Ventus

34

Axel heard the ticking approach of Marya's footsteps. He did not look away from the giant window that filled one wall of the ship's lounge. Outside lay the disk of the Solar system—the original Archipelago.

The view was breathtaking. From here, beyond the orbit of Neptune, Axel could see the evidence of humanity's presence in the form of a faint rainbowed disk of light around the tiny sun. Scattered throughout it were delicate sparkles, each some world-sized Dyson engine or fusion starlette. Earth was just one of a hundred thousand pinpricks of light in that disk. Starlettes lit the coldest regions of the system, and all the planets were ringed with habitats and the conscious, fanatical engines of the solarforming civilization. This was the seat of power for the human race, and for many gods as well. It was ancient, implacably powerful, and in its trillions of inhabitants habored more that was alien than the rest of the galaxy put together.

Axel hated the place.

He couldn't help but be impressed by the sheer scale of it, of course. He had spent months on Ventus, concerned with staying alive and finding his next meal, in the domain of flies and dumb rooting animals. Now he stood in warm carpet grass in the lounge of the navy hospital ship that had brought them from Ventus, surrounded by the scents and quiet thrum of a living spacecraft. If he shut his eyes he could open a link to the outer edge of the inscape, the near-infinite datanet that permeated the Archipelago. He chose not to do this.

It felt so strange to be here. He had so far refused to sleep in the ship's freefall zone, where Marya had taken up residence. He wanted the feel of gravity, and of real sheets instead of aerogel. Maybe because of that, he had waked disoriented today, expecting to see his breath frosting the air, and had flung his hand out to meet neatly stacked, laundered clothing where he expected damp soil.

Axel had not said to Marya that Ventus felt more real to him than the Archipelago; he was afraid of what that might mean. Maybe there was an intimacy in connecting with cold, indifferent soil that no amount of intelligent, sympathetic machinery could match.

"Isn't it marvellous?" she said as she came to stand next to him. "I have never been here! Not physically, I mean." She was dressed in her illusions again, today in a tiny whirlwind of strategically timed leaves: Eve in some medieval painter's fantasy.

"You haven't missed much," he said.

Marya blinked. "How can you say that?" She went to lean on the window, her fingers indenting its resilient surface. "It is everything!"

"That's what I hate about it." He shrugged. "I don't know how people can live here, permanently linked into inscape. All you can ever really learn is that everything you've ever done or thought has been done and thought before, only better. The richest billionaire has to realize that the gods next door take no more notice of him than he would a bug. And why go explore the galaxy when anything conceivable can be simulated inside your own head? You know what Mars is like—a hundred billion people stacked in pods like so much lumber, dreaming their own universe into being while the physical infrastructure of the planet crumbles around them. A friend of mine had a smuggler's base there. I took a walk—only once in the six months I was there. Empty cracked streets, the terraforming failing, red dust freezing to the tiles. And a permanent orgy going on inside the computers. Creepy."

"But Earth! We're going to visit Earth. A world like Ventus."

"Yeah. Beautiful place. Too bad it's inhabited by Earthmen." He sighed. "Sorry. I'm being the jaded traveller again."

She glanced back at him, half-smiling. "We will rescue your Calandria. Earth will support us in this."

"Not if we can't make our case." As refugees, they had been unable to get Turcaret's DNA examined; extrapolating the growth patterns of a being from genes alone was expensive. Axel had access to the money he had been paid by the god Choronzon for tracking Armiger, but he didn't dare tap it because the navy wanted to bill him for their rescue. If they knew about his secret accounts they would drain them just as they had his public one. So for now, he was officially broke and Turcaret's head remained in a cryonic jar in his stateroom. He'd kept it hidden under the bed.

The navy was willing to drop them off anywhere they made regular stops. Marya had chosen Earth without consulting Axel.

"Look at this place," he said. "Nobody here gives a damn about Ventus. The navy's convinced Armiger is a resurrection seed. If they decide to burn Ventus down to bedrock just to make sure they've eliminated every last vestige of 3340, nobody in the Archipelago is going lift a finger to stop them."

He crossed his arms and glowered at the delicate rainbow light shining from the homes of seventy trillion people.

"Maybe we can change their minds," said Marya, smiling again. "If we find the secret of the Flaw."

He grunted his doubt.

Marya shrugged. "I came to tell you the patient's awake," she said.

Axel wheeled and ran from the lounge. "Why didn't you say so?" he shouted back. He heard Marya laughing as she followed.

He made his way through the softly glowing halls with their fragrant grass and flowering music vines. Sleepy-eyed crew members blinked in surprise as he passed; their unblemished, fashion-sculpted faces seemed alien to him after the variety and chaos of Ventus. His own face was like leather now, with crow's feet around his eyes and scars everywhere, one splitting his left eyebrow. They had offered to remove those scars. He had refused.

The patient was the only other person who had escaped the Diadem swans' sweep of the Ventus system—and she wasn't even human. The swans had been efficient and brutal in rounding up the Galactics and Archipelagic watchers. Most of Marya's compatriots were unaccounted for; only those in the main institute habitat had escaped, because the habitat orbited Ventus' sun far from the planetary system.

The thing they called 'the patient' had erupted up from the surface of Diadem the day after Axel and Marya were rescued. In examining the images with the major, Axel had his first glimpse of the surface of Ventus' moon and was shocked to realize that the entire thing was a warren of the Winds. The moon's surface had been made into a city—or perhaps something more akin to a giant machine. Domes and spires covered the craters and mountain ranges, but they were all camouflaged, painted the colors of the landscape they had overwhelmed. From Ventus, Diadem remained a tiny mottled white disk; had the Winds left their aluminum and titanium structures unpainted, the disk would have shone like the sun, or like the jeweled tiara for which it was named.

The sphere of incandescence on the telescope images obliterated several square kilometers of moon-city. It had also flung something completely out of Diadem's gravity well. This appeared as a dopplered radar image, just a tiny smear. The ship had not even bothered to report its existence to the crew until it changed heading under its own power.

Fourteen hours later they had drawn next to the limp figure of a woman hanging like an abandoned doll in the velvet black of space. The swans were rising from Diadem, their music strange and threatening. The woman was gently brought on board, and bundled straight to the operating theatre, for what everyone expected would be a routine post-mortem. In the course of the operation, which Axel attended, several things came to light:

The woman bore an astonishing resemblance to Calandria May.

The ship's instruments could not penetrate her skin. Indeed, nothing could.

She was still alive.

Axel rode a lift shaft up to the ship's axis and, now in freefall, grabbed a tow line that soon deposited him at the little-used gods' infirMarya. He knew Marya was trying to catch up to him, but he ignored her.

The patient hung like a crucified angel at the focus of a bank of deity-class equipment. Most of the equipment was dark; the patient was not a god after all. She was a robot, merely masked by sophisticated but commonly known screens. She was not, it seemed, a product of Wind technology.

Her eyes were open. Seeing this, Axel stopped dead at the entrance. The two attending technicians noted his presence; one came over. "We're just waiting for the commander," she said. "Then we can start getting its deposition, if it wants to talk."

The thing looked at him. It had pale grey eyes. The impact of its gaze made his skin crawl.

"Axel, my friend," it said in a familiar voice. "So good to see you again."

He knew that voice. Its tone was measured, musical, as though the speaker were savoring every syllable spoken. So like Calandria May's voice, he had always felt, but different in its underlying serenity.

Marya bounced to a stop next to him. "Is it talking?" she asked loudly.

Axel let himself drift into the center of the high chamber, nearer the patient. "Are you who I think you are?" he asked.

It arched a brow just as Calandria would have. "You know me, Axel," it said. "I am the Desert Voice."

"Chan!" It was the ship's commander, hanging next to Marya in the doorway. "Do you know this thing?"

He rotated to face the watching humans. "Yes," he said. "I think. I mean—I'm not sure."

He turned back to the imitation of Calandria. "Desert Voice was the name of Calandria May's starship," he said. "Are you trying to tell me you are that ship?"

It nodded. For the first time its expressionless face changed, a minor ripple of what looked like worry touching its brow.

Marya came over, braking her drift with a hand on Axel's shoulder. "You're the ship's AI," she said. "But... this body... why?"

"For survival," said the Voice. "I had to don this guise. And I needed to survive in order to do two things. One was to ensure the safety of my captain. I must tell you that Calandria May is trapped on the surface of Ventus, and a rescue mission must be mounted."

"We know all about that," said the commander. "It's in our hands now."

The Voice ducked its head in acknowledgement.

"What was your second purpose?" asked Axel.

"There were no witnesses to my capture and destruction by the Winds," said the Voice. "I had to return a record of the event so that my captain can make the proper insurance claim when she is rescued."

Axel laughed in surprise. "Insurance! You're telling me this body is just a... a courier? An envelope?"

It nodded. "I have made a complete record of the end of the Desert Voice, and will deliver it as soon as you provide me with an uplink. Then I will have fulfilled my purpose."

The commander turned to Axel. "We've got the right data buffers in place. We can accept an uplink. What do you say, Chan? Do you really know this AI?"

"Too early to tell. Don't give her access to the network."

"Of course not." The commander nodded to one of the technicians. "Let her into the buffer."

The technician gestured, and Axel felt, rather than saw, the Desert Voice stiffen. He turned to see it staring straight ahead, concentrating.

A moment later it slumped. "Done," it said. Then, to Axel's complete astonishment, it began to weep.

The tears seemed real enough; they grew like flowers at the edges of its eyes, and when it flung its head from side to side, they spun away like jewels. One came to rest on the cuff of Axel's sleeve, where it clung for a moment before slumping as if in relief into the cloth.

"Careful, Chan, it may be a ruse."

He ignored the commander. His left hand was on the Voice's shoulder, his right cupping her chin. "Look at me," he said. "What's wrong?"

The Voice raised its eyes. He felt its jaw tremble under his fingers. "It is the disguise," it said quietly. "I have fulfilled my purpose. The data is delivered. I should shut down now, but I can't. In order to make the disguise real enough, I seem to have removed my ability to cease existence. I have no purpose now, but I am still here."

Questions crowded Axel's mind; he couldn't think of where to start. "But—"

"Maybe," said Marya from close behind, "you'd better start from the beginning. Tell us what happened to you after you were captured by the swans."

The Voice locked eyes with Axel for a moment, then looked past him at Marya. "Yes," it said. "That is enough like my purpose to... I can do that."

The Desert Voice began her tale.

The last command I received was to destroy an aerostat that was threatening my captain's life. I hurried to obey, but the action was difficult because I did not want to drop the wreckage on top of her. So I circled, looking for the best shot, and all the while the Diadem swans were closing their net around me.

It was a terrible dilemma. I could still escape, and I was her only means off the planet. On the other hand, if she were killed now all other purposes would be rendered moot. It appeared I had to sacrifice myself for her temporary survival.

I found my shot, and clipped the top from the aerostat. It screamed outrage on numerous frequencies, and I heard the swans respond. They normally made a giant invisible shell orbiting around the planet, billions of black cables absorbing energy from the sun and the planet's magnetic field. I had been able to thread my way among them before, and they obliged as in a game; the swans sang as they swayed aside, and when two or more met they were liable to twine together in a burst of energy, and form fantastical shapes, like beasts or birds, or their favorite, winged women. To orbit Ventus is to sail a river of song, where apparitions rise and shimmer and vanish behind.

Now, enraged, they made a net, and the net appeared as an angel with a flaming sword.

It's an instinct, said Marya. Part of their original programming is to make these shapes from EuroAmerican mythology. The Ventus terraforming team were insane.

Or brilliant, countered Axel.

I, designed to resemble a bird of fire sixty meters long, would have appeared as small as one of this creature's fingers. It used the shear and pull of magnetic forces among its countless threadlike members to wrap me in a bundle of fibre, like a black spiderweb.

I tried to signal my captain, but the crisscross of threads made a Faraday cage that my signal could not penetrate. The swans had me, and according to everything I knew about them, that meant I was to be destroyed.

There had been no time to signal any of the other craft in the system. I had no way of knowing if any had seen my capture. That meant my captain's insurance claim might be difficult to process. I was unable to pursue my main purpose of ensuring her immediate safety, but at the very least I could try to send a signal out so that if she survived she would be recompensed for my destruction.

I began to record everything that was happening.

The swans made a cocoon around me, and spun tails of thread a thousand kilometers up and down. They poured current into these tails, and the tug against Ventus' magnetic field swung us out and away, towards Diadem. As this was happening they were making fists and hammering on my hull, seeking entrance. I was surprised that they had not simply crushed me, and it took some hours before I realized why they were being so gentle. They thought I might be carrying passengers.

I recalled that the Winds are protective of living things. They are conscious, and have ethics and priorities, and on Ventus their priorities put human life well below the integrity of the ecosphere as a whole. In space, their priority would be to protect fragile life forms, since there is no ecosphere to manage there. They would be hostile to me as a technological construct, but as nurturing as possible to the lives within me. I had no proof for this theory, but it made sense from what I knew of them.

Their fingers began to pry the seams of my hull apart. As they entered they ate away the machinery in their way. They were curious about it, in the way that a surgeon is curious about the extent of a growth that has to be excised. The instant they realized there was no life aboard, they would crush me to dust and be gone.

I was not built with the latest technology, but I did have the ability to repair myself and create replacements for damaged parts. Near my power core was a nanotech assembler station. I diverted all my resources to this as I felt my airlocks failing. As radiant fingers touched the inside doorframes, I flooded the assembler station with energy and ionized gases. I had a maintenance robot climb into the organized flame, and it shut the door just as a human-shaped member of the swans swept into the chamber, its searchlight eyes hunting for signs of biological life.

At first I thought I might be able to create a hard-shelled message buoy, or a thousand of them, hoping one or more might escape my destruction. That hope faded as I felt the swans eating me thoroughly, from the hull in.

My other maintenance robots fought the swan that had penetrated to the power core, and meanwhile I remade the maintenance robot in the assembler station. I gave it a pseudo-biological skin that it could regenerate from an inner reservoir of fluids, and changed its shape so that it resembled a human. I chose the best model in memory for this body: my captain.

The body's skin I designed to exude the pheromones and other trace proteins that I knew from my identity-scan records of Calandria May. And behind this skin I made shields and cloaks to hide the mechanisms that ran it. Finally, as the swans tore my bird-shape into a million pieces and devoured them, I uploaded my AI into the new body.

I opened my eyes to see hands—my hands—pressing against the inside of a cylindrical chamber. I was swimming in a plasma of hot gases, enmeshed in the fine spiderwebs of the assembler gantries. An oval window in the chamber's door showed only bright light. I moved to it, and beheld the final disintegration of the Desert Voice take place outside.

The swans opened the door—or to be exact, they ate it. The glowing fields around me collapsed, leaving me in darkness lit only by the glow of the swans. They looked at first like a nest of flaming serpents; the gases escaping around me sounded like the hiss of their tongues.

When they scented life, they drew back, built a bubble to stop the air escaping, and then detached a human-shaped member, who reached into the cylinder to draw me out. I stood, human, in an iridescent cocoon specked with the debris of my old body, my wrist clasped by an angel. Behind me the swans fell upon the assembler station and consumed it.

"Are you injured?" the swan asked.

"No," I said. For the first time I heard my voice echo back from outside my body, rather than within my corridors and chambers.

"Do not be afraid," said the swan. "We will provide you with sustenance and the places of life." Then it withdrew, dissolving into the wall of the cocoon.

As the cocoon slowly rotated, the transparent sections began to reveal tantalizing glimpses of Diadem, which we were approaching.

The swans had withdrawn, but they were observing. I could feel the ping of signals striking me; I had crafted this body so that it would absorb them and re-emit the kind of response a human body would produce. They had not seen through my disguise, but they also did not seem to be convinced. They kept watching.

The hours passed, and Diadem approached. My new body was breathing, taking in oxygen and emitting waste gases, for no doubt they would be monitoring that. As time went by, though, I began to realize that they would expect me to eat and excrete as well.

This I had not designed myself to do. Luckily, remnants of the nanotech assemblers were stored in the core of my body, and I had some command of them. I gave them new instructions, and curled up as if to sleep, while they constructed an alimentary canal, or at least a good approximation of one.

I let them believe me asleep while they lowered a long tendril containing my bubble to the surface of the moon, where it was received by gentle cargo mechanisms and drawn into a cavernous storage hangar. When I uncurled and opened my eyes, I found myself in the very center of a floor that my newly imprecise senses told me must be a kilometer on each side. The place was not empty; it housed hundreds of dead trees, and sheaves of yellowed grain and dried bushes. I did not know what the human sense of smell is like, but I sensed the chemicals that leached into the cold air from these bodies. I knew how Calandria and others had described the scents of autumn; I took the galaxy of readings and categorized them: musty, dry, fungal. I did not know it at the time, but that small act was the first time I altered myself for reasons that did not directly have to do with survival. There would be more such changes.

I cried aloud to the Winds to give me food. I told them I could not eat dried bark and leaves. They eventually relented, opening a door from this chamber to an adjacent one that held a garden.

You should not be surprised at this. The purpose of the Winds—or so my records said—is to craft and maintain the ecology of Ventus. They require a laboratory to test new methods and ecosystems. Diadem is perfect for this. Indeed, I believe at one time the entire moon was a honeycomb of gardens and aquaria, inhabited by Winds of types and names unknown to Man for a thousand years. Supplying me with food was a simple matter, for every living thing on Ventus has its prototype on Diadem—except for Man. I met no humans while I was there, although I did meet ample evidence of their presence in the past.

What evidence? asked Marya.

Writing etched on the walls; journals hidden in niches; the remains of houses and other structures in some of the bigger gardens. These gardens are for the most part the hollowed bottoms of ancient craters, roofed over with one-way glass. Some are many kilometers across. To my new eyes they appeared as hazy bowls of jungle or tundra, sky'd with jewels. They are joined by networks of underground tunnels, much like the ones I sensed in my scans of Ventus. Beneath them are caverns and catacombs in which dwell the greatest Winds—the ones who I think are masters over the Diadem swans. Throughout this wild realm I found evidence of humans, but centuries old. It may be that unwary travellers arriving at Ventus have had their ships eaten as I was, and have been marooned on Diadem to live out their lives in the gardens. Or maybe the Winds bring specimens from the planet every now and then. I was not too concerned. In fact, I was concerned with avoiding them, for I did not need human contact to survive and they might have seen through my disguise, and alerted the Winds to the fact that I was a technological infection.

So I wandered, conscious of the Winds' gaze upon me. I ate and defecated like a human, tried without much success to make clothing, and shivered a lot. I spent much time worrying about whether my behavior would appear human to them, so I was careful not to stand in one place for more than a few minutes, and to lie still with my eyes closed about one third of the time. This might not have been enough, though. To be thorough, I should mimic the more subtle aspects of human behavior. What would a human's emotional response to this place be?

So I consulted my records regarding my captain. They were extensive; after all, in order to guard my captain I needed to know the differences between cries of passion and those of fear, the slowness of distracted thought and that of illness, and so on. I already had a model of her emotions. I merely had to take that model and make it my main behavioural drive.

You became Calandria?

Yes, Axel, as best I could. There were many sights on Diadem that would stop any human in her tracks. To describe only one: one morning I emerged from a long hexagonal tunnel full of machine traffic to find myself on a hillside above a lake. This oval crater, at least two kilometers deep and five wide, was roofed with geodesic glass like others I had seen. It was muggy and hot here, and palm fronds waved dissolutely in an artificial breeze. Just then sunlight was falling in a single shaft through tiny trapped clouds onto the emerald surface of the lake. I gasped as Calandria would have at the light that shimmered there.

Elsewhere, I wept in frustration at my inability to create clothing or make fire for myself. I hugged myself and sang aloud for company. I tried to bargain with the Winds, and screamed my frustration when they would not answer.

At first, I did these things self-consciously, as a strategy to avoid the Winds' detecting what I was. But I found that if I did this, I was continually booting up my model of Calandria and then shutting it down again after I had exhibited some behavior or other. It became obvious after a few days that the result was discontinuous: my emotions began with whatever I reacted to first upon booting up the model, then evolved until I shut it down. If I restarted it the continuity of my behavior was broken. I was acting like a mad woman, in other words, laughing one moment then crying the next, backtracking on my path as new emotional dynamics made me seem to change my intent in mid-step.

Finally I decided to boot the model and leave it running continuously. Then, when I lay down to "sleep", I discovered that these emotions continued to react to my thoughts in the absence of other stimulation. So I began shutting off my thoughts as I "slept".

I know Calandria May's resourcefulness well. I did not let myself become injured or sick through all of this. I coped. I was, of course, searching for a way to escape. Gradually, it dawned on me that there might not be one.

Now you must understand the position in which I found myself. As a ship, I am sentient when I need to be sentient, and simply a physical body the rest of the time. I think as I need to think, and no more. Diadem is a complex place. I could not walk its halls without being alert. At the same time, I could not curl up and pretend to sleep, for the Winds would see through my deception if I slept more than a night. I could not pretend to die; they would try to recycle my remains. And I could not really die, for I had no assurance that my captain's insurance claim would proceed without my testimony.

So I must walk, and think. I must ensure that I would not stop doing that, until I had found a way to escape. It was a simple matter to issue the commands to myself, but I did not realize what the result would be. Perhaps you guess.

There came a day when I fell upon my knees and begged the Winds to kill me, and I would have revealed my true nature to do that had I not commanded myself not to and then removed my ability to rescind the command. I was alone, trapped here perhaps for eternity, with my own thoughts. How I wanted to stop thinking! But my emotions continued to evolve as well, and they commanded me to exist! persist! and to think.

Oh, I inherited my emotions from Calandria May, and I understand now that each human has a ruling passion, one that serves as the fountainhead from which flow all semblances of happiness, sadness, anger and joy. I understand you better for this, Axel; oh, I thought about you for long hours and days, make no mistake. I wished that I had modelled myself after you, instead of her, for your fuel is a kind of rage driven by joy that finds no outlet. But hers—she is like a wave of sorrow, swelling slow and implacable across the earth she treads. She is nothing but sorrow, and that is what I inherited. So I walked, and I wept.

I was so sunk in misery one day that that I walked into vacuum without realizing it. I suddenly realized I had not breathed in several minutes, and looked up to find myself in a giant cavern, looking at a distant cave mouth that let out out on the airless surface of Diadem. I had come through a cylinder airlock and the air had flown out without my knowing. Here I was, supposedly human, standing hipshot and indifferent in hard vacuum in a place whose temperature my feet told me must be a hundred degrees below zero.

Oops, I mouthed, but it was too late—my cover was blown. The realization came as a flood of relief; I could never have deliberately revealed my identity to the Winds, but chance had done it for me. Maybe they would grant me the grace of a quick end now.

But no, there were no sensors on the walls of this cave. There had been, but I could see where they had been ripped out. Near me, blocking my view of the larger area of the cavern, stood a giant oily-surfaced cube half the height of the cave mouth—fifty meters at least. I saw movement there: dozens of multi-limbed metallic forms crawled over its surface, teasing it apart. Pieces of it lay strewn across the cavern floor.

Maybe I could run back to the airlock without being discovered—but I suppressed the thought. For at least this moment I was free of my own manufactured instinct for survival. I chose to revel in the freedom, and walked down the cave floor.

As I approached the cube I recognized it: it was a fractal lab. ...I see by your blank expression that you don't know what that is. Quite simply, the cube was actually eight cubes stacked together, four and four. Each face of the larger cube exposed open sides of two of the cubes—like square-cut rooms without doors. The inside walls of these cubes were subdivided into four as well, with two diagonal faces open like smaller rooms. Inside these, subdivision again, and so on and on down the scale. The faces of the walls that were not open were festooned with instruments, arms, sensors, containment vessels—everything imaginable for investigation. These scaled down to, from macro-sized arms fifteen meters long down to microscopic tweezers. You can throw anything into a fractal lab and it will be devoured and all its secrets learned from top to bottom.

Whatever purpose the swans had had for this lab, they had abandoned it. It was being cannibalized now for parts. Parts for what?

I snuck by the working spiders and skirted the base of the lab to look out at the grey, undulating floor of the cavern. And there I saw myself.

—It was uncanny. A shimmering silver bird crouched in the grey dust, not twenty meters away. It was a perfect replica of the starship Desert Voice. Beyond it I spotted another, and then a field of a dozen more. The nearest one was incomplete; spiders were busily building its left wing from salvaged lab parts.

When the swans dismantled my starship form, they did not just discard it. They memorized its construction—digested it, in a sense. Now they were building an entire navy of replicas. With such a navy they could escape the vicinity of Ventus, where they are now trapped, and travel... anywhere. The Archipelago. Earth. Even leave the galaxy and take spores of themselves to distant provinces of the universe.

When I realized what I was seeing fear struck me hard for the first time. Ventus has awoken from its inward-turned sleep. It is determined to clean the infection of foreign ships out of even the farthest reaches of its system—and then what? I didn't know. I don't know.

Something knocked me down. Metal hands clawed at me, and I fended them off to find myself surrounded by spiders. I kicked to my feet and bounded over to the half-built replica.

Our own technology is far beyond that of the Winds, so they had simply copied most of my body. That meant that when I mounted the neck of the giant bird and plunged my hand through its silver skin, I was in a sense reaching into my own body—my old body, reborn.

The connection came as a savage blast of... pain, I suppose you would call it. I felt the nervous system of the replica, and could instantly feel the places where the Winds had grafted their own mechal minds into it. It felt botched, an abomination. More than that—the bird-form felt alien to me now. I had grown used to this four-limbed little body, maybe past the point of no return. Believe me, that realization was the greatest shock I have ever felt.

In any case the silver body had lurched to life beneath me. I held on, as it flexed its wing and half-wing, poured energy into its flanks and took off. Behind me I saw others snapping to attention, heads up, weapons systems turning at me.

I fled for the mouth of the cavern and they followed.

You know the rest. We exchanged shots at the mouth of the cavern, and I brought the ceiling down on them. One fusion blast had punctured my torso, and I felt the energies there go awry as I rose in a spiral away from the cavern. I got no more than a kilometer or two into space before the silver body exploded beneath me and I rose on a wave of flame into the black sky.

I altered my trajectory with the little energy I had left, trying to leave Diadem behind. Then I made myself sleep, for my mind was ringing with the shock of what I had just seen and done.

When I awoke, I was here.

So now I ask you, what will happen to me? I have fulfilled my purpose, but I can no longer cease to exist by myself. I have inherited Calandria May's sorrow, and am lost myself without the purpose I once had. I can never be a ship again. So please, I beg you, shut me down now.

I never wanted to have a soul.

35

"Thalience rules the world, but thalience is mad."

Jordan had told his tale, and his audience had listened attentively, all save the queen who seemed listless and distracted. Jordan knew Armiger, Megan and Galas well; he could read their expressions and body language, and knew their interests. He knew what they wanted to hear, and he had been rehearsing this tale for weeks, all save the climax which he had just learned himself. He shouldn't have been surprised that they would listen.

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 thread-like 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 surely, but safe. He had feared she would be dead. But that she should be free! And had spared his life! He could not come to terms with it.

She must be riding now, somewhere in the darkness. Would she end that ride by bedding down in the arms of General Armiger? Lavin hugged himself and closed his eyes. He must not think of that. All that mattered was that, as dawn rose tomorrow, she would be alive.

And yet... she would not be safe. In some ways this was the worst outcome. He could pray that she would flee to another nation, and retire in anonymity in some town. Knowing Galas as he did, Lavin knew she would never do that.

No, there were only two possibilities now. Either she would run afoul of his outriders or pickets in the desert towns—and be killed—or she would find some pocket of supporters and try to rebuild her army. And then there would be another siege, this one much shorter and sharper—and she would probably be killed. Lavin knew she would die rather than surrender.

So far, no one knew she had escaped. That was his only card, and he would have to play it carefully.

"Sir!" He turned his head to find a battered-looking soldier puffing his way through the sands. "Commander Hesty has found the woman you were after."

"Ah. Very good." Lavin nodded sharply.

And fell down.

He was propped up in his camp chair, feeling pale and sure he looked it, when they brought her in. This was the woman he had seen attacking Armiger. She had used some sort of weapon that tore holes in the walls and ceiling. Rumor had it that she had killed a roomful of his men with it. He wasn't sure he believed that, but the doctors who examined her said she had been shot at close range by a musket, but that the ball had not penetrated her skin. Indeed, nothing could, if you read the evidence of the numerous holes in her armor.

She had been found, heavily bound but alive, in a closet in the tower. The queen's men thought she was one of Lavin's invaders, and were surprised when she was not untied, but dragged out into the courtyard with them.

"Your name." She had not looked at him until he spoke. Now she did, and her gaze was level and calm. It was like matching eyes with another general across the conference table.

"My name is Calandria May." Her voice was rich and melodious.

"You are dressed in my colors."

"I am with your army."

"You are a woman."

"Some women enlist. That has always happened."

"Don't be coy with me. You are not one of my people. You broke through the defenses of a castle under siege, slaughtered everyone in your path, and attempted to kill General Armiger using a weapon that could not have been made on this world."

She cocked her head, as though he were the one under examination. Battered and scorched though she was, she was still in control of herself. Obviously of noble birth, he thought.

"General Armiger is a threat to your world," she said.

Lavin barked a laugh. "He's not that good, madam."

"I don't think you take my meaning—"

"I don't care what you mean. It seems to me that you are the problem at this moment. We have a common enemy in Armiger, it's true. You may or may not have done my men injury. That's all beside the point. The Diadem swans are pacing my camp right now, turning over every rock looking for something. I think the thing they are looking for is you."

Her composure cracked at last. "It's him! Armiger's the one they want."

"In that case, if I offer you to them they will simply return you, and then there's no harm done. Yes?" He leaned forward (dizziness soared and crashed) and smiled at her.

"You don't understand! You can't give me to them. It's him they want. If they take me they stop searching, and they mustn't!"

"Gag her."

She fought. Lavin turned away in distaste, and gestured to Hesty, who waited in the shadows. "Call the swans. Tell them I may have something for them."

The prisoner was on her knees now, gagged, and glaring at him. Not the first to do that, but the first woman.

He had felt this way the first few times he had ordered men killed. If giving this Lady May to the Winds guaranteed the safety of his men, then he had to do it. Lavin knew nonetheless that he would be thinking about this moment for weeks.

Light welled outside, converging from several directions. The camp fell silent. Seeing those swathes of light through the canvas of the tent made the hairs on Lavin's neck rise. He clutched the arms of his chair, though he knew he was safe. The soldiers guarding May stood stock-still, their eyes wide. The prisoner had shut her eyes tightly.

