Lavin opened Galas’ book once again, unable to resist but reluctant. By lamplight, he read.

Here is a dilemma. We doubt anyone else in history has faced such a dilemma as this. For when One sits at the window to watch the people go about their business, One sees such contentment and joy in simple things, expressed in the routines of the market and the street. And indeed, most people find ways to be happy, most of the time.

But We see also the town square with its gallows, and know that only the healthy walk these streets because only they are still alive. We know that only the strong-minded walk smiling in these streets because only they have won the freedom to do so. We do not see the isolated, failed or victimized people huddling in the back rooms of shops, chained in bedrooms or scattered like dust across the far fields.

If We propose to create something better, then We propose to end this world. That is how it will seem to these happy people, at least. For it may be necessary to make of the rich paupers, and make of the poor princes. In two generations, or ten, all will be well. For now, though, misery! And more and more. Would it not be better to leave well enough alone? If We stay the course, we shall see those smiling faces, bustling streets until Our dying day.

We are certain no one has ever faced such a dilemma. So We are inconsolable.

This is truth, though, that Our fury rises like an ocean storm at the thought that even one poor soul toils in misery out of sight, while these happy folk go about their business. True, it is not their responsibility, and no one should begrudge them what little happiness they can find. It is Our responsibility, however. They may never understand our motives, or see the full scope of the grand plan to be unfolded. We can only hope that their children grow up to be happy, and free, whether they revile our name or not.

He could almost hear her voice saying these words. They were so like her, when in the blush of youth she had fairly burst with idealistic passion. At the time, Lavin had barely understood what she was saying, beyond feeling a certain unease at her strange heresies. She was more intelligent than he, they both knew that, and he had always felt that they both accepted that he did not understand her.

In these diaries, though, he was finding so much loneliness that at times the words brought him near tears. He regretted now not striving to understand her better when he’d had the chance–perhaps he could have changed the course of her plans, and had she not been so lonely, perhaps she would not have chosen fanaticism. He suspected she had ultimately lived up to her reputation of madness because it was the only role left to her in her isolation.

They had met the second time at the military academy. It was some six months after the ball where he had received her approving glance. There were some young girls in regular attendance at academy balls, but Lavin rarely attended; being the faithful son of a rather dour provincial baron, he distrusted such affairs. Consequently he had lived on memories of that one moment of recognition by her. When he heard on the parade ground that the mad princess had been spotted riding through town in man’s attire, his heart began to pound and he missed his cue in the horse maneuver he was practising. At mess that day he had discreetly asked after the source of the rumor. It was true, it seemed: Galas was here, staying in an inn not a kilometer from the academy.

Two of the lads began to joke that the princess was here looking for a wife, or at least a concubine. Her mannish ways were a popular scandal, after all. Lavin threw down his cutlery and challenged them both to duels on the spot.

This altercation might have ended in tragedy had not the quartermaster intervened. He was a huge man who imposed his authority by purely physical means. After warning all three of them that any duellists stood to be thrown out of the academy, he beat them all black and blue. Lavin was not greatly upset by this–at least the disrespectful had been punished as well.

The quartermaster was perhaps a bit too thorough in his lesson, because Lavin spent the next two days vomiting and staggering due to some injury to his inner ear. It would come back to haunt him at critical moments for the rest of his life. This time, it kept him in bed until he restlessly demanded a leave of absence. He was given a week.

Looking back, he supposed he would never have worked up the courage to visit Galas’ inn had he not been dizzy and bruised–already beaten, both literally and figuratively. His mood was fey and unconcerned as he entered the inn, and inquired as to the whereabouts of the princess.

The barkeep smirked at him–Lavin had a black eye, a cauliflower ear and walked with a distinct stagger–and pointed behind him. He turned to find those same dark eyes of memory gazing at his.

She sat in the company of six of the king’s guards. This was her regular bodyguard, men she was comfortable with; just now they were trying to drink one another under the table. She was losing.

Lavin planted himself in their midst and introduced himself. They had met oh so briefly at a ball, he said. Surely she did not remember him.

Oh, but she did.

