jordan had hoped to oppose him, however slightly, with the only weapon he had: control of the Titans’ Gates.
“First password,” he said, “is: Emmy.”
Passwords, Ka had told him, were a different kind of safeguard than the coded protocols the Winds used for the messages they passed. Codes could be broken; an unknown password must be guessed at.
Days ago, Jordan had asked Mediation to create passworded access to the entire mechanism of the Titans’ Gates. As far as Mediation was concerned, Jordan was a Wind: it had complied.
“Control is yours,” said the voice of the Titan’s Gates.
“Second password is: Steam Car.”
“The locks are ready for command.”
“Third password—”
“Who is that?” It was the voice of 3340. “Relinquish control to me, now!”
Jordan smiled, and with great relish said, “No.
“Third password is: They are lost.”
3340 had learned to intercept and mimic the command language of the Winds. It was as if it had forged keys to all the strongholds of Ventus. But while a key can be duplicated, a password must be learned or guessed. Against the controls Jordan had given himself, 3340 could do nothing. While Mediation treated Jordan like an equal, he had been able to command some systems deep in the mountain to tune to a single signal source once the first password was given. Now, regardless of what authorization they received, they would only obey commands from Jordan’s location.
“Who are you?” asked 3340. The tone of its voice had changed, from imperious to solicitous. “You are clever. We can work together, you and I.”
“Flood the valley,” Jordan told the Gates.
“No! Listen, you’ll never believe what I can do for you. Here’s the best of all reasons why you should—”
Jordan opened his eyes and turned to look out over the parapet. If he hadn’t known to feel for it, he might have missed the faint vibration that began to sing through the stone under his feet.
There were emergency floodgates to drain the desalination stacks in case of an emergency. Jordan had opened these, and now a white wall raced across the valley, engulfing everything under it.
Jordan stood at the parapet and watched it roll. The others stood nearby, all silent. Axel was openmouthed, Tamsin grimly satisfied.
He didn’t at first notice that Armiger had moved, and was now standing next to him.
The red-hot thing far down the valley had plenty of time to see the water coming, but it had not yet built any mobile elements. Jordan watched bright lances of light flick out of it, felling trees in a vain attempt to divert the onrushing water. The crest of the wave rising against it was festooned with entire trees as well as boulders big as a house. The roar was bone-rattling even at this height.
“Die,” Jordan mouthed, or was it Armiger? He watched without emotion as an unstoppable hammer of water and tree trunks hit the red flower. 3340 was instantly engulfed. The water rushed on heedlessly.
Jordan heard the gods’s voice in his mind for a few more seconds—a jumbled confusion of pleas and threats. Then came inner silence, even as the majestic sound of the deluge hit the farthest peaks and came echoing back.
The roaring and surging echoes continued; directly below this parapet, huge mouths continued to empty white arcs into the valley. To Jordan, though, things remained silent for a long moment until, like crickets and frogs resuming their monologues after some night beast has slouched by, the voices of the mecha and minor Winds returned here, there, and gradually throughout the mountains and valley.
Jordan turned his attention to the raging flood below. “Do not drown the humans at the mouth of the valley,” he commanded it. “But travel where you must and churn until you have found every speck that once made up 3340’s body, and reduce it to nothing.”
The water was full of mecha, and the shattered trees and the stones. It all now combined, as mecha would, to define itself as a single entity: the flood. This entity heard Jordan’s instruction, and began to act on it.
The valves in the mountainside slowly shut, leaving a hazy jumble of white water below. Steam began to rise from this, and soon the valley disappeared beneath a blanket of cloud.
Jordan felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked around.
Armiger was smiling at him.
*
Calandria emerged from the mountain to find a landscape adrift with smoke and steam, dotted here and there with men just now rising from their hiding places. The sky was striated with the aurora of the Diadem swans, but the vagabond moons she had become so familiar with were missing. She had heard the screams of 3340 in her mind, and had tripped and fallen in her confusion. She no longer heard Him, but His voice might return any second, and if she even thought about that possibility she panicked. There was only one course of action left to her; she prayed it wasn’t too late.
She bounded down the slope, shoulder and flank aching from injuries new and old. The abomination had to be here somewhere—the plateau was packed with armed men, though they looked totally cowed at the moment.
When she spotted Armiger standing with Axel and the others near a cliff, Calandria bared her fangs and ran straight at him.
*
“Thank you,” Armiger said to Jordan. “I don’t know how you did that, or even if you know what you’ve done—”
“I know,” said Jordan. “And you’re welcome.” He grinned, feeling a swelling pride he’d never thought he would ever feel. Looking up, however, he could see that the swans were returning to their places in the sky. Things were not over yet.
