Ventus

by Karl Schroeder

  He could see the duennas, and soldiers; people were weeping and running about. There was no sign of the queen. He couldn't make out what was going on until a single word leapt out of the tumult:

  "Captured!"

  Jordan opened his eyes in surprise. "What is it?" asked Tamsin.

  "Something's happened. The queen's gone."

  "Now what?"

  "I must find Armiger." He closed his eyes again.

  §

  "Bind her wrists, Enneas." Lavin stepped back. "Your majesty, we are leaving now. You may walk, or we will drag you." They stood in the catacombs. Galas' eyes were dark pools in the light from Enneas' lantern.

  The thief fumbled with the bindings. "Excuse me, majesty," he said. He seemed overawed. Lavin realized he had assumed Lavin would fail. The thought made him laugh.

  "What are you laughing at?" demanded Galas. "Is my humiliation so comforting to you?"

  All Lavin's joy shrivelled. "Galas— I... I would never laugh at you, nor hold you in contempt. You are my dearest ideal and the only woman I have ever loved. Your pride and anger will never let you admit the favor I've done for you, but listen—we have time as we walk back to discuss terms. Our terms, not the terms of Royalty versus Parliament."

  "What do you mean? Ah, that hurts!"

  "Sorry, your majesty."

  "Lead on, Enneas." The thief walked ahead, lantern raised. Lavin picked up a second lantern, leaned close to Galas, and whispered, "I mean that I am, and always have been, your servant. Don't you understand the situation? I am the commander of the army that controls your nation, and I am your most loyal servant. This is the moment I have worked for ever since I took charge of the war against you. I am yours, my army is yours, all the resources of Parliament are at our command. All we need do is deceive them as to your capitulation while we rebuild the Royalist power base in secret. You will be queen again, Galas!"

  She stopped. "Lavin, you amaze me."

  "Thank you, your highness."

  "Please raise your hands, general," said a voice behind them.

  Armiger stepped into the glow of Lavin's lantern. He stood in a painful crouch, but his hands didn't waver as they pointed the alien weapon at Lavin.

  The fluttering rage that he had so carefully kept at bay overcame Lavin. He drew his sword and leaped at Armiger with a cry.

  Armiger fired—not at Lavin but over his head. The narrow passage rocked to the concussion, and the ceiling fell in on him.

  §

  Armiger rolled the larger rocks off Lavin, and checked his pulse. "He is alive," he said.

  Galas stared at the fallen general, her old friend and betrayer. She didn't know what she felt now. Rage, yes, and resentment. Fear, perhaps, of a man so obsessed as this, and so clever in his obsession. She could almost believe in his plan to deceive Parliament. Almost—but would Lavin ever be content to let her free, if once he possessed her? At one time, perhaps, she would have held faith with him.

  Megan untied Galas. Ahead of them, an old man stood patiently in the light of a lantern he had placed on the floor. "Come along," he said. "Or go back. Which is it to be?"

  Armiger walked up to him. "We go forward," he said. "Will you help us?"

  Enneas shrugged. "It seems to be my lot in life to shepherd the damned into the underworld. Thief, general or queen, what the hell difference should it make to me? Come along then."

  Galas relit Lavin's lantern, which had fallen, and placed it near his outflung arm. Then, looking back only once, she followed the others into the darkness.

  §

  Jordan was puzzled. He had seen Armiger take down the other man with some kind of weapon. He knew the general was somewhere underground, heading away from the palace. It must be a tunnel of some kind—but where did it let out?

  He left Armiger's perspective and returned to Ka. "Ka, leave the tower," he said. "Fly up, as high as you can." The little Wind obliged, spiralling out and up at a giddying rate. Soon the entire palace was laid out below Jordan, like an architect's model.

  Familiar skills came to his aid now. He could see the different layers and periods of construction of the place; as at Castor's or the Boros manor, the history of the Summer Palace was written in its stones. Armiger kept his eyes on the task at hand, which was negotiating the narrow way, so Jordan had ample time to contemplate his surroundings. He saw the type of stone in the passage Armiger was walking through, and had judged its age in the glow of the lantern held by Armiger's guide. That style of construction was used in particular types of wall or embrasure... He stared down from Ka's height, looking for the structure he knew must be there.