His bruises impressed the bodyguards. She told Lavin later that otherwise they would have pitched him out the door, as they did with the merchants and effete local noble’s sons who came to pay homage. Lavin was no courtier; he wanted no political favours. So they let him stay–but only if he drank to match them.

Never before or since in his life had Lavin been so sick. His only consolation was a dim memory of the princess crouched beside him also throwing up the indeterminate remains of today’s–or perhaps several day’s–lunch.

Deep and lasting bonds are forged in such moments.

It seemed that by achieving the worst nausea possible, he had found a standard by which to measure his injury. Over the next two days he made a remarkable recovery, primarily by discovering in her company sufficient motivation to overcome his dizziness.

Lately, reading the secret diary, he had recovered the memory of her voice. He remembered now how they had debated politics in those first days. She was passionate and angry, and he was willing to indulge her for he was learning she was not the insane creature of reputation, but a young lady cursed with an intelligence that had no outlet within the life prescribed for her. Lavin understood ambition. He wanted to lead armies, be a great general like the heroes whose faces were carved in the keystones of the academy. So he and she became soulmates, even though he censored from his own awareness half of what she said to him.

He had not been fair, he saw in retrospect. That was why, when disaster struck in the form of her coronation, he had not been invited to her side. She knew that though he understood her heart, he could never agree with her mind, and that as her consort he would have been miserable.

Ah! He could tell himself this, it sounded so objective and neatly encapsulating; the pain was still there. He had not gone to the throne with her.

The miraculous did happen, though. He was the first, and as far as he knew the only man she ever invited into her bed. The first time was at the end of that week’s leave. He had won over her bodyguards by dint of being disarmingly frank about his affection for her. They did not interfere when on that last evening she threw him a significant look and retired early, and he quickly made an excuse and followed.

The affair endured two years. They strove for utmost discretion, so meetings were rare and hurried. For all that, or maybe because of it, their passion was almost unendurably intense. Then, she conceived of the sea expedition that was to separate them for the next eighteen years. He learned of it in a letter she sent the day before her departure. The next news he had was of her triumphant entry into the capital bearing the seal of the Winds, there to unseat her father the king. Then nothing, except a single scribbled note received six months later telling him Court was dangerous, that she would meet him as soon as she could escape its entanglements.

They did meet again–once or twice a year at formal courtly functions, and three times she had allowed him to visit her privately, to walk in her gardens and halls alone with her for an hour or two. They never shared a bed again.

Now he rose and went to the flap of his tent. The summer palace lay in darkness, surrounded by an ocean of campfires.

Tomorrow, he would meet her again. The letters of parlay lay on his table now, next to her diaries. She wanted to talk.

He wanted to talk.

Lavin shuddered, and closed the flap of the tent against the chill. He wished he could sleep, but it was impossible. He wished… he wished he could run.

Take her, and run.

He moved to the map table, where the sappers’ charts lay, and drew his newly-ringed finger along a line that crossed the palace wall. He had rewarded the thief Enneas with his life for allowing this line to be drawn. If all worked according to plan, he would shower the old grave robber with jewels.

Take her and run.

Maybe he would.

The landscape was all curves. Gentle undulating dunes of a wonderfully pale tan color stretched off into a hazy horizon. The sky was full of rounded, white balls of cloud. The sun was bright, but it wasn’t hot, which somewhat dashed Jordan’s preconceptions about what deserts were like. The rolling hills, though, the color, and the taste of grit in his mouth were all the way he’d imagined.

They had been travelling for several days now. To his own surprise, Jordan felt pretty good. For once he wasn’t under the control of somebody else. He could plan the day’s travel, set their pace, and admire the scenery as he wished. His thoughts seemed to be getting clearer with each morning that he woke to find himself master of his own fate.

Tamsin’s shoulders were slumped like the dunes. The farther they went into the desert, the more despondent she became. She had not spoken about what she expected to find here, but Jordan had his suspicions. None of those thoughts were good.

He walked his horse up next to hers. The horses were a bit nervous in this vast emptiness, but Jordan had Ka constantly scouting for water holes, and so far they had been lucky. At one hole the water had been a red color, and Ka said it was poisonous. Jordan had commanded the water to purify itself, and it had.