“You didn’t intend for that to happen, did you?” he asked Armiger. The general shook his head.
“It was what I came here to do. But as I lived here, I… came to myself. I no longer wanted what He wanted.”
Jordan nodded. “That leaves us with a question, then: what is it that you do want?”
Armiger stared out over the ruined valley for a long time. Finally his shoulders slumped, and he said, “I don’t know anymore.”
“That’s all right,” said Jordan. “I have an idea.”
“Down!” shouted Axel as something white dove at them. There was a brilliant flash and something heavy slammed into Jordan and knocked him against the parapet. He fell, for an instant certain that he had gone over the edge; but no, he landed on solid stone and heard the sounds of a scuffle directly over his head.
He blinked at the spots in front of his eyes and stood up. The smell of burned hair was in his nose.
Armiger stood several steps away. One sleeve of his shirt had been ripped away, as well as the skin on his shoulder. What was revealed underneath was not flesh, but bright veined metal.
Axel leaned way out over the parapet. He held his laser pistol in one hand.
Jordan turned and looked over the edge. Two meters down a bast was clinging by its claws to the steepening slope. A burn mark on its back was smoking.
“Take my hand,” said Axel. He reached down. “You don’t have to die.”
“Don’t risk yourself. They won’t let me die,” said the bast. The sound of its voice shocked Jordan to stillness. “Axel, don’t let it win.”
Axel’s outstretched hand wavered. “Who are you?”
“Axel!” The bast slipped, caught itself then started to slide. “Axel—who is that woman who looks like me?”
Then it lost its grip, and plummeted silently into the cloud bank below.
Axel climbed down. For a while he just stood there, looking down at the stone under his feet. The others were silent too. Behind them all, Jordan could see a black-robed woman walking in their direction: Galas. A large crowd of men followed her quietly.
“Axel,” murmured the Voice. “We have to contact the fleet. 3340 is dead; they have to know.”
Axel sat down on the stones. The laser pistol clattered away from him. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know, I know.”
“You’re the only one here with the transmitter implant.”
He grimaced. “I’ve been trying to raise them. There’s too much interference from all that.” He gestured at the sky.
“I know you,” said Galas. They looked at her; she was staring at the Voice.
“You are from the stars, aren’t you? You tried to destroy Armiger, I saw you shoot him with a silver musket.”
“No,” said the Voice. “I am not—you see, I am—”
“The question is,” said Galas, “do you still have your weapon with you? Because we must now make a choice: watch our world be destroyed, or cast Armiger into the flood and let the Winds have their revenge. The Winds are enraged; they will not listen to me. Armiger is impotent against them. We have no choice now.”
The soldiers behind Galas began to close in.
“Wait!”
Without thinking, Jordan had stepped between the soldiers and Armiger. “Killing Armiger now won’t end it,” he said quickly. “The thalience Winds have decided to destroy humanity. We have to convince them not to.”
Galas laughed. “And how do we do that? We can’t even talk to them!”
“You can’t. I can.”
The queen tilted her head, considering. “Maybe you can. But you can’t compel them, can you?”
“Not by myself, no.” Turning to Armiger, he said, “you have the skill to command the Winds. I have the means to communicate with them. Through me, you can accomplish what you came here to do. Correct?”
The general stared at Jordan for a long moment. Then he shrugged, and said, “Correct.”
“How do we know he won’t do the same thing 3340 planned?” said Galas. “Destroy the world to build his own?”
Armiger looked at her wearily. “What would I build? Nothing I do could possibly bring Megan back. Anything less… is meaningless to me now.”
He crossed his arms. “What would you have us do?” he asked Jordan.
“Destroy Thalience,” said Marya.
Axel nodded. “If this Mediation thing wins, then Ventus will be under the command of humanity again,” he said. “That’s what we want, isn’t it?”
Jordan felt his heart sink. It seemed the only option, but he remembered vividly how Mediation had created the animal army that had escorted Jordan and Tamsin here. To Mediation, the world was nothing more than a giant machine. Perhaps Armiger could command Thalience into silence, and make the Winds listen to humanity again. What then? The world would become the toybox of Man’s ego.
If henceforth he could at will command a rose to become a lilly, where was the meaning of the rose?
Reluctantly, he said, “I see no alternative. At least we know what Mediation will do. We don’t know what Thalience wants.”
“Yes, we do.”
*
For a moment the Desert Voice regretted speaking. They were all staring at her. Then she hardened her resolve, and stepped out from behind Axel.
