Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

traffic was thick and loud. Vendors appeared walking up the road, offering sweet meats and fresh fish. Still there was no city in sight—but now Jordan heard seagulls, and saw several lift above the next rise.

The builders of Rhiene had wisely widened the road after that rise, because a good half of all the travellers who came here must have stopped dead in their tracks when they got there. Tamsin did, and Jordan stood up and shouted in disbelief. Suneil merely smiled.

First he saw the blue-hazed arc of a distant shoreline, and above that sun-whitened cliffs rising almost straight out of the glittering water. Then his eye took in the whole sweep of the place: those distant cliffs were kin to the crest their wagon had come to. In fact, the cliffs swept in a vast circle to encompass a deep flat-bottomed bowl in the earth. A lake filled most of the bowl; from here Jordan could see sailboats like tiny scraps of white feather dotting it. At the very center of the bowl, a spire of green-patched rock towered out of the water. Coral-colored buildings adorned the spire. He could see docks at its base.

“Rhiene,” said Suneil, pointing down.

The road wound down a set of switchbacks into what at first looked like an overgrown ruin. Rhiene was green with ivy, forest and lichen, and Jordan couldn’t make out the buildings until he realized the gardens he saw were all on the roofs of houses and towers. Rhiene sprawled along the arc of the cliff for kilometers in either direction, and tongues of jetty and wharf made the nearer shore of the lake into a tangle of geometry.

Seeing this made everything that had happened to him worthwhile. Jordan knew he was grinning like an idiot, but he didn’t care. He decided in that instant that Rhiene was where he wanted to live.

“It’s the most beautiful place in the world!” shouted Tamsin.

“Perhaps you would like a guided tour?” said a nattily dressed young man who had appeared as if by magic at her elbow.

Tamsin looked him up and down. “Begone, you trotting swine,” she said.

The youth shrugged and walked away. Astonished, Jordan leapt down and went over to Tamsin.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“Everybody wants to make some coin,” she said. “Everywhere we go there’s people trying to sell you this or that.” She sighed heavily. “They hang around places like this, spoiling the moment for people like us.” The young man had approached another wagon, and appeared to be haggling with its oafish driver.

Suneil had clucked the horses into motion, so they began to walk. “‘Trotting swine’?” asked Jordan.

She blushed. “I read it in a book.”

They walked for a while, taking in the gradually expanding view. Tamsin said little more, but she didn’t seem to mind Jordan’s company either. After a while Jordan dropped back to the wagon and asked Suneil, “What will you do here?”.

The old man nodded to the city, which now spread around and above them. “I’ve got some old business associates here,” he said. “I want to see if I can call in some favours, and make a new start. The war’s over, after all.”

“Is this where you used to live?”

“No. That’s one of the advantages of the place,” said Suneil ruefully.

Jordan had a vivid idea of what a city at war would look like, based on what he had seen at the queen’s summer palace. Clear as that notion might be, he couldn’t picture soldiers in the streets of Rhiene. For all that it was a big city, it appeared sleepy and its citizens unconcerned. It took Tamsin to point out the placards here and there that were signed with a royal insignia. Jordan couldn’t read the script, so she translated. “It’s a decree from Parliament ending curfew and random searches. I guess the war really is over.”

“It’s not,” he said. “The queen is still fighting back. She’s trapped in the summer palace, but she’s got plenty of supplies and her people are still loyal.”

Tamsin looked at him strangely. “I see. You arranged this? Or a little bird told you?”

“I have my sources.”

“Oh ho,” she said. “Behold the grand seer.”

“Hey!” Suneil waved at them from the cart. “We go this way.”

They passed through high stone walls into a teeming caravansary. Here were soldiers—plenty of them—inspecting the cargoes of incoming wagons. While they went through Suneil’s possessions—with Tamsin squawking protests—Jordan took a look around. The place was just a broad quadrangle of pulverized straw with a few water troughs and sheds. It reeked of manure and wood smoke. All the visitors to the city who had no inn or friend to visit were crammed in here. They squabbled over cart space, water and offal buckets. It was wonderful chaos.

The queen had mentioned Rhiene in her story last night. Her tale had not enlightened him much as to the nature of the Winds. There was something to it, though, as of a mystery whose solution hung just out of reach. He had thought about it a lot, and was sure Armiger felt that sense of near-knowledge too; unless the general had already seen the answer Jordan himself could not.

He thought about this as he helped Suneil get the wagon slotted into a narrow space near one wall. Jordan went to find water and feed for the horses, and when he returned Suneil had changed into fine silk clothes.

“I’m going to visit my people,” he said. “Are you leaving us here, young man?”

Jordan shrugged. “With your permission I’ll stay the night and make a fresh start in the morning.”

“Good. You see to my niece. I’ll be back before dark.”