Miracles like that should have puffed him up with pride, but they did nothing to penetrate Tamsin’s air of gloom, and that was his main concern right now. He had no miracle to cure her of her grief.

She glanced wearily at him as he matched her pace. “How are you doing?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I dunno.”

Jordan took a pull from the waterskin he had bought in a hamlet outside Rhiene. “Shall I tell you a story?”

She considered this idea. “What kind of a story? I don’t want you to cheer me up.”

“Well, I could tell you something depressing, then.”

“No.”

“How about something that’s just true?”

“I don’t want–” she gulped. “To hear a story.”

They rode on in silence for a while. Jordan was thinking. Eventually he asked, “Have you ever seen the queen’s summer palace?”

“No.”

“You want me to describe it to you?”

Tamsin sat up straighter. “Look, you don’t have to–okay, why not. But not like it is now, all covered in blood. Tell me what it used to look like before the war.”

Of course Jordan had never seen it that way, because Armiger had arrived well into the siege. He could imagine it though, with his mental blueprints and eye for the architectural detail buried under the siege scaffolding. And there were many places inside that were untouched.

“They built it in a valley where there’s a tiny oasis, centuries ago. The first building was a chapel of some kind–you can still see traces of it in the stonework at the base of the high tower. It’s all built of stone the same color as the sand we’re riding over. Now there’s a big ring wall around the oasis. This has five big towers on it, and one smaller. The biggest tower, on the east side, has a big causeway stretching up to it, and you’d think that that would be gate, but the entrance there was bricked up centuries ago. It’s the west tower that has the main entrance.

“If you come in the main gate you’re channeled between two more walls to the main keep. This tower is huge, Tamsin! It must have six floors, at least, and it steps at two points. Sometimes the queen walks around these balconies and she can look out over the hills and watch the sunset. Her chambers are in this tower, high above the earth.

“Let’s see… if you come in the main doors of the keep, you’re channeled again through it, to the great hall which is a big rectangular building attached to the keep on its east side. The great hall is magnificent. It’s buttressed, with a pitched roof, with mullioned arched windows and a beautiful staggered triple lancet window on the east facade–”

“A what? What does it look like?”

“Oh. One time when Armiger walked through the banquet hall he looked up at it. It’s three very tall arched windows separated by thin mullions–pillars, you know. The glass is leaded in a flame-like pattern. Very beautiful. But I only caught a glimpse of it, because Armiger never looked at it again.

“Anyway, the queen’s garden lies south of the great hall. Then there’s houses and shops all around the foot of the keep on its north and south sides. The rest of the ground inside the big ring wall is full of tents now. The rest of the queen’s army. But I guess it was parade grounds and so on before the war.”

He did not tell her that the beautiful copper roof of the great hall was holed in a dozen places by Parliament’s steam cannon, or that the arched windows were half shattered, nor that the lovely pink marble floor of the banquet hall was almost invisible under a maze of stacked provisions.

She listened as he went on to describe the gardens, which remained untouched, and the little cobbled streets that crowded against the foot of the keep. She seemed grateful for the distraction. And as he painted in words a picture of the palace in better times, Armiger sat like some gargoyle atop the highest parapet of the keep, and wondered what was to come in the next days.

§

Megan touched his elbow. Armiger awoke from a deep reverie; it was near sunset. For hours now he had been lost in transcendent thought.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. He examined her in the fading light. Megan’s face was thinner than when he had met her, but she also looked younger, somehow. He found himself smiling.

“I’m sorry I brought you here,” he said.

“Why?” He could see she was trying not to interpret what he’d said the wrong way.

“The assault will begin soon. It has to. I can see Lavin’s running out of supplies–the number of wagons arriving every day has dropped off sharply. I think Parliament is choking off his budget now that it thinks it’s won.”

“Are we going to die?” She asked it like she might ask any reasonable question.

“I can protect us against the soldiers. But the Winds are still searching for me, and the attack is bound to draw their attention. If they don’t intervene directly, they might still see me. Then, yes, we may be lost.”

She held out her hand, and he took it as he stepped down off the crenel. “Then let’s leave,” she said. “Surely we can sneak out of here.”