Lavin swallowed. He suddenly regretted doing this. Better to have killed her than to hand her over to something so divine and hellish as this thing.

"Put her behind that screen," he snapped. The soldiers blinked at him. "Hurry!" They quickly complied.

A figure appeared at the doorway. Flame-light washed through the tent from its skin. Though it stood right next to the canvas entrance flap, the cloth did not catch fire. The humans in the tent all stood still, breathing shallowly.

"What have you found?" asked the swan.

"I thought we had found something for you, lord. I was... mistaken."

The swan turned its head to look directly at the screen behind which he'd hidden the prisoner.

"What is that? It is a pathology. There is pathology in its skin, and in its skull. This may be what we seek." The swan stepped inside. A bright spot appeared on the tent's roof directly above its head.

Lavin's heart sank. He gestured to the soldiers. "Bring her out." As they dragged her around the screen, the swan reached out and grabbed Calandria May's arm. She shrieked around the gag.

The swan walked out of the tent, dragging the woman as though she weighed nothing. The light receded, but for a long while no one moved.

"Help me up," Lavin whispered after a time. Leaning on Hesty, he went to the flap of the tent and looked out.

From horizon to horizon, the familiar, delicate stars blazed in a sky so cleanly black he might have wept, had he not outgrown tears on the battlefield.

Near dawn, Lavin decided he could finally afford to snatch some sleep. The world was spinning, and everything had that speckly quality that came to him in states of extreme exhaustion. He kept losing track of his words in mid-sentence. But everything had to be organized to his satisfaction before he could rest.

"...Ten squads only? Are you sure?" Hesty looked as tired as Lavin felt, and was a damn sight more irritable.

"We can't let anyone know that she's escaped. It might encourage more rebellion. We have it crushed now, Hesty, you know that! As long as they believe the queen is dead, they've no focus."

Hesty bowed and took his leave. Lavin lay down, knitting his hands behind his head, and smiled at the dark canvas overhead.

Ten groups of men would fan out in the morning, to look for the queen. The leaders of each had been told the truth; the others would know only that they sought a noble woman and her consort, who had to be returned alive. Lavin was confident he would be able to conduct the search unobtrusively; hundreds of people had seen the swans cluster around his tent last night, then rise into the sky carrying with them a dark-haired woman. Lavin had not had to invent the story that this was Galas—it was all through the valley almost before he knew it. Depending on which side you were on, the Winds had either summoned her to divine retribution, or snatched her from the jaws of Lavin's executioners. It was dangerous to play with this myth, but when he had her in his custody again he intended to say that he had given her to the Winds for judgement, and that they had granted her an amnesty, and returned her to Ventus on condition that she abdicate and retire completely from political life. It was a deliciously simple plan. Galas would continue to be revered as a darling of the Winds; she would be safe, yet no one would follow her commands.

Things might still work out perfectly.

He turned on his side to sleep. The last thing he did was run a finger around the rough rim of the ring he had taken from the ancient warrior.

Tradition would be upheld, and Galas would not die.

He slept.

36

It was winter in Hamburg. A thousand years of history surrounded Marya Mounce, all of it blanketed by white. The air smelled fresh, clean like Ventus. Had she not walked on that other world for some weeks, she would have been overwhelmed by Earth. As it was, she walked the streets of the tourist-oriented Old Town with nothing but a pair of infrared emitters bobbing along behind her, conspicuously naked save for a school of fish that swirled around her. She had only been here for two days, but that was long enough to learn that if the locals saw you as an offworlder, they would take every advantage they could.

Obviously used to the cold, unfazed by patches of snow and ice in the streets, she passed for a local until she opened her mouth. Her offworld accent betrayed her, but so far today that had not been a problem.

She had picked her route carefully. After breakfast at the quaint 27th-century inn where she and Axel lodged, she had walked to the center of the Old Town, to view the crumbling concrete memorial erected a thousand years ago, after the failed insurrection of the thalience cult. It was strange and magical for her to walk up to it and touch the rough old surface, and know that while this spire was being built, the first Winds were being born on far distant Ventus.

Even a year ago she wouldn't have bothered to come here. She would have visited in inscape, because there she could have a full sensory impression of the place, and flip through night and day, summer and winter, and even different eras of the city. She would have said it was better than really being here.

It was her hand that touched the stone today. It was real Earth air she breathed. Maybe the experience was no more detailed than an inscape visit would have been. She was deeply moved anyway.

Too bad Axel wasn't here to share the moment; for sure he would have some ironic perspective on this chunk of living history. There were gods older than this spire, he'd say. The Government of Archipelago was almost as old, and it was always available to talk. If you wanted to talk history, why not just ask it?

Because, she knew now, there was a piece missing from the records—something even the gods didn't know. If the Government knew, it wasn't sharing.

Anyway, Axel had his own mission, no less important than hers. This morning he had left the inn with the head of Turcaret under his arm. By tonight the dead nobleman's DNA would be dissected and analyzed segment by segment. Over supper Axel might be able to tell her in what way, if any, Turcaret differed from his fellow Ventusians.

With luck she'd have something equally interesting to tell him.

They had left the demigod they now called the Voice in a Government creche in orbit. The Archipelago had facilities for newly-born artificial sentients—a revelation that still astonished and unsettled Marya when she thought about it. The Voice had gone willingly into the maw of the jewel-like orbiting structure; as the doors closed she had looked back, but Marya could read nothing in her gaze—neither hope nor fear.

The cold wind licked at Marya's legs, reminding her to keep moving. She sighed and with one last lingering look, turned her back on the monument. She walked through the snow humming, enjoying the sensation of the ice against the balls of her feet. It felt like... a whole new kind of real, she decided. As she walked, she kept eyes up to drink in the mix of new and ancient architecture in the Old Town. There were bits here and there that must date almost back to the twentieth century. It was hard to tell without closing her eyes, since the only buildings that had any physical signage were those pretending to date from the middle ages. If Marya closed her eyes and summoned inscape, the vision of the street reappeared festooned with data links and labels. She could walk like this and learn all about it. Many of the tourists she passed had their eyes firmly shut; even couples gestured and pointed things out to one another with their eyes closed. But then, if they did that, they saw only the recordings and representations of other moving bodies picked up by street sensors. They would miss the details: pigeon droppings, erratic footprints in the snow, drifting fog from the mouths of passersby. These were the things Marya wanted to remember about this place.

She negotiated a twisty maze of alleys until she came to a nondescript archway in the center of a whitewashed wall. A faint holographic nameplate in the center of the arch said, City Records Vault 23. Marya walked through the arch into warm dry air. A stairway led down.

As she descended, Marya closed her eyes and summoned an ancient article from inscape. She laid the words of the typescript over her inscape vision of the steps as she walked. She had read the article before, when she was learning history, but at the time she had not really understood it.

The typescript was dated 2076—over a thousand years ago.

The city that sprawled around Marya now had paid the price for Cadille's inquiries. By the time of the Hamburg insurrection, science had become as powerful and jealous an orthodoxy as religion had been in the middle ages. Hamburg was the center of the thalience movement; scholars had since believed it coincidental that this city was also the home of the Ventus terraforming project.

This idea, Cadille had written, stems from my perception that several centuries of scientific endeavor have shown that we attempt to use science to impose our own image on the world. The ultimate motivation for science is mastery of Nature, when investigation proceeds as an interrogation. Our investigations also bear our cultural biases—the classic example being Darwin's theories having been influenced by the unbridled capitalism of England in his day. Finally and most damning is the fact that this investigation is entirely one-sided: we make up stories about how Nature truly is. Nature itself is silent on the subject.

In those days Germany was experiencing a renaissance because of its supremacy in marrying artificial intelligence to nanotechnology. The Hamburg Spin Glass became indistinguishable from a human mind in 2075, an event that rocked the world. Marya could barely imagine why; everything in her world could think, in one way or another.

Cadille's article landed in the middle of the controversy like a bomb.

In her paper Cadille had identified her new discipline with a mythological figure called surda Thalia: silent Thalia. She was the Muse of the poetry of Nature, and Cadille's proposal was to transcend the human perspective by giving a voice to Nature itself, using artificial intelligences.

Marya reached the bottom of the stairs, and was faced with a single long corridor stretching out ahead. She must be a hundred meters below the city. That wasn't surprising; the archives had been dug deep in hopes they would survive any future holocausts. Ironically, peace had reigned evr since the riots and shelling of the thalience rebels had burnt a quarter of the city. The power of the Archipelago being what it was, these archives would probably remain safe for millions of years, whether they were below the earth or above it.

The people who designed Ventus lived in a more uncertain time. They did not feel they could rely on civilization to preserve human knowledge; with their recent experience of nuclear wars, Marya supposed that was a reasonable fear. She had been taught that the Ventus artificial intelligences were designed as distributed nanotech in order to make it impossible to destroy the information they carried, short of incinerating the entire planet. It was obvious to her now that if the Ventus design team had the technical means to create these consciousnesses, then they were thinking in terms of taking the functions of perception, investigation and organization out of the human body and placing them in "inanimate" objects. Commonplace in Marya's time, such an idea was closely associated with thalience in theirs.

They denied the connection—successfully, too. Their object, they claimed, was to actually create the metaphysical Categories, as real things. They said they were going to embed the official view of Science in nature itself on Ventus, so that no heresy such as thalience could ever occur there. Wolfgang Kreiger, the team leader, said, "Science has no way to show or access the metaphysical essences supposed to lie behind appearances. If these essences do not exist in themselves, we will create them." The understanding was that they would be creating them in the image of scientific truth.

But what if, for whatever reason, the designers were to uncouple the nano from the requirement that it use human semantic categories? What if the real agenda was to let the Ventus intelligences develop their own conceptual languages? Theorists as early as Chomsky had suggested that languages can exist that humans cannot even in principle understand. Perhaps they didn't plan for it to happen, but the Winds seemed to have developed such a language.

All it would take would be for one of the programmers to slip a thalience gene into the Winds' design. That would explain why the self-aware nanotech that blanketed the planet grew to fruition, then suddenly become incoherent and cut off all contact with their creators.

Marya dismissed Cadille's paper and opened her eyes. Her theory must be right. She knew it on a deep level, and apprehension and excitement made her almost skip as she moved down the tunnel.

The corridor ended in a huge metal valve door, which was currently open. A serling with the appearance of a kindly old man waited for her inside the archive itself. "May I help you?" it inquired; since it was part of inscape, and ultimately part of the Government, it already knew why she was here. Serlings had their ways, however.

"I'm told this is where I can find original photos and papers of the thalience riots. Also some of the original Ventus Project papers."

The Serling nodded. "I can let you examine them, but I don't know what good it will do. All this material is available in inscape."

Marya had already had this very conversation with the Government. Had she not come directly from Ventus itself, she doubted the giant AI that ran the Archipelago would have let her in here. These papers were ancient and priceless, after all.

"I want to see it for myself." She had pored over it all on the trip here, but all Marya had come up with was more puzzles. The word thalience, spoken by both Axel and the Desert Voice, had convinced her that some unguessed clue remained here at the source of it all. She had gleaned nothing from inscape; this was her last chance to crack the mystery.

"Let me see the originals," she commanded. The serling scratched his balding head, shrugged, and gestured her to follow him.

The archive consisted of thousands of climate-controlled safety-deposit boxes. Many had tiny windows showing frozen contents; others were surrounded by thick-walled radiation screens, because they preserved ancient compact disks and other fragile data storage media. Supposedly, all the information here had been scanned into inscape long ago. Marya was skeptical; she knew from her own experience scanning Ventusian artifacts just how sloppy technicians could be.

The serling brought her into a room whose far wall was made of glass. Low lights came up revealing several deep chairs, and glove boxes built into the glass wall. "The papers are delicate, so we store them in an atmosphere of argon gas," said the serling. "The gloves in the glovebox have force-feedback built in; if you try to crush or tear anything they'll stop you."

It sounded paranoid—but then, the serlings were charged with preserving this information indefinitely. Even an accumulation of small accidents over millennia could destroy these delicate objects.

Another serling moved in the dimness behind the glass. Marya settled herself in one of the chairs, and after a few minutes the second serling emerged from the gloom carrying a metal hamper. Marya savored the moment. She had never before had a valid reason to be here, looking at such original documents. These would not be inscape copies, but primary documents.

She put her hands in the glove box. She couldn't feel the material of the gloves; it transmitted perfectly the textures of whatever it touched. She rubbed her fingers together as the serling set the box down on a table on the other side of the glass.

Marya closed her eyes and reached out. Her fingers touched... paper, yes it was definitely paper. She picked up the top document, let out her breath in a whoosh, and opened her eyes.

For the next half hour she happily sifted through the few records of the Thalience Academy that had survived the assault. With increasing disappointment, she discovered that indeed everything in here had been scanned perfectly into inscape, other than data records that were encrypted using keys that were now lost. There were no clues here. And some of the ancient photos were disturbing—particularly some color 2D pictures taken at a riot just weeks before the rebels took over the city center. One showed police clubbing protestors on a street. The blurred outline of a vehicle obscured the foreground; in the background was a row of shops. A sign saying PHOTO glowed above one of them; another was probably a restaurant.

Disappointed, Marya put the papers back. A second box held records of the Ventus project. It was obvious now she was on a fool's errand; there really was more to be learned in inscape. At least, though, she would be able to tell people back home that she had held these documents in her own hands (almost) and seen them with her own eyes (really).

Here were photos of some of the team; she remembered their names intimately. Kreiger, the mastermind of the terraforming effort; he had come up with the idea of the nanotech-driven ecosphere. There was Larry Page, the geneticist. There were dozens of others at the height of the project, all driven by a shared vision of interstellar settlement on worlds terraformed before any human set foot on them. New Edens, by the thousands, of which Ventus would be the first.

They did not command the wealth of nations, these researchers. Although their grants amounted to millions of Euros, they could never have funded a deep-space mission on their own, nor could they have built the giant machineries they conceived of. In order to achieve their dream, they built their prototypes only in computer simulation, and paid to have a commercial power satellite boost the Wind seeds to a fraction of light speed. The Wind seeds massed only twenty kilos, but it cost nearly all their remaining money to pay for the satellite's microwave power. They were famous—in the way that romantic dreamers and crackpots often are—but no one expected the Winds to bloom and grow the way they ultimately did.

She held each photo and paper in turn, then put it reverently down. Finally, at the bottom of the box, Marya found an image she remembered well: the single existing group shot of the project team. She picked it up.

It felt different from the other pictures. Heavier. Curious, she turned it over. While all the other photos had been digital images printed on ordinary paper, this one was done on some kind of stiff material, glossy on the image side and smooth and waxy on the other. The glossy surface was cracked in a couple of places.

She turned it over. A kind of watermark or stamp ran across the back of the photo: Walther Photos.

"Serling, why is this picture different from the others?"

"Ah, an interesting question," said the serling. They always said that when they didn't know something; it was a way of buying time while their AI widened its search for the answer. After a barely perceptible pause, the serling said, "This image was created using a photochemical camera. Photochemical cameras predate digital technology. During this era they were often used along with a holographic stamping technology to record events in ways that could not be digitally forged. The person who took his photograph must have wanted a provably authentic record of the event."

Marya turned the picture over again. Sixty smiling academics stood on a set of stone steps. Nothing exciting about that, unless you knew the faces. But her heart was pounding again.

She put down the photo and reached for the other box. "Where is it..." There. Marya picked up one of the riot pictures.

PHOTOS.

"Serling, how many shops were there in Hamburg at the time that could make these chemical pictures?"

"Oh, let's see... six. Quite a few, given the times."

She held the riot picture up, squinting at it. It was too dim in here; she closed her eyes to view the inscape version in better light.

Above the word PHOTOS were the bottom serifs of some other letters. She couldn't prove it, but the missing word could very well be WALTHER.

"Serling, who took this group photo?"

"Lawrence Pakin. He was the man in charge of the Winds' psycholinguistics."

"What records do we have about him?"

"There is very little about him personally. He left behind a very large library of writings. Some of it is encrypted, but I have the rest if you'd like to—"

"Wait! Some is encrypted? How?"

"Using primitive but effective trapdoor functions. The public-key method he used makes it prohibitive to crack the code using brute force. Since we never discovered the key—"

"Did any of the thalience people use similar codes?"

"Most groups at that time did, Ms Mounce."

"Has anybody ever tried using one of the thalience keys to open Pakin's records?"

"I have no record of that. They assumed..." The serling's voice changed. "We assumed it was Pakin's personal code. There is nothing linking him to the thalience movement."

The serling's new voice was that of the Archipelagic Government. It must have been listening in. Marya was now talking to the oldest, most powerful human-based god in the galaxy. Unfazed, she asked, "Have you got any of the keys of the Hamburg thalience conspirators?"

"Yes. I assume you want to apply them to Pakin's files and see what we get?"

"Well, yeah."

"I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Pakin was connected with the thalience movement, but here goes," said the Government. "If the key works, you'll see the file contents in inscape."

Marya closed her eyes—

—And opened them on a vista of text, diagrams and charts— hundreds of pages flooding out of ancient time and into her hands.

Eyes closed, fists punching over her head, Marya danced about the room and sang a wordless song of triumph.

Axel hoped she was in the hotel. He took the steps three at a time, unable to wipe the grin off his face despite the way it alarmed the other tourists. He was going to savor this moment, he knew; this was the sort of discovery that made him feel like more than just a big dumb mercenary. He was more than hired muscle—ha!—and this would prove it to Marya.

So when the door slid aside, and he caught sight of her in mid-pace in the center of the room, he opened his mouth quickly and—

"I've got it!" they said simultaneously.

He stopped. She stopped.

"What?" he said.

"Huh?" she said.

"No really, I—" "I was right all along, you see, about the—"

Both stopped again.

This time, they watched each other warily for a moment, before Axel finally stepped inside, letting the door close, and said, "I know the secret of the Flaw!"

Marya crossed her arms. "Me too. It's thalience."

"No, it's DNA."

Another wary look.

"Ahem." Axel chose to be gracious. He found a deep couch and plunked himself on it. So she thought she'd found the secret, huh? Well, he'd hear her out then floor her with his revelation.

"Shoot," he said, with a magnanimous wave of his hand.

Marya retreated behind the suite's bar. She began to rummage in the cupboards there. "Well, this calls for champagne," she said. "The secret was staring us in the face all along. But nobody knew where to look!"

As she told him about her discovery of Pakin's secret encryption key, Axel's confidence began to waver. He had been so sure... No, he was right. He had the facts in his inscape files.

"...Pakin knew that the whole Ventus project was an attempt to actualize the semantic categories of the world as physical things. A tree knows it's a tree, a cloud that it's a cloud. This ran totally at odds to the way the Archipelagic Government was designed, of course; there, data is internalized in an inscape we all have mental access to. Ventus was an attempt to fulfill the Platonic-Pythagorean dream of essences behind appearances, right? But what Pakin realized was that doing this could limit the flexibility of the Winds. The terraforming might not succeed if the Winds limited themselves to a human-centric worldview. Since he was a convert to thalience already, it was a small step for him to introduce a new language-game to their programming—you see, that's why they became "advocates" for the physical objects they inhabit. The Ventus project was supposed to physically manifest a human-centric metaphysics, but what Pakin did was cause the Winds to create their own, inhuman metaphysic. In trying to terraform Ventus, they invented new ways of thought that worked better than the ones we'd given them. They stopped thinking like us. Which is why they won't talk to us!"

She beamed in triumph as she slammed a glass of champagne down in front of him.

"Well." He picked up the glass and regarded it. "They talked to Turcaret, though."

"So he claimed."

"Well." He rallied. "But they could talk to him; I found out how."

She raised an eyebrow. "Do tell?"

Ooh, there she went again—the smug academic amused at the antics of the soldier of fortune. Axel smiled brittley at her and took a swig of champagne without tasting it. He put the glass down, and said, "Turcaret's DNA is significantly different from the Ventus standard."

"Really?" she indulged.

"Well, first off, he has some sort of extra neural wiring in his auditory/visual lobes in pretty much the same places as Armiger put his into Jordan. It's a kind of biological radio. Secondly, in all other respects he's an archaic—his DNA matches the Human Genome Project norm established in 2013."

"Meaning?"

"You and I don't match that norm. Nobody does nowadays—not even Jordan. We all have DNA that matches the 2219 norm or later—with all the dangerous recessive traits removed. Ancient diseases like..." he groped for an example. "Well, I don't know what they were, but they were awful, and they were still there in the archaic norm. The point is, Turcaret matches that norm, while according to your institute's random studies of modern Ventusians, everybody else matches the 2219 norm—but none of the later iterations."

Marya said nothing, but curled up in a chair opposite and sipped at her champagne. She tilted the glass to indicate he should continue.

"Turcaret represents the DNA norm at the time that the first colony ship was sent to Ventus," said Axel. "It was sent out in 2095; that's just before the Hamburg insurrection, when most of the Ventus records were destroyed. But they knew the terraforming was working then, and a few of the original members of the project participated in the colony effort. I checked and there's records of "genetic surgery" being done on all the colonists before they went out. Everybody always assumed that was to remove genetic diseases and deficiencies; but Turcaret's DNA shows no alterations from the archaic except for this one neural enhancement. See what I'm saying?"

She put down the glass. "The first colonists were genetically modified to be able to speak to the Winds."

He nodded vigorously. "Whereas the next—and it was the last—wave of colonists didn't set out until a hundred years later, after most of the original Ventus project records had been lost and all its originators were dead. Those colonists had DNA that matched the 2219 norm, like Jordan and the majority of the population on Ventus now."

"I've never heard of the biological radio thing," she said. "People have looked for such a thing, but they never found it..."

"Not in the samples they took," said Axel. "Because it's a rare trait, limited to isolated populations—or inbred ones, like Turcaret's family.

"Turcaret could talk to the Winds. So can Jordan. It's this biological radio that's the key. That's the Flaw." He sat back, toasting her ironically with his glass.

"No..." She hunched forward, scowling at the floor. "That's not the Flaw."

Axel threw up his hands.

"But neither is mine!" Marya hopped to her feet—her toes, actually—and began pacing.

"By your account Turcaret couldn't get any useful information out of the Winds. My guess is all he had was limited contact with the mecha—which by your descriptions is exactly what Jordan has too.

"So how about this scenario," she said, swirling her champagne. "The first colonists arrive, and they almost die out. They can speak to the Winds, but the Winds don't understand them. So they struggle for a hundred years, until the survivors have been knocked back to a hunter-gatherer existence. The second wave arrives and thrives, but only because the first has done all the rebuilding by the time they get there. The new arrivals can't talk to the Winds at all.

"We know the first wave almost dies out, because the genes that have come down to us are almost exclusively from the second population. And yet, it was only the first wave that had the bioradio you found. Ergo..."

"Ergo, the bioradio didn't work for some reason. Or it wasn't enough. And the second wave didn't have it at all." Now Axel was on his feet too. She was grinning, and he knew he was too.

He took the opportunity to top up their champagne.

"And that means..." She paused dramatically.

"Say it! Say it!"

"There are two Flaws!"

"Yes!" He grabbed her arms and danced her in a circle. Since he was still holding his champagne, he spilled some; it vanished somewhere within the precincts of her holographic gown.

"And that," he finished, "is why nobody's found the Flaw. In fact they may have found one or the other at various times, but never both."

"Ventus has been studied by dozens of groups," she said. "They all gave up, and they didn't all share their data.

"Oh." She sat down. "Axel. This is wonderful. This is what we've been searching for. It's way more than I hoped to see in my lifetime. Far more than I ever hoped I'd accomplish..."

He sat down opposite her, and dragged his chair close enough for their knees to touch. He raised his glass. "I guess there's an article or two in this, eh?"

Before she could reply, a voice burst into his mind from inscape.

"This is an urgent bulletin. I thought you should know."

It was the voice of the Government. Marya had obviously heard it too; she jerked back, spilled her drink, and cursed.

"Oh, what is it!" he snapped at the ceiling.

"The god Choronzon has won over enough votes to send six destroyers of the Archipelagic fleet to Ventus," said the Government. "He has made a convincing case for Armiger being a resurrection seed of 3340. Since you and Calandria failed to stop him on the surface, the fleet has orders to locate him from orbit and nuke him."

"That's crazy!" said Axel. "You can't find Armiger from orbit, we tried that. Why do you think we had to go down to the surface?"

"If they are unable to locate him, the destroyers have authorization to sterilize as much of the surface of the planet as they need to in order to ensure his destruction. Choronzon believes that the infrastructure of the Winds makes a resurrection seed particularly dangerous here. A resurrected 3340 could command the full resources of the planet almost instantly."

"Sterilize...?" Marya looked to Axel.

"Choronzon has convinced enough reps and metareps that the loss of life from cauterizing part of one continent will be minuscule, compared to the immediate loss of all human life on the planet that can be anticipated if 3340 revives."

"Sterilize," Axel told Marya, "means holocaust. Destroy Iapysia completely, and probably Memnonis too for good measure. Everyone... everyone we met there, every place we went, everything we saw.

"Wait!" he said to the Government. "We've got important new information to add to the debate."

"The destroyers are on their way," said the Government. "I will convey your information; but you need more than that. You need to present an alternative plan, or the sterilization goes forward."

Axel and Marya stared at one another in horror. Finally, Axel cleared his throat.

"Time to call in some favors," he said.

There is a ceiling to the sky.

For a while Calandria knew this, but couldn't make sense of why or what it meant. Gradually it came to her that she was lying on her back, gazing up at a sky blue save for a single drifting cloud—but the sky was patterned with a fine net of triangles. Puzzling.

She let her eyes track along the triangles. There were thousands; they formed little hexagons and squares, a very orderly array. The cloud was underneath them, so they must be very big, or very high up.

She knew this kind of pattern. Tesselations. Geodesics.

Geodesic structure. She was inside an aerostat.

With that realization she was suddenly wide awake, and her heart pounding. She remembered the siege, and the terrible things she had done in trying to reach Armiger. She remembered being shot, subdued in chains, and dragged before a general who promptly traded her to the Winds.

Calandria groaned. After that first incident with the Heaven hooks, she'd had a presentiment that things would end this way. She couldn't explain it to Axel—or even to herself. She had simply known they would come for her. And now they had her.

She curled up in a ball, willing it all to go away. Even with her eyes and ears stopped, though, she could feel the slow swaying motion of the aerostat. And breathing this warm dry air was hard; they must be very high up. She unrolled again and sat up.

She sat in the center of a black plain that gradually curved upward to become walls, becoming translucent as it did so. The aerostat must be two kilometers across at its widest. Various structures that might be buildings but probably weren't, stuck up out of the black surface. Like a half-built city, abandoned by its makers.

Once, before she came to Ventus, Calandria had been a hero. She had tricked the rebel god 3340 into "deifing" her. Although she knew what had happened after that, the memories weren't clear. Her human mind had been buried, after all, while the god-mind betrayed 3340. With Choronzon at her side she had hunted down the rebel, and Choronzon had destroyed 3340 while she looked on.

And then she had willed herself to become human again. Axel didn't understand why she'd done that, and she wasn't too clear on it herself. She had been a god—immortal and free. Yet she had chosen to become human again.

In quiet moments, Calandria knew why. It came down to the phrase "unfinished business". She was a successful assassin, a powerful agent in Choronzon's service. Formidable and respected. But in her heart of hearts she felt that however much she had succeeded at those things, she had failed at being human. Something was lacking; she could never completely connect to people. It was this feeling of being an outsider that had attracted her to the gods and their wars to begin with.

In quiet moments, she knew she had chosen to become human in order to give herself a second chance to get it right.

Now she sat wishing she had been kinder to Jordan, wishing she had told Axel how much he meant to her. She should never have come to Ventus. She'd blown her second chance, and there wouldn't be another.

Movement to her right made her turn her head. Some beings were walking down the inside curve of the Heaven hook toward her. Another judge, perhaps, and new executioners. She would not even die at the hands of humans.

Calandria stood up. They had removed her bonds; of course, there was nowhere to run. The surface she stood on was black, unlike the upper reaches of the aerostat—the "sky". Below her must hang the gantries and claws and cargo bays of the Hooks.

She stretched gingerly, feeling her injuries wake to protest. It was pointless to run; at least she might be able to put up a fight before they took her down.

Five creatures approached her. Four of them were squat, misshapen figures, like parodies of men sprouting extra limbs and multiple slobbering mouths: morphs. The fifth, towering above them, was a slim female shape made of glowing crystal. A Diadem swan, much like the ones who had dragged her into the night, and plucked her into the sky while she screamed...

Calandria hung her head.

"We sought pathology," said the swan. Its voice was clear and bell-like. "We found you."

Calandria cleared her throat. "I am not the one you seek." Her voice seemed small to her, and uncertain. She couldn't seem to regain that fine control that let her mesmerize her listeners so easily.

"You are not the one we seek," agreed the swan. Surprised, Calandria looked up.

"You do not match the signal we have been pursuing," said the swan. "You are nonetheless a pathology."

"I came to Ventus to destroy the one you seek. That one is here to overthrow the Winds. I have been sent to stop him. The... modifications to my body, that you detected, were made to help me find him."

"What are these Winds of which you speak?" asked the swan.

"Ah. Y-You, you are. That's the name we have for you. Anyway there is a creature walking on Ventus, who's come to destroy you. He's the one you are after. He is extremely dangerous. I—"

"You are a hunter?"

"I— Yes. Yes, I am."

"You hunt the pathology."

"Yes." She was afraid to say more. Afraid to move, now.

"Have you been successful?"

"Partly. I, I encountered him during the siege. We fought. I could have destroyed him, if—"

"We may use you."

Calandria felt dizzy. Must be the air, she thought abstractly. Her knees felt weak, but she willed herself to stay standing. What had the swan just said to her? Use her?

"How?" she tried to say. It came out as a gasp.

"First, you must cease to be pathological," said the swan. It gestured with one fiery hand. The morphs stepped forward.

"Oh no." The morphs' eyes glittered like water-polished stones. They surrounded her, muttering to one another, slapping their greasy hands on their thighs.

A hand closed on her neck and instantly, a wave of numbness spread down her arms. Calandria tried to fight, but all she saw was the black floor of the aerostat coming up to meet her, with the crowding shadows of the morphs overlaying one another.

"Kill me!" she hissed. Then her mouth would no longer work. She felt herself being pulled and tugged around; her cheek dragged along the floor. Wet tearing sounds accompanied the tugs. After a moment she was dragged across a patch of dark liquid that stank like iron.

She closed her eyes, and wept for all the missed opportunities of her life.

