Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

sure she heard muttering voices under it all—an effect the monks sadly assured her was an illusion.

Galas had been a young queen then. Flushed with the success of her communication with the desals, she had imagined herself the goddess her people claimed she was. When she came here she had felt ownership, not fear, and she had stood upon a stone here and preached a sermon to the monks and the Winds. Her own words returned to her with ironic pain—she had spoken breathlessly of a new age for Man and Wind. Her own sincerity returned to her now like the remembrance of a crime.

The monks were forming up into columns, preparing for the great run up the stairs. Far up there, she could see a column of men on their way down. There was no time to think.

She raced past the head of the line, ignoring the shouts that followed her, and started up the steps. One of the monks came after her, and when he laid a hand on her sleeve she turned and shouted, “Get back to the line! I have to do this alone.”

He stammered something and let go. She ran on, trying with little success to ignore the daggers of pain in her thighs from days of riding combined with her recent climb. After only a few meters she was gasping, her legs wobbly beneath her, but she kept on.

Men were shouting above her. She flipped back the cowl of her robe and looked up into a bristling mass of men and weapons. “Halt!” shouted the one in the lead, who was young enough to be the son she had never had.

She stopped, panting. They came down, slowly, and she had to smile at their caution. These were the veterans of Lavin’s army—men who had committed atrocities in her experimental towns, and had cursed her every day for the past year. They were little more than boys, and were visibly scared. And they were her people, whether they wanted to admit it or not.

Drawing herself up to her full height, Galas wiped her tangled hair away from her forehead, and said, “This attack will not happen.”

The leader gaped at her. “Who are you to tell us that?” Somebody laughed behind him.

She raised her voice, letting it echo off the mountainside. “I am the one you pursued over leagues of charred ground, and over the bodies of thousands. I am the one you obeyed as a child, and feared as a soldier. I am your sovereign, your compass and your ultimate meaning. I am she who spoke to the oceans and commanded rain for your fields. I am Galas, your queen, and I am the only hope any of you have of living to see another day.

“When you moved to destroy me you set in motion terrible events that threaten the very world itself. You know that now, but you do not know what to do about it. You desperately wish to turn back the hands of time, I can see it in your eyes. I am the one who knows what has happened, and why. Only I have the key to halting the advance of the vengeful Winds across our land.

“So you will kneel to me now, and when you rise you will be mine and I will lead you out of this nightmare into which you have fallen.”

At her words they stopped.

They stared in silence at her, then beyond her to the turmoil in the skies.

Then they knelt before her.

*

Armiger stood on the edge of a cliff. Three hundred meters below and kilometers away, his mecha were dying under the lightning bolts of the Heaven hooks—all save one, a thing like a great metal tree that had begun in the past hour to sprout strange multilimbed animalcules, which were harvesting minerals and ores from the rocky terrain around it. This abomination fended off the lightning as if it were rain. He could see it from here, for it glowed a dull red now from its internal furnaces. The forest around it was burning.

He could hear it, too, chuckling inside his head.

You did well, Armiger. This place is perfectly suited to our task.

He shuddered. If he probed deep inside himself, he knew he would find that the strange repository of nanomemory, which he had calculated could hold centuries of vast experience, was gone. It had slipped out of him on its own accord when he began creating mecha. It had been a resurrection seed, and he had unwittingly set it free.

Feel the energy under us! These local beings have tapped geothermal potentials of magnificent power. When my roots have reached deep enough, my growth will be geometric. You could not have chosen a better ground in which to seed me.

3340’s voice alone was enough to freeze Armiger in his tracks. He felt pinioned as by a giant searchlight—the attention of a god was on him. Compared to it, the wrath of the Winds seemed trivial.

We will eat this world in no time.

He tore his gaze away from the red spot and the lightning flickering around it. The Winds would not be able to stop 3340. Maybe the human fleet that he knew waited in orbit could—but their methods would guarantee the deaths of every living being on this continent. There had to be another solution.

The monks and even the army marching down from the mountain’s peak were forgotten. Armiger stood still, frowning into the false day, wracking his brains for a way out of the trap he had himself set and sprung.

*

“Sir, they’re not fighting.”

The lieutenant lay at the very edge of the door, a telescope jammed against his eye. He was staring straight down.

“What do you mean? They haven’t engaged the enemy?”

“I think the monks must have surrendered. They’re all together down there, but there’s no fighting going on.”

“Excellent. Have they got the semaphore set up yet?”

“It’s just coming on line now, sir. They’re sending a test message.”

