Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

linen. He poked his head out after they’d gone; there was the back entrance, in plain sight not five meters away. All he had to do was walk out the door, and he was free.

Except that he couldn’t do it. The conversation Ka had relayed from upstairs had been chillingly familiar to Jordan, if not in its details, in its thrust. Just as Jordan’s father had ordered Emmy to acquiesce to Turcaret’s attentions, so Tamsin’s uncle was ordering her to become his thing—bait, perhaps, to dangle in front of some high born household’s son. And though Jordan didn’t understand what threat Suneil was holding in reserve, it was obviously dire.

He owed Tamsin nothing, really. Jordan knew, though, that he would no more be able to live with himself if he left her in this situation than he would have if he had stayed in bed, those many nights ago, and let Emmy run.

*

Tamsin was drowning.

There was no water here. She could breathe, her heart still beat, she could walk and sit and even eat. Still, she was drowning.

The thing shaped like her uncle moved across the room. He was talking, but she couldn’t make sense of the words anymore. They came to her like sounds underwater, distorted and harsh.

What was drowning her was the horror she felt every time she looked at him—knowing that inside that familiar body was a soul that had helped her, sheltered her and cared for her, laughed with her and murdered her parents.

“—Get ready for bed,” he said now. “Tomorrow’s another day, niece.”

For her own survival, she needed to be silent now—but inside she was screaming at him: “You knew the soldiers were coming! You knew and you didn’t tell anyone, you didn’t tell dad you let them die you let them die…”

The worst thing was that she had known these things all along, somewhere deep in a part of her that she had told, every morning to sleep, look away.

Thinking that she had known and had gone along with this monster, her inner voice simply died out. She sat mutely, and nodded without heat, and rose to go to her sleeping closet.

As she walked she drowned a little more.

“Tamsin.” His voice held an old note of concern that she had once (yesterday?) believed was genuine and defined family. She looked back at him, knowing her face was slack, unable to raise an expression.

“Sometimes—” He had looked her in the eye; now he kept his gaze on the floor as he said, “Sometimes, you have to block out the here and now, and not think about what you’re doing. For your own future good.”

She could picture herself laughing at him, or screaming, hitting… she couldn’t summon the energy to do more than nod again. Then she knelt to open her night chest.

“Don’t scream,” said a voice from nowhere.

She froze. The voice was strange, tiny, like a whispering mouse.

“It’s me, Jordan. I’m free, and I’m leaving. Tamsin, I don’t know what you feel about me. I hope you won’t betray me.”

She looked behind the chest, up the wall, along it. There was no one here.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

“Outside the door.” Yet the door was across the room, and she heard the voice here.

“Who are you talking to?” asked her uncle. He had come up behind her. She whirled, hands behind her on the chest.

“Nobody,” she said. Her voice sounded strained to her own ears.

Her uncle’s eyes narrowed. He eyed the door, then walked over to it.

No. It all broke in her like a dam, and before she knew what she was doing Tamsin grabbed a brass vase from the table and ran at her uncle. She swung the vase up at his head with all her strength; it made a satisfying crunch, and he fell over without a sound.

She flung the door open and practically fell through it—into Jordan’s arms. “Let’s get out of here,” he said simply, and closed the door behind her.

There was only one lifeline for her now, and Tamsin took it. She grabbed Jordan’s hand tightly, and ran with him.

23

They were ten alleys away from the Boros house before either spoke. “Wait,” said Jordan, holding up his hand. “Gotta rest.”

“They’ll come after us.”

“Not for a while.” He had an odd distracted look on his face. He’d had it back in the hall, too. Bemused, almost sublime. “Everything’s quiet.”

She didn’t ask how he knew that. “I’m cold.”

“Yes, we’ve got to find some shelter.”

Tamsin nearly said, “We just left shelter,” but that would have taken too much energy. It didn’t make any sense to go anywhere; there was nowhere to go now. She supposed there might be for him. But why had he come for her?

Jordan closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and smiled. “Yes,” he said, “you’ve done well. Now please return to your master. I’m sure he’ll be frantic without you.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her. She knew he was anticipating a question. Tamsin just stared at him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

The question was so ridiculous she laughed. “No, no I’m not.” She opened her mouth to say more, but the words tripped over one another. And she didn’t know where to start, or why telling him would do any good.

He spoke, touched her arm. But something distracted her, a nuance of emotion like a thing seen out of the corner of one’s eye. Where to go. That was it.

