Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

the smooth white flank of the desal. “What’ll we do?” she said as he put his hand on her shoulder and drew her up.

“If this doesn’t work then I don’t know.” He enfolded her in his arms and watched as the morphs loped toward them.

Suddenly the footsteps of the morphs began sprouting smoke. The morphs stopped walking and one hopped from foot to foot. Very distinctly, Jordan heard the other issue some command in an inhuman tongue. The first sprinted forward, then stopped, confused, and tried to sidestep away. Jordan saw a tongue of flame lick up its calf.

“Come on.” He raced back to the lean-to. They bent to bundle up their meagre supplies, watching the morphs all the while. The first morph, who had not moved, seemed unhurt. It continued to speak in the Wind tongue, and the earth around its feet was no longer smoking.

The second morph’s legs were on fire. As they watched it staggered, fell to its knees in a black cloud. Its hands caught fire when they touched the earth. It scrabbled in the smoke for a few seconds, then fell and began to roll, turning into a fireball as it did.

“Where are the horses?” shouted Tamsin.

“I don’t know. Ka! Where are they?”

“There are no horses nearby,” said the little Wind.

“Come on.” Jordan ran around the long slope of the desal. Maybe the horses were on the other side.

“Look at the sky!”

He looked up, and staggered. The sky was a tangle of brilliant lines that were longer towards the horizon, foreshortened directly overhead. A mauve aurora pulsed there.

Tamsin sprinted ahead, wailing. Jordan put his head down and followed.

A low dark shape appeared as they rounded the far side of the desal. The horse was still on its feet, but only because its legs were locked. Its back was swayed and its belly hung low and trembled like a drop of dew about to fall from a leaf. Tamsin and Jordan slowed to a walk as they approached it.

Tamsin made a clucking sound, which normally would have made it prick up its ears. Jordan wasn’t sure which end was which, because it must have lowered its head; in any case, he saw no sign that it had heard her.

He stopped three meters away, when he realized that neither end of the creature had a head any longer.

Tamsin stopped too, and her hand crept to her face as she began to swear, quiet and urgently.

There was a withered thing hanging down one end of it, and a smaller withered thing on the other end. One of those might once have been its neck and head, but all flesh and liquid had been drained from it to fill the swelling belly. The skin had split in a dozen places there, and blood dripped steadily onto the sand under it.

Blood… Jordan raised his hands, and in the strange auroral light saw that they were smeared with dark stains. He sniffed his palms.

“Oh, shit.” He grabbed Tamsin’s shoulder. “Run. Now!”

As she turned away, the belly of what had once been a horse split like an overripe fruit. In a gush of blood and half-digested organs, two newborn morphs slid to the ground.

The four locked legs of the horse now held up nothing but an empty bag of skin, like some bizarre tent over the coughing morphs. One after the other they crawled out of the entrails and steaming offal, and opened new eyes that hunted the darkness until they found Jordan.

He ran. Panic clamored at him, but he knew if he gave in to it now both he and Tamsin would die. The sky was opening, with a light like the coming of dawn. The morphs would keep coming, and he knew they would not be tricked by the burning ground again.

“Ka! Call the desal! We need shelter! Please!”

Tamsin was halfway up the slope of the desal. She seemed intent on getting as high as she could, or maybe she was just running. He followed, trying not to listen to the wet sounds of the morphs coming after him.

When the slope got too steep, Tamsin stopped and fell back, swaying. He reached her side and panted, “There! See that door?” About five meters away, lower on the slope, faint lines formed a square. “We have to get the desal to open it. Ka!”

“I shall ask.”

They ran down to the square, and now he could see the morph he had stranded in burning ground earlier had found its way out, and was coming round from the other side. Behind the two new ones had learned to walk, in a manner of speaking, and were closing in as well.

“Ka! Ask now!”

“I am doing so.”

“Stand on it.” He stepped onto the square. They were at quite a height here, and the slope was nearly forty-five degrees. He had to crouch to keep his footing. Tamsin edged down next to him.

“What are we doing?” she said, her voice rising in panic.

“Nothing, I guess,” he said as the first morph stepped onto the square with them.

Then he was falling, and for a second he glimpsed towers of fire standing among the stars, before blackness enfolded them.

29

It was completely dark, but it was not the darkness Jordan noticed first. It was the silence.

When he was very young, he had run singing through the woods one day, and met an old man coming the other way. “You like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” asked the old man. His face had wrinkled up around a grin.

“I like music,” Jordan said. His mother had told him to be modest.

“So do I.”

“Then why don’t you sing?” He’d blurted it out, and immediately felt embarrassed. The old man was not offended.

“I’m too busy listening,” he said. “I’m listening all the time.”

