Hours later they paused, halfway around the lake under the eaves of an abandoned barn. Axel was unused to this level of activity, and he had begun to stagger badly. Calandria favoured her wounded arm, so she could only carry so much. Marya had managed to keep up amazingly well, considering her feet. Whatever augmentation had been done to support her shortened tendons had toughened the balls of her feet immensely, and she could indeed run if she needed to.

As Axel slumped down wearily, and Calandria moved slowly to gather old planks for a fire, he noticed that Marya was shivering violently–whole body shivers accompanied by wildly chattering teeth.

“Thermal wear,” she muttered. “There must be some thermal wear here.” She knelt down and began rummaging through the bag.

“Ah. Here we are.” She pulled out a pair of silvery overalls and stood up. Axel expected her to walk away or at least turn around to remove her skirt, but she just pulled the overalls on–and the skirt vanished as she did, leaving nothing but a cloudy blackness that disappeared as she zipped up the overalls.

“What was that?” he said.

“What? What’s what?” Marya peevishly squatted down, hugging herself.

“Your dress–it was holographic.” He heard Calandria pause in the midst of prying a board off the old barn’s door.

“Of-f c-course it-it is,” Marya chattered. “It’s a-a holo unitard. W-what do y-you expect me to w-wear? Cloth?“

Calandria sent Axel an eloquent look that said, you deal with this. She went back to prying at the door.

Axel wasn’t actually that surprised. Holo unitards were increasingly common in the inner systems. They allowed unrestricted and unlimited costume changes for the wearer–but were only practical in climate-controlled environments.

“Well,” he said, “you’re on Ventus now.”

“I know. Anyway, the holo’s not supposed to be visible to the W-Winds.”

“That’s not the point,” said Axel. “You’ll freeze to death in that thing.”

“Anyway, you’ll have to get rid of it,” said Calandria. “We can’t take the chance that the Winds might see it.”

“The ship had no cloth apparel in it. And I didn’t get a chance to put the thermals on before we landed,” muttered Marya. “Too busy falling out of the sky.” She shuddered violently again.

She had a point there. “We’d better get this fire going,” he said. Calandria dropped another load of scraps at his feet and he bent to whittle some kindling. Marya watched him avidly.

“Pretty ironic,” said Calandria as she came to sit on the other side of Marya. She and Axel framed her; he could feel her shudders as he whittled. “A couple of hours ago we were nearly burned to death. Now we’re freezing. Typical.”

“There.” Axel had his kindling. He built a little pyramid of small scraps over, leaving an opening, and began laying larger blocks above and around that. Satisfied, he brought out the lighter from the survival kit.

“I can earn my keep,” said Marya. “Here, let me prove it.” She reached for the lighter.

“Anybody can use a lighter, Marya.”

“I want to do it the old-fashioned way. Do you have a flint and iron?”

“Yes… Have you spent time on Ventus, then?” asked Axel.

“I’m not ground survey staff.” Marya stood over them both, still shaking but looking strangely determined. “But I am a cultural anthropologist. I’ve studied more societies than you’ve heard about. I know sixteen ways to start a fire. We should save your lighter for a real emergency.”

Calandria exchanged another glance with Axel. Then she said, “Let her try.”

“I don’t want to be useless,” said Marya as she took the flints from Axel. She began frantically whacking the flintstone with her iron. She hit her own fingers and dropped it. “Ow!” Before Axel could move she had snatched it up again and resumed, more carefully and also more accurately. A small spray of sparks flew into the shavings.

She bent forward to blow gently on the embers. To Axel’s surprise, the tinder caught. She nursed it for a few minutes like a doting parent, while Calandria and Axel watched with bated breath.

Finally Marya sat back, triumphant, as the little fire began to burn on its own. “See! I did it!”

Both Axel and Calandria made approving noises. Maybe Marya wouldn’t be as useless as her gaudy exterior threatened.

The anthropologist sat down cross-legged, and beamed at her accomplishment. Axel sighed. “Okay, Cal, let’s look at your arm.”