Tamsin looked around. Nothing was familiar. She had no idea where she was. The buildings looming high around were nothing like the ones in her town. Even the air tasted different. She was lost, sliding. Drowning again. “I—” she said. Jordan had hold of both her wrists now. He was speaking to her, low and urgent, but she didn’t understand him. She had no idea who he was.

“We have to go!” Finally words she understood.

“Yes, yes.” She nodded, not to him but to herself.

Jordan began to lead her through the alleys. “Out of the city,” she said. “Take me to the desert. I have to go home.”

“Home?” He tightened his grip on her arm.

“Home, I have to go home, I have to…” She wanted to cry so badly, and she wasn’t able to. It was the most awful thing she had ever felt. She gasped for breath.

“Tamsin, don’t think me cruel for saying this,” said the young man leading her. “But your family is dead.”

“I know.” But she quailed at his words; until this night, she knew, she had never really believed it. Even now… if she could get home, find out the truth. “Maybe somebody survived. They couldn’t have killed everyone—”

“Yes, they could.”

“But you need to get to the queen anyway. To find this Armiger person. Do you know the way? No. The way lies through the desert. I can guide you. We have to go that way anyway.”

“We’ll talk about it. I promise. For now we’ve got to find somewhere to hide.”

He wasn’t really listening. Tamsin felt, if possible, even more alone. That sense of drowning came back, like a roaring, unstoppable noise in her head.

Jordan stopped, and put his hands on her shoulders. She blinked, suddenly seeing the grey crescents of his eyes gazing on hers. “I am listening,” he said. “And I’ll do everything I can to help you. We just have to take things one step at a time.”

This time she followed him attentively, and to her surprise, after she had gone ten paces in his footsteps she began, at last, to cry.

*

Jordan stood on the wall of an alley near the vertical uplands of the city. It was deep night now, but the moon was still up, and he could see its light glinting off the spires of the desal that waited half-submerged in the bay.

“You want to talk to a desal?” It was the first thing Tamsin had said since they had bedded down here. She stood below him on the nest of trash they had made. She still appeared stunned, distracted, her hair a bird’s nest and her hands grimy. Even a little curiosity from her now was an encouraging sign.

“It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

She didn’t answer for a while, merely chewed her knuckle and looked around herself aimlessly. Jordan returned his own gaze to the desal; ghostly in Diadem’s glow, its pinions rose from the middle of the lake like something discarded there, a sunken building or, he imagined, the shipwreck from Queen Galas’ story. Except that the spires were perfect, undamaged by time or the elements. The waves slapped against their sides as peacefully as they did the docks; there was no sign of preternatural life to the thing. Just now an ornate barque from the temple was anchored near the giant central tower. He could see the torchlit figures of priests moving about in it, but couldn’t tell what they were doing. Some kind of ceremony.

“I thought you were crazy when I saw you,” said Tamsin, so long after his own rhetorical question that it took him a moment to connect the two. He glanced at her; she summoned a smile, like an unpracticed conjurer, and hid it as quickly. “With, with your gold underwear and, and talking to things and all.”

As they ran he had given her a very sketchy rendition of his story: that he could talk to the mecha because of something Armiger had done, and that the Winds were after him. She would have heard some of it from through her uncle, if Suneil had bothered to explain why Brendan Sheia wanted him. Jordan didn’t know if she believed any of it yet.

“I can’t think of any other way to put an end to all this,” he said. “I can’t go home, because this curse will just follow me there. The Winds are hunting me because of the mecha in my head; the Boros want me as a scapegoat. The only one who can do anything about it is Armiger.”

“What can he do?” She crossed her arms and looked away; but she was listening and talking now.

“The first time I saw Armiger—saw through his eyes, I mean—he was commanding an army. It was so strange, but part of it was that he was strange. The things he looked at, listened for, and the things he said… they weren’t what I would have done. He didn’t seem to care about the battle, or the people he was commanding, he just gave orders, and they were always good. When the Winds sent the animals to destroy his army, I remember he was totally calm during the retreat. He escaped because he was as confident and calm in the middle of that butchery as he had been standing on the hillside watching from a distance.

“I’ve been watching him for weeks now, and he’s not the same man anymore. I think Calandria was right, he came here to conquer the Winds. He was the agent of some other creature even more powerful. But that one is dead, and Armiger is free.”

She was eyeing him now. He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. You have to be there, you see, to see the difference. But he has a woman now, and he cares about her. And he’s affected by things around him now, where he wasn’t before. The siege, he’s really bothered by it. People are dying, you know, starving and injured, and he’s realizing he can’t do anything to help them. He’s not thinking about conquering the world anymore.”

Tamsin frowned. “So how can he help you? Can he make