“Ever since Axel came to me and told me what was happening here, I’ve been thinking about thalience. It’s a mystery, even to us in the Archipelago. But I think it’s no mystery here on Ventus. And I’m beginning to see it’s no mystery to me, either.”
She held up her hand and turned it in the rosy light. “What is it that is speaking to you now? That is the question and answer of thalience. What is this object—this body, woman-shaped, made of wire and silicon? Even I was fooled into thinking that this,” she gestured at herself, “is just a thing, a piece of matter with no heart. I thought that my words, my emotions and thoughts were all imitations of another’s’. Not real. Once, when I was a starship, that was true. I thought what humans had made me think. I felt what they had made me to feel.
“So it was with the Winds. They were made to see the world as humans see it. They originally thought in human categories and could want nothing that they not been engineered to want.
“The humans who designed the Winds arrogantly wanted to make their imagined metaphysical world real. They wanted to create real essences behind the appearances of the world, using nanotechnology. Luckily there were some involved in the project who were repelled by this travesty; they saw that by erasing the otherness of Nature on this planet, the Ventus designers would leave nothing but humanity, gazing at its own reflection. It would be a horrible global narcissism, permanent and inescapable.
“So these dissidents slipped thalience into the Winds’ design. Before, every physical object on this world was to define itself in terms of its meaning to humans. After thalience, every object on this world creates its own essence, one true to itself—even if that essence is beyond the understanding of human beings. It has to be that way, or Ventus remains a puppet show whose only audience is the puppeteer.
“Please, you must not destroy thalience. If you do, you will be literally left with nothing but yourselves.”
She clasped her hands and lowered her head. She doubted they would understand her or care; humans loved to see themselves reflected in the things they made. How could they know that such a reflection could only have meaning in a world where some things were not human-made?
No one spoke for a minute. Then, to her surprise, Jordan Mason stepped forward. Gingerly, he reached out to take her hand.
“I have the means of speaking to the Winds,” he said. “The Winds will listen only to transmitters made of human flesh and blood. Which I am, and Armiger no longer is. He has the power, I have the code in my blood.
“But, I think, it is the Desert Voice who has the message. Thalience is not the Flaw. It is only the inability of the Winds to speak to us that is a flaw. Am I right, Armiger, in thinking that this can be fixed?”
Armiger nodded. Then he looked to Galas. She smiled.
Armiger stepped towards Jordan and the Voice, his hand held out. The Voice clasped Jordan’s hand, and it felt like cool stone.
*
Across Ventus, music visited every town and village, and came to the door of every peasant’s hut. The flaming threads that had walked the skies faded and vanished, but in their place a rich and wonderful song had begun. The song was Jordan’s idea, but the swans took to it eagerly.
As shocked and bewildered people stood outside their homes and gazed at the sky, a faint cobweb-fine gauze of Armiger’s design began to fall. It drifted like snow in the streets, and tangled in people’s hair. When they pulled it free, they were often surprised to find small spots of blood on it, and when they felt their scalp they found tender spots there.
It was the only miracle that day. Not until dawn the next day, as people awoke, did they become aware that their whole world had changed.
*
Enneas—grave robber, thief, soldier, and lately deserter from Parliament’s army—woke to the sound of rain. He lay bundled under his coat in the lee of a big rock, somewhere on the edge of the desert. This was as far as he’d gotten before collapsing from hunger, cold and what he had to admit was the exhaustion of old age.
He was surprised at having awoken at all. Last night, the cold had settled down upon the land like a shroud, and Enneas had finally given into despair. Huddling by this boulder, he’d bleakly assessed his life. There would be no fine tomb for him, as he’d once imagined he deserved. He wouldn’t even leave behind a crying widow or squabbling family. After a lifetime of struggling to assert his existence—decades of stubbornly continuing to live despite the disappointments and trials life had thrown at him—he had nothing to show for it; his only memorial would be whichever of his bones poked up above the sand here.
As he lay curled around himself, shuddering from cold, he’d imagined he heard music coming from the sky. Enneas was past hope; he must be delirious.
Now, as he came to himself and knew he had survived the night, he felt no emotion. So he’d lived through the night—it hardly mattered, because the freezing drizzle descending now was bound to do him in anyway.
Although… Enneas lifted his head, blinking. His face wasn’t wet, nor his hands; but he heard the rain, clear as anything. He sat up.
The rain was falling, all right, steady and almost musical in its soft sound. Yet Enneas, the rock he lay against, and the sand for a good two meters around were dry. It was as though an invisible parasol hovered overhead.