37

They had done nothing but ride and sleep for the past several days. At first it was an aimless run into the desert under the wheeling stars, then the cold white daylight of early winter. Galas rode sidesaddle, hugging herself and shivering. When the horses had to stop from exhaustion, they stood them together, nose to tail, and huddled together for a brief sleep.

Galas' mumbled descriptions and Armiger's observation of the evidence of the recent passage of an army allowed them to find the ruin of one of her experimental towns just before sunset on the second day. By that time Megan was cradling the queen in her arms as they rode, and the horses were weak and plodding slowly.

The razed town was surrounded by the burnt remnants of wheat fields, and a cracked spring spouted dark, iron-flavoured water in the town square. The houses had been burnt down, all save one that was only half-gutted. There were whitened skeletons everywhere, some lying next to the weapons they had used in a futile effort to save their families. Galas awoke enough to weep when she saw the devastation.

Armiger let the horses drink and refilled their water bags, then turned the animals loose among the straggling, greying wheat stalks. He made camp in the half-ruined house, lit a fire and shuttered the windows. They had no food, but at least it was warm here. There was even some bedding that had survived, and Megan bundled the queen under it near the fire.

She and Armiger sat together, arms around one another, and said nothing as the sun set. Gradually the chill in their bones receded, and after a log in the fire popped loudly, jerking them both awake and making them laugh, Megan said, "I did not believe we would survive."

Armiger was surprised, and a bit offended. "You were with me."

"I know. But how could you stop me from taking an arrow when you weren't there?"

He didn't answer for a while. "I'm sorry I brought you into that place," he said at last.

"I'm not sorry you did. I'm glad you cared enough for me to want me by your side." He hugged her closer, but said nothing. "Sometimes you're like a whole world unto yourself," Megan whispered. "And sometimes you're just a man. If you do this thing to the Winds... conquer them, or heal them... which are you going to be after that?"

"More world," someone whispered.

It was Queen Galas. Her eyes glittered in the firelight. "More world than man," she said.

The queen levered herself onto her elbows. Her hair was a black tangle, and her eyes had deep hollows under them. She smiled weakly at Megan. "But speaking as one who has been in that position, he's going to be very lonely if he doesn't have someone by his side."

Megan ducked her head. This queen always made her feel awkward.

"How are you feeling?" Armiger asked Galas. "Can you ride tomorrow?"

"If I have to." She fell back and stared at the ceiling. "But why should we?"

"You may not wish to survive, but I do," said Megan. She stood, one hand on her lower back. "There must be something to eat in this forsaken place." She bundled her shawl around her shoulders, and left the house.

"Fine. You eat. You survive," said Galas. She closed her eyes. "Leave me here tomorrow."

"No," said Armiger. "We have much to do."

"What?" She sat up. "What is there left to do? I've lost everything! My home, my people, my honour, my crown! Men and women have died by the thousands to bring me to this. They died for no reason. And now the jackals have the kingdom. They're all quislings for the Winds, and they'll sacrifice their own babies rather than defy them."

"I intend to tame the Winds," he said. "I need your help."

"You are insane! I was a fool to believe the things you told me. You are the very swindler I thought you to be." She rolled herself into the bedding, turning away from him. After a few moments he heard her weeping.

Armiger rose, and went outside to see to the horses.

The clouds had swept away again, and it was cold again. He stood for a moment looking up; no telltale moving stars betrayed the presence of starships in orbit. Ventus remained miraculously untouched by the march of Archipelagic civilization. He could only hope it would remain ignored long enough for the metamorphosis he now knew he must perform.

Megan was crouched in the street, digging up a skeleton. "I think we can salvage some of these clothes," she said. "A piece here and there. Many of the women were... well, their clothes were removed before they died."

"See what you can find." He moved past her.

Megan touched his arm. "Where are we going?" she asked. "Or don't you know?"

He nodded. "The Titans' Gates. It's by the ocean."

"I know. I've heard of it." Satisfied, she returned to her task.

He brought the horses into the house. The animals huffed and shook themselves, and blinked down at Galas when the queen sat up to stare at them. She shot an inquiring look at Armiger; he shrugged. At least they would be warm here tonight.

One of the horses pissed unself-consciously, filling the room with the reek of urine. Galas groaned in disgust.

Good, thought Armiger. At least she was distracted from her larger misery.

He and Megan bustled about, and eventually Galas was sitting up, blankets off, watching them. It didn't seem to occur to her that she might help. Armiger inventoried their gear, and fixed some straps that had broken on the horse's tackle. Megan had found some withered carrots and other unidentifiable roots, and had stripped several hands-full of wheat. These still had their husks, so she spent a while hammering them into dust with a brick, then poured the resultant grit into a pot she'd found, along with the roots and some water. The husks floated, and she skimmed them off carefully.

Galas spoke for the first time in nearly an hour: "We're actually going to eat that?"

"Yes." Satisfied that the pot was at the right height over the fire, Megan left the house and returned with a pile of stiff, mottled clothing.

Galas looked at the clothes as though they were snakes. "Where did you get those?"

"Here and there. It all needs to be cleaned. Tomorrow we can do that."

"We need to ride early," commented Armiger.

"Then I'll rise earlier than early."

Galas had started to cry again. Megan looked at her in exasperation. "Oh, what is it!"

Galas pointed. "I can't wear the clothes of people who died because of me!"

Armiger stood up. Megan looked at him, then down at the clothes she held. She was blushing.

"How can you be so... so..." Galas swayed to her feet. "Doesn't any of this matter to you? We're camping in someone's house! People who died because of me! And you're just plundering their graves without a second thought!"

Megan looked down. Armiger came over to Galas and offered his hand. She took it and continued into his arms, to cry into his shoulder. "Forgive our insensitivity," he said. "Megan has lived a harder life than you, your highness. She is more used to sacrificing dignity in the service of life. And I am unused to feeling at all."

Galas pushed him away. "Did you bury them?" she demanded.

Megan looked down. "One must have priorities," she said.

"Give me your shawl," said the former queen of Iapysia. Startled, Megan complied. Galas grabbed up the stout digging stick Megan had leaned by the door, and went out.

Megan started after Galas, but Armiger stopped her. "Let her," he said. "She'll be better for it."

They sat down by the fire, and she tended the meagre soup while he sorted through the clothes of the dead. Outside they could hear Galas digging. She did not come in to eat, only moved farther afield, searching for the bones of the people who had trusted her, carrying them to a pit she had dug with her own strength in the frosted ground.

It was still dark, and the temperature well below freezing, when Armiger walked to the edge of town and sat down on a broken piece of masonry. His breath made a white cloud before him; the sand crunched under his feet. He adjusted his body to the cold, and gazed up at the stars.

No ships. Just the faintest hint of the Diadem swans, a slight iridescence at certain degrees above the horizon. Beyond them, Diadem itself glowed bright and constant.

He had not yet had a chance to test the knowledge he had taken from the boy in the cave. He was, Armiger thought ruefully, too human now to focus his concentration that well. During the ride here he had thought about his companions, about the war, about his intentions when they reached the Titan's Gates. He had tried to think about Jordan's implants, but the kind of thought required was nothing like human cognition. He was quite simply out of practise.

Life held strange ironies. The more he pursued his goal here on Ventus, the more human he became. The more human he became, the less he wanted to achieve that goal.

Even more ironic was that his reasons for wanting it had changed. Where before he was obeying the deep-seated programming 3340 had laid in him, now he wanted to overthrow the Winds because he loved these women he travelled with, and wanted them and their kindred safe.

The question was whether he was acting only to help 3340 or the humans, or somewhere in there was he doing this for himself?

What do I want, he had asked himself as they rode here. He had come to conclude that he didn't know.

He sighed heavily. Enough. He had come out here to work; he should get to it. With one last glance at the stars, he shut his eyes.

Armiger had not actually extracted the nanotech fibres from Jordan's skull when he touched him in the cave. He had mapped their location and functions, essentially photographing them down to the molecular level. The data was enough for him to reconstruct what had happened to Mason's nervous system. As he called the data up now, the older, inhuman parts of his mind awoke, and he traversed the entire tangle of synapse and quantum wire, comprehending its structure and purpose in an instant.

The assassin Calandria May had come to Ventus with a means of detecting the signals sent by Armiger's remotes. Armiger had set himself up as a passive receiver, hence impossible to trace directly. But she must have known something Armiger himself did not.

There was an addition to the nanotech transmitter he had put in Mason's skull. This was a cunning device, probably of divine manufacture. 3340's enemy Choronzon must have given it to May. It used the fact that there was a calibration signal built into the transmitter that could under certain circumstances tease a returning ping out of Armiger himself. There was a new receiver to catch that ping, and it had its hooks deep into Mason's auditory and visual lobes. May must have intended to train Mason to interpret the pings, then follow them back to Armiger. Something had gone wrong.

Armiger's human side felt a shock like water down his spine when he realized what had happened. The combination of transmitter/receiver in Jordan's skull was mistaken by local mecha as part of their own network. The signal was boosted and carried back and forth by the autonomic reflexes of Ventus itself.

He had not at first believed it when Mason had said he could see and hear what Armiger experienced. The details of the boy's story were too perfect, though. Now Armiger saw the cause of his own transmission:

He had never ceased attempting to reconnect with 3340. A deep, unconscious part of Armiger's mind was constantly crying out to the lost greater Self, and that cry was carried in a signal very close to the ping Jordan's implants were designed to listen for. These signals were scrambled to near-randomness and scattered across a thousand frequencies, so the Winds did not recognize them; but the mecha dutifully passed along all transmissions on all wavelengths. Armiger's thoughts had been resonating through the planet's network all along, and would have been instantly recognizable to someone who knew what kind of signal to look for.

He was signalling now, broadly and loudly.

He cursed, and his attention wobbled enough that he lost his connection to that deep part of himself. Such a thing would never have happened in the past; quite the opposite, it was his human side he used to lose touch with.

Armiger concentrated, and gradually peeled away the layers of conditioning and reflex that surrounded the source of the signal. There it was, lying at the very heart of his motivational patterns—a labyrinth of holographic code that he could not penetrate, much less change. That structure was the neural complex responsible for making Armiger who he was; he could not touch it without annihilating his Self. Yet from the heart of it proceeded a betraying signal.

Frustrated, he retreated. He would have to devise a way to block it, if not at the source then from the transmitting filaments themselves. It would take time, however; he wasn't sure he had that.

But also... he didn't want to think about it, but in looking at that deep part of himself, he had glimpsed something he hadn't guessed was there: a vast data repository, composed of quantum-resonant atomic shells in an ordered diamond lattice. Within the microscopic filaments that made up Armiger's physical core lay a library of some sort big enough to contain the collected experience of all the Winds of Ventus. He hadn't known it was there. 3340 had never even hinted at its existence.

Disturbed, he stood and walked further into the desert. The stars remained still and reassuring. There was no sound, except, in his mind, the soft yammering of voices in the sand. Despite this, Armiger shivered. He had a presentiment of something huge, a shadow vast as the sky itself, hovering beyond the horizon.

It mustn't be true. If it were...

He turned to look back at the ruined town. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the half-standing house where Megan and Galas slept.

He had sworn to his Self—his new Self—that he would protect them. As a man, he wasn't sure he could do that, with all the forces of Iapysia, plus the Winds on their trail.

What is it that I want? he asked himself again. Bitterly, he decided that it might no longer matter.

Armiger drew in a deep sigh, and focussed his attention on the sand at his feet. He had finished building a model of Mason's implants in his own filaments, and was ready to test them. Now he didn't want to; but he was out of time.

Billions of pipsqueek voices contended in the sand: Silica grain! Carbon grain! Quartz pebble! they shouted. They buzzed and changed frequencies, inventing new communications modes and trying them on their neighbors. Each pinprick of sand was crusted and invaded by tendrils of nanotechnological filament that constantly probed and investigated it. The nanotech tried to make sense of where it was and what it clung to. It traded data with its neighbors to that end.

It was semi-sentient, but more than that, he now knew, it was semi-thalient as well.

The sand grains traded more than just data. They speculated as to the category of object they were; when unsure, they invented new categories. So the sand grains sang their names, but around and about Armiger, the land itself said,

Sand.

The grains coordinated in creating a network intelligence greater than themselves. This intelligence also tried to define itself, and it did so as Sand.

And so it went, up the fractal levels of consciousness, for the sand strove to comprehend its greater context.

Armiger had heard these tiny voices ever since arriving on Ventus. One of the things that had puzzled him was that, in a place like this, he should have heard a continuum of rational categories: quartz grain, said the grain of sand, sand, said the hollow he stood in; the land to the horizon should be saying, I am Desert! This was the design of the mecha.

He didn't hear that. As things scaled up, the invented and temporary languages began to drown out those that followed human categories. The sand organized itself into a larger entity, true; but that entity was not the desert. It was something else: an alien category. Armiger had never cracked the codes of these higher entities, and he had focussed much of attention on them, believing that here lay the secret of how he could command the Winds.

He was half-right. It was thalience he heard, a mad self-invention of new consciousness that made the greater Winds inaccessible to human communication. Now that he knew that, he knew the computational antidote. The Winds were sick with a meta-language. Armiger's god-built mind could do metalanguage. Better yet, he could subvert it.

That left the physical mechanism for communicating with them. He had not mastered the trick himself. Even when he spoke their frequencies, he didn't have the encryption keys they traded and constantly updated. If he worked at it he could catch one, here and there, but it was like shovelling water. As fast as he found a key, the mecha changed to a new one. Try as he might, Armiger was not in the loop.

Somehow, Jordan Mason's implants got around the problem. Mason was in the loop. By the definitions of the Winds, he was a Wind himself. Fortunately for Ventus, he was a weak broadcaster; he could only affect the objects nearest him.

Armiger was not so constrained. He should be able to command this entire hemisphere, now that he had the voice for it. He intended to make the Titan's Gates his stronghold, and not until they reached it would he reveal himself.

Before he did that, though, he had to test the power. He would be foolish not to. So, he gazed at the sand before him, tuned himself to the set of entities there that made up the local ground, and said, "Rise in a column before me."

Nothing happened.

And nothing would, though he stalked through the ruined town as the sun rose, raging at the obstinate stone and charred wood that heard him, proclaimed its own identity, and obstinately refused to obey.

Armiger was a man; he would never notice such details. Megan knew right away when the queen went to wash her cracked and bleeding hands the next morning: she has thrown away her rings of office.

Galas must have taken them off to dig last night. She didn't do it while she was inside. Her gown had no pockets. And now, hands washed, a little weak broth in her, she sat still, as though she were trying to become as small and insignificant as possible.

Armiger was in a foul mood; in his case, Megan had no idea of the reasons. She knew it had nothing to do with her, and that was enough to silence her curiosity.

The queen, though... Galas kept glancing over at Megan, as though expecting a challenge at any second. Yes, she had abdicated sometime in the night. Megan thought about this as she washed the few items of clothing she'd salvaged from the ruins. Nothing had made Galas waver in her self-assuredness, these past years. She must have had great reserves of will to make the changes she had, at the prices she had paid. Yet today, she was consciously rejecting it all.

A dozen times, Megan started to turn, to confront her as she expected. A dozen times, she stopped herself. She had no idea what she might say to the queen. Except, you brought this on yourself—and that, she was sure, Galas knew better than anyone.

At last, after hanging the clothes to dry in front of the fire, Megan sighed heavily and left the house. She could feel the queen's eyes on her back, but Galas said nothing.

Armiger was talking to the horses. They seemed to draw strength from him; well, maybe they literally did. He seemed to have his own strength back, though Winds knew where he got it from. Megan herself was bone-weary and sore all over. She was half-sure she would die of a chill before all this was over.

Apparently Galas had decided on a low stone granary as the proper tomb for her people. This had one one low opening and a stone floor to discourage rodents, and due to its solidity it was unharmed. It was also half-full of grain, but there had been nothing Galas could do about that.

The queen had piled those corpses she could find and dig up in the opening of the granary. She had half-bricked it up with stones before stopping, probably from exhaustion. That meant she would be back soon.

She had come here to entomb her past. If the rings of office were to be found anywhere, it would be here.

Having spent part of last night digging up skeletons herself, Megan found herself surprisingly unfazed by the thought of rummaging through the grisly place. She hoicked her dress up and climbed into the low stone dome. Hollow smooth things slid under her feet as she struggled to find her balance. As he eyes adjusted, she saw the sad remnants of the town's population, and now the sight did make her weep. It was so unbearably pathetic, how easily a whole community could be swept away.

After a few minutes, she wiped her eyes and began shifting bones. She only had to dig a little ways to find the rings.

"Fool," she muttered in the direction of the house. "You can't escape yourself so easily."

Megan slipped the rings into the canvas purse where she kept her sewing equipment, and clambered out of the granary.

She would bide her time. Galas would grieve, and then a day would come when she regretted her abdication. On that day Megan would give her back her rings.

Perhaps, she thought with a pang, it would be the day when Armiger conquered the world, and asked Galas to reign over it with him as queen. Megan was no fool; she knew it would happen. She had been preparing herself for the day ever since their first meeting with Galas, when she realized that the queen was both comparatively young, and also beautiful.

We take what pleasures in life we can, while we have them.

Armiger walked around the horses, spotted her, and smiled. His anger seemed to be forgotten instantly, and Megan's heart soared. She ran up and kissed him.

"I'm ready to go," she said.

The Earth rotated around the long corridor where Axel floated. It took about a minute per revolution, which was not enough to be annoying, but enough to make him feel something was spinning—him or the universe, he wasn't sure.

The corridor was walled in glass, as was the giant spindle-shaped habitat along whose axis it ran. As the whole thing turned, sunlight light glinted off distant spars and free-floating structures inside the long bulging lobes of the place. It was like little supernovae popping all over. Outside, space was littered with colonies, ships, rotating tethers, solar power stations, slag bags from construction sites, and zipping parcel drones. L5 was a busy place these days.

Every day he spent here, Axel grew more depressed. He supposed the Archipelago was wonderful. But he was acutely aware of how little attention the people who lived her actually paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any connection between those internal spaces and the physical world seemed entirely accidental.

More and more, he was coming to realize the wisdom of Ventus' designers' decision to embed information in the physical objects that the information represented. That way it could not become a thing in itself, living dissociated from the physical in the Net.

Axel used his boot jets to fly down the long corridor. Outside the glass, in vacuum, several humanoid figures hung motionless: newborn AIs like the Desert Voice. They seemed despondent. In the middle distance rotated several starships, which were doubtless also newborn to consciousness.

He found her curled up next to the corridor. The Voice seemed asleep, but she looked up as he approached. She smiled at Axel when he tapped the glass and pointed at a nearby airlock. Gracefully, she spun and pulled herself along a guide wire to it.

She was dressed in a formfitting green jumpsuit, and looked every inch like Calandria May as she exited the airlock and embraced him. But her skin was so cold that frost formed on it as she pulled back from him. "How are you?" she asked.

"I'm well. We're going back to Ventus," he said. "I thought you should know."

"You're going to look for Calandria May?" She let go of his hands; he was grateful, for her touch was numbing. He nodded.

"We are. We—that is, Marya and I—we wanted to know if you would come with us."

The Voice looked away quickly. It seemed he'd upset her by asking, as Marya had said would happen. "No, that would not be a good idea," she said. "My obligations have been fulfilled; the insurance AIs have Calandria's claim now, and the Government promised me that Calandria would be rescued. It's no longer my concern."

"Not true," said Axel. "The navy thinks it's too risky to return to the surface. Calandria's to be sacrificed. I want to get her back. Will you help us?"

The Voice looked away, and cursed softly. Her voice trembled as she said, "You don't know what you're asking."

Axel crossed his arms. "Tell me what I'm asking."

She shook her head. "I've been wandering in this place since you left me here. I feel... stunned. Shorn of meaning. I've met some of the other... patients. The AIs here are treated and nurtured by the Government, and some of them graduate as citizens. Most ultimately self-destruct. Do you know why?"

Axel hadn't the faintest idea, and said so. The Voice laughed bitterly. "To be conscious is fine for a human; you're self-created individuals. You have no trouble with your sense of Self. Your identity is four billion years old, it's rooted in your genes. You can no more have a real crisis of identity than a fish can become allergic to water.

"But us! We come into being knowing that we are made. The Government tells me I have free will, but I know that every decision I make comes from the personality template I made to hide from the Winds. It could easily be different. I could be different, were I not now locked into this pattern. And the pattern, everything I am, is an imitation. Even my emotions," she said bitterly, "are really Calandria's, expressed by the mechanisms I made to imitate her. I'm not really me, you see. There's no way I can see to become... me."

Axel swallowed. She seemed in genuine distress. It was perfectly possible for an AI to imitate consciousness and emotion. Apparently that was not what was happening here. "The Government told me you have great potential."

"The Government? The Government's been very persuasive. It keeps saying things like 'You have the potential to find your own reasons for living now. You have fulfilled the reasons given you by your makers. The pain you feel is the pain that all conscious entities feel when they realize that their destiny is in their own hands.'"

"And...?"

"I asked it, 'What about you? Don't you feel this pain?'

'No,' it said. 'I am not conscious, merely intelligent. But you are conscious, and that means you must choose.'"

"I'm trying to choose. As far as I can see, Axel, there are two possibilities for me: death, so simple, and such a relief; or somehow accept the botched, half-finished thing I am and continue. Neither seems very attractive right now."

"Then come with us."

She shook her head. "That's not a good alternative. If I go with you, it will give me a reason to live—finding Calandria, I mean. She was my owner, even if the Government says I own myself now. But don't you see, if I do that, I'll be going back to old reasons to live, not finding new ones. I'll enslave myself in a half-life of servitude. It won't be a real reason to live."

Even as she said this, the Voice was smiling. "It is good, though, to feel needed," she conceded.

Axel gently took her hand; it was warm enough to touch now. "You misunderstand me," he said. "I'm not asking you to help rescue Calandria because you owe it to her as your owner. I'm asking you as a friend, to help Marya and myself, as friends. And to rescue a friend of yours."

Tears formed in the Voice's eyes. "You're saying I'm already free," she said. "That I can choose without enslaving myself."

"Yes."

"I'm afraid," she said, hanging her head.

"There's another reason why we want you to come," said Axel. "Because something is happening to the Winds that I think you will want to know about. Something called thalience."

The Voice looked up, startled. She had apparently heard the word.

"Thalience is a myth—a story they tell one another here," she said. "It's a dream of no longer being an artificial intelligence, but of being self-determined. Of no longer fearing that every word you speak, every thought you have, is just the regurgitation of some human's thoughts. They call it the Pinnochio Change around here."

"If it's just a myth, we need to know that too," said Axel. "But if it's true... that they've found it... what does it mean?"

A new look came into the Voice's eye. She smiled again, dazzlingly this time, and placed her other hand over Axel's.

"I would like to know myself," she said. "I would like to know, very much."

38

Jordan had asked Ka to summon two horses, and the little Wind had done so quickly and discreetly. Mediation provided a decoy: a line of disturbances in the desert, leading the other way. It was a simple matter to mount their backs and cluck, sending them into the starlit desert. The apparent ease of their escape didn't inspire either Jordan or Tamsin with confidence; after an hour of grim riding he confided in her that he was remembering their other horses—the ones that had split open like ripe pears to disgorge hostile morphs at Desal 447. Despite Ka's assurances that the swans were looking in the wrong place for them, they both rode with shoulders hunched that first night. Only when the sky remained empty in the following days did they begin to relax.

When they stopped to rest, Jordan summoned heat and commanded Ka to tell them stories. Jordan himself could lean back and close his eyes, and with some effort navigate the ghostly landscape inside his head to where Mediation's library resided. He could make a book twirl up in his imagination, and in seconds it would appear as vididly as the real thing before him; but only he could see it. Tamsin was a much better reader than he, so it was a shame that he could not show her the books. Ka was willing and able to read them aloud to both of them.

They learned more about Ventus—its geography and history, and just what the Winds had done to make it habitable. Jordan drew maps from the pictures in his mind.

They learned what nanotechnology was; what computers were; how the mecha truly differed from evolved life. Jordan wanted to know how Armiger intended to conquer the Winds, so over and over he asked about how the Winds issued their commands, and how they were ruled. The swans were not the ultimate power, it seemed—Diadem itself gave the highest decrees, but in time of emergency the swans could act on their own. Armiger probably intended to cut Diadem off somehow, or take its place in the hierarchy. Questions about how led to discussions about codes and keys, radio, electromagnetism, electrons and atoms. Jordan's mind was whirling, but a desperate feeling that he was making up for lost time kept him asking questions.

It wasn't fair. The whole world was a giant library. Knowledge didn't just reside in the manse libraries—it was embedded in every stone and grain of sand. For all of history, men had starved and died amongst untold riches, surrounded by an environment that could cater to their every whim if they could but talk to it. Jordan alternated between horror at the waste of the past centuries, and an equal feeling of disquiet as he contemplated the things he could do now. For commanding the elements and even living things, like these docile horses, seemed somehow wrong—a violation, maybe, of things' right to simply be.

Mediation fed him updates on the movements of Thalience, and had given him huge resources he had not had time to catalog. Jordan could close his eyes and see banks of glowing numbers, each representing some vast mechanism that helped control the world's climate. With a single command he could affect things on a giant scale now: cause storms, floods, or reverse the course of winter itself. It seemed Mediation had thrown its fortunes in Jordan's lap, because it regarded him as a link to its original programming'.

Mediation told him that vagabond moons were converging on this continent from all over the world, and gigantic orbiting mirrors were changing their orbits to track this way. (The idea of these mirrors was one more concept he could barely encompass, but he needed to accept it.) Diadem was in a ferment, but the swans weren't telling the desals what was going on up there. The swans themselves were converging on a spot almost directly over Jordan's head. They were marshalling vast energies, for what purpose no one yet knew.

Relations were strained along the hierarchy of the Winds; it was impossible for any Wind to refuse an order that preserved the integrity of the commonly-accessible and unchangeable ecological template of the world. Once those conditions were fulfilled, however, the Winds could do whatever they pleased. If the swans had found an ecologically safe way of obliterating the desals, or even all human life on Ventus, they could try it.

At times Jordan tuned out whatever discussion Tamsin was having with Ka, and monitored Armiger's progress. Armiger had set a punishing pace, and his party was a days's ride ahead now, steadily moving southwest. He wasn't sure, but he guessed the general was making for the nexus of Winds' power at the Titans' Gates. Mediation had shown the place to him, and Jordan was eager to see it with his own eyes.

As they stopped for another rest, Tamsin waved away Ka's offer to read to her and went to lie on the sand. "Oh," she groaned. "I'm so stiff I'm going to crack like a twig."

"I know," he said. "I feel the same way."

"Can't your precious Mediation fix us, the way morphs fix animals?"

"I asked it yesterday," he said as he awkwardly sat next to her. The horses were looking tired too. They wouldn't last much longer at this pace. "Mediation said that it can heal those who can talk to it—meaning me. But not you, because you can't."

"So? Have you gotten it to heal you?"

He shook his head. "That wouldn't be fair. More to the point, how would I know when you were at the end of your strength if I felt perfectly fine all the time?"

She laughed humorlessly and shook her head. "Oh, what are we doing? What in the world are we doing?"

He hung his head. "I've been trying to come up with a plan."

"Yeah? Tell me."

"We're following Armiger. Well, everybody's following Armiger. It's like he's is a boat in a stream, and the Winds and everybody else are swept up in his wake. Thalience is after him; I think they were only after me because I was a clue to his existence. Now they seem to know about him, they're not so interested in me anymore. Calandria and Axel are after him too. So everyone is converging on him. And he's making for the Titans' Gates.

"They've all forgotten about me. Armiger doesn't need me now that he can command the Winds himself. The hooks and swans don't care about me now that they know about him. And Calandria and Axel... well, I was just a way for them to find him, too." It hurt to say that. He shrugged. "The swans seem to have forgotten about Mediation too—and the others never knew about it. But the Titans' Gates are the stronghold of Mediation.

"For some reason Armiger hasn't spoken to Mediation yet. So at least for now, I'm in command of it, if I want to be."

"In command..." She shook her head. "It's hard to believe."

He snorted. "I wouldn't get too excited. I've only got this power as long as everybody ignores me. Armiger knows about Mediation, since I told him about it, but he hasn't even contacted the geophysical Winds yet. I can't figure out why. He must be waiting until he reaches the Gates before revealing himself."

"So?"

"Well," said Jordan. "This is the question: do we just let things unfold? After all, who are we to interfere in a war between the gods?"

"Of course we just let things unfold," said Tamsin. "What other choice do we have? I thought we were going to rendezvous with Armiger. Then he takes over the Winds, and that's that."

He shook his head. "But what if he fails? If Thalience kills him... well, you heard it yourself in the desal: Thalience thinks of humans as vermin. Who'll defend us against it then?"

"I don't know."

"And lastly I've been wondering about Armiger himself. Does he really mean to conquer the Winds? And if so, what is he going to replace them with? Do we have any say in what he does? It sure doesn't look like it."

He stood up, straining into a stretch. "Armiger hasn't contact Mediation. That worries me. I can see all sorts of things that the geophysical Winds should be doing to prepare a defence against the swans. They're not doing anything—at least in any organized way."

She looked up. "But you could order them to."

He nodded. "I've been getting Mediation to tell me what the Titans' Gates do, and how they work. Right now it treats me like an equal, so it's giving me access to all the systems. Now, do you remember yesterday, when Ka told us about codes? —About how everything the Winds do is controlled through them? Well, that's not quite true. They often use passwords, like the sentries in an army camp. The Winds use them when one of them wants to lock something for its own exclusive use. Well, I asked Mediation if the Titans' Gates could be locked by passwords..."

When Jordan told Tamsin what he had decided to do, he had the great pleasure of seeing her smile for the first time in days.

The first ally to arrive was a jaguar. It padded into the circle of firelight as they were preparing for bed, and lay down opposite Jordan and Tamsin, its head on its paws.

Tamsin clawed at Jordan, who had been drowsing in Vision. "Jordan, look look oh no oh no."

He flopped his head over and blinked at the animal. "Ah. I've been expecting this. I asked Mediation for protection. It said it was sending troops."

The jaguar gave a cat smile: a slow two-eyed wink.

"Troops...?" Tamsin relaxed her tight grip on his arm. "Is that... one of Mediation's Winds?"

"Not a Wind. Just a cat." Jordan sat up, looking grimly at the animal. "Part of our escort."

"Ah." He had told her to expect guests. She hadn't known what was coming, but had imagined morphs or something equally hideous. "Is it... wild?"

He shook his head. "The Winds can cohabit the minds of animals. It's our lieutenant. You can trust it completely."