  "Jordan, we're out of time."

  Opening his eyes, he looked up to see white branches, like frozen lightning, gently touching down at points in the nearby hills.

  He felt the stirring of the Swans' attention. They had not spotted him yet; it seemed they were here for another reason. Beyond the pressure of their searching gazes, he something else as well—a deep murmuring from underground.

  "Mediation," he said, "we need shelter from the swans. Disguise us, or create a diversion—something, anything!"

  "Come on," said Tamsin. "We've got to hide!" She pointed to the palace, where forms like living flames were rising into the air.

  "Just one minute more." He clenched his eyes shut, and reentered Ka's perspective. There had to be something...

  There it was: a long, faint line in the sand, the crumbled remains of a causeway that extended all the way from the central buildings of the palace past its walls. And at its terminus in the desert...

  "I've got it!" That knot of men and horses, surrounding a tumble of stones, must be the end of the tunnel. It only remained for Jordan to orient himself, open his eyes, and find the distant smudge of figures with his own vision. Then he was up and running.

  He went back down the hillside, out of sight of the palace and the now

  abandoned, smoking siege engines. An eery silence was descending as the Swans touched down in the valley. He couldn't see what was happening there, unless he went back into Ka's perspective. That might be too dangerous at this point. But for all he knew, the swans were killing everyone.

  When he estimated they were near the causeway, Jordan jogged cautiously up the hillside again. The long causeway was visible below them. It ended well outside the tents of Lavin's encampment, in the tumble of ruins Jordan had seen from above.

  "Look!"

  Tamsin was pointing at the palace. Jordan was afraid to look. Reluctantly, he turned his head, expecting to see the Swans descending on them.

  Something huge was rising out of the earth near the palace's main gate. It was as big as one of the towers, rounded, and colored in mottled rust and beige shades. The Swans were darting around it like flies. A low drone carried from that direction.

  "Our distraction," said Jordan. "Mediation was listening after all!"

  A troop of nervous soldiers crouched at the ruins. They were watching the living flames walk the palace walls, but duty or fear kept them at their posts around the entrance to the tunnel. One stood to challenge Jordan as he led the horses between the jumbled stones.

  "Now what?" hissed Tamsin.

  Jordan was still covered with dust from their walk across the desert. In the desert he had been able to create heat from the mecha in dust. Could he do something else with them now? The only way to find out was to try.

  He commanded the mecha in the dust covering him to make light. Tamsin gasped as Jordan's body began to glow.

  "Take me to the underground way," Jordan commanded the terrified sentry. "And don't challenge me again." The sentry fell back, stammering apologies. Tamsin stared at Jordan in wonder as they followed him into the camp.

  Before they got to the tumbled stones, a brilliant flash lit the sky from horizon to horizon. Moments later a deep and sustained rolling thunder fell across the ruins. Looking back, Jordan saw a tall spire of smoke and flame where the subterranean Wind had been. The Swans were spir
alling up and away from the rubble.

  He felt the searchlight gazes of the Swans. They were looking for something now; he was pretty sure he knew what—or rather, whom. "We need to get underground," he told Tamsin. "And stay there for a while."

  The soldiers around the tunnel entrance scrambled out of the way of the glowing boy and the girl leading their horses. Jordan motioned for a man to take the reins of the mounts, then walked into the dark niche that housed the tunnel mouth.

  "I'd love to do this to the guys at home," Jordan said. His glow lit up the entire chamber, showing clearly the dark slot of the tunnel. The glow was fading slowly as the mecha lost power.

  They waited, while the Swans passed to and fro overhead. The Winds of Insolation, as Mediation had called them, could not see through the stone. The mecha of the soil were loyal to Mediation, and although Jordan heard the hurricane voices of the Swans demanding to know where the abomination that was Jordan Mason had gone, nothing answered. At least for now, they were safe.