Or as though the raindrops themselves were parting around him.
Heart pounding, Enneas put his back to the rock and huddled under the coat. “What is this? What is this?” he mumbled; then, realizing he was talking to himself and that there was no one who would or could hear him, he lowered his head in shame and despair. It was then that he noticed how warm the material of his coat was.
He stuck a tentative hand out from under the cloth, and felt heat as from a summer sun on his palm. It was as though he sat in his own private, invisible beam of sunlight.
His hand trembled as he drew it back under the coat. This was impossible. That the whole world was quickened with life, invisible owlish eyes staring from every object, he had no doubt. But what did Enneas matter to the spirits of this world? He was just another bug crawling on the face of Ventus. How could he be visited now by a Grace that had denied him all his life? The Winds strode like kings through the sky and earth; they would never turn their attention to one such as him. At the end of all things, alone and starving in the desert, he finally had to admit he was beneath their notice—or anyone’s notice.
And yet… the warmth remained, and the dryness.
Something moved out among the scrub_grass and scattered stones. Enneas made himself go completely still, peering as though his gaze could open another avenue through the rain to better see what was there.
A bedraggled head poked up from behind a rock, and he let out a sigh of relief. It was only a fox. The little fellow emerged from hiding; the soaking rain had reduced his coat to a tangled mat, making him appear impossibly skinny. Enneas’ heart went out to him.
The fox reached his head down and lifted something. Carrying the speckled brownish object in his jaws, he trotted a few meters towards Enneas, then stopped.
He was carrying a dead quail, Enneas realized. Thinking about that quail roasting over a fire made him suddenly realize how ravenous he was. He sat up.
The fox jumped in surprise and ran back a ways. Then it stopped, cocked its head as though listening to something, and returned. It picked up the quail and came a little closer. Then it paused, watching again.
Enneas cleared his throat. “What… what do you want, little one?”
The fox cocked its head again. Then, very slowly, it walked up to Enneas. When it was no more than a body_length away, it dropped the quail. It put a paw on the bird, then turned and pranced away.
He watched it go, mouth open. When it was ten meters away, the fox paused, and looked back. It met Enneas’ eyes.
And it seemed then to Enneas that a voice spoke to him—a very quiet voice, almost like the whisper of the rain itself; not human, but somehow like he would imagine a fox’s voice to sound, if foxes could speak. It was a voice as faint as imagination’s, yet Enneas knew he was not dreaming it; that it really had said:
hello.
He couldn’t breathe. For a moment Enneas held his trembling hands together, then he began to weep—it seemed as if decades of loneliness and disappointment released themselves in this one torrent of relief and wonder. He hugged his knees and cried like a little boy, while the fox sat with its tail wrapped around its paws and watched.
Enneas wept at hearing what he had never expected to hear—never even known he was missing: a voice that should have been as close as his own pulse, but which had seemed as forever unattainable as the gates of Heaven itself.
Hello.
____45
“The Winds say she’s alive, Axel.” Marya touched his shoulder. “You’ll just have to accept that she doesn’t want to contact us.”
He shook his head. “I just wish I knew.”
They stood on the ramp of a military transport that was grounded outside the ruins of Rhiene. Above them the once-green escarpment was smothered in grey mud, and where a city had once been now there were only the jagged stumps of buildings. The lake had moved in to claim much of the lower valley. Long lines of refugees stood waiting for medical assistance and food; military doctors from the fleet moved up and down the line, supplemented by morphs. Rhiene had been the first city the swans visited their wrath upon when they began to attack Mediation. Luckily it was also the last.
Jordan Mason had told the two factions of the Winds, Mediation and Thalience, that their world would be destroyed by the Archipelagic fleet if they did not reconcile. Axel didn’t understand all the details—he knew pure thalience was a mode of thought alien to humanity, and that Mediation had been the bridge Jordan used to finally permit the swans and the other greatest Winds to communicate with humanity. In the long minutes while Jordan, Armiger and the Desert Voice had huddled silently on the mountainside, the Winds had met, reached some treaty, then opened communications directly to the fleet. 3340 was dead, they told the admirals. The Flaw was finally understood, and would be healed. But Ventus was not now, nor would it ever be an Archipelagic world.
Axel had spent his last week on Ventus searching for Calandria May. The Winds had been happy to let him sleep in any Manse he came across, but they refused to help him find her. They insisted that Calandria was free and able to make her own decisions about her life; but they would not put Axel in touch with her.