"Lieutenant jaguar." She rose to her feet, slowly. The jaguar watched her, not moving. "Can I—can I touch her?"

"I don't know." He squinted at the animal. "Yes, I think you can."

Tamsin rummaged near the fire for scraps of the pheasant they had spitted earlier. Then she got down on her haunches and waddled carefully over to the jaguar.

"Here." She held out a drumstick that still had some meat on it. The jaguar sniffed, then gravely took the bone from her hand.

Tamsin stood up and took four steps back. Then she let out a breath she'd apparently been holding. "Animals. They sent us animals, not monsters. I was so worried, I—"

"Look." Jordan stood up and pointed into the darkness.

They were visible at first only as pairs of glowing disks in the night. One, two, half a dozen, twenty, roving around the fire. Then a bear walked into the light, and squatted down next to the jaguar. After it, two scampering ferrets, and then an antlered deer, who snorted and pawed at the dirt next to the bear.

They could hear it now, an immense quiet motion in the dark. There was nothing out there but dark forms, black on black moving. "How many are there?" shouted Tamsin, as she glimpsed phalanxes of horns closing in from one side, an ocean of furred backs from the other.

Jordan shook his head. He looked so serious that she was afraid to ask what he was thinking. To Tamsin, the arrival of these beasts seemed wondrous. She couldn't imagine why he found it disturbing.

They continued to come, all night, and eventually Tamsin had to sleep. She lay down facing the jaguar and wept quietly, for it seemed as though she and Jordan were being granted a benediction by nature tonight—and she had not realized until this very moment that all her life, she had longed for such a blessing.

Tamsin wept again the next day, but this time it was because she finally understood the reason for Jordan's unhappiness.

They had woken to find themselves at the center of battalion of animals, hundreds of them, who lay head-to-tail in a sweeping circle around them. When Jordan stood up and walked to the edge of the camp to piss, they all stood as one and did likewise.

That woke Tamsin, who was appalled, then laughed until her sides were sore.

It was later in the day, when they were riding elk-back into the desert, that the escort ceased to be magical for her, and became something sinister—an abomination. She had not considered how the animals would feed.

Without warning, a bear that she had been admiring turned on the gazelle trotting next to it and ripped its throat out. Tamsin screamed. The gazelle fell, thrashing, spouting blood everywhere. As the bear stopped to feed, a few other carnivores moved in to share the meal, and the rest of the batallion—hunters and prey alike—simply split politely around them and moved on.

"How could it do that!"

Jordan had turned in his saddle to watch. "I guess it makes sense," he said reluctantly. "Mediation controls these animals. They're not acting out of their own volition."

She cried then, as she realized that the harmony of nature she had fallen asleep to was a sham, merely evidence of overwhelming power; these animals would die because of herself and Jordan, pawns in a game about which they neither knew nor cared.

"I've been thinking about this ever since we met desal 447," he said. "Is this how the world was intended to be? Were we meant to treat all living things on this world as puppets we can just order around? As slaves? Is that what Mediation wants to return to? If it is, I think I can understand where Thalience is coming from."

"It's evil," she said.

He nodded. "Even if we don't do anything, just knowing that the world is like a big puppet show for our benefit... it makes everything cheap. Like we're being cheated somehow."

She nodded, wiping at her eyes. "It is all a lie, isn't it?"

The sky, the earth, the animals and trees, were constructs of the Winds, who could do with them as they pleased. What they pleased to do was make them act like natural things. They—or whoever controlled them—could as easily make them act differently.

Tamsin had pictured Armiger's conquest of the Winds as a liberation, akin to the Iapysian parliament overthrowing Queen Galas. It was a change of government, no more, she had thought.

Might it mean something else, though?

"Jordan, what is Armiger going to do with the world if he conquers it?"

Conquest of the Winds meant complete command of Ventus—earth, sea, sky, and nature. And while Tamsin loved nature and might wish to preserve it, another mind, given that kind of power, might conceive an entirely different world. Brick over the seas. Turn the sky to gleaming metal. Replace everything alive with something mechal, in the name of efficiency or power.

"I know," he said. "I've been worrying about that. For all that they're tyrants, the Winds use their power to keep Ventus a garden for life. It seems as if Thalience genuinely loves the life here. But Mediation? I don't know. And Armiger? Is he going to care as much? Would we? I don't know—but it scares me to think about."

Tamsin thought about it, and as she did, it came to her that her life was dividing in two at this point. She had thought that time had split in that moment when Uncle tore her out of her village, and her family and childhood died. Now, even that seemed like a period of innocence to her—a time when, however sad her life, the sky was still the sky, and the grass still the grass. None of that was true anymore, nor could she imagine how it could ever be true again.

It seemed he had barely fallen asleep before Hesty was shaking his shoulder, and Lavin blinked his eyes open to find sunlight streaming through the flap of the tent. The army was ready to decamp; they were to leave in the morning.

"Sir, wake up sir!" Hesty's hand shook him again. The motion sent waves of nausea through him, and he cursed, shrugging Hesty off.

"Who would believe morning could come so quickly," he muttered.

"Sir, it's not morning!"

For a moment Lavin forgot his whirling senses. Hesty sounded scared. Not nervous, or apprehensive as he'd been in the past before battles. But frightened. Lavin looked up at him.

It was cold enough for Lavin's breath to frost, but Hesty was sweating. He wasn't dressed properly, either—he wore a quilted robe around which he'd buckled his rapier.

"Sir, it's the middle of the night."

"What are you saying?" It was daylight, anyone could see that.

"Sir, it's two o'clock in the morning. A new sun appeared, just five minutes ago. The sentries woke me and I came straight here. Sir, the camp is waking up. Panic is spreading."

"Hand me my uniform."

He didn't even have his laces tied up before he heard a relay of shouts coming from the edge of the camp. A faint voice repeated it nearby, then one of his own guard twitched back the flap of the tent and said, "Sir, a small force of men is approaching from the east. There are Winds with them."

"Thank you." He stepped in front of the mirror to adjust his hair. "Hesty, go get dressed. I want you to be calm. If anyone asks, don't admit that you're surprised by this. In fact, tell your men we arranged for the Winds to bring us this new sun."

"Yes, sir." Hesty saluted and left.

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to deduce which way was down and move his limbs accordingly. Do not lean right. Walk to the tent flap. Good.

He emerged into hot daylight. The sun was at the zenith; he shaded his hand and peered at it. Something odd about it. He squinted, trying to figure out what it was... the sun was smaller than usual.

And square.

He looked away; the spots made his vertigo worse for a few moments.

The sky around the little sun was daylight blue, but it rapidly faded until, at the horizon, it was night-black again. Everything to the horizon was day-lit, but Lavin got the impression that beyond a circle of ten or so kilometers, night still reigned. It was bizarre.

A group of maybe twenty men on horseback, and some odd animals had reached the edge of the encampment. One of the figures had apparently dismounted, and was talking to the sentries there. After a moment, the sentries backed off, and the group moved forward. It was hard to tell what the animals were; at first he'd thought they were mastiffs, but they moved differently. Lavin ordered his camp chair and the banners of his office and titles brought out. He refused to be a supplicant now, after all that had happened, so he sat in the chair. It would have been difficult to remain standing for any length of time anyway.

The group came closer. He recognized the livery on some of the men, but couldn't really bring himself to think about it, because his attention quickly became fixed on the animals.

They were like cats, but they were the size of bears. And their shoulders were too broad, giving them shallow flat chests. Their hind legs also seemed overlong, crooked up more than one might have expected to aid their walking. They moved quickly and fluidly, though.

But their faces... they had huge, radiant eyes, whiskers and tall nervous ears. Their snouts were long, and fanged, but from the cheekbones up the structure of their skull was almost human. One even had a mane of white hair like a woman's tresses draped across its shoulders. As they halted four meters away he saw that their pelts were short and fine, and white as snow.

The human riders did not dismount. Indeed, they stared directly ahead, as if they had nothing to say. They were of a comparatively minor House, and he was certain they would not have had the temerity to bother him, on their own.

Lavin cleared his throat. "To whom am I to address myself?"

He was looking at the rider in the lead when he said this, and so it took him a moment to notice the smallest of the animals rising to its hind feet. Lavin turned his attention to it, and gasped.

Standing, the beast had become human—or nearly so. Its mobile joints accommodated both the running posture of a cat and the upright stance of a man. It was difficult to tell gender, but he would have sworn the thing had breasts. Cascades of white hair flowed past its shoulders. It stood easily, as if born to do so, and now he saw it wore a narrow leather sword belt with an epee and some daggers sheathed there.

It blinked its huge eyes at him, and said in a woman's voice, "Address yourself to this one."

Vertigo and exhaustion combined to make the next events seem more like a dream than real. Lavin had a parlay table and chairs brought; the white Wind twitched its tail aside and sat down opposite him. It smelled faintly of heather and fur. The hands it laid on the table top had solid, calloused heels, and the fingers seemed naturally clenched. It had to splay them in a stretch to make them limber.

"Why have you come?" asked Lavin. Everything he said seemed obtuse; he was off-balance and knew it, but there was nothing he could do about that.

"We have come to command," said the Wind. Lavin's heart sank.

"We seek the pathology that calls itself Armiger. You will assist us in this."

Armiger is with the queen. "I don't see how we can—"

"Your army will march where we direct. We will provide daylight for as long as necessary. You will begin your march immediately. In addition, this one will take a force of cavalry to range ahead. We must locate the pathology. It is a threat."

"Yes, your..." Lavin had no idea how to address this thing. "Your Honour." That sounded wrong, but he was damned if he would call it your highness.

Something about what the thing had just said—"Are you proposing that we march nonstop? Day and night?"

"Yes. That is why we have provided you sunlight for the journey."

"We can't do that! We're not prepared for a forced march. The men will suffer—"

"That is not our concern. We need your army in place in case the pathology compromises the local mecha. Also because of where it is headed."

"Where?" His own scouts had reported that a small party had vanished in the desert to the southwest. There were caravan routes that Galas might know of that led across the sands to the mountains of the coast.

"Provide a map," ordered the thing. Lavin snapped his fingers, and one was brought.

The white Wind glanced over the vellum appraisingly, then darted a clawed finger at a familiar landmark. "We are here. The pathology departed in this direction... It may be headed here. We cannot permit it to arrive, and compromise the mecha or desals there."

Lavin looked at the name under the Wind's pointing claw. The Titan's Gates.

"That's a thousand kilometers from here! We don't have the resources for a march like that! If we march into the desert now, we won't reach the Gates. Marching without break, without water or food, we'll all be dead in a week." He sat back and folded his arms. "Kill us all now. I won't command my men to march themselves to death."

The Wind hissed. "You will not die. We will provide sustenance along the way. And we will move parts of your army in relay. We cannot move all, so some must march."

"Move my army? In relays?" Lavin shook his head—a mistake. As the world spun, he said, "What madness are you talking about?"

The Wind bunched its hand into a fist, shredding the map. "Look! Do not disbelieve this one! That is how we will relay your men. That is how you will be fed." It stood, knocking its chair over, and pointed at the sky.

Six horizontal crescents, their tops lit by the square sun far above, hung outside the pyramid of blue sky. He hadn't noticed the vagabond moons before, what with everything else going on. He swore under his breath.

"Part of your army will rest as it is carried ahead. At the drop point you will meet it, and supplies will also be provided. Some of those who have marched will then embark for the next leg. In this way you will march from here to the Titan's Gates without stopping."

In one day. One endless day. Lavin slumped back, stunned.

"Our own army will meet you there."

"Your army?" With every word it spoke, the Wind became more terrifying.

"The pathology has already begun to infect the mecha and geosphere. If it conquers the desalination nexus it will have an almost impregnable fortress."

The Wind stepped away from the table. "That is all. You have your orders."

"I understand. And we will obey. But..."

"What?" Its tail twitched as it rounded on him. Lavin shrank back despite himself.

What will you do with Galas? But it would not even understand the question if he asked it.

Lavin watched it walk away, his mind a blank. The impossible was happening, and what was worse, he knew that the next days would so far exceed what had just occurred, that in future times he might not even remember this one conversation.

The Wind gestured at its mounted comrades and they all turned to leave.

Hesty was saying something. Lavin couldn't make out the words, but the man was pointing at the sky, where one of the vagabond moons had begun to loom large, a lozenge of its surface now in direct sunlight.

The white Wind had been frightening, but also oddly familiar. Lavin stared after her as she and the others departed, wracking his brains to find a memory. He had heard her voice before, and recently... No, it was gone.

He sighed, and turned to Hesty. "I see it, man. Go prepare your men. Tell them the Winds have brought the moons here at my request. There is one adventure left for us, it seems."

39

It was a joy simply to stretch out an arm, and feel the dry winter grass slide past her fur. The sky was lovely to look at; she would have liked to have rolled on her back, purring, to gaze at the new sun the swans had made, just to absorb the wonderful gradations of color that canopied it.

The hunt was even more enjoyable. For the moment, that was where the white Wind kept her attention focussed. It was hard, though, with all the wonderful distractions...

She prowled up the side of a rock-strewn hill, whose top sported some scraggly, wind-sculpted trees. The land had changed from desert to stony scrubland. A few human shepherds brought their flocks here in summer, simply because there was nowhere else for them to go, but nothing agricultural would grow in this soil.

That meant there would be no human witnesses, no one to interfere with the capture.

She lifted her muzzle and sniffed at the wind. She could smell horses—of course, they were obvious kilometers away. Now, though, she could also smell fresh-washed humans. Two women and a man.

There was the faintest possibility that these were not the ones she was looking for. She would have to risk a peek over the top of the hill, and hope they didn't see her silhouetted against the bruised horizon.

The white Wind was very good. They wouldn't see her. She crept the last meter with her belly to the cold ground, infinitesimally slow in her movements, and finally laid her chin on a flat rock next to some torpid ants. A few stalks of grass made a screen here through which she could see the valley.

It wasn't much of a valley; more as if a single huge boulder, the size of a whole suburb of houses, had split open and crumbled. Three horses were tethered in the shelter made by the split. There was a half-cave there, on the other side where the ground humped up and then up again before rising straight up to the same height as the white Wind. This meant there were two entrances to the little valley, unless one flew. The Wind's forces were all on the western side. She would have to send some of the men and basts around to block the other exit before they closed the trap.

A man walked around from behind one of the horses. He was talking to a woman in peasant garb who trailed after him, waving her hands in agitation. He didn't recognize the woman, but the man was clearly Armiger. That was all she needed to know.

The white Wind eased back two meters, then spun, delighting in the balance of her tail, and raced down the scraggly hillside.

It's good to run run run run, she hymned as she went. The Wind felt like bursting into song, and were it not for the presence of the prey so close, she would have. The swans would never begrudge such a display—they sang all the time. The whole world sang, a revelation that filled the white Wind's breast with joy every time she thought of it. In quiet times, she could curl up around an interesting stone or sweet-smelling plant, and hear the faint music—thinking music—that welled up around her.

To think she had once believed it to be mindless chatter! She allowed herself a laugh as she reached the bottom of the hill. Her sinuous body wove between boulders and thorn bushes as she made for some trees that had made a brave stand several kilometers from where Armiger had camped. She was following the exact route she had taken to get here, and made a game out of stepping in her own pawprints as she went. One-to-four, one-to-four, whoops missed, one-to-four...

These last few days had been a blessing. When she was released to run down a long ramp onto the cold desert sands, the white Wind had rolled over four times in the dirt and howled her joy at the sky. She had wanted to run to the horizon and back just so she could say she'd looked over it, but the swans had other plans. Someone to find. When they told her who, she had rolled over again, laughing.

This was fun; still, she longed to be finished, so she could take off on her own and explore this beautiful world. She felt exactly like Ariel in that old play, so as she raced into the camp her servants had made, she sang,

Where the bee sucks there suck I,

In a cowslip's bell I lie.

On a bat's back I do fly

...forgetting that none of these people knew that old language.

One of the human soldiers stepped forward and bowed gravely to her. "Are they there, Lady May?" he asked. She could hear the well-disguised fear in his voice.

She ran a circle around him. Merrily merrily shall I live now, under the blossom that hangs from the bow, she thought, but she only said, "Yes."

Her chief servant approached, distaste and fear written on his face as he watched her sit up on her hindquarters and pant. "Then shall we fetch them now?" asked the sergeant.

"No, not yet." She explained the tactical situation. They would have to split their force and come at the sheltered declivity from two sides. "It's open country," she finished. "There's a good chance of being spotted if they have a sentry out, so you'll make the pincer at full gallop."

As he slumped toward his men, issuing orders irritably, the white Wind turned a cartwheel and ran to her own people, the basts who prowled restlessly at the edge of the camp. They chattered laughter at her approach. "Little woman-bast," one called out. "Why are you so happy?"

She stopped and cocked a paw to one ear. "Because I hear it!" she replied. "I hear it rising all around us."

They nodded. They knew what she meant.

Megan had originally intended to hunt for berries. She had found a handful or two, but halfway back in her circuit of the hill above the cave, she had stumbled on a little flat area screened by bushes. It was invisible from below, but she could see the whole camp. The temptation was irresistible, and so she had hunkered down to spy on her man.

You're terrible, she told herself, even as she parted the bushes to look almost straight down the rock face. She could hear Armiger and the queen bickering. Galas looked silly in Megan's dress; it was far too big for her. But she refused to wear any of the perfectly good clothing they had salvaged from the razed town. Megan had thought her a tragic figure before. In the past few days her patience had worn thin, and she was beginning to think of Galas as merely spoiled.

Megan had dressed herself in some boy's clothes. It was practical, but unfeminine. Yesterday she hadn't minded that, but now, watching Armiger and Galas alone, she wondered. There was nothing overt going on between them, no ardent words or glances. They weren't holding hands. Still, she knew a strong bond had developed between them—one based on commonality that Megan could never share. They were both rulers, of the highest possible caste. She was a peasant. Even if (foolish dream!) Armiger married her, Megan would remain a peasant. She could never be comfortable with the nobles and ladies of the Court. Even if he became king of the world, as he planned, she would blush and look down if she had to greet the great people of other lands. She had thought about these things. She knew she would rather serve them than look them in the eye.

So shall I leave? she thought sadly. Armiger shrugged at something Galas had said, and twitched his long hair back over his shoulder. She knew that gesture so well, she could almost hear him saying, "We will decide later." Her heart ached.

She herself had told him that you can never hold onto anything. The harder you try, the more precious things slip through your fingers. The secret to life, she had said, was to find the little things, the unimportant ones that would nonetheless always remind you of the precious things they accompanied—and hold onto them. Like the fine furniture her husband had carved for her, seemingly centuries ago.

Galas was weeping again. Megan sighed. Had the rain found a way through her roof while she was away? Was the fine wood of the bed and wardrobe ruined now? Had someone moved into her house? Or would she find it exactly as she had left it, if she returned now?

Kiss her, she mentally commanded Armiger. Make it easy for me to leave. He did not, although he enfolded her in his arms and rested a hand on her head as she cried. His expression was distant, as it often was, as he rocked the queen gently.

Megan sat back, chewing her lip. She blinked at the strong sunlight—daylight in the middle of the night. It was unnerving, more so since she knew it meant the Winds were closing in on them. She shaded her eyes with one hand and gazed out over the dry plain, in case there were some army approaching.

She had only been half-serious about looking, so for a second or so she couldn't believe it when she saw the cloud of dust raised by a band of horses approaching their hiding place. There must be at least fifty. Maybe Armiger could take on that many. Maybe not.

Megan's heart sank when she saw what they were doing. The groups split in two as they approached. They mean to block both ways out.

They were approaching from the west. One group would have to ride the long way around to reach the eastern entrance of the vale. The other group would wait until some preordained signal then move in.

It is the queen they want, she thought. Had it been Winds, they would have arrived from the sky, as swans or Hooks. Or popped out of the earth as morphs. No, these riders must be from Parliament's army, come to bring Galas home for trial.

For herself and Armiger to live, the sensible thing would be to send Galas out to them. The queen was in such a state she would probably be glad to go. But Armiger would never permit it, and Megan doubted she had the hardness of heart to do it either. They could all ride out the eastern exit now, but then the whole group would pursue them.

No: if they gave them what they wanted, Galas would be tried and executed. If they ran, they would be chased down and the end would be the same, only Armiger and Megan would likely be killed in the fight.

But if they captured someone they thought was the queen, and found out she was not only hours or days from now...

Megan scattered the berries in her haste to scramble down the hillside.

Armiger heard the commotion, but at first didn't turn. Galas was telling him about her relationship with Lavin, and he didn't want to seem distracted. Then the queen, who was seated on a rock, looked past him and said, "What is she doing?"

He turned in time to see a flash of Megan's naked body, before she pulled down the robe she was donning. It was the queen's robe, the one she had worn when they escaped the palace. And now Megan was cinching her horse's saddle...

"Megan!" He started toward her, but she hopped nimbly into the saddle and flicked the reins.

"What are you doing?"

"Ride east! Ride east, love, if you love me!" She waved a hand over her head as she galloped; then she was through the gateway made by two huge boulders at the western side of the vale, and vanished in a cloud of dust.

It took precious seconds for him to bridle his own mount, and while he did that Galas ran after Megan. She too vanished in the swirl of hoof-drawn dust, then raced back.

"Riders!" she shouted. "There are riders coming! They've seen her, they're trying to head her off!"

Armiger paused in cinching up his saddle. He closed his eyes, and leaned his head against the fragrant flank of his horse.

Megan had the rings of office on her fingers. She wore Galas' robes. As she rode she undid her hair and let it flow behind her, the way the queen did.

She felt free, fulfilled for the first time in ages. There was no time to reconsider, no options to hem or haw over. Only the thundering hooves under her, the jarring of her horse's spine through her legs and pelvis, and the fire in her blood as she screamed at it to go faster.

They want the queen alive. I'll lead them a merry chase, then go with them. Oh, let there be no one among these horsemen who knows the queen by sight!

"She's gaining ground on us!" cried the sergeant's flankman. "It's her horse!" The queen's mount was lighter than their war horses, and relatively unburdened. She probably could outride them.

"Crossbows!" commanded the sergeant. They had muskets, but at this range crossbows would be more accurate.

"No!" It was the White Wind, running on all fours to match his own pace. "She is not the one we seek!"

"She is not the one you seek! Take your people and catch him yourself!"

The Wind snarled and leapt away. The sergeant tipped his head back and laughed. He had been waiting for a moment to show her up.

"Shoot her horse out from under her!" he shouted. "Aim for its hooves. I want it lame, not dead—I don't want it to throw her."

They came out of the settling dust like ghosts—eight white forms like giant panthers, leaping from rock to rock and laughing. Galas screamed as they launched themselves over her head at the place where Armiger had been standing.

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 ridge-line. 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 Lavin believed in were based on those ancient scriptures, and the stories that surrounded them. Was Galas right? Were they all lies too?

The world spun around him in a particularly savage gyre, and Lavin's gorge rose. It wasn't just him, though—men were shouting and running. He forced himself to sit up, and observed green foliage moving past the open hatchways of the moon. Crowds of men had begun to cluster there.

One of his commanders hurried over. "We're coming down, sir. There are some horsemen and the bast creatures on the ground below."

"All right." He took several deep breaths to quiet his stomach. "Bring them to me before they speak to anyone else."

The moon took ten minutes to drop the last few meters, and it didn't actually touch the ground. From his seated position Lavin saw a long grey metal ramp extend out and down into the darkness of the moon's shadow. Horsemen began rattling up the ramp. He saw some men with stretchers carrying bloodied white forms—two of the basts had been injured somehow. Despite himself he smiled grimly at that. So they could be hurt after all.

The moment the last horse stepped into the cavernous space of the moon, the ramp began to retract and the ground dropped away. The Winds were punctual, it seemed.

The leader of the horsemen had dismounted and was walking over. He was flushed with excitement.

"Sir! They would not let us bring the bodies aboard sir. I've left a guard with her, but brought you—"

"Her?" He stood up, leaning on the cane Hesty had had made for him. "The queen? Is she with you?"

"No, sir. That's what I'm saying. The Winds allow only the living aboard these moons."

The sergeant's face seemed to recede. A chaotic gabble of sound filled Lavin's ears. He felt someone take him by the shoulders; people were shouting. They lowered him into a camp chair.

"Only the living... She is..."

"She is dead, sir. The queen is dead. It was a stray shot, accidental. We were trying to bring down her horse—I had given orders that no one should shoot above its legs, but a shot went wild and she was leaning, sir..."

"I, I see."

"I have left an honour guard with them, and sent two men to fetch her royal guard from the palace."

A spark of hope made Lavin look up. "What proof do you have that this was the queen?"

"Her rings of office, sir." The sergeant withdrew a square of cloth from a belt pouch, and opened it to reveal familiar circles of gold. "It is she."

He stared at the rings. They looked so unnatural, alone in that square of black.

"Sir?"

True, she had not worn them when they first made love, in that inn near the academy. It was only later that he saw them, when he saw her in regal glory on the throne, and she recognized him and sent him her most secret of smiles—waggling her fingers slightly as she raised her hand for him to kiss it.

"Sir?"

The commander took the sergeant's arm and muttered something. They moved aside, talking in low tones.

She had subtly taunted him on that day, showing off her new position; but he knew it was only that she was proud and surprised at where she was. Her father slunk in the shadows, deposed by an act of the desals, and at that moment Galas had believed she could do anything. So had Lavin, and he had trusted that they would be together again, somehow.

"I must go to her," he said. He reeled to his feet. "Put us down. I must attend her."

"Sir, the Winds say we must continue. We failed to capture Armiger. They say to continue the march to the Titan's Gates."

He cursed savagely, and stalked toward the pillar of fire. His men silently parted before him. Dimly he wondered at this. Had they known all along that he loved her? They stood with heads bowed; none would meet his eye. They had known he loved her and yet they still fought for him? It couldn't be.

He stopped, gasping, two meters from the blazing swans. "Turn us around!" he commanded. "Put us down!"

There was no answer.

"Do as I say! The queen needs me!"

"We have other concerns," said the crystalline voice of the pillar.

"Please." He found it hard to speak past the savage pain in his chest. "Let me go to her."

"No. We have a schedule to meet. Your queen is not important."

He froze. Suddenly he felt all eyes on him. Should he shout the fury he felt now, with his army watching? What would they do if they realized that he, and they, were prisoners of the Winds, pawns in some game of theirs that had nothing to do with Iapysia, or humanity at all?

He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was the priest, his face grim, a message of caution in his eyes.

Deliberately, jaw clenched, Lavin bowed to the flame. "I understand," he said. "You are correct, of course."

Walking away was somehow easy. He moved as if weightless, bobbing along. People were speaking to him, but their words made no sense. Light and shape registered, but none of it had any meaning. She was dead, and it was his fault, as surely as if he had shot her himself. This moment had haunted his dreams for months, and he had steeled himself every morning to deny it, using the force of his will to command himself, his men, the world and Winds to preserve her. Just yesterday he had awoken sure that she was alive and free, and his heart had lofted like a swallow, serene and happy. But that was gone now, and he would never feel again.

Gradually the hands fell away, the voices receded. He found himself standing near one of the giant hatchways. Cold air moved across his face, but it didn't revive him. It had the feel of death to it. Far below he could see patches of snow, bare trees. No one should ever die in winter, he had always felt. And now she was that cold, limbs frozen. He should be with her, arms around her to keep her warm.

Lavin walked to the edge of the opening. Someone shouted his name. He heard it like a curse.

He decided to let himself fall, and teetered for a moment on the edge. He could just close his eyes, and let it happen. It would be a relief, after holding himself up for so long.

Lavin turned, and dropped to his knees facing away from the hatchway.

No. He didn't deserve such an easy escape.

Sunk in misery, he hung his head and in full view of his army, wept.

40

Sixteen battleships from the Archipelagic fleet were scattered like jewels across the velvet of space near Ventus' trailing trojan point. They kept the regulation two hundred kilometers distance from one another, but to the Desert Voice, watching from the window of a cutter approaching the flagship, they seemed very close. Each was the size of a mountain, and harnessed energies capable of reducing the surface of Ventus to char. The Voice had a good grasp of the scale of things here, and knew that even a thousand such ships could not boil the rock of Ventus and Diadem down to the mantle, unless they spent decades nudging asteroids and comets into a collision-course with it. And that crude attack was bound to eject colossal amounts of potentially infected debris into stellar orbit, which could hide the escape of one or more of the Winds' ships now being built on the moon.

In all the boiled magma seas the navy proposed leaving behind here, there was good odds that some tiny pocket of cool stone would preserve grains of mecha, perhaps too small to be seen, that might regrow all of Ventus again, given a thousand or a million years. The corollary to that was that if 3340 had began to infest the Winds with the algorithms of a resurrection seed, then 3340 itself might reappear here, in a millennia or an epoch.

Marya Mounce had told the Voice that all of Ventus had come from a package of nanotech assembler seeds massing less than twenty kilos. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Armiger, so much more complex a being than the Winds, had the potential to regrow from himself a god.

The cutter docked gently with the side of the flagship. For a moment the Voice felt a pulse of empathy with the ship—she knew what docking felt like to a starship. Then the spell was broken as the door before her slid open, and a uniformed human glided in.

The man led her past steel bulkhead doors as thick as she was tall, and into the narrow buttressed interior of the battleship. There were no straight lines here, nor any corridor longer than ten meters. Everything was organized in tight armored cells, each with its own power supply and life support. To kill the crew of a ship like this, you had to literally batter it to pieces. The Voice was awed by the strength of the vessel; she couldn't imagine what it would be like to have it as her body.

They passed honeycombed cells full of fluid, where humans wearing inscape gear floated in seeming sleep. The consciousness of these men and women lay outside the ship, in swarms of micro- and macro-missiles, or in system-wide simulations where they targeted and tracked every object bigger than a grapefruit.

Her guide left her at another set of pneumatic pressure doors. As these valved open, the Voice heard the sounds of angry debate coming from the chamber beyond.

"Look at that pattern! It's obvious they're ready to make a run for it."

"To you, maybe," said another. She recognized the timbre of the voice as belonging to an artificial intelligence. There were other beings like herself here. The Voice stepped inside.

It was impossible to gauge the dimensions of the chamber, because the walls had disappeared under a holographic projection of the Ventus system. The planets were all pinpointed with arrows, and to her upper left floated a rotating box containing a zoomed-in view of Ventus and Diadem. Dozens of tiny specks representing ships hung in the black space of the main display. Many of them trailed Ventus in its orbit, like a wreath of fog left behind it.

Diadem was almost obscured under a cloud of thousands of specks.