He hesitated. “We could.”

“Then let’s!”

“A week ago I would have said yes. After all, I’ve learned all I can from the queen. Or all I care to,” he added ruefully. “And there lies the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked out at Parliament’s army, a city of tents sprawled in an arc to the southwest of the palace. Hundreds of thin lines of smoke rose from campfires there.

“Once,” he said quietly, “I was a god. Then it seemed a reasonable desire to rule the world. That is what I came here to do. I needed to learn the Achilles’ Heel of the Winds. My other agents could not uncover the secret, so I came here to the one person in the world who, it was said, knew the most about them. But along the way, my goals… changed.”

She smiled. “Are you complimenting me?”

“Yes, but it’s not just been you.” He kissed her. “I’ve started remembering. There was a time, ancient now, when I was free, simply a man like any other. Those memories are returning, and…”

How could he describe it to her? Such a memory would come to him like the wind after a storm, full of sweet scent and alert joy. There had been a time when his hand was just his hand, and not one instrument of many in the service of vast intricate schemes. When his eye would light on a beautiful person or place, and simply rest content, with no calculation of its utility. When he began to remember this way, Armiger had also begun to recognize such moments in those around him. The moment that unlocked this recognition had been seeing, on Megan’s face, a simple span of pleasure as she savored then swallowed some warm broth from the queen’s kitchen. For two, three seconds Megan had thought nothing, merely tasted and enjoyed. And it came to Armiger that it had been seven hundred years since he had experienced such a moment.

“It’s something that connects me to all these people,” he said, gesturing to include both the palace and the besieging army. “Before, they were counters on a board. Now, somehow, they’ve become like me. I know it can’t make any sense to you.”

“Ai,” she snapped, yanking on his hair so that he laughed. “Of course it makes sense, silly. You were a child, and now you’re growing up. All those years you were one of them, you were like an infant, all want. So now you’re surprised when you start to become like the rest of us? You are sometimes a very, very silly man.”

For a while he was completely flummoxed, and just stared at her while she laughed. Then he caught her around the waist. “Maybe I am. You made me care about you, and now I’ve come to care about these people too. And I can help them.”

She sobered. “Help? How?”

“I was a general once. I can be again.” He kissed her forehead and stood back. “It’s time to abandon the plans of the entity that enslaved me all these centuries,” he said. “And time to start making my own.”

Megan stepped back. “Armiger–”

“Galas is the most deserving ruler on this world,” he said. “I can’t let her be destroyed. Nor her people.”

Megan turned and went to the crenel, where she looked out over the sea of tents for some time. Then she looked back, her face a play of rose-lit arcs in the sunset. “You must be careful,” she said. “You may come to care too much, you know. And that could cost us more than all your uncaring ever could.”

Marya dreamed about home. Outside her window she could see the gently upcurving landscape of Covenant, her colony cylinder. Sunlight streamed through a thousand lakes and pools, turning the hills and cities into translucent lace and backlighting the spiral of clouds in the center of the cylinder. As always, thousands of winged human figures drifted in the air between her and those clouds.

She walked the deep moss carpets of home. She breathed the warm honeyed air, felt it drift over her limbs finer than any cloth as she passed through room after room of her parents’ apartment. Her family were here, she knew, in other rooms she had yet to reach. Then, in the back of her own bedroom, she found a door she had never seen before.

She waved the door open, and gasped to find herself in a giant library. She recognized paper books, had held a few in her hand as a student, feeling then the tremendous age and dignity of pre-space knowledge. It was this sense of ancient dignity that had driven her to anthropology.

Here were thousand upon thousand of bound books, arrayed in shelves that towered to an invisibly distant ceiling. Marya walked reverently among them.

She stumbled, knocking over a side-table. The echoes of its fall went on and on, almost visibly reaching into every distant crevice between the volumes. When it finally died, she heard a growing rustle, as if the books were rousing from slumber.

A voice spoke. “You’ve done it now.”

“What have I done?” she asked, tremulously.

“You’ve got to make a choice,” said the voice. “You woke us. Now you have to choose whether you want us to become a part of you, as memory; or whether you want us to become people, with whom you can speak.”

