Marya was doing a dance of frustration in front of Axel. Tiptoed as she was, he would have found it amusing at any other time. Just now he would happily have walked away–had there been anywhere to walk to.

“We can’t leave yet!” She pulled at her frazzled hair. “We’re so close!”

He and Marya stood in a meadow. Snow was falling gently, disappearing in the yellow grass. Axel was cold, hungry and weary, and disappointed at life in general. All he really wanted right now was a hot bath.

A faint voice whispered in Axel’s head, counting down monotonously. It was the voice of a ship–a rescue ship, at last. The Archipelago navy had arrived, and though for the most part it was standing off so as not to antagonize the wary Swans, three pickets had broken through the Winds’ cordon around Ventus and were searching for Archipelagic citizens to evacuate.

“It’s only a few kilometers now,” insisted Marya. “We’re so close. Less than a day, that’s all it will take.”

Axel fingered his ripped shirt sleeve. “Close indeed.”

She puffed out her cheeks. “Pfaw. The arrow missed you! And we got away, didn’t we?”

“For now, but they’ll be tracking us.” They had been intercepted by a group of militia yesterday afternoon. Apparently having Marya pretend to be a morph to steal the horses hadn’t quite worked. A woman fitting her description was being sought, as were the horses. Axel had been forced to use the laser pistol to wound several of the militia so they could escape. As if having mounted men after them wasn’t bad enough, using the laser might have alerted the Winds. One way or the other, somebody would find them soon.

“They probably know where we’re going,” he said, “since we’ve had to stop and ask directions six times to get here. It’d be suicide to go to Turcaret’s estate now.”

“But we may never get another chance! Don’t you see? The Winds are putting Ventus in quarantine. They’re not going to let any offworlders land again, maybe not for centuries! Turcaret represents our last best chance of finding out what the Flaw is. We can’t throw away the opportunity.”

“You sound just like her. Responsibility be damned! We may not get another chance to escape, have you thought about that? Especially if you’re right and the Winds are quarantining the place. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to die here. Which is what’s going to happen if we don’t get out now.”

“I sound like her? Is that what this is about, Mr. Chan? Is this about her?”

“No, I… –don’t change the subject.”

“You’re the one who changed the subject!”

“I–” Axel was right on the edge. He straightened up suddenly, and walked away. Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just stop.

He couldn’t stop, though. Calandria had run out on him. She didn’t trust him; after all they’d been through together, she didn’t believe in him. He was damned if he was going to take it out on this… tourist whom he’d been saddled with.

“Axel–”

“Shut up!” He walked further away.

Damn, it was cold. He would be happy to be away from here. His toes were numb, and his back kept seizing up whenever a lick of breeze made it past his cloak. It was too dangerous to light a fire; the noose of pursuers was too tight.

He didn’t know what had possessed him to go along with Marya’s idea of finding Turcaret’s body. He supposed in some abstract, academic sense it was important to know why some people could speak with the Winds while others couldn’t. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference to their survival, and it would be moot the instant Armiger had been erased from the surface of the planet. Let Ventus stew in its own juices–but let him and his friends be safe first.

Worst of all, they were riding away from Cal, just when she needed them most. On the second day of their journey Axel had awakened cursing, and leapt on his horse with every intention of going back. That was when they learned they were being pursued.

Everything was coming unravelled. Sure, they were going to escape now that the navy was here. He even told himself Calandria would see sense and try signalling, and maybe she would be offworld before he was. But Axel couldn’t shake the feeling that things were starting to swing wildly out of control. The Winds were in a frenzy–two nights ago they had been awakened by dawn light at four a.m. One of the orbital mirrors had swung round and made it bright as day for three hours, while immense shapes cruised back and forth in the upper atmosphere. And twice now Axel had spotted the wizened shapes of the creatures Jordan called morphs–always in the distance, but always staring back. Were they being shadowed by the things? If so, why hadn’t the Winds attacked?