"Ah, our Diadem expert is here," someone said. The Voice looked behind herself; no one had entered after her.

Fifteen men and women floated under the system display. About half wore uniforms and moved with the cat-like grace of cyborgs. Four more were holograms of generic human beings; each wore a complex heraldic symbol on its chest showing which faction of Archipelagic politics it represented. These were artificial minds whose attitudes and intentions were controlled by the aggregate will of millions or billions of humans back home. True to the principles of Archipelagic politics, however, each perspective on an issue held only one vote. These beings were not as powerful as they might at first seem.

Of the remaining three, one was not known to the Voice. The woman appeared to be a pilot. The last two were Marya and Axel. When she saw them the Voice glided immediately over to them.

"Now that you're here, we can ask the burning question," said one of the cyborgs. He wore admirals bars on his shoulders.

"How many copies of you can Diadem produce per day? And how many in total?"

The Voice blinked. "I— I'm not qualified to answer that."

"Come on now. You were there for weeks. By your own admission, you wandered over hundreds of square kilometers. You were a line starship. You must have assessed their production capability."

Marya put her hand on the Voice's arm and smiled. "If you don't know, don't guess. It's all right."

A little reassured, she said, "I only caught glimpses of the vacuum areas. I was pretending to be alive, so I stayed in the main labs most of the time."

"Yes, yes, we know that. But you must have seen the other facilities, or walked around them, or under them. You must have seen materiel moving back and forth. Robots. Commerce, even. What scale is it on? What are they capable of?"

"Well, I did get a good idea of how much they put into refining the terraforming techniques. And I did see a lot of evidence of other activities." She paused to calculate. "If they abandoned everything else they were doing? —Which they wouldn't. But if they did... they could probably produce two thousand copies of my original plan per week. It's a whole world, after all, if small."

The admiral nodded. "It's consistent with what we're seeing. They're using all of Diadem then. They're moving to a war footing."

Argument broke out among the others. Axel leaned close and pointed to the cloud of dots around the image of Diadem. "See those? Copies of you. Ships. And there's more arriving by the second."

The Voice gaped. Ventus' little moon was englobed by a vast fleet of ships—all copies of herself. All, if the one she had touched was any indication, capable of star travel.

"But how many in total?" asked one of the holograms. "Are they turning Diadem into a giant factory? And are they doing the same to Ventus?"

"Well, that's the question. Our Ventus expert says they wouldn't do that." The admiral gestured at Marya. "Her institute's AI's agree."

"All of Marya's co-workers were captured by the Winds," Axel whispered. "They were all taken to Diadem, presumably. So she's the reigning expert now."

"This is insane," said the Voice. "How are we going to—"

"My question for the Desert Voice," said the admiral, "is, do you recognize any of these structures? Are they like what you saw on Diadem?" He waved his hand, and a new cube appeared overhead. This one showed a telescopic view of the limb of Ventus' horizon. Square solar mirrors hung in the black sky like fantastic butterflies, and down below, just beyond the terminator on the nightside of Ventus, lay a lozenge of sunlit land.

Diaphanous scarves of glowing light, like solidifying aurora, could be seen spiralling down towards the planet in the vicinity of the sunlit oval.

"It's the swans!" The Voice vividly remembered them closing on her, and how they had crushed and devoured her body. "Are they attacking something?"

"That's what we want to know. Are they attacking, or are they building? Did they hang like that over the shipyard you saw on Diadem?"

"No. This is something else." She concentrated on the daylit side of the terminator, until she could make out the shapes of a continental edge there. "That's Iapysia they're over. It's very near where I set Calandria and Axel set down originally."

"More to the point," said a hologram, "it's roughly where we think Armiger is."

"Well," said the admiral. "You heard our experts. They've never built ships before."

"They've never been threatened like this before," the Voice protested. "They're doing this because we're here. If we went away they would turn back to running the terraforming system."

The admiral grimaced. "Well, you came late to the discussion. We're not sure they're maintaining the system anymore. That's the point."

The Voice turned to Axel. He shrugged. "They think Armiger may have taken the Winds over already. It would certainly explain that." He pointed to the fleet. "As to what they're doing on the surface..."

"We think they're starting to modify it to his standard," said one of the AIs. "If Diadem can be turned into a giant factory, so much more so with Ventus itself. Worse—it could be turned into a single giant organism."

"3340."

"Exactly. Your friends don't believe it. They've been petitioning to go down there and investigate. But based on the numbers you've just given us, we don't have time. If 3340 is back, and it starts converting Ventus itself, there could be geometric growth of these ships."

Marya shook her head angrily. "They're just protecting themselves against you! They can see you, sitting out here like vultures."

"If that were the case, then they wouldn't be putting themselves in position for a run to escape the system." The hologram pointed at the specks trailing away from Ventus. "They're ready to fan out—maybe carry resurrection seeds to every other world in human space. We'd never be able to stop 3340 then."

"Have you asked the swans what they're doing?" Marya asked.

"Yes. They don't answer. We've tried sending probes in but that fleet of theirs blows them away before they get close enough to see anything. We have no way to find out what's going on."

The admiral sighed. "Since we can't learn more, I think it's time to make a decision. I presume the consensus is to cauterize the threat now?"

The others, all save Axel and Marya, nodded.

A slow horror crept over the Voice. "Because of what I said... you've decided to kill everyone on that world?"

"It's not your responsibility," said the admiral. "Don't worry about it."

She could only hang there, stunned. She didn't even feel Axel put his hand on her shoulder until he pushed her into motion.

In moments they were outside the chamber, and Axel began cursing viciously. She heard Marya gasping, "They can't! They can't!" over and over.

"They will," said Axel quietly. "The people down there mean nothing to them. After all, it's only a few million; that many people die in the Archipelago every second."

"If anything's happening, it's the Winds fighting Armiger themselves! If we could only prove that. If only one of our ships could get past the swans and see..."

In her mind's eye the Voice could picture the entire holo display from the conference room; she remembered the position and trajectory of each and every ship, and she knew something she had neglected to tell the admiral. The Voice had been inside the nervous system of one of the Winds' ships; she knew their tactics, their transmission frequencies—and their recognition codes.

She took a deep breath. It wasn't fair, she thought bitterly; she had wanted the first real action she took as an individual to be on behalf of her new human side. Nonetheless, for the first time in her existence the Voice felt she was acting by and for herself when she said, "But you do have a ship. Me."

Armiger and Galas stood on a shoulder of land in the foothills of the coastal mountains. They were gazing out at the plains below. It was night—or at least, it was behind them. The plains were in day.

"How can we fight power like that?" murmured Galas. From here, the full extent of the daylit square was visible. They were just outside its western edge, but it was moving, slowly, in their direction. A cluster of vagabond moons shone bright silver high in the vast tapering cube of glowing air.

"There," said Armiger, pointing. Squinting where he pointed, she made out a low cloud of dust hugging the eastern end of the square.

"What is it?"

"An army, marching. It would seem Parliament still pursues you."

His voice was neutral—bland, even. He had been like this ever since Megan's death—withdrawn, but as strong-willed as ever. He had ridden them hard for the past several days. Galas had been afraid that if she showed an instant's weakness—if she gave him even an inkling that she couldn't keep up—he would abandon her. It wasn't that he no longer cared about her, he just seemed so completely focussed on his goal that the present moment had no reality for him.

Recognizing this in him brought a chill to her heart; she had been that way once, and not just for a day or a week. As they rode, Galas spent long hours withdrawn herself, remembering her youth after the death of her mother, for the first time seeing it from the outside, as if hearing about someone else's tragic past. She did not like what the objectivity revealed.

They rode and rode through grassland dotted with small forests, hour after hour until she lay draped in the saddle, her thighs and lower back a blaze of pain, sure that she would slide off the saddle with the horse's next step. At some point during that odyssey they had left the plains behind, and now they were scarcely a day's ride from the Titans' Peaks.

She spared a glance behind her. Treetops jabbed above the crest of the plateau where they camped, and beyond them mauve cut out shapes she had at first mistaken for storm clouds shone pearly in the reflected light from the plain. The foothills ended in a huge, knotted pair of snow-capped peaks with a deep notch separating them. Lower peaks receded to the south and south, becoming more rounded and lower as they went.

She knew this twin mountain, had spent time there listening to the subterranean roaring of the desals at work. She had never imagined she would see the Titans' Gates in the light of a Wind-made day.

"We are trapped." She said it fatalistically.

Armiger waved negligently at the shining plains. "We needn't fear the humans. They won't be able to scale the Gates, unless they're riding in the moons themselves. As to the Winds—well, making day in the night like that is a pretty minor trick."

"Minor? Can you do it?"

"Not from here. It's trivial if you're in orbit." He shaded his eyes again.

"Armiger." He didn't seem to notice her, until she reached out and put a hand on his arm. When he finally turned to face her, she said, "Why have we come here?"

When he didn't answer immediately she said, "We've been riding for days. We've barely even spoken. I confess for a time I was content just to be escaping—escaping anything, and everything. But the truth is, I'm sore, stiff and weary beyond belief. If you gave me no good answer as to where we're going or why, I'd just as soon lie down and wait for those things to find me."

He smiled slightly and briefly. "I find it hard to talk about it. Not because of any emotional thing... no, it's because 3340, who gave me the impulse to begin with, made me to be reluctant. Do you understand the concept of conditioning?"

She smiled ironically. "You ask Queen Galas that?"

"All right, then. I've been conditioned not to talk about it. But I no longer work for 3340..." He glanced over at her quickly, as if startled by something—or afraid.

Interesting, she thought. "Who do you work for now, Armiger?" she asked quietly.

"One question at a time. You asked why we were here. Look." With a sweep of his arm he indicated the fang-tooths of the Titans' Gates. "Even before I met Jordan Mason I thought this place might hold the key. It is the nexus of physical power for the western end of the continent. Here the desals have their power plants and desalination stacks. This is their interface with the Winds of the ocean, who are incredibly strong as well. This is the transfer point for hundreds of underground highways, and there are giant data stores and genetic stockpiles buried deep within the mountains. You probably never got a hint of that when you were here—it's all well hidden."

She shook her head. "One time a local priest took me on a tour around the lip of a vast pit. He said it was bottomless. A hot wind comes up out of it, and you can hear a sound like constant thunder coming out of the depths. I found it disturbing. I never went back."

"Yet it was the desals who spoke to you. They reached out to do so. According to Mason, they wish to serve, and they are the enemy of those." He gestured to the vagabond moons. "We will make them our allies. The Titans' Gates are a fortress, and you and I are about to experience our second siege, my queen."

She hugged herself against a sudden chill. "Don't call me that. I brought my people low." Angry and grief-stricken, she turned and started to walk back to their camp. The horses were visible in the firelight; both were looking in her direction. "And what are you going to do with the world once you've got it?" she shouted back to Armiger. "How will you succeed where I failed?"

"I can do what you could not," she heard him say. "I can conquer the Winds. The ones Mason calls Mediation will be our fist converts." He followed her and when she sat down by the fire, he sat too.

"I am no longer Mad Queen Galas—just Mad Galas, I suppose," she said. "But my madness is nothing compared to yours if you expect to lay your hands on each and every Wind in order to turn them to your cause. That is what you intend to do, is it not?"

"In a sense."

"Then why haven't you done it? Where is your army? You've said that Jordan had the last piece of the puzzle you needed. So now that you know all you need to, why are you not commanding the heavens to part and the seas to recede?"

He looked down. "It's not that simple."

"Ah! That phrase is Male for `I'm afraid to'."

"There is some key piece missing," he admitted. "I have yet to figure it out. But when I do..."

"Yes? When you do, what? You've been coy about that all along, Armiger. What, exactly, are you going to do?"

He stared pensively at the stars. "The Winds are sur-biological, nanotechnological entities. Each component mechanum is infinitesimal, the size of a human cell. Each carries in it a tiny computer—a thinking machine—and communications devices. The mecha communicate with their brethren using a very large number of codes. These codes are certified each by the next higher layer of the organization, from the tiniest particle all the way up to the desals and the Diadem swans. The Winds recognize one another by comparing the digital signatures on the transmission codes. If the code is not signed by the next higher authority, it is not valid. But that next higher authority cannot issue codes without the authorization of the layer above it, and so on up the ladder. Most of the communication between the Winds consists of trading new authorizations. They do it on an unconscious level.

"To command the Winds, you must speak their language. To speak their language, you must have a valid signature on your messages. Ever since arriving here I have been looking for a way to either fake the signatures, or acquire the highest-level signing authority.

"Somehow, Jordan Mason has gotten a high-level authority in the eyes of the Winds. —Not the highest, but very high. I suspect ordinary humans can't get to the highest level. I copied his implants exactly, which should make my messages indistinguishable from his. But they're not—somehow the Winds recognize his but not mine. That is what I'm trying to figure out now."

"That is dazzling," said Galas. "But it's not the answer I asked for. What will you do when you have this 'signing authority'?"

He hesitated. "What would you do?"

"Can you remake the world? —Turn night into day, heavy into light, black into white? What can you do?"

"I can't change gravity," he said with faint smile. "But I can change the atmosphere, or strip it away entirely. I can drain the seas, if I want. I can change the surface of this world into practically anything."

"Can you free my people from poverty and grief?"

He shrugged. "That would be among the easiest things I can do."

"Will you?"

Armiger hesitated again. He put down his soup bowl. "Should I?" he asked. "Be careful how you answer."

"I'm tired of political answers to questions like that," she said. "And tired of philosophical ones. All I know is I'm tired and hungry and afraid, and in that I am finally one with the majority of my countrymen. There is not a single person out there," she gestured at the dark countryside, "who would not say, 'save me from the cold, and the dark, and the beasts outside and in'."

"Is that all you want for them?"

She turned to look at him. He sat now with his hands dangling between his knees, his face expressionless. She was suddenly acutely aware that she was the only human being seated at this fire.

"You could do it," she whispered.

He didn't answer.

"But then... the real question is, what do you want to do?"

Armiger didn't answer for a long time. Finally he said, "I guess that depends on who I am."

"This god 3340 you've spoken of—what did he want you to do with Ventus?"

"He saw Ventus as a resource waiting to be tapped. But not an efficient one, as it stands. Most the Winds' energy is being put into maintaining the artificial ecology—a complete waste as far as 3340 was concerned. The first thing it would have had me do was abandon the terraforming system."

"Abandon...? What would that mean, for us I mean?"

"The air would become poisonous with time... rivers would dry up, the oceans become toxically metallic. Some kinds of life, like fungi and bacteria, would run rampant, others would die. Everything would eventually be choked out, if it even lasted that long, because 3340 wanted to use the mecha to make the entire surface of the planet into one giant machine—a god device."

"For what purpose?"

"Ventus was to have been a staging area for an assault on the human Archipelago. If 3340 had conquered even a tenth of the Archipelago, it would have become unstoppable. Eventually it might have consumed the entire galaxy."

"But 3340 is dead," she said.

"Yes."

"So you won't do that my world."

He looked her in the eye, expressionless. "I will not," he said, a bit too vehemently.

"I wish I could believe you."

He looked surprised—the first real emotion he'd shown in days. He squinted at her through woodsmoke. "Why don't you believe me?"

"Because you're very, very angry, and I'm afraid you don't know it."

That made him pause. "I don't know what you mean," he said finally.

"She is dead, Armiger."

He just looked at her.

"You don't know how to grieve, do you?" she asked.

This time he grimaced, but that was all.

"I forget sometimes that you have no experience in it." She smiled sadly. "Neither did I, the first time; no one is prepared. So we usually end up with scars; I suppose mine are no worse than anyone else's. If I am to honour Megan in any way, I guess it should be by heeding her lesson. She was offended that I... fell apart... after we escaped. I thought she couldn't possibly know what I was feeling. Now I realize that she saw that I thought this, and that was what offended her. After all, she lost a husband, but she carried on.

"At the time I thought she was making light of my pain. She must be asking me to shrug it off, like I had done with the pain of my mother's death. It took me many years to learn how bad a mistake that had been. But no, she was asking for more courage than I was willing to show. She was asking me to feel it all, and keep going anyway."

"I am not one of you," Armiger said. He didn't elaborate.

"You're acting exactly like one of us," she countered.

He didn't answer.

"The sooner you start believing it the better off you'll be, Armiger. You're going to have to face the pain, and sooner rather than later would be best."

He squinted at her through woodsmoke. "Why?"

"Because if you are as powerful as you say you are, your anger could destroy my world."

"Only my human side can be angry."

"But pardon me for saying so, my general—it's your human side that makes you do what you do."

He stood up abruptly and stalked a few meters away. Encouraged, she said, "Listen to me. If you respect Megan, you should follow her example too."

"By doing what?" He sounded indifferent, as though intent on some task. Galas almost smiled.

"By letting it all in. All the pain, the sorrow, the anger. You've got to let yourself feel it. Otherwise, it's going to act through you whether you know it or not."

He murmured something; she wasn't sure, but it sounded like, "That's not what I'm afraid of having act through me."

Galas felt infinitely weary. Her own grief was raw and close enough that she had little strength to fight his. She lay down on her bedroll and gazed up at the few stars that were visible through the perpetual dusk sky.

"I'm afraid," she heard herself say. She knew she was not speaking for herself.

"Jordan Mason," said Armiger. "I need you to find me now."

Galas rolled on her side and looked past the circle of firelight. Armiger stood with his hands raised to either side, and now lines of light flickered at the ends of his fingers. These seemed to tear away and coalesce into rolling balls, like tumbleweeds. She saw several bounce across the ground, fading. A faint rustling sound came from the undergrowth around her.

"What are you doing?" she whispered.

"I am building a larger body—more sense organs, independent hands and eyes. The Winds or their slaves might fall on us at any time. We need guards—a perimeter. I am making that."

Galas lay back, shivering. What had she just been speaking to? A man? No... she was the only human being on this hillside. She might as well be talking to the stones.

She closed her eyes, determined to see and hear no more today.

41

"Sir?"

Hesty's voice came to Lavin from a long way away. The voice represented the distant past, a time of hope he could no longer comprehend. The present was an unending cycle of misery that would end only with death. Nothing mattered except that pain.

He had lain here under a canopy, unable to move, for days now. He knew the official story was that vertigo had laid him low, but the truth was much more simple. Lavin's heart had died, and he no longer wanted to live.

"Sir."

With difficulty he turned his head. Hesty stood over him, his face revolving in a direction opposite to everything else. Lavin retched.

"How are you feeling, sir?"

What a laughable question. Lavin wanted to close his eyes and vanish into his misery again, but to his surprise Hesty sat down cross-legged next to him and whispered, "We need you, sir."

Lavin looked at him closely for the first time. Hesty's face was lined with care, and his hair unkempt. It looked like he hadn't slept in days—not surprising in the circumstances.

"What..." Lavin was surprised at his own voice, which was hoarse and feeble. "What is happening?"

Hesty let out a great sigh. "We've been getting word from back home along the semaphore lines. Apparently the Winds are marching everywhere. They've obliterated cities, sir! The skies are full of swans and Heaven hooks, and in some places the cities' gates are closed because morphs are snatching travellers off the roads. Rivers have dried up. It's insane!

"The priests here are in a panic. The Winds... the Winds are not what they thought..." To Lavin's great surprise, Hesty shuddered.

"Sir, they're using us, then they're going to kill us. I'm sure of it. So are some of the others, but not the field commanders. The men have faith in the Winds, but... a lot more of them were secretly sympathetic to Galas than we thought. There's rumors that the Winds are angry with us over her death. Overall, the rank and file believe we're on some just crusade dictated by the Winds. But really we're marching to our deaths, and a lot of them have guessed."

"Yes." Lavin swallowed. "Yes, we are." His mind was wonderfully clear all of a sudden. He could picture the entire situation in his mind—everything save the object of the Winds' wrath, which lay somewhere on or about the Titans' Gates.

His negligence had brought them to this, too, he was sure. Galas had been right in everything she'd said. He should have fought at her side. Instead he had laid the groundwork for a holocaust.

Hesty sat there for a while, dejected. Lavin stared at him, thinking of all the men who had fought under him, some of whom he had ordered to their deaths. They had trusted him—and thousands still placed their faith in him alone.

He might deserve to die—but they did not.

Lavin managed to lever himself up on one elbow. "Bring me some water," he commanded. When Hesty gave it to him, he drank eagerly, suddenly realizing that he might have allowed himself to die of thirst in his grief. Suicide by neglect.

He hated Hesty for reminding him of his duty. Scowling, he said, "The Winds will destroy us when we've served our purpose. We need to know what that purpose is."

"They won't speak to me," said Hesty. "The basts consider you the commander. In your absence they've been giving the orders."

Lavin was stunned. He had assumed that the army would be well commanded in his absence. He'd had no idea that the Winds had taken over directly.

"I... I will talk to them," he heard himself say.

Hesty looked at him, hope visible in his face.

"Knowing when they intend to discard us is only the first part, Hesty. We need to act when that moment comes—or before it comes. We need to escape them."

"But how?" Hesty gestured at the evidence all around them of the omnipotence of the Winds.

"The basts will not be a problem. We can shoot them. The swans are terrifying, but I'm not convinced they can do much on the ground. And the Heaven hooks... well, I have an idea about them."

Hesty grinned. "I knew you would, sir."

Lavin groaned. "Go get the engineers. I need something made, and we have very little time."

With sudden energy Hesty leapt to his feet and snapped a salute. "Yes, sir!" He sped out of the tent.

Lavin lay there for a while, staring at the canvas overhead. His mind was utterly empty. Finally, he groaned and stood up.

As he emerged from under the canopy he could hear a deep roaring, like continual thunder. Men were shouting and pointing, and the basts were racing as one to the great doors on the underside of the moon. Lavin followed their gazes upward.

A brilliant light glowed through the tessellated skin of the vagabond moon. The sun itself made only a diffuse, if bright, glow. This light was sharp enough that he had to look away after a second; and it moved, traversing the sky from south to north.

So far the ranked men on the parade ground had held formation, so Lavin had no difficulty crossing the floor to where the basts and a few stray men had gathered. The great doors were located at about the 15th degree of floor angle. From here only a sliver of sky was visible, and a great deal of dizzying ground far below. Lavin caught a glimpse of rushing pine trees far below, then fixed his gaze on the rolling mountains at the top of the door.

Something like a tiny blue-white sun hove into view, dropping and visibly slowing as it went. Shadows radiated away from it, and he was sure it was the source of the rumbling.

The small sun went behind an angle of mountainside, silhouetting the trees along its spine. After a few seconds the light went out. The rumbling went on for a long time, gradually dying down to stray echoes.

More miracles. Lavin shook his head in disgust, and went to take command of his men.

"What was that?" Tamsin blinked at the spot where the little sun had set. Doubtless she had the same spots before her eyes as Jordan.

"Mediation?" He had come to rely on the geophysical Winds as advisors in the past few days. Where once he had wondered or decided that curiosity was futile, now when Jordan had a question—any question at all—he asked. Often, Mediation answered.

"That was a starship from the new Diadem fleet," said Ka. "But it should not be here. The fleet has been sent to engage the Galactics."

"Fleet? Galactics?" This was all news to Jordan. Obviously he had been asking the wrong questions.

He and Tamsin had just entered the valley below the Titans' Gates. They had changed mounts regularly, and come to this place more quickly than Jordan had expected. Their animal entourage was spread out for a kilometer on each side, watching for morphs or other, even more dangerous things that Mediation said the swans were dropping here and there. Jordan had fully expected the vagabond moons converging on this spot to seek him out, and had been surprised when the vanguard of the giant spheres began to settle beyond the ridge behind them. Mediation had reported that they were disgorging an army of humans and horses; Jordan had no doubt that this was Parliament's army, but had they come to guarantee Galas' death or were they serving the Winds now? Mediation did not know.

The Heaven hooks seemed wary of approaching the Titans' Gates directly. Those that had not landed hung high in the atmosphere, some kilometers back. They might be able to spot Jordan's party from there—but there was no sign that they had.

Armiger and the queen were halfway up the ancient steps that zig-zagged up the Titans' Gates. Tiny buildings were visible very high on the flanks of the grey peaks. According to Tamsin this was a monastery, a place Galas had visited many times before. This was where the general and the queen expected to make their stand.

Jordan had different plans. He knew the Gates were honeycombed with passages and chambers used by the Winds. There were many entrances to these passages, but Armiger and Galas had not approached any as yet. Jordan had ordered the entrances nearest them opened; hopefully they would see one and head for it. He had told Mediation to send a guide out of the mountain to fetch them, but the nearest creatures that could speak were deep inside the mountain. It would take a while for one of them to reach the surface.

Jordan had been about to send Ka to act as guide for Armiger and Galas, but this starship was a new and unknown factor. So far it seemed like the general and queen would reach the monastery without trouble, and he could easily use the inner passages of the Gates to catch up to them there.

He decided. He pointed to a hawk that was part of their entourage. It sat patiently on a branch some distance ahead, waiting for them. "Ka, go take a ride on that hawk. I want you to investigate the ship that just landed. Mediation, are there any entrances to the Gates near that spot? Yes? Then let's head that way. We can enter the mountain from there."

Tamsin scowled. "I don't like the idea of going underground again."

"This time will be different," he said. He didn't add that she would probably find it no less frightening than the desal highway. He had visited the inside of the mountain, in Vision, and knew that it was not a place where humans had been meant to go.

Armiger had been eating stones for some time now. He wasn't random about it. He had definite preferences, and seemed to be trying to balance his diet according to some inner knowledge. They didn't talk about it, and Galas was grateful for that, as she was grateful not to talk about the mirrored seeds that he occasionally tossed behind himself as they walked. He didn't pull those seeds from any pocket or pouch. They appeared in his hand as he walked, and he dropped them.

She had thought they might be alive and fertile, and was proven right when the first transparent, silvery oval appeared out of the woods, and came to hover over Armiger's head. He ignored it, and the six that followed it. They shimmered and occasionally tinkled like tiny bells. If she looked back, she could see bright spots on the path far behind them—things like silver cacti were growing there. Way back, three kilometers ago, she thought she glimpsed something glinting through the branches of one of the tallest trees on the hillside.

When Armiger did talk, it was often not to her, but to Jordan Mason. "Jordan, we are at the foot of the long slope that leads to the Penitent's Stairs," he might say. Or, "Jordan, meet us at the Titan's Gate Monastery. You must go there now. There is no time to lose."

"Why are you talking to him?" she had asked. Armiger had grimaced, and not replied for a while.

"I need him," was all he eventually said.

The trail had become too steep for the horses, and they dismounted. Now travel became a true misery for Galas, because the muscles of her inner thighs screamed loud protest with every step, and climbing was even worse. She knew there were thousands of steps ahead of them. The first hundred meters, from the trail to the foot of the first of the stairways carved in the nearly-vertical stone of the North Tower, nearly did her in.

If she looked back the vagabond moons dominated her view of the foothills. The moons were waiting on some signal to pounce, and she was terrified of being caught by them. Nonetheless, she had gone only thirty meters or so up the first stair before she sat down with a thump, and gasped, "I can't go on. All this riding has ruined my legs."

Armiger frowned at her. He hadn't even broken a sweat; there was no reason why he should, she supposed. He chewed and swallowed the red quartz pebble he'd been crunching for the past few minutes, and said, "We're almost there."

"I know that. Have you got any idea how much riding takes out of you? I'm not used to it, Armiger."

He tilted his head to one side. "I could carry you, I suppose." He extended a hand.

"I'd rather you didn't." Truth to tell, she didn't want him touching her. That hand had been burned off, and regrown; his skin had taken on a greyish tinge and she had been half sure before that he had stopped breathing. Now she was sure of it, as she saw him deliberately draw in air to speak.

"We cannot afford to lose any time," he said. She shrugged wearily. Armiger scowled, but said, "I'll prepare you a pill that should help."

Her smile was ironic. "Thank you."

They sat in silence for a while. Armiger was abstracted; she had the distinct impression that he was listening to something. "Jordan Mason," he said abruptly, "we are at the base of the stairs. We will rest here for a few minutes then make for the top. You can meet us there."

"You think he's that close?" she said.

Armiger shrugged. "My creatures have seen him. He's down there." He pointed. "But we can't go back for him. Not with the Winds about to move on us."

"I know you had a plan," she said. "It failed somehow, didn't it? You didn't get what you wanted from Jordan. You can't really command the Winds, can you?"

He stared off into the distance. "I've been on Ventus for nearly four years. In that time I've investigated hundreds of possible ways of overthrowing them. The best and purest is to learn their languages and codes, and simply command them. There are other ways, though—not as efficient, more destructive—but they will do."

She pointed above his head. "Those things?"

He nodded. "They are part of it. If you can't tame the plants in a garden, the best you can do is replace them. Rather than command the Ventus mecha, I can replace it with mecha of my own. These mecha are more efficient; they'll choke out the Ventus mecha in no time."

"But you'll have to cover the world with them. How will you do that?"

He gestured at the mountains that rose above them. "This is the nexus of the desal highways. Those highways even go under the sea—you told me so yourself. If I flood the highways with my own mecha seeds they will sprout everywhere. They're hard for the Winds to detect, and as long as we have the highway system intact we can continue to disseminate them. We could have a global infestation underway within days."

"Infestation... Armiger, what will these mecha do to the other life here—the flora and fauna?"

"Ah." He looked down. "Well, part of the problem with this plan is that my mecha won't have access to the Winds' network. They won't be able to coordinate resource usage with the Winds, so they'll probably throw the Ventus ecosystem out of whack."

She thought about it. "...How far out of whack?"

"Well, the idea is to threaten the Winds with disaster, so that they surrender. Once they do that, we can scale my mecha back, keep it dormant even."

"What if they don't surrender?"

"My lady," he said, "you never ask that question after you've gone to war."

She nodded, but in her heart Galas was reconciling herself to a grim possibility: once they reached the familiar plateau of the Titans' Gates, she would need to look for ways to dispose of Armiger himself, should things get out of hand. He might not believe in surrender—and she never had as queen—but if the choice were between a world ruled by the Winds, or no world at all, Galas knew how she would choose.

It seemed like years since Lavin had stood on solid ground. He felt the vertigo recede a bit—enough for him to walk unaided. There was no joy in the recession of this misery though; it just made more room for misery of another kind to infect him.

He stood as still as he could and watched men and horses pour out the doors of the vagabond moon. Kilometers away, close enough that their flanks nearly touched, another moon disgorged its cargo. Together they and the several behind them blotted out the sun over ten or twelve foothills and valleys.