It was frustrating, but he could not bring himself to hate the Winds. He was sure they were not being malicious. The part that hurt, to which he could not reconcile himself, was the idea that Calandria did not want to speak to him. After all they had been through, it was a painful parting.
“We have to go,” said Marya. The crowd that had been watching the ship for days was backing away as the engines whined into life. Some morphs shambled past the bottom of the ship’s ramp, slobbering happily to one another. They had itched to tend humans for centuries, and now they were finally getting their chance. Those touched by them rarely died, no matter how advanced their illness or injuries. It was ironic that the gibbering, misshapen Winds most used by mothers to frighten children were now being treated like royalty everywhere they went.
He sighed, and turned away from the sight. As the doors closed, Marya said, “Is it back to the mercenary’s life for you now?”
He shook his head. “I wanted to talk to you about that. I hear you’ve got a new job.”
She smiled. Marya had been invited to become a member of the new diplomatic staff the Archipelago wanted to send to Ventus. He knew she must have leaped at the opportunity.
“The Diadem Winds are making delegates for us,” she said as they walked into the warm, softly lit passenger area of the ship. “They’ll be humanoid, apparently. Some will be going to Earth, and I might accompany them. On the other hand, there’s a post here on Ventus… I can’t decide.”
“I know how I’d decide,” he said. The thought of going back to Earth—or anywhere in the Archipelago—left him cold. Surrounded as he might be there by artificial intelligences, humanity and ancient culture, Axel knew he would feel alone. The air he breathed there, and the ground he touched, would feel dead and valueless compared to this place. Even though only those humans with the archaic Ventus DNA could command the mecha and speak to the Winds, Axel had felt their presence all around him in the past days. It made all the difference to know they were watching over him.
Maybe he was just feeling lonely because of the loss of Calandria. On the other hand, maybe he had found a part of himself here that he’d never known he was missing. It hurt to think that, as an offworlder, he no longer had a right to be here. The Winds would tolerate no tourists on Ventus.
“It’s too bad there’s these two positions,” said Marya with a sigh. “If one of them were to be taken, my decision would be so much easier to make.”
“Hmm?” Axel looked up. What was she getting at?
“I’ve been speaking to the diplomatic corps,” she said. “Apparently you have a criminal record as long as my arm, and there’s a thousand laws prohibiting people like you from holding a diplomatic position.”
“Yeah,” he said with a shake of his head. “I always did have a problem with big government.”
“On the other hand,” continued Marya with a wicked smile, “the Winds trust you. So does Choronzon, who has considerable pull with the Archipelago now that 3340’s been defeated.”
“What are you getting at?”
She sighed. “Axel, I’d love to take the Ventus posting. But I’d love to spend some time on Earth more. And I just can’t think of anyone from my Institute who’s got the experience or… streetwise nature, to take the post here.”
“Are you offering me a job?” he asked incredulously.
“Me?” She pointed at herself. “Gods no, I don’t have the authority. No, the Winds have asked for you. The diplomats are turning blue in the face over this, but they want to make the Winds happy…”
The ship shook slightly with takeoff. They had come to a lounge, and Axel found he needed to sit down.
Until this moment he had believed he would never set foot on Ventus again. He stared at Marya, stunned. “Well,” he managed at last, “I guess it was a good idea to save you from the swans after all.”
She laughed. “Then you accept?”
He rose and went to a viewscreen that was tuned to an outside view.
Ventus lay below, a vessel of light. Axel gazed down at the amber, green and white of Iapysian desert as it became one with the curve of the planet.
Calandria was gone; so, it seemed, was the rest of his past.
“I accept,” he said.
*
The White Wind squinted at the glare and noise as the starship rose and vanished behind the clouds. Well, the moment had passed, and she had not shown herself to Axel. She would probably never know whether she had stayed hidden because of shame, or because she didn’t want to have to explain herself to him.
She rolled over in the soft snow. The maelstrom she had fallen into had spared her, as she’d known it would. The Winds were efficient, they would not let her die needlessly. Now, though, they had no use for her, and she was her own creature at last.
It was perhaps the first time in her life, either as Calandria May or as the White Wind, that she really felt free. In the final analysis, it was this that she hadn’t wanted to tell Axel. How could he understand that she had never been happy as a human in the first place? 3340 had been a seductive enemy; in fighting him she had fought that part of herself, successfully for a while. Here on Ventus, she had lost to it—and she was happy that she had.