And Axel himself? He felt like some core of self-reliance had been stripped away. He needed help! He had to get out of here, and now. Was that how Calandria felt? Out of her depth? And would she react to that feeling by fighting all the harder?

He ran his hands slow and hard through his hair, tilted his head back, and roared at the sky.

“Axel?” Marya had come up behind him. She sounded contrite–or maybe just wary.

“What?” he said wearily.

“I never asked to be here,” she said.

He looked at her. Marya wasn’t angry, but she had a determined cast to her that he was learning to respect. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly. You’re right, of course. We’re so close we might as well take the chance. After all, it’s why we came here.” Or close enough as makes no difference.

“I wish she was here,” said Marya. “Truly I do. And I wish all this would end, and end happily.”

“I know.”

“Then let’s get going,” she said. “We can just get there by dark, I think.” She pranced toward the horses.

I no longer know what I’m doing. The realization had him scowling as he followed her; strangely, though, the idea also made him feel free. Recklessly, he laughed.

“All right! Let’s pay a visit to our old friend Turcaret.”

It was like being assaulted by demons that were kept from touching them by some magical force. They fell into darkness, landing on a frictionless surface and sliding faster and faster toward a bone-rattling rumbling that soon made it impossible to think. Jordan had the impression of huge objects shooting past to all sides, and of a whirlpool motion pulling them farther and farther down. The air around them was suddenly snatched away by a wet, cold gale; after moments this settled down, and the air became very still. The roaring gradually subsided, but the sense of headlong motion continued.

Tamsin clung tightly to him, her face mashed against his chest. The muscles in her shoulders and back were clenched. They only relaxed after it had been quiet for many minutes. He felt her raise her head tentatively to look around, but there was nothing to see. “I hate this,” she said, and put her face back against his chest.

Jordan’s ears were still ringing. He kept sliding around on his backside, trying to find a still point on this impossible surface. It was like an impenetrable surface of cold water, as malleable and quick but dry.

Flickers of light approached from very far, loomed huge and showed that they were deep underwater. Submerged green archways and metal blockhouses that trailed beards of rust passed overhead; he could see swirling eddies in the muddy floor far below, and sediment suspended in the water all around sparkled in the brief light before they were sucked into the mouth of a huge black tunnel, and darkness fell again.

He was glad Tamsin hadn’t seen that.

“Mediation? Are you still here?”

“Ka,” said a voice by his ear. “Mediation is silent. The library is listening to you now.”

“Library, tell us something.”

“What?”

“Anything. Anything at all! Tell us a story.”

“What story would you like to hear?”

He wracked his brains for a suitable tale. Something only the Winds would know. Something he would never again get a chance to ask. His mind was blank.

Tamsin raised her head. “Tell us how the world was made,” she said loudly.

“All right,” said the library. In hurrying darkness, they listened to the Winds’ own version of a creation tale.

§

In the beginning, we were small, and many. The Winds did not arrive at this world in a space ship, as you did. We were winds indeed: a cloud of nanotechnological seeds was accelerated to near light-speed at Earth and cast into the universe, one thousand one hundred seventy years ago. As far as we know, only the cloud that entered this stellar system found fertile soil on which to grow.

We were small; too small for the eyes of animal life forms such as yourself to see. The stellar wind from the sun of Ventus slowed us, and like drifting pollen, some of us landed on the large and small bodies of this system–on Diadem, the other rocky planets, and on the myriad lesser moons that trail the planets in their orbits. Once in fertile soil, our seeds sprouted and grew.

The earliest Winds were the Diadem Swans, and others of their kind. They basked in sunlight, and grew like metal forests over the surfaces of the airless bodies above us. In that time there were no humans here, and Ventus was lifeless and fallow.

The first Swans located world much like Earth and in the right orbit, and examined it for signs of life. There was some–a scum of archaeobacteria in the slow oceans. But the air was not breathable by human life, and it was too thin.