“Can we see the city?” asked Tamsin.

“If you’d like. Just don’t get lost.”

He left with a spring in his step. Jordan turned to Tamsin.

“How’s your ankle?”

“Good.”

“Up for some walking?”

She held out her hand, smiling. “Lead on, sir.”

*

Rhiene was much bigger than it seemed from above, and much dirtier too. The everpresent foliage hid a great deal, and Jordan supposed that was part of the idea. The overriding purpose for the greenery, however, was to keep the Winds at bay.

An ancient statue near the docks showed a man and woman raising their hands to the sky, holding flowering branches. Tamsin read off the plaque at the base of the statue. “The city was destroyed by the desal seven hundred years ago,” she said. “They rebuilt in secrecy, using wood harvested without killing trees. They struck a balance between creation and destruction, and the Winds let them continue to this day.”

“There’s supposed to be a desal here,” said Jordan. The statue stood in a busy square surrounded by ivied merchants’ houses. The city sprawled for kilometers in either direction, a fact visible from here because this square was emplaced on a knee of land that thrust out of the cliff wall. The cliff itself towered majestically above, and the vast sweep of it to either side was intoxicating.

“There is a desal,” said Tamsin. “I saw it on the way down.”

“Where is it?” He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to visit it or not, after what Galas had said about them. Knowing where it was, though, he would be able to avoid it.

“You can see it from here.” She stepped up on the plinth of the statue. “See?”

He followed the line of her arm. There was something out in the bay, offset slightly from a line he might have drawn to join the city to the spire at the lake’s center. From here it was visible only as a set of white spikes thrusting from the surface of the water. There were no boats near it, so judging its size wasn’t easy.

“I recognized it because we had one near where I grew up,” she said. “My father took me to see it once, when I was young. That one stood alone in the desert, like it was abandoned, but he said it was alive, and we shouldn’t get too close. It’s strange to see one underwater.”

“Well, at least it’s not in the city,” he said.

“Hey, get off that!” shouted a passing woman. Tamsin jumped down from the statue’s base. A few heads turned, but no one else stopped them as they ran down the hill to the docks.

In stories Jordan had read, a city’s docks was always the place where lowlife sailors and prostitutes waited to prey on travellers and lost children. He had always pictured the wharves of a seagoing city as full of one-eyed men with swords and nasty dispositions, with bodies in the alleys and kegs of wine rolling down from visiting ships.

Rhiene was not like that. Of course, it was an inland port; most of the traffic here came from barges that simply shuttled between the city and the far end of the lake, a distance large enough to cut a day or so off the travel time of wagons coming from the south. There was supposedly a river that emptied into the lake somewhere, and boats went up that too, but not, apparently, pirate ships. The docks were clean and well kept, and other than one disciplined work gang unloading a shallow single-masted ship, there was no great activity.

“This is pretty stale,” said Tamsin. “Let’s find the marketplace.”

“There might be more than one,” he pointed out.

“Whatever.”

They wandered in the crowds for a while, and though Tamsin looked quite blas� about it all, Jordan felt overwhelmed by the huge press of people. Hundreds visible at any time, and around every corner there was a new hundred. Most of the people in sight were dressed similarly, men in fashionable townsman’s jackets, the women in long pleated dresses that swept the road gracefully. He had to conclude that they all lived here. Could he live in such a place, with so many neighbors?

For a while they stood at the gates of the University of Rhiene, gazing at the sun-dappled grounds and ivied buildings. Queen Galas had walked here, he thought, and knowing this suddenly made her seem real in a new way. They had shared something, Jordan and Galas, if only the fact of having stood here.

In a flux of troubled emotions, he let himself be swept along by Tamsin, until they came to a market.

If Jordan had thought there were many people in the streets, this place was as crowded as Castor’s during a wedding, only the mob went on and on, dividing and subdividing into alleys and sidestreets. Lean-tos and carts stood along all the walls, and some enterprising men and women had simply laid their goods out on blankets in the street. A roar of voices welled from the press of people, animals, and running children. Smells of incense, manure, fresh-cut wood and hot iron filled Jordan’s head, making him dizzy.

Tamsin laughed. “This is the place! See, Jordan, this is the place to be in Rhiene!” She ducked into the press.

“Wait!” Shaking his head but grinning, he ran after her.

The chaos had an infectious energy to it. You could not walk slowly in this place. After a few minutes, Jordan found himself darting around like Tamsin, poking about on tables of turquoise baubles, then flitting over to a fruit seller, nearly stumbling over a one-legged woman selling cloth dolls from her mat—wishing he had more than the few coins in his pockets.

The only problem was, the roar of voices tended to trigger his visions. Every now and then Jordan had to stop and shake his head, because he would hear Armiger’s voice coming at him from within his own skull, or that of a doctor with whom the general was speaking. Such moments