“Well,” said Calandria as Axel poked and prodded, “What do we do next?”

Marya was beginning to warm up, and seemed to be regaining her poise as well. She said, “Obviously we need to get offworld as soon as possible. Something’s happening–I’ve never seen the swans like this!”

Axel and Calandria exchanged a glance. Armiger. It could only be him.

“Listen,” continued Marya. “I know Ventus like the back of my hand, even if I’ve never been here. We’ve had agents down here on and off for decades–people like Axel who’ve sent back reports, brought back books. I know the history. I know the geography, every city and hamlet on this continent. I speak six local languages, without the need for implant dictionaries. I’ve studied the religions twelve different ways.” She leaned forward to warm her hands on the new fire. “I know I’m not the outdoorsy type, I think I can help you.”

Calandria nodded. “Thank you. We need the help, right about now. One thing, though–you should get rid of that unitard. I know you say it’s supposed to be invisible to the Winds, but do we know that for sure? I don’t think we should take the chance.”

“Yes, I agree,” said Marya. She jerked a thumb at the sky. “Especially after seeing the swans close up–not something I want to do again, let me tell you!” She stood up and unself-consciously unzipped her coveralls.

“Hang on,” said Axel. “I disagree. Marya, I think you should keep your unitard.”

“Why?” asked Calandria.

Axel grinned. “I’ve got an idea.”

25

“Where is she?” Marya strained to see through the darkness. She and Axel were crouching in damp weeds, while Calandria snuck up on some horses in a nearby paddock.

“She’s nearly there,” whispered Axel. “Pipe down, or the dogs will hear you.”

Marya started to sit back, remembered they were on a planet covered with foul dirt, and recovered her crouching position. She shook her head. Calandria May seemed to take it for granted that her ways were the best. She had insisted on being the one to steal these horses.

“As soon as they discover they’re gone, there’ll be a posse out after us,” she said, for what felt like the tenth time.

“We’ll be long gone by the time that happens,” he repeated back. “Trust us.”

“My plan was better.”

“We’ve been over this. Your unitard wouldn’t fit Calandria.”

“So what? I-”

The dogs started barking. Marya Mounce cursed under her breath. Calandria had been approaching downwind and with almost supernatural quiet, but the damn animals had sensed her anyway. She wasn’t even to the paddock gate yet.

Calandria raced up to the paddock gate and began unhooked the loop of rope that kept it shut. Horses nickered nervously in the darkness beyond.

Marya shook her head, scowling. She had come up with a plan that, ethnologically, should guarantee that they were not pursued when they took the horses. Calandria had rejected it. The woman seemed to think only in terms of skulduggery–or maybe she didn’t want to admit that Marya’s plan was better than hers.

Here came the dogs, three of them snarling through the grass straight at Calandria. Marya’s breath caught in her throat as Calandria froze–but then there came a brilliant flash of light that dazzled Marya’s eyes for a moment.

The laser pistol was set on flash mode. Marya heard yelping, and opened her eyes to see the dogs stopped, pawing at their snouts. Poor things. A moment earlier they had been all teeth and claws, but already Marya felt like stroking them.

Calandria threw open the paddock gate. The horses were a bit dazzled too, and skittish.

The cottage door opened, throwing new light across the clearing. Two men stepped out. One shouted at the dogs.

“Trust?” said Marya. “Yeah, I trusted this was going to happen.”

“Calandria will handle it, you’ll see.”

Indeed, May was walking confidently across the paddock towards the men. One pointed at her and swore. Marya did a mental tally of the Ventus oaths she knew, trying to identify the language. Memnonian, of course…

Marya never found out what Calandria was planning to do next, because her own impatience and annoyance got the better of her. Marya stood up, unzipping her thermal overalls. “Hey, what are you-” began Axel, stopping as Marya disappeared from sight. She had tuned her holographic unitard to black, and before he had time to figure out what she was doing, she ran into the clearing.

The men were both burly, but short. They looked rough. Behind them another figure had appeared in the cottage doorway, hands bundled in its skirts.