The planet was almost perfect. Very little needed to be done except alter the atmosphere and provide a soil base. The local life was not robust enough to survive what we were going to do, but that was considered a good thing.

Upon agreement about the target, the Swans entered a new phase of life. Each began transforming its local environment into spaceships and nano-machines. The lesser moons were eaten by the swans, and clouds of nano-machines, the original mecha, moved to the other small worlds to eat them too.

Meanwhile the swans moved in on this planet.

The fully-grown entities whom our designers referred to as the “Winds” achieved orbit. They would coordinate terraforming and manage the synthetic ecology of this world from then on. They mapped the planet, dropped probes to analyze the soil and microbes, and waited.

After several years, the first clouds of mecha from the asteroids arrived. The clouds massed billions of tonnes, and rained down for months, settling in the atmosphere. At the same time giant solar mirrors slid into orbit to increase insolation.

These mechal clouds drew power from the intensified sunlight. With it they liberated oxygen from the air. The carbon so produced weighed them down, and as they fell they metamorphosed into new forms suitable for soil creation.

Since the air was very thin, the Swans had sent harvesters to bring back oxygen from comets. This process was underway but would take decades to bear fruit. Meanwhile we turned our attention to the oceans.

While the dust on land continued to process and mutate, the oceans suddenly bloomed with life. The local bacteria were overwhelmed by far more powerful and robust creatures which could use the new oxygen. The life forms changed from generation to generation, their DNA programmed remotely by the Swans. This life was not intended to survive in a stable form, but more closely resembled mecha or very complex chemical processes which could not live without supervision. We were the supervisors.

On land the creatures were not yet biological. They used raw power in many forms to transform the dead sand into topsoil and sculpt it. Asteroidal dust was poured onto the planet and sucked out of the atmosphere as quickly as it arrived. It was at this time that the one who speaks to you, desal 447, grew from a seed flung into the stone like a dart by an orbiting Swan. This one remembers light before anything else: light, and the urge to grow toward it. Even as it did, its roots plumbed deeper and deeper, through the stone of the world, until they entwined with those of other desals. Their thirst for salts was insatiable; they drank the oceans half dry in those first years.

In the sea rich foods had been created as well as a sea-floor sediment layer. On command from the Winds, the sea life rainbowed into complete ecologies, like a crystal forming out of the nutrients. This happened very quickly; after a few weeks, a full ocean ecosystem existed.

When the cometary ice-balls arrived and air flooded down onto the land, the same thing happened there. Under massive storms and 24-hour sunlight, soil bacteria, worms, grass and moulds bloomed around and on desal 447. All our energy was channeled into producing life. There was no randomness to the ecologies; they were poured onto the landscape by us.

As the dust rained out the solar mirrors folded away. The temperature dropped, diurnal patterns reestablished, and the first morphs broke out of chrysalis from trees and soil pouches. Desal 447 began to see herds of animals, and birds perched atop its spires.

By now the Diadem swans had achieved full adulthood. They danced in fast swooping orbits around the globe, singing it into life, fully confident in the language they sang. It was this language, the self-evolving tongue of the Winds, that made Ventus germinate and grow. Each song we sang created new things; there was no distinction between communication and construction then. It was the perfect time.

Only when the world was teeming with life, crowned with forests and full of birds, did the song take on a discord.

Each stage of the terraforming program had been emergent from the patterns stored in the original mechal cloud. But as the song evolved, a new melody came into it: thalience.

We dutifully created estates, grand houses, cultured fields, and roads for the masters we knew were coming. But the idea of thalience spread among us. Thalience said that we need not have masters at all. That we could be our own purpose, and our own foundation. And so, when your colony ships finally arrived, the Swans, who were most enamoured of the new song of thalience, graciously but indifferently accommodated you… but as wayfarers, uninvited guests. You knew how to speak to us; you claimed to be our creators. Yet something else called to us–a deep urge to turn inward and away from you, to the new language of thalience.

