Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

an imagined sky with all his might:

“Ka!”

He waited. There was no response, and he could see nothing as he scanned the vague landscape that opened out beyond the manor.

“Ka! Come here!”

Nothing. He waited a long while, but the little Wind must be too far away to hear him. All right; on to the next idea.

Careful not to break his concentration, he rose and moved to the door. He ran his fingertip around the keyhole on the large iron lock plate. He could actually see inside the lock if he concentrated; the mechanism was simple. All he needed was something with which to manipulate the tumblers.

There was another thing he wanted to try. He had nothing to lose now, where before he had been afraid of alerting the Winds to his presence by experimenting. Jordan returned to the cot, gathering his cloak on the way; it was getting quite chilly in here.

For some time now he had known he could communicate with the mecha. He had been reluctant, however, to ask himself the next logical question:

Could he command the mecha, as the Winds did?

As he sat by the lakeside and poured water from bucket to cup and back again, Jordan had discovered something he had at the time been afraid to test. Each and every object in the world knew its name; all, that is, save for the humans who lived here, because they had no dusting of mecha within them.

The waves on the lake had known their identity as waves, but as they lapped against the shore they disappeared as individuals. Jordan had found by experimenting that when you changed an object into something else, its mecha noticed and altered its name to suit.

That had got him wondering: could you command an object to change its name; and if you changed an object’s name, would the object itself change to match it?

The cot was a plain wooden frame with thin interwoven slats to lie on. He pried one of these up and held it out in front of him. “What are you?” he asked it.

“Cedar wood. Wood splinter…”

“You are now kindling, hear?”

“Consistent,” said the splinter.

“So, burn!”

He held his breath. After a moment the splinter said, “Ignition of this mass will exhaust all mechal reserves. Further transformations will not be possible without infusion of new essence.”

“Just do it.”

He opened his eyes to watch. Nothing happened… then the splinter began to smoke. “Ow!” He dropped it, whipping his fingers to cool them. For some reason Jordan had assumed the thing would neatly sprout a flame from one end. Instead, the entire splinter was afire.

“Splinter: douse yourself.”

It didn’t answer. Well… it had said something about exhausting reserves. Maybe the mecha in it had died in setting it afire. He closed his eyes and examined it with his inner vision, and indeed the small flame was a dark spot in the mechal landscape.

Jordan restrained the urge to leap to his feet and shout. He would only bring down the guard—but then, couldn’t he just command the guard’s clothes to burst into flame too? Was there anything he couldn’t do now?

He sat there for a while, giddy with the possibilities. He picked up another splinter, and said to it, fly.

That is not possible for this object, said the splinter.

Hmm. Well, at least he knew he wouldn’t freeze now. He picked up a rock and tried to convince it to become a knife, but it demurred, listing off a dozen conditions he needed to fulfill for it to transform: heat, presence of carbon and significant iron deposits, etc.

So the mecha were limited. It wasn’t really a surprise—and he could hardly complain! He should be able to get out of this room, at least, if he could pick the lock. He might even be able to defeat the guard if he was clever—but it would be better to sneak past him, if possible.

He pried a good splinter off the bed, and said to it, “Can you become harder?”

“At an exhaustion rate of 50% it is possible to—”

“Just do it.”

The splinter seemed to shrink a little in his hand. He bent down, closed his eyes, and applied it to the lock.

“Ka,” said a voice like a chime.

Jordan turned. Hovering in the narrow window slit was the wraith-like butterfly from the market. It had heard him after all!

“Greetings, little Wind,” he said respectfully. “Can you help me?”

*

Ka drifted from room to room, reporting what it saw. Its habit was to hover at least a meter above the heads of the empty ones, because a randomly swung arm could smash it. This had happened to more than one of its previous bodies. Ka was in its own way proud that it had survived in this one for thirty years now.

Desal 463 did not mind Ka’s servitude to the magician. Neither did Ka. Its patrol was the market anyway, where it hunted for ecological deviations. The entire city hovered on the edge of abomination, but the empty ones had learned scrupulous cleanliness over the centuries. Every now and then, however, some visitor imported something outside the terraforming mandate —petroleum, crude electric devices, most recently some cheerfully glowing radioactives stolen from a fallen aerostat—and it was Ka’s job to find the offending substance. Then other agents of the desal would act, recovering the deviation and generally killing any empty ones associated with it. Empty ones made good fertilizer when they died; it neatly balanced the equation.

The being who had called it forth from the market was something else entirely. Its voice had the power to compel in a way the magician’s could not. As far as Ka was concerned, it was a Wind.