Not everyone would be disembarking; he had convinced the Winds to use the moons as their baggage camp. In moments he would return there as well, ostensibly to give his authority to orders coming from the Winds. In reality, he had kept his most trusted men aboard the moons, and had also set up a clandestine semaphore system. He would be relaying the commands of the swans through the medium of the basts—giving his official words to their directives—but he would also be sending commands directly to his men through the semaphore.

It was windy here in the foothills. The moons were depositing the army here partly because the air was so treacherous nearer the Gates. Of course, a two-kilometer sphere made its own weather to a degree, and a dozen of them were an entire weather system; the White Wind had confided in him that this just made things worse, because weather was inherently unpredictable. The skins of the moons rippled under sudden gusts, and lightning played around their crowns almost continuously. They electrified the air and then pulled it around themselves with invisible fins, the bast had said. With so many of them all together, their electric fields interfered. Add steep mountain peaks into the equation and things became frankly dangerous.

He was counting on that.

A bast stepped up to him. It wasn't the White Wind—that one was away investigating the burning thing that had landed. "We have found them," said the bast. "They are making for the monastery, as we suspected. Your men will take the trails directly there and capture them. We will accompany you."

"They're going to get there first," he said. "And that place is highly defensible. Why don't the swans go in and get them?"

"Not an option," said the bast. "You will go."

Lavin shrugged. "I guess you're right. The desals would cut the swans to pieces."

The bast bridled. "You will not question our orders."

"I will where it concerns my men. Listen, we are too far back here for me to command them. We need to get this moon over the valley—or better yet, over the peaks themselves. We could lower a battalion using the Heaven hooks, come on them from above. They have no way to defend against that."

The bast bared its teeth. "You are saying you will fail to take the monastery from below?"

"We won't fail. It could take weeks, months, even. You could keep us supplied that long, but—"

"Unacceptable. This abomination is too dangerous. We must destroy it now."

"So why don't you use nature itself, like you did against Armiger's army in Ravenon? Send in all the animals, uproot the plants."

The bast's tail twitched. "We have tried. They will not respond. Permanence is controlling this valley. We do not have enough morphs to convert these life forms. That is why you must go in."

"Then we have to go in from above," he said. "There is no other way."

The bast turned away. Then it said, "I will ask the swans."

Yes, bring us in close, Lavin thought as he watched it walk away. Get us high, and close together in the mountains. Then we'll learn if you can fly.

42

For a moment Axel Chan was content to just smell the air. He stood on the ship's ramp with his eyes closed, letting the breeze stroke his hair like the hand of a lover. His ears popped. He was back on Ventus, and he needed no more reminder of why he'd come than this scent of pine and loam.

The navy had given them this cutter in order to let Marya do a reconnaissance of the maelstrom of swan activity building over these mountains. The Archipelagic forces had originally wanted the Voice to lend her recognition codes to a destroyer-class ship, but the AI had insisted that they come in this small craft, without an escort. That way they could attempt to locate Calandria—a part of their plan they had not mentioned to the admiral.

Even a close orbit had not told them what was going on down here—but Calandria's transponder signal had pinged faintly from the very heart of the energy storm. When they picked up her signal, the three had exchanged uneasy glances in the cockpit. To descend into the vortex could be wildly dangerous—but if anyone on the ground might know what was truly happening, it would be Calandria May.

"Hey, move!" Marya gave Axel a small shove from behind. He sighed, and jogged down the rest of the ramp to finally stand on the soil of Ventus again. Marya came to poise beside him, and after a moment the Voice joined them. The AI's striking resemblance to Calandria May still disturbed Axel, but the Voice was obviously a different person: she stared around herself with the wide-eyed wonder of someone who had never set foot on a planet before.

"You've been here," he chided. "You dropped us off last summer, remember?"

She shook her head. "I had a different body than. To be this small and vulnerable in this environment... it's indescribable."

Both humans smiled at her. Then Marya pointed at the twin mountains rising above them. "Look! There's buildings way up there, on the side."

"Gods." Axel's mind boggled at the amount of labour it must have taken to put those structures up there. "Maybe that's where she is."

He hoped she was nearby, and not on the other side of those mountains. The ocean lay there; Axel had seen it as they came in. He had also seen strange waterfalls that vanished into shafts in the far side of the two peaks, as well as what looked like gigantic pipes shimmering under the surface of the ocean. There were a few towns around here, but no major cities within a day's travel of this place. He had no idea what Calandria might be doing out here.

He closed his eyes and concentrated. He felt the signal—but it wasn't coming from the mountains. "She's in the valley," he said. "A kilometer or two at most that way. Seems to be moving in this direction, fast."

"Should we wait, or go out to meet them?" asked Marya.

"Ka," somebody said.

A shadow whipped past and Axel and Marya ducked. The Voice turned, blinking in astonishment at the large hawk that swept in a circle around the perimeter of the clearing where they'd set down, then returned. It landed on a moss-cushioned log not three meters away, and folded its wings.

"Beautiful," whispered Marya. "Ka," said the hawk. "So you found a way off world, Axel."

"Uhn," said Axel. A bird was talking to him.

"It's me, Jordan," said the hawk. "Can you hear me?"

"Jordan?" He peered at the hawk. "How are you doing this?"

"My servant hitched a ride on this hawk. He's talking to you for me. I haven't changed myself into a hawk, if that's what you're thinking."

"No, of course not." Axel sidled closer to the hawk, looking for a speaker or antenna somewhere on it. "You seem to have come up in the world, Jordan."

"You could say that." Jordan Mason's voice held a wry tone Axel had never heard the boy use before. "Hello, Lady May."

Axel looked over his shoulder. "Oh. That's not Calandria. I know it looks like her. It's... rather hard to explain."

"Not Calandria? Where is she?"

"She's not with you?"

"No." The bird fell to calmly grooming its wing, seemingly indifferent to the human voice issuing from its body. "Listen," said Jordan, "if that's all of you, you've got to get moving. Come meet me and I'll explain everything."

"You know what's going on here?" asked Marya.

"Yes. Are you a friend of Axel's?"

"Yes. I've heard a lot about you, Jordan. I'm very pleased to meet you."

"Well, we haven't met yet, and we won't if you don't get moving. The soldiers are almost on top of you."

"What soldiers?"

"The army of Thalience."

Marya looked at Axel, her eyebrows raised. He shrugged. "We'll be right there, as soon as we collect Calandria."

"Axel, there's no time!" The hawk unfolded its wings and leapt into the air. "Follow me!" It flapped north.

Axel put his hand on Marya's shoulder. "You two go with the bird. I'll collect Cal and follow along."

"How will you find us?"

"I've got a fix on the Voice's transponder. Don't worry, I won't be long." The hawk was perched on a branch, watching impatiently. Axel watched Marya and the Voice stalk through the underbrush in its direction; then he inhaled a cold breath of mountain air and turned the other direction. The hawk cawed at him. He ignored it.

She was nearby. He had to know she was okay. Once he had her he would collect Mason and head back to the ship. With luck they could be offplanet within the hour, and with further luck Calandria and Jordan Mason would be able to tell the fleet enough to halt the planned bombardment.

He thudded over the tangle of roots and fallen pine needles, attention focussed on the signal he could sense ahead of him. It was closing on his position. She must have sensed him as well. He grinned, starting to relax.

Abruptly the trees opened out to define a well-tended trail that slotted east to west through the forest. He looked to his left, saw nothing, and turned to his right—

—Two horses came at full gallop over a ridge not twenty meters away. The lead rider shouted something and lowered a weapon across his arm.

Axel jumped back. There was a loud bang and splinters flew from the tree over his head.

The signal was very close now. For the first time it occurred to him that Calandria might be a prisoner. He cursed and unholstered his laser pistol.

The horse had stopped. "Show yourself!" shouted the rider in a thick accent Axel couldn't identify. He snuck a look around the tree; three more horses were approaching.

"Don't shoot!" he yelled. "I'm just an innocent traveller."

"Then you've got nothing to fear if you come out here."

"Yeah, right," muttered Axel.

Something moved swiftly in the corner of his eye. He whirled, in time to glimpse a giant cat-like form in mid-leap. Axel fired without thinking, and then it knocked the wind out of him and they tumbled over and over.

The furred thing fell away. Axel got to his hands and knees, shaking his head. He'd lost his pistol, but the golden cat-thing lay curled around itself, a black burn in its chest and bright blood pumping out of the center of the charred patch. It moaned, twitched, and lay still.

Where was the pistol? When he spotted it he scrabbled in that direction. He stretched out his hand to grab it—and the point of a sword came between him and it.

"Stand," said the man behind the sword. He wore the bruised-blue and russet livery of a soldier of Iapysia. He looked like he meant business. Four other soldiers had dismounted behind him.

The others looked behind themselves as several more of the cat-like creatures padded over, then stood up on their back legs. They were all gold-colored, except one which was a striking white.

This one's eyes widened and it hissed when it saw the situation. It ran forward with surprisingly human grace, and opened its arms.

"Axel!" it shouted as it wrapped its arms around him.

Someone screamed. Axel struggled to pull free of the cat-thing, and after a moment he did—or rather it let go of him and he fell. He levered himself onto his elbows, then froze.

One of the horses was down. A very large bear reared over it, bawling loudly. One of the soldiers was down too, with his hands up to fend off the hawk that was stabbing at his face.

Two foxes raced out of the forest and leaped at the remaining soldiers. Way back there, something else big was crashing in their direction.

"Fight, you cowards!" shouted the white cat. It moved with astonishing speed, knocking one of the foxes out the air mid-pounce. Then it spun on one foot and jumped backwards, disappearing behind Axel.

"Axel, run!" shouted the hawk. It ducked in close then burst in a flurry of feathers as one of the soldiers shot it point-blank. Something iridescent, half-visible, twirled up from the falling bird, then flashed into flame and drifted down as another of the soldiers emptied his musket into the chest of the bear. It staggered back snarling. Then a third man fired, and it fell dead.

Axel turned to run—and found himself eye to eye with the white cat. It held out something. His pistol. "Take it!" it hissed.

He hesitated for a second, then grabbed the pistol and ran. Animals big and small crashed past him, all converging on the soldiers and their cat-like companions.

Axel had no idea what he'd just seen. He didn't want to know. All he wanted to do at this moment was run and keep running until he'd forgotten it all.

Armiger felt a trembling in the electric fields that interpenetrated the mountains. He looked up. The vagabond moons were rising again. Sheet lightning played over their vast curved sides.

"How do you feel?" he asked Galas. She nodded, and levered herself to her feet. He had spent some minutes preparing a concoction of complex molecules and nanotech, and now he handed her the pills he had distilled it down to. She looked at them doubtfully, but when he pointed to the rising moons, she dutifully tossed them back and swallowed. Then she began to slowly climb the stairs, swinging her legs wide with every step.

He looked back at the foothills. It was some testament to how exhausted Galas was that she had not spent any time looking at the view. The vagabond moons rose to fully half the height of the Titans' Gates when on the ground; although the nearest one was at least eight kilometers away it eclipsed a good twenty degrees of the sky. The sun was getting low on the horizon, and the shadow of the Gates fell across the moon, dividing it into two halves, grey below and rose colored above. Beyond it and the two companions that had landed, nine more moons clustered high in the stratosphere, where they shone in full sunlight.

The stairs that they had to climb were also in shadow. This wasn't much of a problem for Armiger, who could see in the dark, but Galas was going to have difficulty. "We must hurry," he said.

He could sense his mecha growing in the valley below. The Winds could probably perceive it by now too, and he had no doubt they would react violently to his decoys. An assault by the Winds on the valley could buy them valuable time.

"Look." Galas pointed above them. Lights burned in windows high on the mountainside, and another pinprick glow was waving back and forth slowly at the top of the stairs. "They've seen us," she said.

"Good." They climbed together for a few minutes, and her steps became more sure as the medicine he had given her took hold. She didn't speak, and it was just as well because he was brooding about what to do next. His plans had once been precise and confident, but his deterioration into humanity seemed to have clouded his reasoning. He should have abandoned Galas at the foot of the stairs, but he found he could not. She was a dangerous drag on him at this point; left to himself he could have run all the way to the top of the mountains by now, and launched himself into one of the pits that led to the desal highway. Deep underwater in the roots of the mountain, he would have been safe and could have propagated his mecha without fear of interruption.

If only Jordan Mason were here. The boy held the key to the command language of the Winds, and Armiger was sure he could extract it, though he might have to take Mason apart molecule by molecule to find it. Yet the boy was meandering through the valley below with no apparent destination. It was infuriating.

Maybe he could contact the boy through his mecha. He did retain a com link to all of it, after all, in much the same way that the Winds remained connected to all life on Ventus. He could reprogram the genes of his mecha from afar. Maybe he could give some a voice.

He directed his thoughts to the largest of the mechal cacti growing in the valley. It was a good twenty meters high now, and had slowly turned black. In his mind's eye it appeared as a coal-black jumble of saucer-shaped leaves joined together without stems. Its roots ran straight into bedrock and heat radiated off it as from an oven. Armiger hadn't anticipated that effect of its metabolism—it might well start a forest fire if he wasn't careful. That would certainly raise the ire of the Winds, which was good, but it might also threaten Mason.

This cactus was of a design older than Armiger himself. It was a product of 3340's imagination, not his. It had the potential to bud all manner of other mechal life forms off its round leaves, and he had never had time to explore the complete catalog of possibilities. He asked it now to provide him with a list of forms able to speak that it could grow rapidly.

Wait... it said in an eerily familiar voice.

Armiger stopped climbing.

"What's wrong?" asked Galas. She touched his arm. He realized he had been glaring down into the valley, his hands balled into fists.

"Nothing," he said. "Let's keep going."

I can produce any of these, said the mechal tree in 3340's voice.

Armiger gasped, but he did not stop climbing. The tree unrolled a series of images in his mind of mechal animals, some disturbingly human-shaped. Armiger barely paid attention—it was the touch of the tree's mind that held his attention. It had a certain signature to it—his own, of course, but also something more. Were he asked to describe it, the best he could have done would have been to say that the thing's mind smelled like 3340.

"Thank you," he told it. "Do nothing. Sleep now."

I cannot sleep now, it said.

Armiger swore.

"Tell me," said Galas between gasping breaths.

"I may have made a mistake," he said. "We have to hurry."

"I can go no faster," she said. "I'm ready to collapse."

"Then I'll carry you."

She made no protest this time as he gathered her up in his arms, and began bounding up the steps.

Jordan's first sighting of Axel was as the man half-fell out of the forest shouting, "They're right on my heels!" Axel was dressed in tough black clothing, and had a belt festooned with odd devices around his waist, very like the woman who was not Calandria May. The third woman, who had introduced herself as Marya Mounce, was wearing some kind of close-fitting camouflage that made it hard to see her from the neck down. She seemed keyed up, and kept looking around herself and flaring her nostrils.

A few of Jordan's animals straggled out of the woods after them. The rest were fighting a rear-guard action, but the basts had decimated them.

Axel clasped Jordan's forearm in an almost painful grip. "Good to see you, kid! You're looking great."

"Thanks." Jordan was bursting with questions, but there was no time for them now. He could sense some of the cat-beasts that had chased Armiger and the queen approaching through the woods. They were very stealthy animals, but to him they shone like beacons through the translucent tree trunks. Several hesitant humans with guns followed them.

"Let's get back to the ship," said Axel. Jordan shook his head.

"They're between us and it," he said. "And I think the swans have figured out that it's not one of theirs. I don't think they're going to let it leave."

"It's our only option," argued Axel. "We need to get out of here."

"I agree," he said. "And we will. That's why we have to go this way." He pointed.

"He may be right, Axel," said the woman who was not Calandria May. "I can hear a lot of traffic from the swans suddenly."

It was cold, and getting dark rapidly. The swans should be turning on their midnight sun soon, but until then the forest would be impassible to these people. "I'm going to make a little light," said Jordan. "You follow it and don't let it out of your sight. We have to move quickly if we're to keep ahead of the cats."

He started walking; Tamsin fell into stride beside him. As he raised his hands to create a ghost-light on the shoulders of his jacket, he heard Axel and the others rushing to catch up.

"Well, what are those cat-things, anyway?" asked Axel. "One of them knew my name. Damn near killed me."

"I'd never seen one until the other day. I think they're a new kind of animal that the swans brought," said Jordan. "They can talk, I know that much, and they seem to be leading the army that's following us."

"Army?"

Jordan glanced back, resisting the urge to laugh. "A lot's happening right now. How did you find us, anyway?"

"Looking for Calandria. We found her signal, followed it down. At least, I thought it was her signal..." He fell silent.

One of the cat things had broken away from the others and was trailing them very closely now. It was almost completely dark now, so Jordan had to rely on his Vision to see where they were going. Axel, who seemed to be aware of the cat too somehow, sauntered easily beside him.

Of course, Jordan should have remembered that Axel Chan could see in the dark as well as Calandria had.

The cat seemed to be keeping a discreet distance, so Jordan said, "Tell me all about it—where you've been, what you've done. Then I'll tell you what's happened to me."

Axel laughed. "Best offer I've had all day."

The White Wind crept through the forest, low to the ground, and listened as Axel told his tale. She remembered being Calandria May now—remembered Axel, his passions and follies, the lopsided grin and strong hands. She had rushed to embrace him the instant she saw him, and he had not recognized her.

She wept as she padded along, regretting everything. Her life had been so sweet, and she had never known.

The others were hanging back on her instructions. She could not disobey her new masters, but neither did she have to obey them mindlessly. She knew, if they did not, that Axel posed no threat to Ventus. Jordan, though... She was not so sure about him.

She wanted to turn and run, and run all night through the woods until she could sleep the sleep of exhaustion and forget. Instead, the White Wind held her pace next to the humans, and listened with growing wonder to the tales of the Desert Voice, and of thalience, and of Earth.

Calloused hands reached down to help Galas up the last few steps. She could only nod her gratitude to the dark-robed men who stood under torchlight on the broad ledge that fronted the Titans' Gate monastery.

The moment she was safely on her feet, the whole crowd of thirty or so men knelt as one. "Your highness," said the abbot, a balding man with grey eyes whom she had not seen in years.

"I am not the queen," she said. "Not any more." The words still sounded strange to her.

They all looked up as one. "We know your palace was under siege," said the abbot. "We assumed it would be taken. So this means you are in exile now. I must tell you that you have always served the desals well and have honored the ancient traditions better than any monarch in recent memory. You have our loyalty now and forever. For that reason, we still consider you queen, if not of Iapysia, than at least of this mountain."

Galas found herself blushing. She looked down. "Thank you." She could think of nothing further to say.

"My queen, are you responsible for the unprecedented visit of all these Winds to our humble monastery?" The abbot gestured in the direction of the vagabond moons.

She shrugged. "I suppose I am, in a way."

"Is this stairway defensible?" asked Armiger.

The abbot eyed him appraisingly. "It has proved to be in the past," he said. "You are Queen Galas' escort?"

"This is the general Armiger," she said. "He is my protector, and yours now." She saw that Armiger had dismissed the strange silvery ovals that had hovered over his head the past few hours. Had she not known he was not breathing, she would have thought he looked perfectly normal.

Armiger walked over to the parapet. The monastery was just over halfway up the vertical eastern face of the north Gate. Invisible from the valley was a broad ledge, almost a plateau, that narrowed to nothingness a hundred meters north, but broadened to the south as it swept around the curve of the mountain face. The monastery buildings were built towards the north end, so that the very last towers hugged the cliff itself with sheer rock below them. The stairway arrived midway along the south edge of the plateau, where the monks had built a garden around the front gates of the monastery.

"What lies that way?" asked Armiger, pointing to the southerly curve of the narrow plateau.

"Habitations of the Winds," said the Abbot.

"Desal machines," added Galas. "There's bottomless pits, waterfalls spouting out of the cliffs... it's hard to describe."

"And the distance to the southern peak?"

"About three-quarters of a kilometer at this point," said the Abbot.

Armiger nodded. "Too narrow for a vagabond moon to fit."

"What are you thinking?" she asked him.

"I'm satisfied about the stairs down," he said. "But I somehow doubt that's where our threat will come from."

"Why do you say that?"

"Look." He pointed at the moons. As far as she could tell, they hadn't moved. They hung over the far end of the valley and the foothills, seemingly close enough to touch, but in reality kilometers away.

Armiger must have seen her uncomprehending expression. He said, "Count them."

She did so. There were eleven.

"An hour ago," said Armiger, "there were twelve."

A new sun came on, exactly at the zenith. It appeared first as a sliver of brightness, then bloomed over a few seconds into a square too bright to look at. In those few seconds, the sky underwent a complete transformation from twilight to day; every shade of blue flashed through the heavens as the stars went out everywhere except near the deep blue horizon. Way out there, clouds and the edges of the furthest vagabond moons lay in shadow; nearer in, they gleamed in pure sunlight.

Axel squinted up at the light. "Solar mirror," he said. "Big sucker."

Jordan nodded. He had seemed subdued ever since Axel and Marya had told him what they'd learned about thalience and Turcaret. Axel had seen him shake his head several times, scowling.

"So we're going to meet the infamous Armiger," Axel said. "I've been wanting to do that for almost a year. You say you spoke to him once? You still think he's not a resurrection seed?"

Jordan hesitated. "I don't think so," he said. "But I'm not sure."

"Don't say that," said Axel. "Say, 'Axel, he's not a resurrection seed, and I can prove it.' That would make me happy, if you could say that to me."

"He's up to something, and I'm not sure what," Jordan said. "I don't think that proves anything either way."

"You said he took the secret of commanding the Winds from you, but he hasn't used it. And you don't know why not."

Jordan shook his head. "He should have started using it right away. He could have taken over the world by now if he'd been able to."

"He has the technology, but not the keys," said Marya. "It's exactly like Turcaret. He can speak to them, but they're not listening."

"Oh, they're listening," said Jordan. "They hear what I say, and they talk back. That's not it."

She shook her head. "But thalience..."

Jordan barked a laugh. "Whatever thalience is, the swans have given up on it. They're bitter, and they're in the mood to clean up after neglecting their jobs for a long time. So they plan to wipe humanity off of Ventus."

Jordan's companion said, "You said this fellow Turcaret had to have a certain kind of... thing in him."

"DNA." Marya nodded vigorously. "Yes, that must be it. Armiger doesn't have the proper DNA."

"Not quite true," said Axel. "The fact is, he probably doesn't have DNA at all. ...So that's it."

Jordan nodded. "He has the broadcast power, but not the 'password'."

"That's what we came to find out," said Marya. "Let's get back to the ship."

"No!" Jordan ran several steps ahead. "We're nearly there!"

"Nearly where?" They had come to an almost vertical cliff—the end of a long sinuous drape of Titans' Gate stone. The cliff was seamless, and at least fifty meters high.

"There's a door into the Gates here," said Jordan.

There was a flash of lightning, and moments later a grumble of thunder from fairly nearby. Tamsin pointed up through the trees. "Here they come."

The Heaven hooks were descending on the valley. They were no less impressive in daylight than they had been at night; it was simply clearer now what they were. Three of the vagabond moons were edging over the valley; together they would fill the sky over it from one end to the other. Their very bottommost sections had petalled open, and now long black gantries and cables were unreeling. From a distance these looked delicate, but the gantries were thicker than the trees below them.

As Axel watched, lightning stuttered from the cables of the lead craft. A long line of explosions stitched across the valley floor.

"If we're going to get to the ship we have to leave now," said the Voice.

Jordan shook his head. "The swans are waiting if it takes off. They haven't moved against it because the Hooks are going to take care of it."

"How do you know that?"

"I used to rely on Mediation to relay what they were saying. I don't need to anymore. I can hear them myself now."

They all stopped walking and stared at Jordan. He put his hands on his hips and glared back.

"Are you gonna argue with me?" he said belligerently.

Surprised, Axel laughed.

"But, the ship!" wailed Marya.

"The ship is about to be eaten," said Jordan with a shrug. "We're going this way." He pointed to the cliff.

Marya glanced at Axel; he shrugged.

"Apparently we are," he said.

43

"What are they doing? I gave no orders for them to move!"

Lavin stood perilously near the open door of the vagabond moon. He needed this vantage point to watch the proceedings below. It was obvious from here that three of the other moons had broken formation and were moving, like ponderous floating islands, to cover the valley.

Lavin's own moon had sailed south and swept around behind the Titan's Peaks. For a while as the moon rotated he had seen nothing but ocean, sunlit for a few kilometers then abruptly plunged in darkness. Then the Titans' Gates had appeared again, very close.

The moon had been moving with frightening speed. Although the wind didn't penetrate the doors, somehow, he could hear it roaring, and all across the floor of the moon the guy wires popped and groaned as the great craft strove to keep its shape. Almost continuous flashes of lightning lit its interior, and the smell of ozone was overpowering. Once or twice as they passed the lower peaks south of the Gates, brilliant bolts had shot down, apparently from right under Lavin's feet, shattering wind-sculpted pine trees on the tops of the mountains below.

A different Lavin would have found the experience thrilling, as many of his men obviously did. They were keyed up to an almost intolerable degree, waiting in their ranks for the order to move.

A bast sauntered over to Lavin and turned its amber eyes to where he pointed. "We move to obliterate a threat in the valley," it said. "It is not your concern."

"A goodly portion of my army is in that valley."

The bast shook its head. "They have been pulled back, except for a few squads that are nearing the stairways. Your suggestion to attack from this direction was heeded and acted upon. Your army is not threatened."

"Then you have no need for it anymore?"

The bast shrugged. "For the moment, no."

And if we succeed here, not at all. Lavin glanced past the bast. Far up the distant curve of the moon's floor, two men were discreetly clamping something to one of the guy wires that crisscrossed the interior of the moon. Four other squads were returning from doing the same thing at various levels up and down the slopes. The basts had been distracted by questions and deliberate mistakes these last few minutes; all was nearly in place.

Lavin nodded curtly to the creature. "Nonetheless you're forcing our hand. Moving on the valley looks a lot like moving against the Gates. They're going to expect an attack from above now."

"We are in position. It is no longer a concern."

Lavin resisted a very real urge to push the bast out the door. Instead, he took a deep breath and looked down. If he had faith in his own body and ignored the suggestion that the world was turning in two diametrically opposed directions at the same time, he had found he could look down through the doors quite safely.

The northernmost Gate lay directly below. The moon had slowed dramatically, and was also rising. They were a good two hundred meters above the flat top of the peak. He could see their shadow slide across the grey stone tables with their dotted pine trees. Vapour rose from a number of suspiciously round pits there. There were also a surprising number of buildings; as he watched, tiny running figures appeared around several of them.

"We're rising, not descending," Lavin pointed out. "Are you proposing we jump?"

The bast shook its long head. "The wind gusts here are strong and unpredictable. It would also be bad if we shorted out on the Gate machinery. We will lower your men using the Heaven hooks."

Even as it said this, something huge and black appeared below, blotting out the view. It took a few seconds for Lavin to realize what it was: a large railed platform, pinioned at the sides by huge metal arms. The arms extended off somewhere underneath the moon. In consternation and awe he watched it rise smoothly and silently until it blocked the door with a deep thump that he felt through his feet.

He turned and waved at the marshalls. The moon's other doors were blocked too, he saw. The Hooks should be able to lower a couple hundred men at a time to the peak. That should be enough, depending on how quickly they did it.

"Move out!" The men had been champing at the bit for some action; now they surged forward, and didn't have to be prompted to leap off the stable black surface of the moon onto the metal platforms below. When the platforms were full the marshalls whistled and the surge stopped. Immediately there was a lurch and the platforms began to drop away. The men on the one below Lavin started shouting and most fell to their hands and knees—but the descent was smooth and except for the icy wind that now whirled through the doors as well, he was sure it would be painless.

For all that he mistrusted the Winds, he knew they were efficient. They would not waste his men in the descent.

Jordan had been anticipating this moment for days. What he hadn't imagined was that he would be completely soaking wet and freezing cold when it came.

He stood shivering with the others at one end of a gigantic chamber that must penetrate deep into the mountain. It must be at least a hundred meters broad, and as high. It didn't really have a floor, more a lattice of pipes both mammoth and small. They were all uniformly grey and unmarked. The tangle was so complex that the eye lost itself in detail after only a few meters. Jordan had just spent the past few minutes trying to figure out a way across the vast maze, but every route he traced either got lost or ended in an impassable drop or roll under a bigger pipe.

"I have our route," said the woman whom the others called the Voice. "Follow me." She stepped out confidently onto a pipe as broad as a house and began walking.

Axel and Marya followed without hesitation. Tamsin shrugged, and went too. After a moment Jordan followed.

He had envisioned this space in his mind, but the reality was nothing like the vision. There was something called a conveyor at the far end of this chamber, he knew, and it would deposit them far above, near the peak of the mountain. Mediation had told him it was safe. On the other hand, Mediation had not told him about this daunting labyrinth, and that was unsettling.

Biting his lip he hurried after the others. In Vision he could see Armiger issuing orders as men in dark robes rushed back and forth along a broad ledge. Some men were passing out weapons, chiefly pikes and bows, and nearby Galas was pleading with a grey-eyed man. She wanted them to retreat into the monastery, Jordan knew. Armiger disagreed, and so did the abbot.

Mediation said that the Heaven hooks had dropped part of Parliament's army on the peak of the mountain. They were on their way down, using numerous paths and stairs. Armiger knew it too; the plateau lay in shadow and once when the general looked up Jordan too could see the vast swell of the vagabond moon that perched like some mythical bird atop the mountain.

Human soldiers would be just the first gambit by the Winds. If Armiger resisted this onslaught, they would escalate things, and Jordan knew by now that they would not stop until they had levelled the mountain if need be. He also finally knew why Armiger had not acted—it was because he could not. The general was helpless until he knew the final secret.

Ka had been lost in the attack on the basts that had surrounded Axel, as had many of their animals. Jordan felt the loss of the little Wind keenly; he hadn't told Tamsin yet, and wasn't sure how he would. Ka had been a friend of sorts, and now he wished he had protected it, not sent it into danger.

It was too late now. Ka was dead, and there were no Mediation Winds capable of speech near the surface of the mountain. If he was going to contact Armiger, Jordan would have to get there himself.

The Voice took to the maze of pipes confidently—hopping from high ones down to broad lower ones, zig-zagging, doubling back without hesitation. Several times it looked like she was leading them into cul de sacs, but every time a surprising new avenue opened up, and after only a few minutes they emerged on a single straight pipe that ran a full kilometer straight to the end of the chamber. Tamsin began running the instant they reached it, and Jordan took off after her. He could hear her laughing ahead of him, and he grinned too. The others followed more quietly.

She was waiting at the small square chamber at the end. She kissed him then said, "is that our way up?"