Jordan cocked his head. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Yes you do.” The old man made Jordan listen for the sound of the breeze in the leaves, the distant cawing of a family of birds, the crackle of twigs underfoot. “All sound is music,” he had said, “and there is no place without sound.”

“I bet there is.”

“All right.” The old man smiled. “For the next week, I challenge you: find silence. I’ll be staying at the Horse’s Head. When you’ve found silence, visit me there and I’ll give you a copper penny.”

Jordan never did collect the penny. Strange how it was the first thing to come to mind upon waking now; or maybe not so strange. For he had finally found silence.

It smelled strongly in here, a sharp tangy odor he almost recognized. He must be in the belly of the desal, he thought. In that case, where was Tamsin? Startled, he tried to sit up. A solid weight on his chest kept him motionless.

Oh. She breathed slowly and regularly; her head lay on his breast and one arm was flung carelessly down his flank, the other crooked around his head. They lay on a powdery surface of some kind; it felt like the ceramic of the desal’s skin, overlain with finest sand.

He knew there could be no morphs here with them. Jordan’s skull would have been opened by now and his brains scattered in their quest to find Armiger’s implants. He imagined the things holding his gore up to the skies to those lights that had been descending on them, and shuddered.

Jordan let his head thump back on the cool floor. That was a mistake: he discovered a pounding headache that had been lurking around the base of his skull. Maybe the morphs had poked their fingers in his head after all.

He groaned, and heard himself, but something else was missing. No breeze, of course; no twigs underfoot. There was always sound, and now that he concentrated he could hear Tamsin breathing. No, he could hear, but at the same time he could not hear; there seemed to be a great gaping lack in his head.

Armiger was missing.

Tamsin’s whole body jerked when he shouted. “…What?” She put a hand on his solar plexus and pushed herself into a sitting position. “You’re okay!” Her hands grabbed him by the shoulders. Gasping for air, he started to sit up and they bumped foreheads. “Ow!”

“I guess I hit my head,” he said as they carefully arranged themselves in a sitting position. She would not let go of him, and from experience with darkness he knew why. “Where are we?”

She laughed; the laugh had an hysterical edge to it. “Where do you think we are?”

“Sorry. I meant… how big is this place. Did you explore?”

“I didn’t want to lose you. It might be… who knows how big.”

Jordan shut his eyes so he could look about himself using his Wind sense. He saw nothing but the speckled black inside his own eyes. Either there were no mecha here, not even the smallest speck, or he had lost his second sight.

His heart was in his mouth as he called “Hello?” with his Wind voice. He sent the call to anyone, anything that might hear him. “Hello, please!”

“Ka.” The little Wind’s voice rang in his head like the purest bell.

Jordan sagged in relief. “So I’m not…” He stopped, and forgot to breathe for a moment. Had he really been about to say crippled?

“Dead?” Tamsin laughed. “No, we’re not dead, but we might as well be. We’re in the belly of the monster.”

He had come all this way to divest himself of the new senses Armiger and Calandria had given him. Was he really disappointed now they were gone?

Yes.

Jordan found himself laughing. Every sound he made drove a spike of pain through his head, so he stopped quickly.

“I fail to see the humor in the situation,” said Tamsin.

“Sorry.”

“Well.” She hugged him. “You came here to talk to this thing. So… talk.”

“I’m not sure I—” he felt her tense. “Yes, yes, I’ll talk to it. Ka?”

“Yes?”

“Where are we? Do you know this desal? Can it talk? Why did it let us in? Are the morphs still outside? What about—” Tamsin nudged him in the ribs.

“Slow down,” she hissed.

“You are in a holding pen near the gene splicing tanks of desal 447,” said Ka. “I know this desal. It has no vocal apparatus, but conversation with it can be relayed through me. The morphs are still outside.”

Jordan told this to Tamsin, then said, “Ka, are able to speak out loud?”

A faint voice came out of the darkness overhead: “Yes.”

“Ah!” Tamsin clutched him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “That’s our travelling companion.” He had described Ka to her on the trip here; he didn’t know if she’d believed him then. Judging from the way she kept her grip on him, she didn’t quite believe him now.

“Ka, could you speak aloud for a while, so we can both hear?”

“Yes.”

Tamsin remained silent for a minute. “Of course. Yeah, I knew he was real, I just… um…”

“I find it hard to believe he’s real myself,” said Jordan. “Ka, will the desal speak with us?”

“It says, ‘Mediation speaks.’”

The voice was Ka’s, quiet, flat and calm. Nonetheless, the hairs on the back of Jordan’s neck stood on end. He felt small and unimportant suddenly, like being addressed by Castor or some other inspector, only infinitely more so. He tried to force confidence into his voice as he said, “Do you know who I am?”

“Identity,” said the desal. “It asks ancient questions. Identity was abolished.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Wait. Mediation raids ancient language archives. I. You are I. That