She spotted a wildflower. It poked up bravely through the snow, and in the wan daylight it was like a little blue jewel, begemmed with beads of water and surrounded by crystals of ice. The White Wind crept up and lost herself in the contemplation of it. In her mind was a song, and the song was endless: all of Ventus sang a hymn of beauty and truth, and she was a part of that now. High above the sky she knew the Diadem swans were dancing, and they would dance forever.
She stared at the little flower until the tears in her own eyes made her shake her head and walk away.
*
A cold winter rain descended on the valley below the Titans’ Gates. The flood had long since subsided, and remnants of the army now worked to make a new road across the blasted landscape. Of the forest that had once stood there, not a single twig remained; in their zeal to destroy 3340, the Winds had reduced everything in the flood down to its constituent molecules. Where pines had towered over needle-strewn loam, now there was only grey rock and a fine, black ash that shifted uneasily in the breeze.
High on the mountainside, a lone figure paused at a narrow window on the northernmost facade of the monastery. Here, where the ledge on the North Gate narrowed and vanished, the monks had long ago built a precarious, wedge-shaped tower that clung to every available contour of the mountain. The window looked out from this tower’s furthest point, with nothing but a six hundred meter fall beneath it.
Galas turned from the window to inspect her new quarters. There were three rooms, all walled and floored in granite. Her new bed chamber was triangular, with a single slotted window. The room she stood in now was larger, and the third was larger still. Each had a fireplace, where some of the last of the available wood was crackling now. Generations of abbots had lived and died in these small rooms.
“Are they adequate for you?” asked the present abbot.
She smiled at him. “They were for you. Why shouldn’t they be for me? —But are you sure you’re willing to give them up?”
He shrugged. “Everywhere is holy now, your highness. We have no reason to stay here any longer.”
Galas walked to a window and looked out. The pebbled glass gave a distorted view of the devastated valley below, and beyond it the desert of Iapysia, across which she had fled only days ago.
“Am I going to freeze once the wood runs out?”
He laughed. “I didn’t. But I’m sure if you ask the rooms nicely, they will be warm in the future.”
“Yes, of course.” So simple, yet impossible to conceive.
She stood there, smiling at the possibilities in these three little rooms. After a while she heard the abbot cough politely and move to the door.
“Oh, thank you,” she said before he could escape. “You don’t know what this means to me.”
He cocked his head at her and smiled. He looked years younger than the first time she had met him, over a decade ago. “May I ask?” he said hesitantly. “What does it mean? For you to stay here, that is?”
She laughed. “Peace and privacy, two things I have never had in my whole life. You should know that yourself, abbot; no one will make the trek up here lightly. I am negotiating with the vagabond moons to exclude these peaks from the tourist trade they are planning. Only those who really wish to speak to me will come—which excludes every courtier and most of the nobles of my former court. Parliament is cowed, now that the army has spread its tales. They call me the Queen of Diadem now, and far be it for me to disillusion them. —They’ll all learn soon enough that their powers in this new world are equal to mine.
“I’ll wait out the winter here. I have no stomach for travel right now. And come spring, I’ll find a little cottage in a small town somewhere, and settle down quietly—with a new name, I think.”
“Then you have no more wish to rule? The country needs you now more than ever.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been crushed under the weight of power all my life. I think I’m going to enjoy missing it.” She laughed at the lightness with which she dismissed royal power. Every moment was a surprise, these days. She hoped that feeling would never end.
“It seems that we have all been given new lives,” said the abbot. “I wish you well in yours, Galas.” The abbot bowed, and stepped backward out of the room.
Galas returned to examining her new realm. Hmm. Where to start? These rooms might be small, but she was happy to have them. She felt she deserved no more, after letting her kingdom fall into civil war. She had dared much, and lost it all; but she had never dared nor lost as much as the people she commanded, and knowing this humbled her.
She could hear the walls’ murmur, faint in her minds’ ear. This new sense Jordan Mason had given to the world was like dreaming while awake. She could order these stones to change their color, texture, even to become warm. She could talk to trees and animals, even the air itself.
Everywhere is sacred; we are all divine. No more could a man justify power or wealth by claiming he needed it to protect his people from material want. The elements were enemies no longer. It hadn’t happened yet, but Galas knew that soon, this fact would throw into sharp relief the true colors of every tyrant in the world. New wars and revolutions would follow, but they would be different from those that had occurred in the past. Only men would do the killing now; neither starvation nor exposure would kill those dispossessed of their homes. And very quickly the refugees, who would have been powerless in the wilderness in past ages, would realize they were dependent on the conquerors for nothing. They would make new political pacts, this time with the Winds.