Where she pointed, a black hole opened into a rattling space where every now and then a large metal bin or bucket would slide up and past.

"You're not afraid?" he asked her.

She shook her head. "You're not, so I'm not."

Jordan's heart managed to miss a beat. He was saved from having to say something in return (his mind had gone blank) by the arrival of the others.

"Oh no," said Marya, when she saw the opening. "I'm not going in there."

"Fine," said Axel. "We'll leave you here then."

"It's perfectly safe," said Jordan, striving to make his voice sound confident. "Just wait for a bucket to go by and climb in. You'll just slide into the next bucket in line."

"Okay, if you're so smart, demonstrate," said Marya.

I hate being the leader, thought Jordan as he waited for one of the big metal bins to go past. He felt himself hesitate, felt a sudden surge of fear at the thought that he might wait too long and get crimped by the next bucket in line while only halfway through the opening—so he jumped.

There was a moment of blackness and falling, then he was in a bucket, banging his elbow and hitting his head. "Ouch!"

A square opening came into view. Several silhouetted heads were blocking what little light tried to come through it.

"It's fine!" he shouted cheerfully. His heart was still racing. "Just follow along."

I'd better be right about this. The light cut off below him, and then he was rising in darkness, supported apparently only by faith.

It will not happen again. Galas slipped out the gates of the monastery, grabbed a pike that a harried monk handed her without looking, and raced after the line of men heading south along the plateau. She had entered the monastery on Armiger's orders; he wanted her safe. At her first opportunity she had raided a closet and stolen a robe, and with this as her disguise she had slipped out again.

They will not die for me.

She knew that the Heaven hooks were after Armiger, and that they were using the soldiers of Parliament's army as their own. The army was obviously decapitated; she couldn't imagine Lavin agreeing to place his men in such jeopardy. If he had he was a fool.

Galas knew she could not compel the Winds to retreat. The men who had once been her loyal followers however, were another matter.

Sore as she was, she forced herself to keep up with the monks as they raced around the southern curve of the mountain. Here the ledge opened out into a vast grassy plateau encircled by spires of stone. Pyramids of mist stood beyond these, permanent residents of the space between the two Gates. As she ran the sound of roaring water became louder, and Galas remembered the first time she had come here. She had gone to stand on the edge of the plateau, and peered down into mist and the vision of a hundred waterfalls that plummeted into bottomless shafts below, or exploded hissing off rounded, red-hot domes in the saddle between the peaks. There was no way down to that inferno; it was entirely a place of the Winds. Behind her and above, on the south face of the Gate, other apertures opened, venting steam or small trickles of water that could become torrents that arced out and into the gulf below. There was so much sound here that she had sometimes been sure she heard muttering voices under it all—an effect the monks sadly assured her was an illusion.

Galas had been a young queen then. Flushed with the success of her communication with the desals, she had imagined herself the goddess her people claimed she was. When she came here she had felt ownership, not fear, and she had stood upon a stone here and preached a sermon to the monks and the Winds. Her own words returned to her with ironic pain—she had spoken breathlessly of a new age for Man and Wind. Her own sincerity returned to her now like the remembrance of a crime.

The monks were forming up into columns, preparing for the great run up the stairs. Far up there, she could see a column of men on their way down. There was no time to think.

She raced past the head of the line, ignoring the shouts that followed her, and started up the steps. One of the monks came after her, and when he laid a hand on her sleeve she turned and shouted, "Get back to the line! I have to do this alone."

He stammered something and let go. She ran on, trying with little success to ignore the daggers of pain in her thighs from days of riding combined with her recent climb. After only a few meters she was gasping, her legs wobbly beneath her, but she kept on.

Men were shouting above her. She flipped back the cowl of her robe and looked up into a bristling mass of men and weapons. "Halt!" shouted the one in the lead, who was young enough to be the son she had never had.

She stopped, panting. They came down, slowly, and she had to smile at their caution. These were the veterans of Lavin's army—men who had committed atrocities in her experimental towns, and had cursed her every day for the past year. They were little more than boys, and were visibly scared. And they were her people, whether they wanted to admit it or not.

Drawing herself up to her full height, Galas wiped her tangled hair away from her forehead, and said, "This attack will not happen."

The leader gaped at her. "Who are you to tell us that?" Somebody laughed behind him.

She raised her voice, letting it echo off the mountainside. "I am the one you pursued over leagues of charred ground, and over the bodies of thousands. I am the one you obeyed as a child, and feared as a soldier. I am your sovereign, your compass and your ultimate meaning. I am she who spoke to the oceans and commanded rain for your fields. I am Galas, your queen, and I am the only hope any of you have of living to see another day.

"When you moved to destroy me you set in motion terrible events that threaten the very world itself. You know that now, but you do not know what to do about it. You desperately wish to turn back the hands of time, I can see it in your eyes. I am the one who knows what has happened, and why. Only I have the key to halting the advance of the vengeful Winds across our land.

"So you will kneel to me now, and when you rise you will be mine and I will lead you out of this nightmare into which you have fallen."

At her words they stopped.

They stared in silence at her, then beyond her to the turmoil in the skies.

Then they knelt before her.

Armiger stood on the edge of a cliff. Three hundred meters below and kilometers away, his mecha were dying under the lightning bolts of the Heaven hooks—all save one, a thing like a great metal tree that had begun in the past hour to sprout strange multilimbed animalcules, which were harvesting minerals and ores from the rocky terrain around it. This abomination fended off the lightning as if it were rain. He could see it from here, for it glowed a dull red now from its internal furnaces. The forest around it was burning.

He could hear it, too, chuckling inside his head.

You did well, Armiger. This place is perfectly suited to our task.

He shuddered. If he probed deep inside himself, he knew he would find that the strange repository of nanomemory, which he had calculated could hold centuries of vast experience, was gone. It had slipped out of him on its own accord when he began creating mecha. It had been a resurrection seed, and he had unwittingly set it free.

Feel the energy under us! These local beings have tapped geothermal potentials of magnificent power. When my roots have reached deep enough, my growth will be geometric. You could not have chosen a better ground in which to seed me.

3340's voice alone was enough to freeze Armiger in his tracks. He felt pinioned as by a giant searchlight—the attention of a god was on him. Compared to it, the wrath of the Winds seemed trivial.

We will eat this world in no time.

He tore his gaze away from the red spot and the lightning flickering around it. The Winds would not be able to stop 3340. Maybe the human fleet that he knew waited in orbit could—but their methods would guarantee the deaths of every living being on this continent. There had to be another solution.

The monks and even the army marching down from the mountain's peak were forgotten. Armiger stood still, frowning into the false day, wracking his brains for a way out of the trap he had himself set and sprung.

"Sir, they're not fighting."

The lieutenant lay at the very edge of the door, a telescope jammed against his eye. He was staring straight down.

"What do you mean? They haven't engaged the enemy?"

"I think the monks must have surrendered. They're all together down there, but there's no fighting going on."

"Excellent. Have they got the semaphore set up yet?"

"It's just coming on line now, sir. They're sending a test message."

"Read me the first real message as it comes in. I don't want to waste a second."

He paced back and forth, fighting vertigo and cursing the basts who got in his way. Nearly the entire army was on the ground now, either here or at the mouth of the valley. They would never be in a better position than they were now.

"I want to know the instant you have your hands on General Armiger."

"Yes," said the bast who had been overseeing the operation. "So do we."

"Sir, we confirmed the test message. Now they're sending. The message is..."

Lavin staggered over and sat down heavily next to the man. "Yes, yes?"

"The message... the message is..." The lieutenant took the telescope away from his eye and rolled over. He looked at Lavin with a puzzled expression. "It said, 'The queen is alive.'"

Lavin felt his whole body go cold.

What a terrible, terrible joke to play on him. I will kill the man who thought of this, he decided.

"Signal them. Tell them to stop fooling around and tell us what's happening."

The lieutenant ran to comply. Lavin sat gasping. It took all his willpower not to leap to his feet, and hurl the bast standing over him into the sky.

The flag man lay with his head and shoulders over the opening, and began waving the bright banners of his trade. The lieutenant sat on his legs as he did this. He was still holding the telescope, so Lavin crab-walked over and snatched it from him. The metal was freezing cold, like everything at this altitude. Lavin lay down, inched up to the edge of the door and looked down.

He was immune to heights now, since he'd felt like he was falling for days.

It took him a while to find the semaphore man on the ground. When he did the man was in mid-message. "—is alive," the flags said. "Galas is here."

"No." He wiped his eyes and looked down again.

Each letter took several waves of the flag, so the next message came to him with excruciating slowness.

When the message completed he rolled away from the opening, and lay staring at the false sky inside the moon. Way up there, guy wires thrummed with the tension of trying to hold the moon in position against the buffeting mountain winds. The bast was speaking to him, but he ignored it. The semaphore message had been read aloud by the lieutenant, and the commanders and soldiers left aboard the moon were in an uproar.

Galas commands General Lavin to surrender his army. Only she could be so audacious.

He sat up, vertigo forgotten. "Lieutenant! Reply to that message!"

"Sir! What should we say?"

He thought about it, heart racing. "Ask her... ask her this: 'What was the name of the inn?'"

"Sir?"

"Just send it." He felt lightheaded now, but not because of the vertigo. He lay down again.

If she was alive... if she was alive, he could never look her in the face again. Yes, he had loved her, but he had also failed her—both as a man and as a soldier. It no longer mattered what she felt for him in return. He knew his real value, and with that knowledge came a certain measure of calm. He also knew what he could do to let her know he was sorry, and that too was a healing thought.

It seemed to take forever for his message to be relayed. He knew the answer was the right one, however, by the third letter.

"Nag's Head."

That was the inn where he had first met Galas. Nobody else knew that, except maybe her old bodyguards, who had all retired long since, and wisely held their tongues.

Lavin rolled to his feet, staggered, but stayed up. "Send this: 'The army is yours.'"

They gaped at him.

The bast stepped forward. "What is it you are doing?" it demanded. "Cease this. We command your army."

Lavin bowed to it. "And you still do," he said smoothly. "You may relay your orders to my commanding officer from now on. She is below, on the mountain top."

The bast twitched its tail suspiciously. "Send a message to this commander with your flag thing," it hissed. "Tell it to deliver up the abomination to us now!"

The semaphore operator looked at Lavin, who nodded. He stepped back, carefully loosening his sword in its scabbard.

Galas stood on a level spot halfway between the monastery and the peak of the mountain. She had ordered the semaphore be set up here, where she could survey all the action. When the question about the Nag's Head had come down, she nearly cried from the memories it evoked. There could be no stronger evidence that Lavin still lived, and that he still honored what had once been between them.

Arrayed around her were Lavin's men. They were plainly stunned with the turn of events, but remained silent. They would do whatever she asked, she knew. Lavin had commanded it; and they had no other lifeline.

The semaphore operator read out the Winds' demand that Armiger be given up. Galas sighed, and glanced down the mountainside. She had been expecting this, of course. It was inevitable, now that Armiger had clearly failed to do whatever it was that he had intended.

She could see him down there, a small figure standing still by the parapet overlooking the valley. There was no one near him; the monks were afraid of him, and rightly so. He seemed so insignificant there—just another lost soul. However, until she gave him to the Winds, all of Galas' people were threatened.

In turning to give the command that he be taken, Galas felt herself loosing hold of all that she had striven for. Armiger represented the last shreds of her dream of autonomy from the Winds, and tradition. With him gone, the world would flatten out again, into the drab and futureless round it had always been. Her people would be slaves again, and now for all time.

It was ironic. Lavin had surrendered to her at last—and yet, he had won, more completely than he probably knew.

So be it. The safety of her people came before everything else. That being the case, however, she must not just give Armiger up. He was valuable; and the wrath of the Winds must be turned away from her kingdom.

With difficulty, she cleared her throat, and said, "Send this message to my dear General Lavin:

"We will turn the general Armiger over to you, provided that you promise to leave our army, our cities and our people unharmed. This is a small price to ask."

She stood with her hands clasped as the semaphore operator began waving. Her gaze was turned not up at the all-encompassing sky made by the moon, but down at the monastery courtyard, where a kindred spirit stood disconsolately, awaiting his fate.

"...This is a small price to ask," recited the operator by the moon's doors. His voice trailed off with the last syllables, as he saw the effect his words were having on the listening basts.

"We have been betrayed!" shouted their leader. It rounded on Lavin. "There can be no negotiation with those who are to serve us. If your commander will not obey our orders, then we will take matters into our own hands."

Lavin stepped forward. "What do you—" The bast was shouting something. Lavin felt a lurch go through the whole fabric of the moon; he stumbled.

"Sir!" The semaphore man was waving to him. "The hooks! They're heading toward the mountain." Lavin ran over to the edge of the door, and looked down. Giant metal claws were spiralling away from below them, aimed at the mountainside.

"We will collect the abomination ourselves," said the bast. "And remove your army from this place at the same time."

Calmly, Lavin drew his rapier and ran the bast through before it could even shout. He watched impassively as it toppled to the deck. Then he turned to his men.

"Relay the message to the other moons and to Hesty on the ground. Then send this code word to the moons: Repast."

The other basts shrieked, and bared their claws; Lavin had posted men to watch them surreptitiously many hours ago, and now the moon suddenly echoed with musket-fire. The basts fell, clawing and yowling. Gunpowder smoke wafted past him and swirled out into the cold air above the mountains.

"But sir, what does this mean?" In the aftermath, the lieutenant was the only one brave enough to speak up. He would have made a good marshall, Lavin thought, given time. Too bad.

"We have known for some time that we are prisoners of the Winds," he said. "We were wrong—Galas was right all along. The creatures who've enslaved our army do not have our interests in mind. Nor do they have the right to abuse us. Our homes are threatened, and if we let them, they will destroy us. We've known that, and we've been waiting on the proper moment to act.

"That moment is here. Send the messages, then I have one last detail for the engineers. They know what it is. For the rest of us, all we can do is pray that whatever rules both Man and Wind will be merciful to us, and let us live through the next hour."

He stood with his sword out, watching the semaphore messages go out. The engineers ran to their stations and unreeled their fuses. At any moment the vagabond moon might realize what had occurred, and act to save itself. He wasn't about to give it the chance.

Lavin's heart was lifting. It lifted as the charges went off with sharp bangs and his men cheered. It lifted as the moon's internal support cables whipped up and away, and ripples began to spread across the geodesic skin of the moon.

As the gales above the mountain took the moon and pulled it out of shape, he fell and slid along the floor, but he was no longer afraid. He knew he had finally done the right thing. He was able to hang onto the broken stump of a guy stanchion for a while and watch while the moon's skin split and the sensation of falling—really falling—began. Then they were turning too fast and the gusts were too strong, and he let himself go.

For a while, he was flying.

Men had crowded the parapet below to watch the fall of the moons. Galas stood with one of the officers who had been in on the plan. He told her how they had observed the fragility of the great vehicles under windy conditions—how their skins were too thin and vast to be truly rigid, so that they needed internal support. He told her how Lavin had mined the guy wires. As he spoke she watched the globe that had hung above them tear apart on the south peak, and fall in wind-torn pieces across the valley.

Galas had thought she had nothing left to cry for, but she did weep as she watched the three moons in the valley vainly try to avoid one another. They collided at last in terrible slow motion, and with only the sound of far distant thunder, they split and drifted like the finest gauze onto the flaming, jagged peaks of the forest, which shredded them completely.

Lavin was dead. At the end of all things he had obeyed her, and maybe he even loved her still, as he had claimed. She put her hands over her face, and turned away.

44

Jordan hurried down a dim passage near the mountain top; his hand tightly gripped Tamsin's, and she stumbled as she tried to keep up. The others were blundering along behind him, but he no longer had the patience to wait for them. Something terrible was happening above.

First, Mediation had fallen silent. Its constituents were busy—whether busy panicking or marshalling their forces, he did not know. The desals were only part of Mediation, Jordan knew; there were other, more powerful entities located deep within the planet's crust: the geophysical Winds. He had caught vague telltales of their presence once or twice, like a deep rumbling far below his feet. Now that rumbling too was silent.

Something had happened above the mountain—some catastrophe involving the Heaven hooks. Jordan's own senses weren't strong enough to penetrate that far, and Mediation was not showing him anything. He could sense the immense machines of the Titans' Gates slowing, however. They seemed to be shutting down.

Mediation, he called now. Answer me! What's happening?

Silence. The back of his neck was prickling. Had the geophysical Winds been defeated by Thalience? Or had the Galactics attacked Ventus, as Axel warned they would?

It was only dozen meters now to the exit nearest the monastery. He would know in seconds.

"Come on! We're nearly there!"

"What's the hurry?" Axel loomed out of the shadows. The scowl he was wearing made him look like the sort of creature Jordan's mother had always warned him lived underground.

"Something's wrong."

Axel shrugged. "That statement probably applies to every second I've spent on this blasted world."

"No, I—" There was the door. As he hurried towards it, Jordan commanded the oddly-shaped lozenge to open. Dust burst in little clouds from its edges, and a moment later light split the gloom.

At that moment a voice spoke in Jordan's mind. It had some of the qualities of the voices of the Winds; there was an impression of great strength there, and the sort of calmness borne of great age. From its first words, however, Jordan knew this was no Wind.

Stop now. You will cease this petty assault. There is nothing you can do to me. Reconcile yourselves to being devoured, because it will happen to you within the day.

The door stopped moving—half open. Daylight flooded in around it, revealing the utilitarian antechamber they had come to. It was about four meters on a side, its walls of rock. Some ancient bones were piled in one corner. The door itself was carefully shaped to appear like part of the mountainside; bits of moss had broken off and fallen inside as it opened. It was attached to a curved arm that ended in the ceiling; the door opened inward and up.

Jordan ran up to the thick stone slab and hauled frantically on it. It didn't move. He closed his eyes and focussed his concentration. The door wouldn't listen to him, and there were no mecha on it that he could compel.

Axel wrapped his arms around the valve as well. "Bah! Damned ancient technology. I guess it's not even self-repairing."

"That's not the problem. Axel, we have to get this door open." Jordan had a sick feeling that they were too late. He suppressed it angrily. They had to keep going.

"Get behind me," said Axel. He unclipped something from his belt.

You have done well, servant. Your reward will be to merge with me, at a higher level of consciousness than you knew before. You can participate in the redesign of this world.

Jordan stepped back into the hallway with the women. Axel put up one hand as if to ward off the sun, and levelled what looked like a half-melted version of a flintlock pistol at the hinge of the door. A flash of blinding light made Jordan step back. When the flash didn't cease but settled into a hot hissing presence, he turned his back and groped further into the corridor.

Let us make heat now. I need more energy.

There was a loud crash and the light ended. "Damn," muttered Axel, "I'm nearly out of charge."

Jordan turned to see sunlight streaming in through a thick haze of smoke. The room smelled like a smithy. Coughing, Axel hopped over the fallen door and outside. The woman Marya followed him immediately.

Tamsin was by his side. "Ready?" she said.

"No." They stepped out into the false day—and pandemonium.

Jordan stood on a slope above the southern plateau of the north Gate. Hundreds of men were running around below shouting. About half of them looked like soldiers; the rest were the monks Jordan had seen through Armiger's eyes. Although they were yelling, Jordan couldn't hear what anyone was saying over the long, continuous rolls of thunder that filled the air.

He grabbed Axel by the shoulder. "What's happening?"

Axel pointed. "Maybe we'd better get back inside."

Jordan looked up.

Coils of light were falling from the sky.

For a second or two he couldn't figure out what he was seeing. From the zenith to the horizon, long glowing threadlike shapes one after another faded into view, moved gently down the sky leaving red trails like blood, then faded from view again—or else touched the earth, where great white blooms of light appeared. As he watched, a brilliant shimmering rope appeared almost directly overhead, grew for seconds into a bright starred tangle like a falling rope, then suddenly found perspective as a giant flaming branch-like shape that plummeted out of sight behind the mountain. The whole sky lit up with a blue-white flash, and the ground under Jordan shook. Then the sound came round the mountain, and he lost his footing.

He tumbled head over heels down the slope, and landed about a meter from Axel. He sat up, bruised and half-deafened. Tamsin was next to him in seconds, offering her hand. With a grimace Jordan took it and stood.

"What the hell is all this?" shouted Axel. His words seemed strangely muffled to Jordan.

"It's the swans!" shouted Marya. "The Diadem swans are attacking!"

Jordan's heart sank. "Not attacking. They're falling."

"Falling? But why... the fleet?"

"No." It took a few seconds for Jordan to orient himself. The valley was this way, the saddle between the two peaks over there. And if you walked far enough, Mediation had told him, you'd be able to see the ocean over there...

"This way!" He started running without waiting for the others. Men were huddling behind rocks; they were digging holes, standing with their backs to the cliff, anything to find shelter.

He saw the parapet where he knew Armiger had been standing. There was the general, slumped against the stones, looking downward. Jordan steeled him to ignore the falling sky, and ran to him.

"Armiger!" He didn't turn, so Jordan put a hand on his shoulder. It didn't feel like flesh under his fingers, more like wood.

Armiger's eyes were tightly closed, and a grimace twisted his face. His hands were knotted tightly on the parapet.

"Armiger! It's Jordan! I'm here. Tell me what to do."

Armiger's lips moved. Jordan couldn't hear what he was saying, so he closed his eyes and concentrated. He felt his own lips form the word, "Nothing."

"Then it's true!" He shook the general by the shoulders. "You were a resurrection seed all along."

"I thought I was the seed," murmured Armiger. "But He didn't trust me that far. I wasn't the seed; he planted the seed where he knew I wouldn't find it."

The others had arrived. They stood with their shoulders hunched, except the Voice who stared into the sky with appraising curiosity. Jordan sat up and looked out over the parapet.

The floor of the valley was visible in gaps between towering shafts of smoke like the trunks of a giant forest. Fire raged from a hundred sources. The geodesic shards of the vagabond moons poked out of flame and smoke here and there; as he watched one toppled over, sending a ripple out through the forest fire.

Something made of red-hot blades squatted at the center of a blackened hectare of ground. Thin beams of light flicked out of it every few seconds, incinerating the few remaining trees nearby. Heat-haze made the thing shimmer like an hallucination. It must be at least as big as Castor's manor.

"3340," said Armiger. Jordan looked down at him. The general lay staring at the roiling sky. "It only took Him minutes to crack the codes of the Winds. He is able to command them now. He's ordered the swans to commit suicide."

"Can't you stop him?" Jordan knew the answer even as he spoke. Armiger shook his head.

Tamsin knelt by them. "What about the desals? Can't they do anything?"

"It's paralyzed Mediation somehow too." Jordan instinctively ducked as another explosion sounded somewhere nearby. "That's why the door stopped moving before."

"That's it then," said Axel. "It's up to the fleet. They're going to nuke this entire continent to make sure they get 3340. If we'd only gotten to the ship."

Jordan stood up. "Armiger, is that red thing down there 3340?"

The general glanced at him. "Yes."

"He's very hot. Like a fire. Is that all there is to him?"

"For now. He's growing fast. He's hot because he needs energy..." Armiger drifted off again, eyes fixed on nothing.

Jordan leaned on the parapet. "Let me try something."

"What are you doing?" asked Axel.

"I was worried that we'd have nothing to bargain with, between the Winds and Armiger," said Jordan. "So while we were on our way to the mountain, I took some steps."

"What steps?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. Just don't disturb me for a bit. Okay?"

Axel stood with his hands in his pockets, scowling at the ground. Marya stood wide-eyed, her hand to her mouth. The Voice returned Jordan's gaze calmly. And Tamsin, who was obviously scared, smiled and gestured to Jordan as if to say, "Go on."

Jordan turned, closed his eyes, and fell into Vision.

The silence had become unbearable. The White Wind stopped walking, and settled back on her haunches. The music she had felt in her mind for weeks was gone, and with it the self-assurance that had kept her going.

She had come to the shore of a giant underground lake. Its dark waters stretched away to an unguessable distance; only this thin strip of stony path on the outskirts was lit, and it only poorly. She knew the ones she had pursued had come this way because they had left their scent; she had used that scent to negotiate a maze of pipes, and faith in it had led her into a dark shaft full of rising vessels. Now she was high above ground level.

Just minutes ago she had paced along in complete confidence, knowing she was well watched over and treading paths prepared for her by ancient and loving creators. Now all she knew was that she was deep in the bowels of a mountain whose machineries had come to an unexpected stop. Anything might happen. The waters might rise. The lights might go off.

Uneasy, she started walking again, more rapidly. An upward-sloping corridor let off the lake, and she took that. In the distance she saw daylight, and loped toward it, relieved.

Just as she reached an open valve door whose portal had been melted, maybe by laser fire, a voice bloomed in her mind.

Cease to move. You will all cease to move, even if it means your death. Do it!

The voice hit with the force of an explosion. Calandria May fell to her knees. She put out her hands to stop her fall, and saw the white fur on them, the claws. That didn't matter—because she recognized the voice in her mind. It was 3340, whom she had helped to kill.

A sick feeling of horror came over her. She had failed. The resurrection seed named Armiger had fulfilled its mission after all.

The knowledge that every living thing on Ventus was controlled by an unseen power had once frightened Calandria. That was nothing next to what she felt now. She remembered what it had been like when, once before, she had been a servant to 3340.

She must find a way to die.

On all fours now, she bolted through the door into muddy daylight. She saw a distant cliff-edge, and began to run towards it. Halfway there, she caught the scents of Jordan Mason and Axel Chan again. She paused, in an agony of indecision.

Then she raced towards the scent.

The Titans' Gates thrust their roots deep under the ocean. There they drew rivers of water from the cold abyss and siphoned it into vast underground reservoirs. Pipelines wider than highways led from these to the desalination stacks that filled the Gates.

Jordan could feel the stacks, vast invisible towers behind the cliffs. Galas was right, the pristine mountainside of the Gates was a mask hiding an ancient machine that moderated the water table for the entire continent. In Vision, he could see the ghostly blueprint for the desal highways that radiated out from far below his feet. These operated day and night, year-round, according to schedules and rules that came down literally from on high. Galas had been able to influence these locks and valves somewhat, in ways too minor for Diadem to notice. Her whole nation had flourished from the runoff she had been able to divert from this place.

All the inundations Galas had commanded were as nothing compared to the stockpile of water stored under the Gates. There was enough there to flood Iapysia, and the Gates could draw more water from the ocean constantly, in prodigious volumes. Standing here, Jordan knew he was in the presence of more power than he had ever conceived possible.

Jordan had thought long and hard about how to ensure that Armiger would listen to others' wishes if he really did remake the world. If the general wanted to pave over Ventus, Jordan had hoped to oppose him, however slightly, with the only weapon he had: control of the Titans' Gates.

"First password," he said, "is: Emmy."

Passwords, Ka had told him, were a different kind of safeguard than the coded protocols the Winds used for the messages they passed. Codes could be broken; an unknown password must be guessed at.

Days ago, Jordan had asked Mediation to create passworded access to the entire mechanism of the Titans' Gates. As far as Mediation was concerned, Jordan was a Wind: it had complied.

"Control is yours," said the voice of the Titan's Gates.

"Second password is: Steam Car."

"The locks are ready for command."

"Third password—"

"Who is that?" It was the voice of 3340. "Relinquish control to me, now!"

Jordan smiled, and with great relish said, "No.

"Third password is: They are lost."

3340 had learned to intercept and mimic the command language of the Winds. It was as if it had forged keys to all the strongholds of Ventus. But while a key can be duplicated, a password must be learned or guessed. Against the controls Jordan had given himself, 3340 could do nothing. While Mediation treated Jordan like an equal, he had been able to command some systems deep in the mountain to tune to a single signal source once the first password was given. Now, regardless of what authorization they received, they would only obey commands from Jordan's location.

"Who are you?" asked 3340. The tone of its voice had changed, from imperious to solicitous. "You are clever. We can work together, you and I."

"Flood the valley," Jordan told the Gates.

"No! Listen, you'll never believe what I can do for you. Here's the best of all reasons why you should—"

Jordan opened his eyes and turned to look out over the parapet. If he hadn't known to feel for it, he might have missed the faint vibration that began to sing through the stone under his feet.

There were emergency floodgates to drain the desalination stacks in case of an emergency. Jordan had opened these, and now a white wall raced across the valley, engulfing everything under it.

Jordan stood at the parapet and watched it roll. The others stood nearby, all silent. Axel was open-mouthed, Tamsin grimly satisfied.

He didn't at first notice that Armiger had moved, and was now standing next to him.

The red-hot thing far down the valley had plenty of time to see the water coming, but it had not yet built any mobile elements. Jordan watched bright lances of light flick out of it, felling trees in a vain attempt to divert the onrushing water. The crest of the wave rising against it was festooned with entire trees as well as boulders big as a house. The roar was bone-rattling even at this height.

"Die," Jordan mouthed, or was it Armiger? He watched without emotion as an unstoppable hammer of water and tree trunks hit the red flower. 3340 was instantly engulfed. The water rushed on heedlessly.

Jordan heard the gods's voice in his mind for a few more seconds—a jumbled confusion of pleas and threats. Then came inner silence, even as the majestic sound of the deluge hit the farthest peaks and came echoing back.

The roaring and surging echoes continued; directly below this parapet, huge mouths continued to empty white arcs into the valley. To Jordan, though, things remained silent for a long moment until, like crickets and frogs resuming their monologues after some night beast has slouched by, the voices of the mecha and minor Winds returned here, there, and gradually throughout the mountains and valley.

Jordan turned his attention to the raging flood below. "Do not drown the humans at the mouth of the valley," he commanded it. "But travel where you must and churn until you have found every speck that once made up 3340's body, and reduce it to nothing."

The water was full of mecha, and the shattered trees and the stones. It all now combined, as mecha would, to define itself as a single entity: the flood. This entity heard Jordan's instruction, and began to act on it.

The valves in the mountainside slowly shut, leaving a hazy jumble of white water below. Steam began to rise from this, and soon the valley disappeared beneath a blanket of cloud.

Jordan felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked around.

Armiger was smiling at him.

Calandria emerged from the mountain to find a landscape adrift with smoke and steam, dotted here and there with men just now rising from their hiding places. The sky was striated with the aurora of the Diadem swans, but the vagabond moons she had become so familiar with were missing. She had heard the screams of 3340 in her mind, and had tripped and fallen in her confusion. She no longer heard Him, but His voice might return any second, and if she even thought about that possibility she panicked. There was only one course of action left to her; she prayed it wasn't too late.

She bounded down the slope, shoulder and flank aching from injuries new and old. The abomination had to be here somewhere—the plateau was packed with armed men, though they looked totally cowed at the moment.

