Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

She spun around to see, but he wasn’t there anymore. Before she could find him the floor of the little valley exploded in colored fire.

The concussion knocked her over again. When Galas regained her feet, it was to see Armiger, halfway up the sheer rock face of the northern wall of the vale, leaning back and sending bolts of fire from his outstretched hand. White forms dodged in the roiling smoke below.

Something soft slid past her hand. Galas snatched it away, only to find a large form flowing around her. It sounded like it was purring.

“Oh, what have we here,” said a measured, hypnotic voice. “The once and never-again queen. Who then was it that we saw barreling out of here a second ago?”

Two golden eyes rose up to her own height, and blinked lazily at her. Over the thing’s shoulder, the vale flickered with white light. Something screamed.

“It hardly matters,” said the thing. “We have you now. A bonus—since you’re not the one we came for. But I know some people who’ll be very happy to see you.” Before she could move it had her by the arm—claws embedding deeply in her muscle so that she shrieked.

“Armiger!” cried the creature. “Stop harming my people! I have your lady companion. If you don’t come down now and surrender yourself to me, I will kill her.”

Galas looked down at her arm, and blinked at the blood there. Once, she would have had a thousand—no, ten thousand men willing to die to prevent even such a tiny injury as that.

And who was this creature to ill-use her so? No one touched her like that!

“I will give you one minute,” the monster was saying. The lightning-flashes from the hillside had ceased. “Starting from—”

It was the monster’s turn to scream, as Galas twisted the hairpin she had thrust into its ear. It let go of her arm, and she ran into the dust and confusion of the vale.

Blue and white light light and roaring thunder surrounded her.

*

Megan’s horse screamed and staggered. She rocked in the saddle, falling forward across the beast’s neck. Hanging on to its mane for dear life, she looked down. A crossbow bolt stuck out of the poor thing’s flank, just above its front haunches.

Too soon! She had to get a little farther, to give her love time to escape. She withdrew one foot from its stirrup and leaned down to try to grab the bolt.

Pain exploded in her side driving all the breath from her. She grabbed at the reins and missed, then she was tumbling headfirst off the horse, straight at a big rock.

Armiger, my love, I—

*

Rocks tumbled around the white Wind. She staggered from agony in her head and along her side where one of Armiger’s bolts of fire had clipped her. The perfidious queen was gone, and her basts were falling back, yelping in confusion. The little vale was full of smoke but she could see at least four bast bodies on the ground, and one horse with its throat torn out.

“Where is the other horse?” she shrieked at a bast who came within grabbing distance.

“They took it,” it shouted. “Rode. East, they went out the east exit!”

A bolt of fire from somewhere made them all duck.

“Follow!” She raked her claws across the bast’s shoulder. “Catch him! I don’t care if you all die doing it!”

The remaining basts vanished into the haze. The white Wind moved to follow, but she hurt too much; she could only stagger a few paces.

She cursed the swans. You took out my armor, and for what? So I could die here in this wasteland? For a few moments, she was Calandria May again, as she wept at her misfortune, and then the world greyed around her, and she tumbled onto the sand.

*

Armiger’s hand was missing. In its place was a smoking black ball. Every now and then he would lean back in the saddle and aim that ball at the monsters that were chasing them. Fire would leap from where his hand used to be, and once she heard a scream as it struck home.

He was taking them in a grand circle to intersect the line of Megan’s flight. Even if they ended up facing fifty mounted knights, it was the right and proper thing for him to do. Galas said nothing, just held onto him and the horse and let the ride go on.

He stretched back again, and she hunched from the blast of sound. “Ha!” he shouted. She risked a look back, and saw one monster in flames, another leaping away to the side, with only one more still following. It was losing ground steadily.

Suddenly he reined in the horse. Galas almost fell out of the saddle, and only after a giddy moment righting herself was she able to look up and see why.

They were cantering along the top of a ridgeline. The human riders were below them, dismounted and clustering around something on the ground.

Galas recognized her dress before she made out the crumpled figure in it.

The dress was stained scarlet.

She had time to glimpse someone raising a limp arm and letting it fall back to the earth, before the horse shied out of the way of a panting white creature.

Armiger shrieked a curse at the thing, and shot it as it made to leap again. Then he plunged the horse back from the ridgeline—away from the riders, away from his love.

For the first time since she met him, she saw him weep, wretchedly and uncontrollably, and it was Galas who took the reins and led them into the sunlit night.