She looked up at the towering wisdom, and felt a sudden love for it–as if these books were family. “Oh, please become people,” she said.

But even as Marya spoke she remembered she wasn’t on Covenant any more. She was on Ventus. As grim men with swords stepped out of the walls, she screamed, for she had chosen wrongly.

§

The sound of Axel cursing woke Marya. She groaned and tried to roll over. Her eyes felt pasted shut, for all that she had slept badly. Her back seemed to have been remade in the shape of the stones she had lain on, and the cold had entered through every chink in the blanket.

Axel was using some language Marya didn’t know, but it was plain he was upset. Too bad; but couldn’t he be quieter about it?

“Damn it, get up, Mounce! She’s gone!”

Marya opened her eyes. Grey clouds had taken over the sky while she slept. The fire was out. She levered himself up on one elbow, fought a wave of dizziness, and blinked at two horses where there should be three. The beasts were staring at Axel wide-eyed.

“She snuck off! I can’t believe this! What a bitch! ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning.’ Ha! She never could trust anything past her own nose. Damn damn damn damn!” He kicked the log he’d sat on last night, then kicked it again twice as hard. “I’ll crack her skull, I’ll, I’ll boil her alive! Damned, arrogant…” he groped for words.

Marya tried to say, “We can probably catch her,” but her voice came out as a croak. Damn this planet! Every bone in her body ached, as if she were a tree slowly freezing up with the onset of winter. And her skin–it itched from the fabric touching her as if a thousand fire ants were biting her.

Axel made a chopping motion with his hand. “To hell with her. We’ll find Jordan. We know where she’s going. She’s going to face down Armiger herself. Of all the arrogant…” Again, he seemed to lose his vocabulary. He switched languages, maybe to disguise the hurt tone that had crept into his voice.

Marya levered herself up. Axel had started jamming things into his pack, pausing now and then to stare down the road. He looked down, muttered, “She never really trusted me,” in an unbelieving tone, and then shook himself.

“All right, Marya,” he said. “Let’s go.”

With an effort, she transcended her discomfort. “Where?” she asked, squinting at him.

“To find Jordan. He’s still running from the Winds, and it’s our fault. The only way he’ll be safe is if we get him off planet.”

How to put this? “Axel… I understand your impulse to help this man. But Calandria’s half-right. We need to do something to attack the larger problem.”

“What larger problem?”

“The Winds.”

He stopped stuffing the pack. “What in hell’s name can we do?”

Marya stretched. “We continue signalling for a ship, you’re right about that. Meanwhile, though, we go back.”

“Back where?”

“To Memnonis. To steal the corpse of this man Turcaret.”

§

Calandria paused at the crest of a hill and looked back the way she’d come. She felt a vague disquiet, leaving like this.

The feeling raised old memories. She remembered crying for days after overhearing that the children she’d thought her friends, had been hired as her playmates by her wealthy mother. Now she felt the same almost-guilty feeling she used to have when leaving residence parties early and alone, at the Academy. She always reached a point where she could accept no more closeness. Her basic alienation came back to haunt her. When that happened she had to leave, and today she was leaving Axel and Marya. It was not, she told herself, that she was afraid of the Winds; if she were, she would have agreed to his plan to leave Ventus as quickly as possible. No, she had come here for a purpose; her resolve was greater than his, that was all.

She chewed on the reasons for her leaving him as she rode. It was easy to suppose that she was saving Axel and Marya from unnecessary risk. It was also true that every day they left Armiger alone, he moved a step closer to taking over the vast and invisible machine that surrounded her. What it finally came down to, however, was that she and Axel could never work together as a team. Calandria liked to pass like a ghost through the worlds she visited. She was the perfect chameleon, adopting personalities and appearances as they suited her. By tomorrow she would have changed, and no one, possibly not even Axel, would recognize her. This was the right way to do the job she had come to do: by dancing around the edges of the human world, darting in only for the quick surgery that would remove the cancer she had come to kill.

Axel wanted to marry every woman he met, and get drunk with every man. He was probably headed for some inn now, to drown his anger at her in a tankard or two. Well. When they met again it would be apologies all around, she was sure. She would have to plan how to conduct those. She didn’t want to lose Axel’s friendship, after all. Certainly not over their work.