“Read me the first real message as it comes in. I don’t want to waste a second.”

He paced back and forth, fighting vertigo and cursing the basts who got in his way. Nearly the entire army was on the ground now, either here or at the mouth of the valley. They would never be in a better position than they were now.

“I want to know the instant you have your hands on General Armiger.”

“Yes,” said the bast who had been overseeing the operation. “So do we.”

“Sir, we confirmed the test message. Now they’re sending. The message is…”

Lavin staggered over and sat down heavily next to the man. “Yes, yes?”

“The message… the message is…” The lieutenant took the telescope away from his eye and rolled over. He looked at Lavin with a puzzled expression. “It said, ‘The queen is alive.’”

Lavin felt his whole body go cold.

What a terrible, terrible joke to play on him. I will kill the man who thought of this, he decided.

“Signal them. Tell them to stop fooling around and tell us what’s happening.”

The lieutenant ran to comply. Lavin sat gasping. It took all his willpower not to leap to his feet, and hurl the bast standing over him into the sky.

The flag man lay with his head and shoulders over the opening, and began waving the bright banners of his trade. The lieutenant sat on his legs as he did this. He was still holding the telescope, so Lavin crab-walked over and snatched it from him. The metal was freezing cold, like everything at this altitude. Lavin lay down, inched up to the edge of the door and looked down.

He was immune to heights now, since he’d felt like he was falling for days.

It took him a while to find the semaphore man on the ground. When he did the man was in mid-message. “—is alive,” the flags said. “Galas is here.”

“No.” He wiped his eyes and looked down again.

Each letter took several waves of the flag, so the next message came to him with excruciating slowness.

When the message completed he rolled away from the opening, and lay staring at the false sky inside the moon. Way up there, guy wires thrummed with the tension of trying to hold the moon in position against the buffeting mountain winds. The bast was speaking to him, but he ignored it. The semaphore message had been read aloud by the lieutenant, and the commanders and soldiers left aboard the moon were in an uproar.

Galas commands General Lavin to surrender his army. Only she could be so audacious.

He sat up, vertigo forgotten. “Lieutenant! Reply to that message!”

“Sir! What should we say?”

He thought about it, heart racing. “Ask her… ask her this: ‘What was the name of the inn?’”

“Sir?”

“Just send it.” He felt lightheaded now, but not because of the vertigo. He lay down again.

If she was alive… if she was alive, he could never look her in the face again. Yes, he had loved her, but he had also failed her—both as a man and as a soldier. It no longer mattered what she felt for him in return. He knew his real value, and with that knowledge came a certain measure of calm. He also knew what he could do to let her know he was sorry, and that too was a healing thought.

It seemed to take forever for his message to be relayed. He knew the answer was the right one, however, by the third letter.

“Nag’s Head.”

That was the inn where he had first met Galas. Nobody else knew that, except maybe her old bodyguards, who had all retired long since, and wisely held their tongues.

Lavin rolled to his feet, staggered, but stayed up. “Send this: ‘The army is yours.’”

They gaped at him.

The bast stepped forward. “What is it you are doing?” it demanded. “Cease this. We command your army.”

Lavin bowed to it. “And you still do,” he said smoothly. “You may relay your orders to my commanding officer from now on. She is below, on the mountain top.”

The bast twitched its tail suspiciously. “Send a message to this commander with your flag thing,” it hissed. “Tell it to deliver up the abomination to us now!”

The semaphore operator looked at Lavin, who nodded. He stepped back, carefully loosening his sword in its scabbard.

*

Galas stood on a level spot halfway between the monastery and the peak of the mountain. She had ordered the semaphore be set up here, where she could survey all the action. When the question about the Nag’s Head had come down, she nearly cried from the memories it evoked. There could be no stronger evidence that Lavin still lived, and that he still honored what had once been between them.

Arrayed around her were Lavin’s men. They were plainly stunned with the turn of events, but remained silent. They would do whatever she asked, she knew. Lavin had commanded it; and they had no other lifeline.

The semaphore operator read out the Winds’ demand that Armiger be given up. Galas sighed, and glanced down the mountainside. She had been expecting this, of course. It was inevitable, now that Armiger had clearly failed to do whatever it was that he had intended.

She could see him down there, a small figure standing still by the parapet overlooking the valley. There was no one near him; the monks were afraid of him, and rightly so. He seemed so insignificant there—just another lost soul. However, until she gave him to the Winds, all of Galas’ people were threatened.

In turning to give the command that