Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

can destroy him. You can surely escape us, Jordan, but by doing that you guarantee you will never escape Armiger.

“Well?” she asked after they had glared at one another for a long moment.

“He’s coming here,” Jordan said sullenly.

She dropped her foot and sat up. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, he’s after me!”

“How do you know that?”

“I… I just know.”

She grimaced. “I don’t think so. At least, we’ve seen no evidence that he’s aware that his connection with you is still open. As I told you, we’ve taken steps to disable it so he can no longer see through your eyes. But we’ll determine all of that soon. This is our headquarters now, Jordan. We are also guests here, and I expect you to behave accordingly.”

“What do you mean?” he asked suspiciously.

She patted the bed next to her. He sat on the linen; it was softer than any bed he’d known, except maybe the one in the manse. Lady May leaned over and massaged his shoulders delicately. “I’m going to go talk to Axel. When the tailor comes, I want you to ask him to dress you. Not in servants’ clothing—you are no one’s servant now, you are the equal of anyone in this building. So waistcoat, evening dress, the lot. Do you understand?” He nodded. “And do not wander too far, but please do not enter any of the servants’ areas—when you walk, you will walk in the main halls like the owners. I think this might be hard for you, but it is necessary.”

He frowned. He hadn’t thought about it, but it definitely would be hard. Never in his life had Jordan walked the halls of a manor as if it were his home. He was used to ducking from stairwell to stairwell, never straying beyond areas where he could justify his presence. She was right: his instinct would be to find the back halls, eat in the kitchens and leave the building when night came. He shook his head. “I’ll try.”

“Good.” She rolled off the bed. “I’m off to tackle Axel. Wish me luck.”

He watched her go, and bolted the door when she’d left. Then he went to examine the mortaring around the window, and tried to gauge its strength.

*

Axel had weaseled his way into the main building, naturally. Calandria had no difficulty getting directions to his room; all the servants knew him. He’d only been here two days.

She took the steps up to the third floor two at a time. Despite herself, she smiled as she thought of Axel tossing that fop on his ear. Outside his door she paused, looking down at herself. She still wore ragged outdoors gear. It would have been so much better if they’d arrived first, then she could have met him in a proper gown, with pearls at her ears. She sighed, and rapped on the door.

“Enter.” She stepped into a lavish bedroom. It was huge—and had a perfect view of the grounds. Velvet draperies hung everywhere, over the windows and framing the bed. The bedposts were carved with leaf motifs, and painted gold. Or maybe they were gold. A woman’s slipper lay half-concealed under the bed. Yes, this was Axel’s room all right.

He rose from a writing desk. He had discarded his jacket, and wore a billowing blue silk shirt. “Ho!” He opened his arms as he came to her. “And don’t hit me this time!”

She returned the embrace warmly. He still smelled of wine, but she knew him; he’d have taken a restorative before meeting with her. He held her for a second longer than she’d have liked, but that too was normal. As he broke away he gestured at the room. “Quite a place, no?”

“I expected no less of you,” she said, eyeing the slipper.

It constantly amazed her how well Axel did in situations like this. After all, he wasn’t a professional, like her; Calandria had been trained in espionage and intelligence-gathering by people who made a religion of such things. They had plucked her out of the crude reformatory she had ended in after her mother’s arrest and death, and erased all links with her past and home world. Then they had given her, not a new identity, but a repertoire of identities. Calandria had spent every waking moment since then acting. Only after she had turned rogue on her employers could she behave like something approaching her true Self—and then only with close friends like Axel.

She had met Axel in deep space, on a remote, frozen planet without a mother star. He was a smuggler. They dealt to their mutual satisfaction several times, and each time she was a different person. It took him quite a while to wise up to her act, and by the time he did she had taken a liking to him. When he confronted her, she took the opportunity to chastise him for his inattention. “If I’d been hired to trap you, you’d be undergoing decriminalization now,” she told him. “Count yourself lucky.” He had laughed at that.

Calandria needed her disguises to move through the different societies and subcultures demanded by her work. Axel just seemed to make friends where ever went, without changing one iota of his appearance or style.

“Here, look at these pictures,” he was saying now, as he dragged her to one wall. The walls were hung with large, faded photographs, apparently of ancient members of the Boros clan. “Printed on porcelain,” he said. “So they don’t deteriorate. Good idea, no?”

She arched an eyebrow. “I suppose.” Photography was permitted by the Winds, along with other gentle forms of chemistry; Axel knew that, so why should he care about these examples? They were nothing compared with even the most primitive hologram.

Axel had picked up a decanter of wine. “Oh, do stop,” she said. “It’s not even dinner time yet.”

“I think these pictures are fascinating,” he said. “Especially this one—it’s printed on vellum.” He put the decanter down on an ornate dresser under one, and stretched to grab both sides of the frame. He lifted it off the wall.