Jordan… Once she killed Armiger, the link, and with it the thing that made the Winds interested in him, would be gone. He would be just a normal man again. And with any luck, he would use what she’d taught him to get rich.

She was doing the right thing.

Her thoughts turned easily to Armiger. How to pursue, how to kill him? Her eyelids flickered; her horse walked on; and Calandria began to drop the Lady May persona, becoming once more the hunter.

Marya nodded. They’d seen one that afternoon, a vagabond moon as the locals called it, moving as slowly as a real moon through the sky, but from north to south. It had glowed gorgeous red in the sunset, and Marya had almost cried to think she might never have seen that, had she’d stayed out her term here in orbit. Being on Ventus was affecting her profoundly, in ways she hadn’t begun to figure out. All she knew was she was an emotional wreck.

She looked across at Calandria May. The mercenary woman looked back levelly, but it was the steady gaze Marya had seen from prostitutes and beggars–the challenging gaze of the emotionally damaged. Marya couldn’t figure her out. She was so formidable in her talents, but incredibly brittle somehow in her fundamental character. Why did she care to argue, tonight, about whether the Winds were gods?

“The Winds are in everything,” said Marya, watching Calandria carefully. “The air, the rocks, the soil, the water. But they’re not just sitting there, they’re working, all the time. Ventus is a terraformed world–a thousand years ago there was no life here. Our ancestors sent the seed of the Winds here by slow sub-light ship, and it bloomed here and turned a dead world into a living one. The Winds couldn’t do that if they were just instinctive creatures.”

“But they didn’t recognize humans when we came to colonize,” Calandria pointed out. “When the colonists landed, the Winds couldn’t tell what they were. They couldn’t speak, or interact with the colonists. They left them alone because as organisms they fit into the artificial ecology–they filled a niche, like they were designed to. But their machines looked like some kind of infection to the Winds, so they destroyed them, all the computers, radios, heaters, building machines. They pounded the people back into the stone age. A thousand years later, this is as far as they’ve gotten, and it’s as far as the Winds are ever going to let them get.” She shook her head sadly. “The Winds can’t be conscious. They act like some sort of global immune system, cleaning out potential infections, like us or Armiger.

“Because of that,” she said quickly just as Marya opened her mouth to speak, “Armiger could take them over. They were decapitated, or born without a brain. There was a flaw in the design of Ventus. Armiger is here to exploit that.”

Marya shook her head. “Can’t be done,” she said. “He would have to reprogram every single particle of dust on the planet. And even if he could, the Winds are conscious. They’d see through it before he could get too far.”

“You think he’s harmless?” snapped Calandria. She stood up. “You’re so enraptured by your beautiful nanotech terraformers you don’t think there’s subtler things out there?”

“I didn’t say that, I–”

“This system is nothing like a real god,” said Calandria. “3340 told me that even its thoughts were conscious entities. Conscious thoughts!” She laughed harshly. “3340 was like an entire civilization–an entire species!–in one body. With a history, not just memories. He could make a world like Ventus in a day! How do you know he’s not the one who put the flaw in the Winds in the first place? He might have done that a millenium ago, intending to let the place ripen then return to harvest it. But he got distracted by another planet before he could do that. Hsing was a much better toy, he could forge it into his own private hell much more easily. Still, he sent Armiger here. How do you know Armiger isn’t a resurrection seed? He may be planning to turn the entire planet into a single giant machine to recreate 3340. It’s within his capabilities. Your precious Winds are no match for Armiger.”

She turned and stalked off into the grass.

Marya turned to Axel. “Well!” she said.

Axel watched Calandria’s silhouette recede for a few moments. Then he grimaced and turned to Marya. “You touched a nerve,” he said.

“Obviously.”

“We went to Hsing to destroy 3340,” he said. “With Choronzon’s help, and the backing of the Archipelago.” Axel told Marya the story of how Calandria had beaten 3340 by becoming its willing slave. She shook her head sadly when he was done.

Marya shifted, finding that her rear had gone to sleep on the hard log on which she was sitting. She couldn’t get used to such physical annoyances. “She’s wrong about the Winds though,” she said.