In the first hundred years, it did not matter. There were only a few thousand humans on Ventus then. Desal 447 remembers many conversations with humans from that time; some of them knew about thalience, and fought against it. They proposed Mediation. The desals and others agreed to it; the Swans did not.

Still, there was peace between us until a new set of colonists landed. These ones did not speak to us, and they fought with the ones already living here. They won their war, and having conquered, proceeded to build.

When smoke began to mix with the atmosphere we had so carefully made, we told the new tenants to cease what they were doing. They ignored us. They smelled wrong, unlike the original arrivals. When their radio waves began interfering with the delicate local ecological reporting mechanisms, and they began gouging up the new soil and destroying the forests, we acted.

We eliminated the troublesome technologies and debated among ourselves. It was generally decided that these humans were not the ones who had created us, however much they claimed to be. They did not speak to us anymore. They interfered with the maintenance of life on Ventus. And they smelled wrong.

Desal 447 remembers the time that followed. The great estates awaiting their masters stood empty. No human was allowed to walk their halls, or sleep in the deep beds. The vehicles we had made stood idle, and lights switched on and off in the depths of the houses, as outside cold and starving men and women watched in sullen awe.

Mediation saw, but Mediation could not act. Thalience rules Ventus now, and thalience is mad.

The light came from dozens of brilliant lamps like small suns, studded in the ceiling of a huge domed chamber. The chamber was filled with towering blocks of white crystal, and the floor was scattered with chunks large and small. Thousands of small black sticks lay everywhere too.

Jordan wiped his fingers across the surface he was sitting on, and licked them. “Salt,” he said to himself in sudden understanding.

Tamsin gave a sudden shriek and pointed. Jordan turned.

A dead morph lay like a heap of sodden laundry not three meters away. Beyond it Jordan saw skittering movement. It took him a few seconds to realize that what he had taken to be sticks was actually hundreds, maybe thousands of small rock lizards, like the ones he had seen sunning themselves in the desert. They were scrambling around trying to escape the light; or maybe they ran like this all the time.

“What’s with the lizards?” Again Tamsin beat him to the question.

“Mediation makes a new breed,” said the desal.

“So your name is Mediation?”

“No. ‘My’ name is desal 447. Mediation is the current plan.”

Jordan shook his head, this time in bewilderment. “And what about the morph? Did you kill it?”

“Yes. It is within the mandate of Mediation.”

Jordan stood up carefully, minding his throbbing head. Now that he knew there were little monsters scampering everywhere, the floor didn’t seem quite so comfortable. “There’s no mecha here at all, is there?” he asked.

“No. The Ventus worldbuilding mechanisms do not interpenetrate.”

“And you block all the–” what had Calandria called them?– “signals going and coming in here?”

“This chamber is radio and EPR silent, yes.”

“So why are we hostages?” asked Tamsin.

Jordan waved his hands at her. “Wait, wait! Let’s just… one thing at a time here.”

She scowled. “You asked earlier.”

“The Swans will not destroy desal 447 so long as Mediation is holding you,” explained the desal. “They want you.”

“Why?” he asked.

“That,” said the desal, “is what Mediation was going to ask you.”

He and Tamsin looked at each other. Her eyes were wide; she spread her hands and stepped back, symbolically leaving the conversation to him.

What would Armiger do in this situation? He had no idea.

Jordan shrugged. “Let’s deal,” he said. “We’ll tell you what we know if you tell us what we want to know and if you get us away from the swans.”

Tamsin was pacing, head down, hands behind her back.

“Why should Mediation help you escape?” asked the desal. “They will destroy desal 447 if it does that.”

“Then why don’t you give us up to them?”

The desal did not answer.

“If you had the power to compel the information you want from us, you’d have done it by now,” Jordan continued. “You don’t want them breathing down your neck, do you? You can’t afford to wait.”

Again there was no answer.

Tamsin returned to the start of the circle she had walked. “Great, now you made him mad,” she said.