  After a long while the sound of scraping and footsteps came from the slot, and one after another, weary soldiers popped out and blinked at the afternoon sunlight. Jordan's glow had faded, and the soldiers were apathetic and ignored him. After the last one, an old man with a lantern emerged. Jordan's heart was in his mouth. He knew what he was going to see next, but he could scarcely believe it. When a man stepped into the light whose face he had only seen in mirrors, Jordan found himself tongue-tied. He simply stood there, as Armiger helped Megan, then Galas, out of the tunnel. Galas was dressed in tattered finery, Armiger in splendid armor. They looked like creatures of legend.

  Armiger waved some device in his hands at the assembled soldiers. "Begone," he said. Jordan knew the voice, and yet he didn't; he had never heard it save from within his own skull.

  "You too," said Armiger to Jordan.

  "I, I brought horses."

  "Good. Now go."

  "No. I, I've got information for you."

  "For me? What are you talking about?"

  "I'm Jordan Mason. I've been watching you for months. Ever since... you came at night and put something in my skull, mecha or something, and then the others came and changed it—I can see through your eyes, hear through your ears. I've been watching! I know it all."

  "Wait, stop." Armiger held up a hand. He seemed to be having trouble with his eyes; he focussed on Jordan only with great difficulty. "You're one of my remotes. I thought I'd lost you."

  "Yes, sir, I mean no. The woman who attacked you just now, Calandria May—she wanted to use your implants to track you down, only something happened, I was able to see everything you saw..."

  "What is this?" Megan took Armiger's arm. "We have no time for this."

  Armiger nodded, and turned away.

  "Wait!" The three people Jordan had watched in waking dreams for weeks were walking away. This wasn't turning out at all the way he had expected.

  Tamsin elbowed him. "Come on!"

  He blushed, then cleared his throat. They were nearly at the entrance now.

  This was too much. After everything he'd been through...

  "Hey! Armiger, you're going to listen to me! I know why you came to Ventus. I know what you're after. You want the secret of the Winds. Well, guess what, I have it!"

  That stopped them. Armiger turned, and Megan turned with him, scowling. The queen merely sat down on a tumbled stone, and stared.

  Jordan bowed. "'That a stone should speak, as you speak.' I think you told Queen Galas once that that was our deepest wish. You craved permission to speak. Well, now it's my turn. You want to know what the Winds are after, and what their alliances are. With your permission, I will tell you."

  Finally I will speak, and you will listen.

  Part Three

  Resurrection Seed

  34

  Axel heard the ticking approach of Marya's footsteps. He did not look away from the giant window that filled one wall of the ship's lounge. Outside lay the disk of the Solar system—the original Archipelago.

  The view was breathtaking. From here, beyond the orbit of Neptune, Axel could see the evidence of humanity's presence in the form of a faint rainbowed disk of light around the tiny sun. Scattered throughout it were delicate sparkles, each some world-sized Dyson engine or fusion starlette. Earth was just one of a hundred thousand pinpricks of light in that disk. Starlettes lit the coldest regions of the system, and all the planets were ringed with habitats and the conscious, fanatical engines of the solarforming civilization. This was the seat of power for the human race, and for many gods as well. It was ancient, implacably powerful, and in its trillions of inhabitants habored more that was alien than the rest of the galaxy put together.

  Axel hated the place.

  He couldn't help but be impressed by the sheer scale of it, of course. He had spent months on Ventus, concerned with staying alive and finding his next meal, in the domain of flies and dumb rooting animals. Now he stood in warm carpet grass in the lounge of the navy hospital ship that had brought them from Ventus, surrounded by the scents and quiet thrum of a living spacecraft. If he shut his eyes he could open a link to the outer edge of the inscape, the near-infinite datanet that permeated the Archipelago. He chose not to do this.

  It felt so strange to be here. He had so far refused to sleep in the ship's freefall zone, where Marya had taken up residence. He wanted the feel of gravity, and of real sheets instead of aerogel. Maybe because of that, he had waked disoriented today, expecting to see his breath frosting the air, and had flung his hand out to meet neatly stacked, laundered clothing where he expected damp soil.