An irregular hole was revealed. Set into the plaster was the verdigrised mouth of a large horn. Calandria blinked at it. Axel cupped his hand at his ear. He adopted an exaggerated listening stance. Then he made a talking gesture at her with the other hand.

She cleared her throat. “I wonder how they did that?”

“The porcelain, or the velum?” Axel picked up the decanter, and gestured at the horn. She shook her head.

He shrugged, and upended the decanter into the horn. Red wine gurgled as it drained down into some pipe in the wall, and, she imagined, straight into the ear of whoever might be listening at the other end.

Axel cackled with glee and, grabbing up the silk doily on the table, stuffed it down the horn after the wine. Then he replaced the picture, and dusted his hands. “That was the only one,” he said. “Now we can talk.”

“Oh come now,” she said. “Why would they be bugging us? We’re just visiting.”

“Timing,” he said. He flipped a white, plush-cushioned chair backward and sat in it, leaning his arms on the back. “The whole Boros clan is here, and that’s bad. Old Yuri may think we’re spies.”

“Why? They seem like a friendly enough bunch. Not that I’ve had the time to talk to any of them…”

“Ah, you will. You’re better at this than I am, I suggest we attend dinner and you can tell me who intends to kill whom. They are a murderous lot—did you see a certain statue in the courtyard?” She nodded. “Yesterday night. A duel. I didn’t see who, or who lost, mostly because it wasn’t pre-announced. Ambush, maybe? Who knows.”

“Really.” She sat at the writing desk, and looked out over the grounds. “I’ve never been anywhere quite like this.”

“It’s positively medieval,” said Axel with a nod. “But then, look at their history. Six hundred years ago these people were still scrabbling in the muck, living in mud huts. Only a few warlords had any kind of power. It’s actually pretty amazing how far they’ve come as a society, considering the ancestors of people like the Boros.”

He waved at the grounds. “All this is very European in style. I’m pretty sure people must have raided manse libraries here and there over the centuries. How much would it take, do you think, to build a nation? One book of economics? Another about gardening? They saved very little from the initial disaster, so they must have supplemented it from the manses, but it was obviously hard-won knowledge, or there’d be more of it.”

Calandria pictured a group of soldiers armed with pikes trying to face down several of the golden creatures she and Jordan had seen—battling their way to a manse library, grabbing a few books at random, then bolting with crystalline things at their heels.

That was interesting, but not what she had come here to talk about. “What’s the occasion for this reunion?” she asked.

“Yuri called it—the patriarch, you met his wife. Marice. Good name. There’s some kind of power struggle within the clan, and he wants to resolve it. The Boros are old money in three nations: Memnonis, Ravenon, and Iapysia. The revolt of the parliament in Iapysia has tipped the balance of power somehow, and Yuri wants to make sure it trickles through the family correctly. The Iapysians don’t mind—they get to call in favors to consolidate their position back home. Problem is, there’s two factions represented there—the parliamentarians, and the royalists. If you look you can probably make them out—at opposite ends of the grounds.”

“Hmm.” Calandria did look out. “Dinner will be fun.”

“It gets better. There’s some dispute over Yuri’s position as patriarch. Which side will he support in the Iapysian thing? That’s a touchy question, because the loser might decide to open the old wound of his legitimacy. That’s all happening down there even as we speak.”

“My.” She smiled at him. “We do pick the most interesting hotels.”

“Yeah. Well, we’ll have to be careful not to get involved. Now: how’s Mason?”

“You saw him. What do you think?”

Axel shrugged. “He looks tough. Does he know where Armiger is?”

“If he did we’d be able to send him home,” she said. “No, he doesn’t. That’s our job for the next day or two—locating Armiger. Jordan’s a bit wrapped up in his own misery right now, so we’ll have to show him the advantages of his position. He’s afraid Armiger is coming here.”

Axel frowned. “Is he?”

“I don’t know. That would surprise the Boros, wouldn’t it? I guess Armiger is a walking corpse at the moment, though he may be recovering. We have to know how powerful he is before we face him. I’m wondering how we can get Jordan to find out for us.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Axel chewed on one knuckle absent-mindedly. “We need more power.”

“Political?”

“No, guns, damn it. I don’t like this planet, Cal. The damn Winds are always watching. If you bring anything higher-tech than a wrist watch in here they’ll pounce on you and rip it off. We can’t face Armiger without real weapons—a plasma cannon would do.”

She laughed shortly. “We stick to the plan. When we’ve got him in our sights, the Desert Voice will hit him from orbit.”

“And then the Winds will blow your starship out of the sky!”

She glowered at the table top. “My reading of the Winds is that they have an abysmal reaction time. They let us bring the cutter down, and it got back to the Voice okay. Nothing technological stayed on the surface, as far as they know.”

“Yeah, but they’ll object to Armiger getting nuked. I have another idea.”

She didn’t