Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

Armiger’s keen eyes bored into him, and about halfway through his recitation Jordan began to feel the familiar sensation of Vision come over him. He let it happen without interrupting his narrative, although what he saw astonished him.

He saw a youth, sunburnt and dusty, gripping the hand of a slim frank-eyed young woman in the amber light of late afternoon that bathed the cave. He watched his own mouth move as he spoke, and saw his unfocused eyes—for the first time he saw himself as others saw him, and also as he was when in the grip of Vision. And the young man he saw bore no resemblance to the person he had thought he was.

In his state of trance, Jordan’s face became a calm mask. His eyes gazed ahead like a prophet’s, open to hidden vistas. He was bigger than he’d thought; he supposed he’d been growing in the past few months, but hadn’t paid attention. His hair had become a mane that swirled around his shoulders, and the beginnings of a beard speckled his chin. New angles made his cheekbones stand out. Half-starved, but lean and fit, he no longer resembled the youth whom Calandria May had kidnapped.

With a start that put a noticeable pause into his storytelling, he had realized that he might go home now, and not even be recognized in Castor’s villa.

Deliberately, he pulled himself back from Vision, until he could see Armiger and the others as they sat in silence. They were all watching him save Megan, whose gaze lingered on the horses outside.

“Thalience,” murmured Armiger.

“Do you know what that is, sir?” Jordan asked.

Armiger laughed humourlessly. “Yes. It’s just not what I expected. Not at all.”

“We must go,” said Megan. “If we are to escape…”

Galas knuckled at her eyes like a child. She ignored everyone else.

“Sir,” said Jordan. “The Winds are mad. They have to be cured. Or stopped. Can you do it?”

Armiger crossed his arms. “Why should I?”

Very slowly, Galas raised her head to stare at him.

“I was sent here to conquer them,” said Armiger. “And by doing so, to end the world. Do you want me to end the world?”

Jordan was unimpressed. He knew Armiger’s style; the man was stonewalling, as he often did when someone touched a nerve. “All I want is for the Winds to listen to us,” he countered.

“You think I can do that?”

Jordan looked Armiger in the eye. “I ask you to try.”

The general held his gaze for a moment, then looked down. “You’ve been pursued by the Winds because of what I did to you,” he said. “I apologize. And I’m flattered that you sought me out. But as long as you are with me, the Winds can find you—and me as well. Had you considered that in your grand scheme?”

Jordan shrugged. “When I came to find you, it was to get you to remove the implants. With them gone, the Winds wouldn’t seek me anymore, right?”

“Is that what you want?” asked Armiger.

Thinking about it, Jordan realized that it wasn’t, not any more. He had gained far more than he had lost from his maddening and unpredictable ability to see through Armiger’s eyes. Reluctantly, he shook his head.

“Then you cannot travel with me, I’m afraid,” said the general. “They will find us both that way.”

Jordan scowled. He hadn’t planned on things working out this way. But now that he could converse with Mediation—had traveled the desal highways and commanded the mecha—to go back to what he had been would feel like having a limb amputated.

“Mediation can hide us,” he said. “Or at least protect us from Thalience.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” said Armiger. “If as you say, Mediation and Thalience are two factions in a civil war, then we are pawns in that war. Pawns can be traded or sacrificed.”

“Let’s go,” insisted Megan. She seemed reluctant to look at Jordan.

“Yes.” Armiger crossed his arms and frowned at Jordan. “If you found me once, you can find me again. I need to get well away from here—somewhere the Winds aren’t looking. To do that, I’m afraid we have to leave you behind for a while. You seem to have eluded them in the past. If you can do it again, you can join us in a few days. Fair?”

Jordan bowed. He didn’t like it, but it was the sort of thing Armiger would command. And Jordan knew that there was no bending Armiger’s will away from a plan.

“First, though, you can give me the secret you found.”

Jordan looked up, surprised. “I told you all I know.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Armiger reached out.

A tickle of shock ran up Jordan’s spine as the general’s fingers touched his face. Armiger turned Jordan’s head from side to side, running his fingers along the angle of his jaw and into his hair.

“Hold still.”

He felt a tingle spread from where Armiger touched him, and Tamsin gasped. Sparklight lit the ceiling of the cave. Jordan felt the world recede suddenly, as it had once when as a young boy he had fallen and cracked his elbow, and fainted from the pain. He heard voices, but they joined together in an amorphous roaring that seemed to come from inside his own skull. Then he felt himself shudder, and light and coherence came back.

He lay in Tamsin’s lap. She was spitting some very inventive curses at Armiger; Megan scowled, Galas looked interested. Armiger himself stood back, hands on his hips.