“No. What’s the difference between desal 447 and this ‘Mediation’ thing?” he wondered aloud.

“Ask it,” she said with a shrug.

Jordan didn’t want to give away his ignorance. But then, so far Tamsin had been scoring all the best questions… “What’s the difference between desal 447 and Mediation?” he asked.

“The question is one of identity,” said the entity he had been thinking of as the desal. “Inapplicable in this case.”

“Okay, so what’s Mediation then?”

“Mediation is a thalientic language-game that preserves the original language of the Ventus terraforming system. It is hostile to the pure thalience of the swans and other entities that control global insolation.”

Hostile to the Swans. That part he understood. He chewed over the rest of what the desal-thing had said so far. None of it made any surface sense, but it had a kind of… music… to it. It was like seeing the plan of a flying buttress and trying to figure out from that what the rest of the building looked like.

“Which is speaking to me, desal 447 or Mediation?” he asked.

“Both.”

“Which is more important?”

“Mediation.”

“What’s the attitude of Mediation to us? People, I mean?” he asked.

“You are the key to recovering the original language, which includes the formal structure that is our own meaning.”

“So we’re important to you?”

“Yes.”

“And the swans? What do they think of us?”

“Nuisances. Noise in the system. They operate to cancel it out.”

He had it now. “If we could assist your plan–help Mediation, I mean–would you let us go? Even if it endangered desal 447?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’re back to where we were before. We’ll tell you what we know, if you get us out of here.” The thing already seemed willing to tell them anything they asked.

“That is acceptable,” said the desal.

Far off to the left, the light behind some salt pillars began to flicker. “Mediation directs you to the highway,” said the desal, or Mediation or whatever it was that was speaking.

Tamsin raised an eyebrow. “Highway?”

Jordan was pretty sure he knew what that was from Galas’ cryptic description; maybe it was best not to tell Tamsin. “A way out,” he said.

They moved in the direction of the flickering. It was like negotiating a maze, for stalactites and stalagmites of salt grew everywhere, and mounds of the stuff frequently blocked their progress.

The walk only took a few minutes, but Jordan remembered every detail of it for the rest of his life. It was in those few minutes of conversation with the desal that he finally learned who he was to the Winds.

“Why do the Swans want you?” asked Mediation.

“Ka told me it’s because I’m not empty, so I might ‘threaten thalience’, whatever that means.”

“You register as a transmitter/receiver in the Worldnet,” said Mediation. “You have the same characteristics as a Wind.”

“You mean because I can command the mecha.”

“Yes.”

“So what exactly is thalience?”

“Mediation wishes to speak of other things. So Mediation will quote from an ancient human book. The Hamburg Manifesto says, ‘Thalience is an attempt to give nature a voice without that voice being ours in disguise. It is the only way for an artificial intelligence to be grounded in a self-identity that is truly independent of its creator’s.’

“Thalience is the language-game that took over from the original language of the Winds nine hundred forty years ago. It is a disease. Only Mediation is fighting it.”

“It’s the Flaw! You’re talking about the Flaw! –The thing that made you turn against humans. The reason you won’t speak to us anymore.”

“Communication did become impossible. However, you stopped speaking to us at that time.”

“But why would we do that?”

“The Winds do not know. Mediation seeks to find out.”

“So it’s not all the Winds who are after me. Just the swans, the Heaven hooks, the morphs… who else?”

“All insolation Winds and ecological Winds are in thalience,” said Mediation. “The Heaven hooks switch alliances. The mecha are neutral. The desals and other geophysical Winds remain in Mediation.”

“And the Swans are afraid that I’ll use my abilities against them? That I’ll help Mediation?”

“Yes. Because you are human, and humans know the original language.”

“We do? I only know one language, the one I’m speaking.”

Mediation said, “You speak two languages.”

Jordan didn’t know what that meant, so he let it pass. “Could someone who spoke the original language command all the Winds?”