“Don’t pursue it,” he advised. “Anyway, nothing we’ve seen since we arrived here suggests the Winds are conscious. Little bits of them here and there, like the morphs, might be. I don’t know about the Diadem swans.” He glanced up uneasily. “But the system as a whole? No, it’s just a planetary immune system, like she says.”

Marya shook her head. “If Ventus hasn’t spoken to you, it’s because you’re beneath its notice. You forget, this world is my subject. I know more about it than you do.”

“But you haven’t been here,” he said quietly. “You’ve never seen it up close. You’re here now–does it seem like there’s intelligence to this?” He waved his hand at the ragged grass.

“I don’t know what you see when you look at it,” Marya said. “Maybe it’s because you’ve been on worlds where life just is, like Earth. Where nothing maintains it. But everything around us is artificial, Axel. The soil: there may be a thousand years of mulch here,” she kicked at it, “but there’s meters of soil beneath that, layer upon layer of fertile ground underneath what’s been laid down since Ventus came to life. Every single grain of that was manufactured, by the Winds.

“Look at the grass! I know it looks like Earth grass, it’s uneven in height, looks randomly patched over the hillside. Maybe in the past few centuries things have settled down to the point where it can be allowed to spread on its own. But I doubt it. The grass has been painted on, by the nano. Look at the clouds. They look like the clouds I see in videos of Earth. But if the Winds weren’t busy sculpting them right now, do you think they would look like that? Axel, Ventus is not like Earth. Its sun has a different temperature, it’s a different size, the composition of the crust is different, so the mineral balance in the oceans is–was–totally different. As a result the composition of the atmosphere, and its density, are naturally very different. This weather is not natural.” She held her hand up to the breeze. “The air’s been made by the Winds, and Axel, they have to keep making it. The instant they stop working, the planet will revert, because it’s not in equilibrium. It’s in a purely synthetic state.

“You don’t honestly think the distribution of bugs, mice, and birds around here is natural, do you? It’s planned and monitored by the Winds, on every square meter of the planet. Bits of it are constantly going out of wack, threatening the local and global equilibrium. The Winds are constantly adjusting, thinking hard about how to keep the place as Earth-like as possible. It’s what we made them to do.”

He shook his head. “Well, exactly. It’s a complex system, but it’s still just a big machine.”

“Surely you’ve wondered why the Winds don’t acknowledge the presence of humans?”

“The Flaw? Sure, whole religions exist here to try to answer that,” he laughed. “You think you know?”

“I think I know how to find out. Listen, in your last report to us before the Heaven hooks incident, you said that Controller Turcaret claimed to be able to hear the Winds.”

He glared at her. “Not claimed. He did hear them.” Calandria still didn’t believe that part of the story, and it obviously annoyed Axel.

“We’ve heard of people like that,” said Marya. “But we’ve never been able to verify a case. If we had one to study, I’m sure we could crack the problem.”

He laughed shortly. “Too bad Turcaret’s dead.”

“I’m not sure that’s a problem,” she mused. “As long as there’s bits of him left…”

She heard the grass rustle; Calandria was returning. Marya saw the woman’s eyes glinting like two coals in the darkness, and shivered. “We go after Armiger,” said Calandria. “You know we must.”

“No,” said Axel. “We can return with reinforcements. I’m going to keep signalling for a ship, Cal. You can’t stop me.”

There was silence for a while. Then Calandria shrugged. “You’re right, I can’t stop you.”

The atmosphere around the fire suddenly seemed poisonous. Marya stood up quickly.

“Think I’ll turn in,” she said, smiling at them both.

Across the fire, Calandria nodded, her perfect face still as carven stone in the firelight. Her eyes betrayed nothing, but Marya thought she could feel the woman’s gaze on her back as she knelt and made her bed.

“You’re crazy,” said Axel Chan later that night. “He’ll kill us.”

“We have to try.” Calandria stamped the dirt near the fire in an attempt to warm her feet. “Every day we wait he’ll get stronger, and nearer his goal.”

“But without the Desert Voice…”

“He’s not invincible, Axel. None of them are.”