“I have given myself a duplicate of your damaged implants,” said the general as Jordan sat up. He felt no pain or disorientation. It was as if the incident of a few seconds ago had not even occurred. “If you truly have the power to command the Winds, Mason, now I have it too.”

With a gesture to the ladies, the general turned on his heel and left the cave. The two women rose to follow. Megan hesitated, then curtsied gravely. Galas paused at the doorway and looked back searchingly. Her eyes were still dazed, as they had been ever since the fight in the tower.

She seemed to think she should say something, but in the end she shook her head in confusion and turned away.

*

Lavin walked. He had never felt so helpless. The doctor had ordered him to lie down, because his vertigo had returned with a vengeance. But though he had lost his lunch and felt he might never eat again, and though he often had to lean on the spear he carried when the world turned over, he couldn’t stop moving. There was only one thought in his head: She has escaped.

The troops thought he was inspecting camp. Lieutenants kept running up and asking for orders, their eyes tracking uneasily to the spires of flame that towered over the valley. He waved them aside irritably. He didn’t care about the Winds. He didn’t care that the summer palace had fallen due to their intervention. The queen’s forces were rounded up now, and Lavin’s own army seemed safe for the moment. He didn’t hold any illusions, of course; both defenders and attackers were at the mercy of the Diadem swans; they were all prisoners.

All that really mattered was that, when he awoke from the rockfall, Lavin had found, not the blade in his heart he would have expected after his treatment of Galas, but a lantern glowing by his head. The new dust from the rockfall was disturbed in only one direction; footsteps led out along the passage. She and General Armiger had left the palace.

When he finally pulled himself out into the cave-like antechamber to the tunnels, Lavin had found only a pair of young camp followers huddling in the dusk light.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“An hour or so,” said one, a sunburnt boy almost old enough to enlist.

“Has anyone else come the way I did?”

They shook their heads. Lavin cursed, staggered past them, and emerged into the evening air to behold the Diadem swans for the first time.

The zenith was afire with aurora-light. Long threadlike lines descended from there, growing as they neared to become bright twisted cords of flame. The flames hovered just above the earth, and at that moment some were moving slowly through Lavin’s camp. His army was scattered, men cowering in groups in hastily-dug foxholes or under overturned wagons. Many must have run into the desert, because there were surprisingly few around.

There were no cheering defenders on the walls of the Summer Palace; the swans walked there too. As Lavin neared the camp he saw the terminus of those cords of fire more clearly: each cable of fire ended a meter or so above a human-shaped body of fire. These bodies walked like men, but their feet did not quite touch the ground. His skin crawled at the way they moved; they seemed like puppets, jerked to and fro by some unimaginable manipulator above the sky.

The swans were not massacring the soldiers. In fact, they seemed to be ignoring them, as they searched for something.

Well. He couldn’t have his men dying of exposure in the desert if the swans posed no real threat. Where was Hesty during all this?

The prerogative of leadership is to behave as though protected by invisible armor. Lavin made sure he was visible to a sizeable number of his men, and then walked right up to one of the swans.

“Excuse me, lord.” The thing turned its head in his direction, and he nearly turned and ran. It had no real features, just a sketch of flame shaped like a head. Lavin felt no heat, and though he held his breath expecting to be destroyed, it did nothing but wait.

Careful to plant his trembling feet and forget that the world was spinning, he said, “I am the leader of this army of men. How have we offended you?”

“One is here,” said a deep and resonant voice. The voice seemed to emanate from the hazy tail of fire above the swan’s head. “One we seek is here.”

“What is the name of the… person you seek?” Oh, let it not be Galas!

“We do not know names,” said the swan. “You are not it.” It turned away.

“Wait! May we help?”

It paused. Lavin cleared his throat and went on. “I need to consolidate my men, for their own safety. To do that I have to be able to issue commands, and come and go as needed. Will you let me do that, if I agree to help you find the one you’re after?”

“Yes,” said the swan.

An hour later, Lavin had approached the gates of the palace, two swans walking at his side. He had commanded the gates to open, and the queen’s men had meekly complied. The few hundred men Lavin been able to reassure so far had nervously marched into the keep. He kept expecting them to break and run; surely their ill-concealed panic must be apparent to the defenders behind their arrow-slits. They barely obeyed orders, and certainly didn’t march in step. As the queen’s men laid down their arms and surrendered, they gradually regained their confidence. Hesty appeared from somewhere, looking shamefaced. Lavin left him in charge, and walked out of the palace and into the night.

She has escaped.

And she let me live.

Lavin stopped walking, waited until his head steadied, then looked up past the swans, at the stars. Never, in all the long days of this war, had he imagined such an end as this. On the one hand, it was far from over. Two days ago he had hoped that tonight he might have her as his prisoner, hating him