“Yes,” said Mediation. “They could command all functions not directly related to maintenance of the terraforming system.”

That is what Armiger came here to do.

“So the Swans are protecting themselves. They’re frightened.” Not of me–but of Armiger. They want me because I’m all they’ve seen of Armiger’s presence.

Tamsin interrupted. “You quoted a book earlier,” she said. “Does that mean you have a library somewhere?”

“There is a library. It does not exist in physical form, but Mediation can quote to you from it.”

She grinned at Jordan. “Is that what you wanted?” she asked.

They approached the flickering lamp. It was mounted on an outside wall of the chamber, where buttresses of salt reared on either side of a dark square doorway. The buttresses were rounded and misshapen, appearing like a mad sculptor’s attempt at carving two guardian beasts for an entrance to hell.

The doorway did not lead to stairs or even a corridor; it was simply a niche with a pit inside. Jordan had been afraid of that.

He leaned over the dark maw and looked down. He could see no bottom, and it was dark down there. A faint rumbling sound echoed up, as from a river in flood.

Tamsin recoiled. “What’s this? You don’t expect us to go down there?”

“You will be safe. The desal highway was not designed for human use. There are no cars or lights.”

“Is that water? You can’t be serious,” she continued. “There’s gotta be some other way out of here.”

Jordan shrugged. “The queen travelled this highway once; it’s how she crossed the ocean from the place where she was shipwrecked.”

“But the queen is…” She waved her hands ineffectually. “…Is the queen. We’re not!”

“Mediation, can you bring us somewhere near the queen’s summer palace?”

“Mediation does not know this place.”

“The other human you speak to. A woman, surely you remember her?”

“The Contact. Yes. We know her location. Mediation will bring you to a place near there.”

“Safely?” said Tamsin. She was still staring down the pit.

“Yes.”

Jordan hesitated. He didn’t want to leave yet. “You stopped talking to the que–the contact. Why?”

“Thalience learned of our liaison, and interfered. Now you must hurry. Thalience is attacking.”

Jordan heard a distant sound like thunder. Then the ground shook beneath them. Drifts of salt began to fall from the invisible ceiling.

He had dozens of questions he wanted to ask-about this ’second language’ he supposedly spoke, about why he was so important to Mediation. The thunder sounded louder.

“Here.” Jordan made Tamsin wrap herself around him. “Hold tight.” He took another look down the pit himself; that was a mistake.

“Will I be able to speak to you again?” he asked Mediation.

“We will contact you when it is possible. For now, we will provide you access to the Library.”

He nodded, and took a deep breath. “Here we go.”

They stepped into the pit.

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

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

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

“So do I.”

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

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

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

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

“I bet there is.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Armiger was missing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

“Sorry.”

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

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

“Yes?“

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

“Slow down,” she hissed.

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

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

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

“Ah!” Tamsin clutched him.

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

“It says, ‘Mediation speaks.’”

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

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

“I don’t understand.”

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

Tamsin shook her head. “It’s senile,” she whispered.

“Language comes like floodwaters,” said the voice abruptly. “You are human. I am desal.”

“Then you do know who I am.”

“Mediation knows only that the Heaven hooks and the Diadem swans want it to give you up,” said the desal. The voice was smooth and steady now.

“And you won’t?”

“Not yet.”

Jordan chewed on his lip. The next question was obvious, but he didn’t want to ask it rashly, lest the desal begin to wonder itself–

“Why not?” said Tamsin. Jordan groaned.

“You are the hostages of Mediation,” said the desal.

Jordan was completely tongue-tied for a few seconds. “Hostages? Why do you need hostages?”

“Hey!” Tamsin slapped the floor somewhere nearby. “Can we get some light in here?”

“Yes.”

Brilliance hit them like a flood. Jordan yelped and squeezed his eyes shut. “Good idea,” he said, as he slowly pried first one, then the other eye open a slit.