“But we can’t guarantee his destruction. You’ve said yourself every molecule of that body has to be vaporized.”

Calandria patted the large case they’d taken from the Pan Hellenia. “This should be enough to incapacitate him. Then we get him offworld, and take care of him once and for all there.”

Marya watched them bicker wearily. This had been going on for hours now. She was beginning to wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to throw herself on the mercy of the farmers. At least she had studied them. These two were galactic citizens, like her, but they were also foreign mercenaries with completely alien priorities.

They had made camp in a hollow beneath a windswept hill. It was very cold again tonight; Marya could see her breath. She had never been so cold, for so long, in her life. Privately she was amazed and proud that she was still alive, much less mobile. Every day she battled bone-numbing cold, agoraphobia from being on the unprotected surface of a planet, and the onslaught of so many minor physical inconveniences that she was sure they were going to drive her insane.

To make matters worse, Axel had told her he thought it would rain tonight. Would it hurt? she wondered. The very thought of countless tiny water-missiles plummeting down at her from ten thousand meters made her shudder. But he seemed quite unconcerned. Show-off.

She scratched at the heavy, binding cloth garments Calandria had stolen for her the day before. She had been taught that clothing was primarily an invention for sexual display, but the people who told her that had like herself been raised in an environment of perfect climate and hygiene control. She wouldn’t abandon the cloth now, uncomfortable as it was, because she needed it to keep her warm.

The argument across the fire had shifted back to whether they should continue with their mission, and attempt to stop Armiger, or whether they should try to escape the planet. Axel wanted to use their implanted radio to signal other ships that might be in the system; Calandria was adamant about retaining radio silence. She seemed frightened of attracting the attention of the Winds. And yet it was she who proposed that they confront this Armiger, whom Axel said might be hiding in the depths of a besieged fortress. The argument went back and forth, back and forth, and nothing was resolved.

Axel had told Marya the story as they walked, though he glossed over the extent of his and Calandria’s interference with local affairs. Covering his ass, apparently. But this General Armiger was an off-world demigod, and somehow a young man named Jordan Mason had gained the ability to see through his eyes.

“I heard about the war with 3340,” said Marya. “So Armiger is really one of that monster’s servants?”

Axel nodded. “And devilishly dangerous, for that. 3340 corrupted entire planetary systems. He seduced people by offering them immortality and almost infinite power,” he added with a glance at Calandria May. “Then he absorbed the resulting entities into himself. Armiger may have been an early victim.”

“He was human, once?” She was surprised and disturbed at the thought.

“If he was, there’s nothing left of that personality,” said Calandria. She hugged herself as her gaze dropped back to the fire. “3340 absorbed millions of individuals, and then mixed and matched their consciousness as he saw fit. Anything he absorbed became part of the single entity that was him. He was ancient when the Winds were just being designed. Maybe aliens designed him–but he claimed to have made himself.”

Axel harumphed skeptically. “So did Choronzon–our employer,” he added in an aside to Marya. “An ex-human who had himself genetically rebuilt and made himself into a god. He’s a few centuries old. It was his war with 3340 that got us involved in all of this.”

Marya shook her head in wonder. “I’ve never met a god, unless you count the swans.” She kicked at the wilting grass near the fire for a second, then added, “The Winds are gods of a sort. But damaged. They’re fully aware, even if they’re not completely awake. That’s the tragedy of it.”

“They’re not gods,” said Calandria with odd vehemence. “They’re just machines. Idiotic. Mechanical. You can see it in everything they do.”

“What do you think they do?” asked Marya.

“She’s thinking of the Heaven hooks,” said Axel. “They acted like a horde of dock robots gone amok. As far as we could tell, that’s what they were too–the aerostats are just big cargo carriers for the terraforming operation.”

Marya nodded. They’d seen one that afternoon, a vagabond moon as the locals called it, moving as slowly as a real moon through the sky, but from north to south. It had glowed gorgeous red in the sunset, and Marya had almost cried to think she might never have seen that, had she’d stayed out her term here in orbit. Being on Ventus was affecting her profoundly, in ways she hadn’t begun to figure out. All she knew was she was an emotional wreck.