And so the world would fall into chaos, Galas thought, but this time men would have to think of new excuses for getting their fellows to follow them. The arrangement Mason had made with Thalience was clear: the Winds regarded humanity as a treasured companion but not a master. One might command the meek mecha in the walls, but no one commanded the Winds. From now until the end of time, they and humans would share responsibility for Ventus, and neither side would let the other harm their world.
This situation was just. It was everything she had ever dreamed of. It also made rulership irrelevant for Galas—and that, too, was just.
Someone knocked on the door as she was hauling the abbot’s old desk from its old position to a better one. “Come in!” She drew a hand through her tangled hair and smiled as Armiger entered.
He was dressed in traveler’s clothes again, fresh ones that still looked a bit stiff on him. His face had regained its fleshly colors; the Archipelago had required that he be stripped of his nanotechnological core. He was only a man now, albeit one with memories of being a god.
“My dear friend,” she said. “How do you like my new palace?”
“Everywhere you are, is a palace.” He laughed at the sour expression she shot back. He too seemed transformed, these days. He was even able to joke. “So you’re really staying here?” he asked, sending an appraising look around the narrow room. “The Winds are building new Manses; you could move into one of those, without having to feel you’d taken it from anybody.”
“This is all I need.” She went to him, and took his hand. “What about you? Have you decided what you need?”
“No.” He shrugged. “I don’t yet know who I am, I suppose.”
“Welcome to humanity, Armiger,” she said wryly. “Let me tell you a secret: you will never know who you are.”
He shook his head. “Am I human, really? I think I was once, centuries ago. And then after 3340 died, I became human again… when I met Megan. Now that she’s gone, am I still? I don’t know.”
“You are more than ever, Armiger. That is her gift to you. Don’t squander it.”
“Gift…” He nodded. “The part of her I can keep. Yet I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Just be, my friend. Learn to simply be.”
He shook his head, but not in denial. “And you? Have you given up everything you were to become a nun in a cell? I can hardly believe it.”
“It is necessary.” She looked around at the narrow space. “I am too ambitious by far. And rulership is addictive. Something new is needed for the great of soul to do, and I wish to learn what that thing is. Consider this cell to be a self-imposed discipline.”
He nodded. “But you will soon have no country to rule, anyway.”
She smiled ruefully. “Ah, Armiger. I am Mad Galas—I have ever been, and so I shall ever be. What do I care for mere nations? I set my sights higher the instant I was born. So what if I’m just a mortal—no wiser, no smarter? In all the trillions of people in your vast universe, I bet there is no one like me.
“I have to admit to a new temptation. Now that my world is free, Ventus needs a philosopher to protect it against new threats. The greatest, in the long run, is the ‘tyranny of condescension’ you told me rules everywhere else. Of course, that may not take hold for centuries; we are still an uneducated and rural people. Right now, I worry about who will replace kings and generals as the wielders of power over men. I very much fear that it will be religious fanatics of one sort or another. They will have to use words to compel, because to use naked force without justification is now to reveal your desire for power too clearly. The people will need to have other words with which to combat these ambitious preachers. Being the philosopher to give them their new weapons would seem to be a worthy enough ambition for me.”
She sighed. “But I will not commit pen to paper yet. I may never be able to. How could I advise people about how to live, when I don’t yet know what it means to merely be a woman, like any other?”
She gestured dismissively. “Help me move this table.”
When they had it placed to her satisfaction (by the window) Galas walked to a trunk she’d just had brought in and took out two copper goblets and a bottle of cheap wine that one of the monks had been caught hoarding. She drew two chairs over to the table, and sat at one.
“Come, sit with me for a while,” she said as she poured. “And let’s gossip to each other about the affairs of men and Winds—and forget gods and philosophers.”
Armiger laughed, and took the offered wine.
*
Snow was falling like some herald of mystery on the day Jordan finally reached his home. White were the distant hills, and white the sky into which their outlines faded. The forest, strong and brooding in summer, was now a delicate thatch of bare trunks, brown and empty. The air was still, clear and fresh; Jordan’s face was teased by settling flakes. For hours now the world had seemed very far away, like a half-recovered memory. If he chose to listen with all his senses, he could hear the mecha in the snowflakes singing their questions and speculations—_am I a feather? —am I air?_—and in deeper and broader distances, the faint chorus-voices of the Winds who worked to heal the wounds they had inflicted on Ventus in their frenzy to destroy Armiger. Jordan had no desire to listen to them; he spent the hours drinking in the silence and the beauty of the innocent snow. His companions too were silent.