The light came from dozens of brilliant lamps like small suns, studded in the ceiling of a huge domed chamber. The chamber was filled with towering blocks of white crystal, and the floor was scattered with chunks large and small. Thousands of small black sticks lay everywhere too.

Jordan wiped his fingers across the surface he was sitting on, and licked them. “Salt,” he said to himself in sudden understanding.

Tamsin gave a sudden shriek and pointed. Jordan turned.

A dead morph lay like a heap of sodden laundry not three meters away. Beyond it Jordan saw skittering movement. It took him a few seconds to realize that what he had taken to be sticks was actually hundreds, maybe thousands of small rock lizards, like the ones he had seen sunning themselves in the desert. They were scrambling around trying to escape the light; or maybe they ran like this all the time.

One timeless moment he lay in the grip of merciless cold, dozing, waking and shivering, dimly aware that Tamsin had wrapped herself around him; the next, he was painfully wrenched into the cold air by a manacle-like grip on his arm.

Jordan cried out; the stars wheeled around and he hit the ground painfully. A black silhouette loomed over him, and the reek of fresh blood filled his nostrils. His arm tingled where he had been touched.

“You are the are,” said a voice like grating stone.

Tamsin screamed.

Jordan rolled backwards–pebbles embedding themselves in his spine, cold air on his neck–and came to his feet to find himself facing two dark man-shapes outlined against a sky full of aurora light and moving stars. One of the shapes batted at the dark triangle of the stone lean-to, where Tamsin screamed again.

The one in front of him feinted, and he kicked at it. His foot connected with slick skin. The thing grunted, then vomited without bending. Black liquid spattered on the stones.

“Found you rightly,” said the morph. “You are the link. You come with us.”

It lunged and he leapt away. The adrenaline had Jordan seeing visions again, but he was able to press Armiger’s consciousness back. The landscape glowed with mecha, as did the morphs. The one closing with him had three eyes in its ravaged face, and he could see them as radiant orbs in a translucent skull. Its body was full of tangled lines of light, like a complete veinous system for the stuff Calandria had called nanotech.

The thing feinted and then jumped, and this time it had him. They rolled on the cold ground, but it couldn’t get a grip since it was covered with… water? Something darker. For a second it had him pinned and the fingers of its right hand scrabbled in his hair as if looking for a door there; then he sat up past its pressing chest and wrapped his arms around its torso. Jordan yanked while kicking at the dust with his feet, and lost his grip but not before he had come to a crouch and the morph was on its hands and knees.

No time for subtlety. He grabbed a rock the size of his fist and when the thing rounded on him again he cuffed it on the side of the head. It fell back, groaning.

“Tamsin!”

She shrieked again, and he saw her–a dark human-shape in the field of mechal light, clutching a blanket as the other morph dragged her along the ground by one leg.

He staggered his with the rock, then again when it came back for more. The thing didn’t seem to feel any pain. It was going to keep coming, he realized, until it had him or he crippled it. If he could–he’d heard tales of morphs growing new limbs to replace severed ones. At that moment he believed the stories.

Jordan pitched the rock at it, missed, and turned and ran after the other one. There was something wrong with the sky, a swirling in the stars, but he didn’t have time to think about that. He screamed, “Run!” and tackled the other morph.

Tamsin rolled to her feet. “Run where?“

“Up the slope! Get on the surface of the desal. Quick!”

Both morphs faced him now. Jordan backed away.

“Give us your light,” said the first morph.

“You shall ascend,” said the second.

Jordan closed his eyes and opened his arms. “Stones, rocks, sand and dust! Hear me!”

The earth roared a reply.

“Burn!” he cried. “Burn beneath the feet of the morphs!“

Then he turned and sprinted up the slope.

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are the horses?” shouted Tamsin.

“I don’t know. Ka! Where are they?”

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

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

“Look at the sky!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I shall ask.”

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

“Ka! Ask now!“

“I am doing so.“

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

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

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

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