  Axel had not said to Marya that Ventus felt more real to him than the Archipelago; he was afraid of what that might mean. Maybe there was an intimacy in connecting with cold, indifferent soil that no amount of intelligent, sympathetic machinery could match.

  "Isn't it marvellous?" she said as she came to stand next to him. "I have never been here! Not physically, I mean." She was dressed in her illusions again, today in a tiny whirlwind of strategically timed leaves: Eve in some medieval painter's fantasy.

  "You haven't missed much," he said.

  Marya blinked. "How can you say that?" She went to lean on the window, her fingers indenting its resilient surface. "It is everything!"

  "That's what I hate about it." He shrugged. "I don't know how people can live here, permanently linked into inscape. All you can ever really learn is that everything you've ever done or thought has been done and thought before, only better. The richest billionaire has to realize that the gods next door take no more notice of him than he would a bug. And why go explore the galaxy when anything conceivable can be simulated inside your own head? You know what Mars is like—a hundred billion people stacked in pods like so much lumber, dreaming their own universe into being while the physical infrastructure of the planet crumbles around them. A friend of mine had a smuggler's base there. I took a walk—only once in the six months I was there. Empty cracked streets, the terraforming failing, red dust freezing to the tiles. And a permanent orgy going on inside the computers. Creepy."

  "But Earth! We're going to visit Earth. A world like Ventus."

  "Yeah. Beautiful place. Too bad it's inhabited by Earthmen." He sighed. "Sorry. I'm being the jaded traveller again."

  She glanced back at him, half-smiling. "We will rescue your Calandria. Earth will support us in this."

  "Not if we can't make our case." As refugees, they had been unable to get Turcaret's DNA examined; extrapolating the growth patterns of a being from genes alone was expensive. Axel had access to the money he had been paid by the god Choronzon for tracking Armiger, but he didn't dare tap it because the navy wanted to bill him for their rescue. If they knew about his secret accounts they would drain them just as they had his public one. So for now, he was officially broke and Turcaret's head remained in a cryonic jar in his stateroom. He'd kept it hidden under the bed.

  The navy was willing to drop them off anywhere they made regular
stops. Marya had chosen Earth without consulting Axel.

  "Look at this place," he said. "Nobody here gives a damn about Ventus. The navy's convinced Armiger is a resurrection seed. If they decide to burn Ventus down to bedrock just to make sure they've eliminated every last vestige of 3340, nobody in the Archipelago is going lift a finger to stop them."

  He crossed his arms and glowered at the delicate rainbow light shining from the homes of seventy trillion people.

  "Maybe we can change their minds," said Marya, smiling again. "If we find the secret of the Flaw."

  He grunted his doubt.

  Marya shrugged. "I came to tell you the patient's awake," she said.

  Axel wheeled and ran from the lounge. "Why didn't you say so?" he shouted back. He heard Marya laughing as she followed.

  He made his way through the softly glowing halls with their fragrant grass and flowering music vines. Sleepy-eyed crew members blinked in surprise as he passed; their unblemished, fashion-sculpted faces seemed alien to him after the variety and chaos of Ventus. His own face was like leather now, with crow's feet around his eyes and scars everywhere, one splitting his left eyebrow. They had offered to remove those scars. He had refused.

  The patient was the only other person who had escaped the Diadem swans' sweep of the Ventus system—and she wasn't even human. The swans had been efficient and brutal in rounding up the Galactics and Archipelagic watchers. Most of Marya's compatriots were unaccounted for; only those in the main institute habitat had escaped, because the habitat orbited Ventus' sun far from the planetary system.

  The thing they called 'the patient' had erupted up from the surface of Diadem the day after Axel and Marya were rescued. In examining the images with the major, Axel had his first glimpse of the surface of Ventus' moon and was shocked to realize that the entire thing was a warren of the Winds. The moon's surface had been made into a city—or perhaps something more akin to a giant machine. Domes and spires covered the craters and mountain ranges, but they were all camouflaged, painted the colors of the landscape they had overwhelmed. From Ventus, Diadem remained a tiny mottled white disk; had the Winds left their aluminum and titanium structures unpainted, the disk would have shone like the sun, or like the jeweled tiara for which it was named.