“Tell me what you see,” it said now.

“I can relay the information directly to your sensorium, if you wish,” said Ka.

“What? What do you mean? Show me.”

Ka beamed an image of the corridor to the waiting Wind.

“Ah! Stop it!”

“As you wish.”

“Um… can you do that with hearing? Can I hear what’s going on around you?”

“Yes.” Ka began to relay sound as it travelled.

It drifted from room to room, pausing to eavesdrop on conversations, then moving on.

“…Don’t know why I’m forbidden to go into the cellars tonight. He’s up to something bad, I just know it…”

Down the hall from that room: “…I don’t think this meat is cooked through…”

Elsewhere on the same floor: “He could be useful to us, but obviously we can’t trust a turncoat like that. Especially one who’s spent his career with the Perverts. How do we know what he wants, in the end?”

“So he’s a pawn?”

“We’ll play him out a little. He could be a competent bureaucrat. When the time comes, we’ll trade him for something more valuable.”

“And Mason?”

“Mason is going to save us. There’s grumbling that our house is cursed. Cursed! —Because of what happened at Yuri’s. You and I know it wasn’t our fault. We have to convince the rest of the world that we’re innocent victims. If Turcaret was right, and the Heaven hooks were after Mason, then all we need to do is stake him out in a field in full view of the town, and wait for the Winds to come. The sooner the better; we can’t let the courts get ahold of this, they’ll tie us up in years of wrangling. No. Tomorrow, we put the word out, then the day after we put him out, and if anyone objects we put a sword to their throat. It’ll be done before anyone can mount an organized resistance. And after the Winds come down, no one is going to question why we did it. We’ll be seen as having done the Winds’ bidding. It could end up in our favor.”

Someone entered the room, and the voices turned toward a discussion of food. Ka drifted on, up the grand stairway, and towards the back of the house. There were voices coming from behind one door there, and it was made to pause and listen again.

“It’s called the Great Game, niece, and you have to play it to survive.”

“So it was a game you were playing when you led the soldiers to our town.”

“No, you misunderstand me—”

“Ha! You could have saved them. You lied to me. And I believed you!”

“You do what you have to in order to survive, niece. And you can’t get emotional about it. That’s the beginning and the end of it. If it weren’t for me, you’d be dead now. I saved you—”

“You killed them! You killed them!”

“Silence!”

“No! I won’t be silent anymore. I won’t be anything for you anymore.”

“You will. Yes, you will. Listen, do you think your life has any value in this country if people find out what you really are? Where you’re from? They won’t look at you and see a young woman full of promise, as I do, Tamsin—they’ll see a monster, born of monsters. At best a curiosity, at worst an abomination to be stoned. Now you have two choices, young lady. You can do as I tell you, learn your lines and your dance steps, and become the proper young lady in society here at Rhiene. Or, if you won’t do that, I can still get something of my investment back if I turn you in to the high court as a renegade Pervert. If that’s what you want, then that’s the way we’ll do it. Believe me, I don’t care either way at this point.”

There was no reply to this; only silence, drawn out until at last Ka was ordered to withdraw.

*

The lock made a very loud click as it turned over. Jordan held his breath past a tight grin. Had the guard heard? Apparently not. He pushed the door open slowly.

The brawny man who had hit him earlier was sitting at a table in the hall outside. He was industriously carving leaf designs into the capital of what was obviously going to be a chair leg. Three other half-completed legs lay on the table next to him.

The knife he was carving with was very large.

What would Armiger do? Jordan asked himself. The general knew when to attack, and when to be discrete. This was a time to be discrete.

It was interesting that Ka had been able to move sound from upstairs down to Jordan’s waiting ear. That implied all kinds of things about sound that he hadn’t thought before—that it was a substance, that it could be packaged and carried around. Maybe you could also choose not to carry it?

He focussed his attention on the hinges of the door, each in turn, and said, “make no sound,” with his inner voice.

Each hinge acknowledged his command, but he had no idea if they would obey. Gingerly, he pushed the door open. He could feel a faint vibration under his fingers, as if the rusty hinges were grating—but he heard nothing.

Once outside, he slowly closed the door again. Holding a torrent of Vision at bay, Jordan stepped into the earth-floored cellar behind the guard, and backed his way slowly to the stone steps that led up. His heart was in his mouth. When he got to the steps he let out the breath he had been holding, but still went up them one at a time, pausing after each to look back at the broad back of the man with the knife. He knew he wouldn’t just get a beating if he was found this time.

Upstairs, he ducked into a niche as two servants passed carrying a heap of