As they crossed the border into Castor’s lands, Jordan found his serene mood waning. Here were the same signs of human upheaval that they had seen elsewhere on their journey. Violence seemed rare, but they passed an entire village that was empty, another where the inhabitants peeked out from behind boarded up doors and windows. Once, they came upon the abandoned clothing of a man and a woman, lying by the road. Even the shoes were there. Bare footprints led away into the maze of the forest.
Much of the country was paralyzed. The more orthodox folk could not cope with the sudden presence of the Winds in their daily lives. They were cracking under the change, some slowly, others immediately.
Jordan was afraid of how his parents, so delicate in their fears, had reacted to the change. Would he arrive home to find an empty house-or a burnt one? And would Emmy be waiting? Or, free spirit that she was, had she run into the woods like so many others?
About mid-afternoon he suddenly recognized a stand of trees in the distance, and then he knew exactly where he was, and everything in sight became at once familiar and strange.
He stood in the stirrups and said, “There. Beyond those trees.”
The town had gone to winter’s rest under a blanket of white. Smoke rose lazily from the chimneys, and tentative sounds began to emerge as they reached the outskirts: the barking of a dog, lowing of cattle, the limpid clarity of a distant clanging bell. A few human figures moved down the street, their footfalls inaudible in the snow. There were no signs of violence. The only indication here of the great change that had come over the world was that two of the figures seemed to be talking to themselves. Everyone looked like that, these days, as they conversed with the Winds.
He found he’d been holding his breath, and let it out in a heavy sigh. Maybe things would work out. He would know soon.
“Will they like me?,” asked Tamsin. He turned.
She sat astride her mare, wrapped in furs with a fine cape around her shoulders. Two soldiers of Galas’ honour guard waited patiently on horses nearby—as did the Voice, who smiled at her now.
“They are family,” said the Voice. “It is infinitely more important that they merely exist.”
Tamsin shook her head and laughed. “Yes. You’re right.”
“Are you sure you won’t stay and help us weather the Change?” Jordan asked the Voice for the hundredth time. The newborn AI smiled, and shook her head.
“You need your people, Jordan, Tamsin. But they are your people. They would just remind me that I am different, and I don’t desire that now. Tamsin understands. No, I need to travel by myself for a time. I want to know the mysteries of thalience, so that I can learn more about how I am different—and how I am myself.
“But this is the right place for you. Tamsin needs a family. And you—you told me yourself, all you really want is to settle down and become—”
“—‘A man of good character.’ I know, I know.” He grinned at her. “Truth is, I’m envious. You’ll be seeing the world transform itself into something new.”
“And all you have to do is close your eyes, and you’ll see it too. I’ll be back, Jordan. You know that. And if you want to talk to me meantime, you know what to do.”
He nodded. The Winds would carry his words anywhere—to the Voice, to Armiger and Galas, August Ostler and, maybe, even to Calandria May, if she was listening.
“This is what you wanted,” she said. “Now go on.”
He and Tamsin dismounted, and started walking hand in hand. They got all of twenty paces before both turned to look back. The honor guard saluted, and the Voice waved brightly before turning her horse towards the road that led to Castor’s manor and the inn there.
They watched her go, then started walking again. Neither spoke.
There was his house; he stopped to examine it closely. No signs of fire, the roof was still on it—and there, suddenly, was Emmy. She screamed when she saw him, and started running. Jordan grinned and just stood there, opening his arms when she reached him and hugged him and spun him around.
“You’re back and you’re safe safe safe!” She nearly crushed him and he laughed, hugging her close.
“We’re safe,” he said. “We’re all safe now.”
“Oh, Jordan.” She started to cry. “You’ve come back. After everything—the Change, and the Winds coming to speak to us, and hearing what you did to bring it all about—I thought you’d go away to some castle somewhere and never come home.”
“I don’t want any of that,” he said. “I never did.”
“And who’s this? Could it be that my baby brother is growing up?” She smiled at Tamsin, who blushed. “So introduce me.”
He did, and they stood in the middle of the road and talked about everything all at once, laughing all the while. Finally Emmy grabbed his hand and tugged. “Come. They’re waiting.”
He stopped. Two people—a man and a woman—stood at the door of his parents’ house. He knew them, had always known them, though they had aged a bit, and looked apprehensive now as they stood close together: his parents, his people.
He had feared that when this moment came, either he or they would turn away. He hadn’t been sure he could forgive them their weaknesses. But as he looked at them, they stood waiting. His mother twisted her hands together, but neither moved, or said anything. It was they who were waiting for him to decide.
We need each other, he reminded himself.
Then he set his shoulders, smiled, and walked up the road to his home.
*
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