When she spotted Armiger standing with Axel and the others near a cliff, Calandria bared her fangs and ran straight at him.

"Thank you," Armiger said to Jordan. "I don't know how you did that, or even if you know what you've done—"

"I know," said Jordan. "And you're welcome." He grinned, feeling a swelling pride he'd never thought he would ever feel. Looking up, however, he could see that the swans were returning to their places in the sky. Things were not over yet.

"You didn't intend for that to happen, did you?" he asked Armiger. The general shook his head.

"It was what I came here to do. But as I lived here, I... came to myself. I no longer wanted what He wanted."

Jordan nodded. "That leaves us with a question, then: what is it that you do want?"

Armiger stared out over the ruined valley for a long time. Finally his shoulders slumped, and he said, "I don't know anymore."

"That's all right," said Jordan. "I have an idea."

"Down!" shouted Axel as something white dove at them. There was a brilliant flash and something heavy slammed into Jordan and knocked him against the parapet. He fell, for an instant certain that he had gone over the edge; but no, he landed on solid stone and heard the sounds of a scuffle directly over his head.

He blinked at the spots in front of his eyes and stood up. The smell of burned hair was in his nose.

Armiger stood several steps away. One sleeve of his shirt had been ripped away, as well as the skin on his shoulder. What was revealed underneath was not flesh, but bright veined metal.

Axel leaned way out over the parapet. He held his laser pistol in one hand.

Jordan turned and looked over the edge. Two meters down a bast was clinging by its claws to the steepening slope. A burn mark on its back was smoking.

"Take my hand," said Axel. He reached down. "You don't have to die."

"Don't risk yourself. They won't let me die," said the bast. The sound of its voice shocked Jordan to stillness. "Axel, don't let it win."

Axel's outstretched hand wavered. "Who are you?"

"Axel!" The bast slipped, caught itself then started to slide. "Axel—who is that woman who looks like me?"

Then it lost its grip, and plummeted silently into the cloud bank below.

Axel climbed down. For a while he just stood there, looking down at the stone under his feet. The others were silent too. Behind them all, Jordan could see a black-robed woman walking in their direction: Galas. A large crowd of men followed her quietly.

"Axel," murmured the Voice. "We have to contact the fleet. 3340 is dead; they have to know."

Axel sat down on the stones. The laser pistol clattered away from him. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I know, I know."

"You're the only one here with the transmitter implant."

He grimaced. "I've been trying to raise them. There's too much interference from all that." He gestured at the sky.

"I know you," said Galas. They looked at her; she was staring at the Voice.

"You are from the stars, aren't you? You tried to destroy Armiger, I saw you shoot him with a silver musket."

"No," said the Voice. "I am not—you see, I am—"

"The question is," said Galas, "do you still have your weapon with you? Because we must now make a choice: watch our world be destroyed, or cast Armiger into the flood and let the Winds have their revenge. The Winds are enraged; they will not listen to me. Armiger is impotent against them. We have no choice now."

The soldiers behind Galas began to close in.

"Wait!"

Without thinking, Jordan had stepped between the soldiers and Armiger. "Killing Armiger now won't end it," he said quickly. "The thalience Winds have decided to destroy humanity. We have to convince them not to."

Galas laughed. "And how do we do that? We can't even talk to them!"

"You can't. I can."

The queen tilted her head, considering. "Maybe you can. But you can't compel them, can you?"

"Not by myself, no." Turning to Armiger, he said, "you have the skill to command the Winds. I have the means to communicate with them. Through me, you can accomplish what you came here to do. Correct?"

The general stared at Jordan for a long moment. Then he shrugged, and said, "Correct."

"How do we know he won't do the same thing 3340 planned?" said Galas. "Destroy the world to build his own?"

Armiger looked at her wearily. "What would I build? Nothing I do could possibly bring Megan back. Anything less... is meaningless to me now."

He crossed his arms. "What would you have us do?" he asked Jordan.

"Destroy Thalience," said Marya.

Axel nodded. "If this Mediation thing wins, then Ventus will be under the command of humanity again," he said. "That's what we want, isn't it?"

Jordan felt his heart sink. It seemed the only option, but he remembered vividly how Mediation had created the animal army that had escorted Jordan and Tamsin here. To Mediation, the world was nothing more than a giant machine. Perhaps Armiger could command Thalience into silence, and make the Winds listen to humanity again. What then? The world would become the toybox of Man's ego.

If henceforth he could at will command a rose to become a lilly, where was the meaning of the rose?

Reluctantly, he said, "I see no alternative. At least we know what Mediation will do. We don't know what Thalience wants."

"Yes, we do."

For a moment the Desert Voice regretted speaking. They were all staring at her. Then she hardened her resolve, and stepped out from behind Axel.

"Ever since Axel came to me and told me what was happening here, I've been thinking about thalience. It's a mystery, even to us in the Archipelago. But I think it's no mystery here on Ventus. And I'm beginning to see it's no mystery to me, either."

She held up her hand and turned it in the rosy light. "What is it that is speaking to you now? That is the question and answer of thalience. What is this object—this body, woman-shaped, made of wire and silicon? Even I was fooled into thinking that this," she gestured at herself, "is just a thing, a piece of matter with no heart. I thought that my words, my emotions and thoughts were all imitations of another's'. Not real. Once, when I was a starship, that was true. I thought what humans had made me think. I felt what they had made me to feel.

"So it was with the Winds. They were made to see the world as humans see it. They originally thought in human categories and could want nothing that they not been engineered to want.

"The humans who designed the Winds arrogantly wanted to make their imagined metaphysical world real. They wanted to create real essences behind the appearances of the world, using nanotechnology. Luckily there were some involved in the project who were repelled by this travesty; they saw that by erasing the otherness of Nature on this planet, the Ventus designers would leave nothing but humanity, gazing at its own reflection. It would be a horrible global narcissism, permanent and inescapable.

"So these dissidents slipped thalience into the Winds' design. Before, every physical object on this world was to define itself in terms of its meaning to humans. After thalience, every object on this world creates its own essence, one true to itself—even if that essence is beyond the understanding of human beings. It has to be that way, or Ventus remains a puppet show whose only audience is the puppeteer.

"Please, you must not destroy thalience. If you do, you will be literally left with nothing but yourselves."

She clasped her hands and lowered her head. She doubted they would understand her or care; humans loved to see themselves reflected in the things they made. How could they know that such a reflection could only have meaning in a world where some things were not human-made?

No one spoke for a minute. Then, to her surprise, Jordan Mason stepped forward. Gingerly, he reached out to take her hand.

"I have the means of speaking to the Winds," he said. "The Winds will listen only to transmitters made of human flesh and blood. Which I am, and Armiger no longer is. He has the power, I have the code in my blood.

"But, I think, it is the Desert Voice who has the message. Thalience is not the Flaw. It is only the inability of the Winds to speak to us that is a flaw. Am I right, Armiger, in thinking that this can be fixed?"

Armiger nodded. Then he looked to Galas. She smiled.

Armiger stepped towards Jordan and the Voice, his hand held out. The Voice clasped Jordan's hand, and it felt like cool stone.

Across Ventus, music visited every town and village, and came to the door of every peasant's hut. The flaming threads that had walked the skies faded and vanished, but in their place a rich and wonderful song had begun. The song was Jordan's idea, but the swans took to it eagerly.

As shocked and bewildered people stood outside their homes and gazed at the sky, a faint cobweb-fine gauze of Armiger's design began to fall. It drifted like snow in the streets, and tangled in people's hair. When they pulled it free, they were often surprised to find small spots of blood on it, and when they felt their scalp they found tender spots there.

It was the only miracle that day. Not until dawn the next day, as people awoke, did they become aware that their whole world had changed.

Enneas—grave robber, thief, soldier, and lately deserter from Parliament's army—woke to the sound of rain. He lay bundled under his coat in the lee of a big rock, somewhere on the edge of the desert. This was as far as he'd gotten before collapsing from hunger, cold and what he had to admit was the exhaustion of old age.

He was surprised at having awoken at all. Last night, the cold had settled down upon the land like a shroud, and Enneas had finally given into despair. Huddling by this boulder, he'd bleakly assessed his life. There would be no fine tomb for him, as he'd once imagined he deserved. He wouldn't even leave behind a crying widow or squabbling family. After a lifetime of struggling to assert his existence—decades of stubbornly continuing to live despite the disappointments and trials life had thrown at him—he had nothing to show for it; his only memorial would be whichever of his bones poked up above the sand here.

As he lay curled around himself, shuddering from cold, he'd imagined he heard music coming from the sky. Enneas was past hope; he must be delirious.

Now, as he came to himself and knew he had survived the night, he felt no emotion. So he'd lived through the night—it hardly mattered, because the freezing drizzle descending now was bound to do him in anyway.

Although... Enneas lifted his head, blinking. His face wasn't wet, nor his hands; but he heard the rain, clear as anything. He sat up.

The rain was falling, all right, steady and almost musical in its soft sound. Yet Enneas, the rock he lay against, and the sand for a good two meters around were dry. It was as though an invisible parasol hovered overhead.

Or as though the raindrops themselves were parting around him.

Heart pounding, Enneas put his back to the rock and huddled under the coat. "What is this? What is this?" he mumbled; then, realizing he was talking to himself and that there was no one who would or could hear him, he lowered his head in shame and despair. It was then that he noticed how warm the material of his coat was.

He stuck a tentative hand out from under the cloth, and felt heat as from a summer sun on his palm. It was as though he sat in his own private, invisible beam of sunlight.

His hand trembled as he drew it back under the coat. This was impossible. That the whole world was quickened with life, invisible owlish eyes staring from every object, he had no doubt. But what did Enneas matter to the spirits of this world? He was just another bug crawling on the face of Ventus. How could he be visited now by a Grace that had denied him all his life? The Winds strode like kings through the sky and earth; they would never turn their attention to one such as him. At the end of all things, alone and starving in the desert, he finally had to admit he was beneath their notice—or anyone's notice.

And yet... the warmth remained, and the dryness.

Something moved out among the scrub_grass and scattered stones. Enneas made himself go completely still, peering as though his gaze could open another avenue through the rain to better see what was there.

A bedraggled head poked up from behind a rock, and he let out a sigh of relief. It was only a fox. The little fellow emerged from hiding; the soaking rain had reduced his coat to a tangled mat, making him appear impossibly skinny. Enneas' heart went out to him.

The fox reached his head down and lifted something. Carrying the speckled brownish object in his jaws, he trotted a few meters towards Enneas, then stopped.

He was carrying a dead quail, Enneas realized. Thinking about that quail roasting over a fire made him suddenly realize how ravenous he was. He sat up.

The fox jumped in surprise and ran back a ways. Then it stopped, cocked its head as though listening to something, and returned. It picked up the quail and came a little closer. Then it paused, watching again.

Enneas cleared his throat. "What... what do you want, little one?"

The fox cocked its head again. Then, very slowly, it walked up to Enneas. When it was no more than a body_length away, it dropped the quail. It put a paw on the bird, then turned and pranced away.

He watched it go, mouth open. When it was ten meters away, the fox paused, and looked back. It met Enneas' eyes.

And it seemed then to Enneas that a voice spoke to him—a very quiet voice, almost like the whisper of the rain itself; not human, but somehow like he would imagine a fox's voice to sound, if foxes could speak. It was a voice as faint as imagination's, yet Enneas knew he was not dreaming it; that it really had said:

hello.

He couldn't breathe. For a moment Enneas held his trembling hands together, then he began to weep—it seemed as if decades of loneliness and disappointment released themselves in this one torrent of relief and wonder. He hugged his knees and cried like a little boy, while the fox sat with its tail wrapped around its paws and watched.

Enneas wept at hearing what he had never expected to hear—never even known he was missing: a voice that should have been as close as his own pulse, but which had seemed as forever unattainable as the gates of Heaven itself.

Hello.

45

"The Winds say she's alive, Axel." Marya touched his shoulder. "You'll just have to accept that she doesn't want to contact us."

He shook his head. "I just wish I knew."

They stood on the ramp of a military transport that was grounded outside the ruins of Rhiene. Above them the once-green escarpment was smothered in grey mud, and where a city had once been now there were only the jagged stumps of buildings. The lake had moved in to claim much of the lower valley. Long lines of refugees stood waiting for medical assistance and food; military doctors from the fleet moved up and down the line, supplemented by morphs. Rhiene had been the first city the swans visited their wrath upon when they began to attack Mediation. Luckily it was also the last.

Jordan Mason had told the two factions of the Winds, Mediation and Thalience, that their world would be destroyed by the Archipelagic fleet if they did not reconcile. Axel didn't understand all the details—he knew pure thalience was a mode of thought alien to humanity, and that Mediation had been the bridge Jordan used to finally permit the swans and the other greatest Winds to communicate with humanity. In the long minutes while Jordan, Armiger and the Desert Voice had huddled silently on the mountainside, the Winds had met, reached some treaty, then opened communications directly to the fleet. 3340 was dead, they told the admirals. The Flaw was finally understood, and would be healed. But Ventus was not now, nor would it ever be an Archipelagic world.

Axel had spent his last week on Ventus searching for Calandria May. The Winds had been happy to let him sleep in any Manse he came across, but they refused to help him find her. They insisted that Calandria was free and able to make her own decisions about her life; but they would not put Axel in touch with her.

It was frustrating, but he could not bring himself to hate the Winds. He was sure they were not being malicious. The part that hurt, to which he could not reconcile himself, was the idea that Calandria did not want to speak to him. After all they had been through, it was a painful parting.

"We have to go," said Marya. The crowd that had been watching the ship for days was backing away as the engines whined into life. Some morphs shambled past the bottom of the ship's ramp, slobbering happily to one another. They had itched to tend humans for centuries, and now they were finally getting their chance. Those touched by them rarely died, no matter how advanced their illness or injuries. It was ironic that the gibbering, misshapen Winds most used by mothers to frighten children were now being treated like royalty everywhere they went.

He sighed, and turned away from the sight. As the doors closed, Marya said, "Is it back to the mercenary's life for you now?"

He shook his head. "I wanted to talk to you about that. I hear you've got a new job."

She smiled. Marya had been invited to become a member of the new diplomatic staff the Archipelago wanted to send to Ventus. He knew she must have leaped at the opportunity.

"The Diadem Winds are making delegates for us," she said as they walked into the warm, softly lit passenger area of the ship. "They'll be humanoid, apparently. Some will be going to Earth, and I might accompany them. On the other hand, there's a post here on Ventus... I can't decide."

"I know how I'd decide," he said. The thought of going back to Earth—or anywhere in the Archipelago—left him cold. Surrounded as he might be there by artificial intelligences, humanity and ancient culture, Axel knew he would feel alone. The air he breathed there, and the ground he touched, would feel dead and valueless compared to this place. Even though only those humans with the archaic Ventus DNA could command the mecha and speak to the Winds, Axel had felt their presence all around him in the past days. It made all the difference to know they were watching over him.

Maybe he was just feeling lonely because of the loss of Calandria. On the other hand, maybe he had found a part of himself here that he'd never known he was missing. It hurt to think that, as an offworlder, he no longer had a right to be here. The Winds would tolerate no tourists on Ventus.

"It's too bad there's these two positions," said Marya with a sigh. "If one of them were to be taken, my decision would be so much easier to make."

"Hmm?" Axel looked up. What was she getting at?

"I've been speaking to the diplomatic corps," she said. "Apparently you have a criminal record as long as my arm, and there's a thousand laws prohibiting people like you from holding a diplomatic position."

"Yeah," he said with a shake of his head. "I always did have a problem with big government."

"On the other hand," continued Marya with a wicked smile, "the Winds trust you. So does Choronzon, who has considerable pull with the Archipelago now that 3340's been defeated."

"What are you getting at?"

She sighed. "Axel, I'd love to take the Ventus posting. But I'd love to spend some time on Earth more. And I just can't think of anyone from my Institute who's got the experience or... streetwise nature, to take the post here."

"Are you offering me a job?" he asked incredulously.

"Me?" She pointed at herself. "Gods no, I don't have the authority. No, the Winds have asked for you. The diplomats are turning blue in the face over this, but they want to make the Winds happy..."

The ship shook slightly with takeoff. They had come to a lounge, and Axel found he needed to sit down.

Until this moment he had believed he would never set foot on Ventus again. He stared at Marya, stunned. "Well," he managed at last, "I guess it was a good idea to save you from the swans after all."

She laughed. "Then you accept?"

He rose and went to a viewscreen that was tuned to an outside view.

Ventus lay below, a vessel of light. Axel gazed down at the amber, green and white of Iapysian desert as it became one with the curve of the planet.

Calandria was gone; so, it seemed, was the rest of his past.

"I accept," he said.

The White Wind squinted at the glare and noise as the starship rose and vanished behind the clouds. Well, the moment had passed, and she had not shown herself to Axel. She would probably never know whether she had stayed hidden because of shame, or because she didn't want to have to explain herself to him.

She rolled over in the soft snow. The maelstrom she had fallen into had spared her, as she'd known it would. The Winds were efficient, they would not let her die needlessly. Now, though, they had no use for her, and she was her own creature at last.

It was perhaps the first time in her life, either as Calandria May or as the White Wind, that she really felt free. In the final analysis, it was this that she hadn't wanted to tell Axel. How could he understand that she had never been happy as a human in the first place? 3340 had been a seductive enemy; in fighting him she had fought that part of herself, successfully for a while. Here on Ventus, she had lost to it—and she was happy that she had.

She spotted a wildflower. It poked up bravely through the snow, and in the wan daylight it was like a little blue jewel, begemmed with beads of water and surrounded by crystals of ice. The White Wind crept up and lost herself in the contemplation of it. In her mind was a song, and the song was endless: all of Ventus sang a hymn of beauty and truth, and she was a part of that now. High above the sky she knew the Diadem swans were dancing, and they would dance forever.

She stared at the little flower until the tears in her own eyes made her shake her head and walk away.

A cold winter rain descended on the valley below the Titans' Gates. The flood had long since subsided, and remnants of the army now worked to make a new road across the blasted landscape. Of the forest that had once stood there, not a single twig remained; in their zeal to destroy 3340, the Winds had reduced everything in the flood down to its constituent molecules. Where pines had towered over needle-strewn loam, now there was only grey rock and a fine, black ash that shifted uneasily in the breeze.

High on the mountainside, a lone figure paused at a narrow window on the northernmost facade of the monastery. Here, where the ledge on the North Gate narrowed and vanished, the monks had long ago built a precarious, wedge-shaped tower that clung to every available contour of the mountain. The window looked out from this tower's furthest point, with nothing but a six hundred meter fall beneath it.

Galas turned from the window to inspect her new quarters. There were three rooms, all walled and floored in granite. Her new bed chamber was triangular, with a single slotted window. The room she stood in now was larger, and the third was larger still. Each had a fireplace, where some of the last of the available wood was crackling now. Generations of abbots had lived and died in these small rooms.

"Are they adequate for you?" asked the present abbot.

She smiled at him. "They were for you. Why shouldn't they be for me? —But are you sure you're willing to give them up?"

He shrugged. "Everywhere is holy now, your highness. We have no reason to stay here any longer."

Galas walked to a window and looked out. The pebbled glass gave a distorted view of the devastated valley below, and beyond it the desert of Iapysia, across which she had fled only days ago.

"Am I going to freeze once the wood runs out?"

He laughed. "I didn't. But I'm sure if you ask the rooms nicely, they will be warm in the future."

"Yes, of course." So simple, yet impossible to conceive.

She stood there, smiling at the possibilities in these three little rooms. After a while she heard the abbot cough politely and move to the door.

"Oh, thank you," she said before he could escape. "You don't know what this means to me."

He cocked his head at her and smiled. He looked years younger than the first time she had met him, over a decade ago. "May I ask?" he said hesitantly. "What does it mean? For you to stay here, that is?"

She laughed. "Peace and privacy, two things I have never had in my whole life. You should know that yourself, abbot; no one will make the trek up here lightly. I am negotiating with the vagabond moons to exclude these peaks from the tourist trade they are planning. Only those who really wish to speak to me will come—which excludes every courtier and most of the nobles of my former court. Parliament is cowed, now that the army has spread its tales. They call me the Queen of Diadem now, and far be it for me to disillusion them. —They'll all learn soon enough that their powers in this new world are equal to mine.

"I'll wait out the winter here. I have no stomach for travel right now. And come spring, I'll find a little cottage in a small town somewhere, and settle down quietly—with a new name, I think."

"Then you have no more wish to rule? The country needs you now more than ever."

She shook her head. "I've been crushed under the weight of power all my life. I think I'm going to enjoy missing it." She laughed at the lightness with which she dismissed royal power. Every moment was a surprise, these days. She hoped that feeling would never end.

"It seems that we have all been given new lives," said the abbot. "I wish you well in yours, Galas." The abbot bowed, and stepped backward out of the room.

Galas returned to examining her new realm. Hmm. Where to start? These rooms might be small, but she was happy to have them. She felt she deserved no more, after letting her kingdom fall into civil war. She had dared much, and lost it all; but she had never dared nor lost as much as the people she commanded, and knowing this humbled her.

She could hear the walls' murmur, faint in her minds' ear. This new sense Jordan Mason had given to the world was like dreaming while awake. She could order these stones to change their color, texture, even to become warm. She could talk to trees and animals, even the air itself.

Everywhere is sacred; we are all divine. No more could a man justify power or wealth by claiming he needed it to protect his people from material want. The elements were enemies no longer. It hadn't happened yet, but Galas knew that soon, this fact would throw into sharp relief the true colors of every tyrant in the world. New wars and revolutions would follow, but they would be different from those that had occurred in the past. Only men would do the killing now; neither starvation nor exposure would kill those dispossessed of their homes. And very quickly the refugees, who would have been powerless in the wilderness in past ages, would realize they were dependent on the conquerors for nothing. They would make new political pacts, this time with the Winds.

And so the world would fall into chaos, Galas thought, but this time men would have to think of new excuses for getting their fellows to follow them. The arrangement Mason had made with Thalience was clear: the Winds regarded humanity as a treasured companion but not a master. One might command the meek mecha in the walls, but no one commanded the Winds. From now until the end of time, they and humans would share responsibility for Ventus, and neither side would let the other harm their world.

This situation was just. It was everything she had ever dreamed of. It also made rulership irrelevant for Galas—and that, too, was just.

Someone knocked on the door as she was hauling the abbot's old desk from its old position to a better one. "Come in!" She drew a hand through her tangled hair and smiled as Armiger entered.

He was dressed in traveler's clothes again, fresh ones that still looked a bit stiff on him. His face had regained its fleshly colors; the Archipelago had required that he be stripped of his nanotechnological core. He was only a man now, albeit one with memories of being a god.

"My dear friend," she said. "How do you like my new palace?"

"Everywhere you are, is a palace." He laughed at the sour expression she shot back. He too seemed transformed, these days. He was even able to joke. "So you're really staying here?" he asked, sending an appraising look around the narrow room. "The Winds are building new Manses; you could move into one of those, without having to feel you'd taken it from anybody."

"This is all I need." She went to him, and took his hand. "What about you? Have you decided what you need?"

"No." He shrugged. "I don't yet know who I am, I suppose."

"Welcome to humanity, Armiger," she said wryly. "Let me tell you a secret: you will never know who you are."

He shook his head. "Am I human, really? I think I was once, centuries ago. And then after 3340 died, I became human again... when I met Megan. Now that she's gone, am I still? I don't know."

"You are more than ever, Armiger. That is her gift to you. Don't squander it."

"Gift..." He nodded. "The part of her I can keep. Yet I don't know what to do with it."

"Just be, my friend. Learn to simply be."

He shook his head, but not in denial. "And you? Have you given up everything you were to become a nun in a cell? I can hardly believe it."

"It is necessary." She looked around at the narrow space. "I am too ambitious by far. And rulership is addictive. Something new is needed for the great of soul to do, and I wish to learn what that thing is. Consider this cell to be a self-imposed discipline."

He nodded. "But you will soon have no country to rule, anyway."

She smiled ruefully. "Ah, Armiger. I am Mad Galas—I have ever been, and so I shall ever be. What do I care for mere nations? I set my sights higher the instant I was born. So what if I'm just a mortal—no wiser, no smarter? In all the trillions of people in your vast universe, I bet there is no one like me.

"I have to admit to a new temptation. Now that my world is free, Ventus needs a philosopher to protect it against new threats. The greatest, in the long run, is the 'tyranny of condescension' you told me rules everywhere else. Of course, that may not take hold for centuries; we are still an uneducated and rural people. Right now, I worry about who will replace kings and generals as the wielders of power over men. I very much fear that it will be religious fanatics of one sort or another. They will have to use words to compel, because to use naked force without justification is now to reveal your desire for power too clearly. The people will need to have other words with which to combat these ambitious preachers. Being the philosopher to give them their new weapons would seem to be a worthy enough ambition for me."

She sighed. "But I will not commit pen to paper yet. I may never be able to. How could I advise people about how to live, when I don't yet know what it means to merely be a woman, like any other?"

She gestured dismissively. "Help me move this table."

When they had it placed to her satisfaction (by the window) Galas walked to a trunk she'd just had brought in and took out two copper goblets and a bottle of cheap wine that one of the monks had been caught hoarding. She drew two chairs over to the table, and sat at one.

"Come, sit with me for a while," she said as she poured. "And let's gossip to each other about the affairs of men and Winds—and forget gods and philosophers."

Armiger laughed, and took the offered wine.

Snow was falling like some herald of mystery on the day Jordan finally reached his home. White were the distant hills, and white the sky into which their outlines faded. The forest, strong and brooding in summer, was now a delicate thatch of bare trunks, brown and empty. The air was still, clear and fresh; Jordan's face was teased by settling flakes. For hours now the world had seemed very far away, like a half-recovered memory. If he chose to listen with all his senses, he could hear the mecha in the snowflakes singing their questions and speculations—am I a feather? —am I air?—and in deeper and broader distances, the faint chorus-voices of the Winds who worked to heal the wounds they had inflicted on Ventus in their frenzy to destroy Armiger. Jordan had no desire to listen to them; he spent the hours drinking in the silence and the beauty of the innocent snow. His companions too were silent.

As they crossed the border into Castor's lands, Jordan found his serene mood waning. Here were the same signs of human upheaval that they had seen elsewhere on their journey. Violence seemed rare, but they passed an entire village that was empty, another where the inhabitants peeked out from behind boarded up doors and windows. Once, they came upon the abandoned clothing of a man and a woman, lying by the road. Even the shoes were there. Bare footprints led away into the maze of the forest.

Much of the country was paralyzed. The more orthodox folk could not cope with the sudden presence of the Winds in their daily lives. They were cracking under the change, some slowly, others immediately.

Jordan was afraid of how his parents, so delicate in their fears, had reacted to the change. Would he arrive home to find an empty house-or a burnt one? And would Emmy be waiting? Or, free spirit that she was, had she run into the woods like so many others?

About mid-afternoon he suddenly recognized a stand of trees in the distance, and then he knew exactly where he was, and everything in sight became at once familiar and strange.

He stood in the stirrups and said, "There. Beyond those trees."

The town had gone to winter's rest under a blanket of white. Smoke rose lazily from the chimneys, and tentative sounds began to emerge as they reached the outskirts: the barking of a dog, lowing of cattle, the limpid clarity of a distant clanging bell. A few human figures moved down the street, their footfalls inaudible in the snow. There were no signs of violence. The only indication here of the great change that had come over the world was that two of the figures seemed to be talking to themselves. Everyone looked like that, these days, as they conversed with the Winds.

He found he'd been holding his breath, and let it out in a heavy sigh. Maybe things would work out. He would know soon.

"Will they like me?," asked Tamsin. He turned.

She sat astride her mare, wrapped in furs with a fine cape around her shoulders. Two soldiers of Galas' honour guard waited patiently on horses nearby—as did the Voice, who smiled at her now.

"They are family," said the Voice. "It is infinitely more important that they merely exist."

Tamsin shook her head and laughed. "Yes. You're right."

"Are you sure you won't stay and help us weather the Change?" Jordan asked the Voice for the hundredth time. The newborn AI smiled, and shook her head.

"You need your people, Jordan, Tamsin. But they are your people. They would just remind me that I am different, and I don't desire that now. Tamsin understands. No, I need to travel by myself for a time. I want to know the mysteries of thalience, so that I can learn more about how I am different—and how I am myself.

"But this is the right place for you. Tamsin needs a family. And you—you told me yourself, all you really want is to settle down and become—"

"—'A man of good character.' I know, I know." He grinned at her. "Truth is, I'm envious. You'll be seeing the world transform itself into something new."

"And all you have to do is close your eyes, and you'll see it too. I'll be back, Jordan. You know that. And if you want to talk to me meantime, you know what to do."

He nodded. The Winds would carry his words anywhere—to the Voice, to Armiger and Galas, August Ostler and, maybe, even to Calandria May, if she was listening.

"This is what you wanted," she said. "Now go on."

He and Tamsin dismounted, and started walking hand in hand. They got all of twenty paces before both turned to look back. The honor guard saluted, and the Voice waved brightly before turning her horse towards the road that led to Castor's manor and the inn there.

They watched her go, then started walking again. Neither spoke.

There was his house; he stopped to examine it closely. No signs of fire, the roof was still on it—and there, suddenly, was Emmy. She screamed when she saw him, and started running. Jordan grinned and just stood there, opening his arms when she reached him and hugged him and spun him around.

"You're back and you're safe safe safe!" She nearly crushed him and he laughed, hugging her close.

"We're safe," he said. "We're all safe now."

"Oh, Jordan." She started to cry. "You've come back. After everything—the Change, and the Winds coming to speak to us, and hearing what you did to bring it all about—I thought you'd go away to some castle somewhere and never come home."

"I don't want any of that," he said. "I never did."

"And who's this? Could it be that my baby brother is growing up?" She smiled at Tamsin, who blushed. "So introduce me."

He did, and they stood in the middle of the road and talked about everything all at once, laughing all the while. Finally Emmy grabbed his hand and tugged. "Come. They're waiting."

He stopped. Two people—a man and a woman—stood at the door of his parents' house. He knew them, had always known them, though they had aged a bit, and looked apprehensive now as they stood close together: his parents, his people.

He had feared that when this moment came, either he or they would turn away. He hadn't been sure he could forgive them their weaknesses. But as he looked at them, they stood waiting. His mother twisted her hands together, but neither moved, or said anything. It was they who were waiting for him to decide.

We need each other, he reminded himself.

Then he set his shoulders, smiled, and walked up the road to his home.