*

Lavin’s ears popped and he groaned. He had elected to travel the first leg of their journey by means of the vagabond moon, in part to encourage his men and partly because his vertigo would not go away. He had not suspected that air travel would be like sea travel—full of dips and sways. He had lain huddled on his bedroll for most of the past eight hours, unable to tell what motion was in his head and what was real. The illness left him alone with his thoughts, which was the worst possible situation.

He would dearly have loved to tour this fantastical place, and look down on the world passing below. Two thousand of his men were bivouacked here on the black floor of the moon. There were no tents, because the Winds had forbidden them from driving tent pegs into the floor, and no fires for similar reasons. At four sides of the vast empty floor large rectangular openings let in the cold air; just now several men were standing near one, peering down in awe at the landscape passing below. As they looked, another man walked up casually, holding a chamberpot, and upended it over the opening. He laughed at their expressions and walked away.

Lavin closed his eyes as the world swayed again. Vertigo reminded Lavin of how he had met Galas. He could not stop thinking about her, going over and over in his mind the strange paths that had brought them to this endless day.

He had taken the side of Parliament partly to ensure her safety. In order to allay any suspicions on the part of the members, he had loudly proclaimed his allegiance to tradition. At the time, he had been crossing his fingers behind his back, hoping they would believe him and let him lead the army. But—and this he had not wanted to admit to himself—he really did believe. Galas was wrong. The traditions were sacred, and beautiful. He remembered the country dances of his youth, where singers would recite the names of the Winds and the seasons decreed by the desals. When he tried to picture the future Galas was building, he could not imagine what would replace those dances, and the cordial sense of community they fostered. Her future might be just, but her thoughts seemed to have a cold, insectile quality. He pictured the empire of Galas as a giant hive.

Just a while ago, as the tiny sun set and the ordinary one was just rising, a priest had come to him. The man had knelt by Lavin’s bedroll, and Lavin had smiled at him, expecting words of comfort. But the man was crying.

“I have been speaking to the Winds,” he said. “All my life, that was all I wanted to do. The desals and the other Winds of the earth can’t talk, but the swans can. I went to them and recited the ancient chants. They waited in silence. Then I—I ventured to ask a question.” He took a deep breath. “I asked them why they had not spoken to us, all these centuries.”

Lavin had sat up, despite his spinning head. “And what did they say?”

“They said that they had never stopped speaking to us in all that time. That it was us who would not listen.”

The priest looked carefully over his shoulder; a hundred meters away stood a pillar of flame, pale in the wan sunlight. Faces appeared and vanished like hallucinations within it. “I said I was listening now. And do you know what they said? They said, ‘no, you are not listening. We are asking you to speak even now, and you are not speaking.’ General, it had the sound of madness to it! I recited the sacred scriptures to them. And they… They asked me what this nonsense was I was barking. Lord, they didn’t know them! Are these truly the Winds, or…”

“Or what? Something else?” He almost shook his head, but refrained. “No. Who else has this power? They are who they say they are.”

“But sir, there’s more.” The priest looked like he was about to be sick. “I… I asked them what was to become of us. Of humanity. Had we disappointed them? How could we serve them? And the swans said… the swans said, ‘We have tried to complete ourselves for centuries. We thought you might be the key.’ They said they had been searching for something and studying for many generations, but that it was all done now. ‘We have completed our Work,’ they said. ‘We need not tolerate your presence any longer.’”

“Need not tolerate us?”

“They have no more use… for the human race.” The priest stood up, appearing stunned, and walked away.

Everything we know about the Winds is wrong. Lavin remembered Galas writing something like that, in the secret letters he had liberated. They are not benevolent gods. They are antagonists in a struggle for command of this world. And what is that to us? she had continued. A tragedy? Only if we are lazy. It is more like an opportunity—a chance to create a new reality that is more true to nature.

Was she right? Should he have razed the sleepy towns with their inheritance-bound guildsmen and books of ritual appeasement instead of her experimental villages—burned the festival costumes and children’s’ storybooks—and helped her build the hive of the future? Could her love have sustained him while everything else he had known and cherished whithered and died? She had claimed she had the permission and advice of the Winds in all she did; he had known that to be a lie, for one time they had discussed the lies of great men, and she had blithely stated that all nations were based on them. Yet, the Diadem swans did not know the scriptures attributed to them; even now he could see the priest standing before the pillar of flame, arms apart, pleading for sense from the masters of the world. All the traditions