“What you doin?” the first barked at Calandria. Pure Memnonian, she marveled. A rich strain of it, from the accent. She could almost trace this man’s ancestry by the way he sounded his vowels.

Marya stepped between the men and Calandria, and said “Morph,” in a loud and clear voice. As she did, she tuned her holographic clothing to another suit.

The men’s eyes widened and they fell several steps back. Marya had gone from peasant clothing to a festival costume that was all feathers and rainbows. Marya knew her face glowed out of it like an angel’s. That was the design.

“Uh, hello,” she said carefully. The words sounded clumsy in her own ears. “I mean you harm–no, no harm, I mean you.”

They both stopped short, a couple of meters away, and looked her up and down. Behind her, Marya heard Calandria muttering something. She chose not to listen.

The men were intimidated, but stood their ground. “W-what do you want?” asked the first, who looked older. “We have nothing. We’ve not harmed a single creature in this wood. Look, all we’ve got is horses–”

“Horses,” she said, nodding. “We need three. One for me, and two for my human servants.”

They looked so tragic that Marya wanted to turn and just walk away. The horses were all they had, after all. They were abjectly poor, and she was robbing them. Maybe there was something she could give them… but all the off-world paraphernalia she had would endanger them if they kept it. “I’m sorry,” she said.

They glanced at one another. “Do you need saddles?” said the younger man. The older one shot him a dirty look.

They really did need saddles, but Marya couldn’t bring herself to go that far. “No,” she said.

“Marya,” hissed Calandria.

“No saddles. Just horses. Thank you.”

The dogs were recovering their sight, and whined and snuffled around the feet of the men. Reluctantly, they turned to walk three palfreys over to her. She had no way of judging the quality of the mounts, and would probably have turned down the best if she knew they were offering them to her. Silently, the men bridled the horses and handed her the reins. “Spare us,” was all that the older one said as she led the horses out the paddock gate.

She could smell the animals–a spicy and enticing odor, but somehow… unsanitary. Her nose wrinkled. She made hushing motions as she approached them.

The walk to the woods seemed to take forever, and Marya looked back several times. The woman had joined them, and the three stood there with slumped shoulders watching part of their livelihood go. Marya felt so bad she nearly cried.

“That was a damnfool thing to do,” accused Calandria. “You could have got hurt if they’d attacked us.”

“I told you my plan would work better,” Marya shot back. “And I told you yours wouldn’t work at all, remember?”

For once, Calandria had no answer.

“There you are!” she shouted as Axel and Calandria fell over one last log. “See, we survived! You–you are May and Chan, aren’t you?”

“Who else would be crazy enough to be here?” he said. “Are you alone?”

“Yes, it’s just me.” Mounce turned and waved vaguely at the ship. “I was doing a demographic survey, it involved some close orbits, so that’s why I got caught in the–”

“You can tell us later,” said Calandria in her most diplomatic voice. “The swans are coming.” She pointed.

“Ah. Yes.” Mounce’s looked disappointed, but not frightened.

The sky was full of arcing incandescent lines. They stretched in a spiral all the way to the zenith, like ladders to heaven. Axel had seen the Heaven hooks when they came to destroy the Boros estate, and those too had been skyhooks of a sort, but nothing like this. Where the Heaven hooks had been cold metal and carbon-fibre, the swans seemed bodiless, creatures made of light alone.

From his scant reading on the subject, Axel knew the swans were nanotech, like most of the Winds. They were constituted from long microscopic whisker-like fibres. These could manipulate magnetic fields, and in their natural environment in orbit they meshed together in their trillions to form tethers hundreds of kilometers long. They drew power from the planetary magnetic field, and projected it by the gigawatt to where ever it was needed.

They could fly apart in an instant and recombine in new forms, he knew. Some of these forms could apparently reach down through the atmosphere itself, maybe even touch down on the surface of Ventus.

Calandria took Mounce by the shoulders. “Do you have any survival supplies?”

“Y-yes, it’s a institute policy to carry some.”

“Where are they?” Calandria vaulted into the ship. “We need stealth gauze. Have you got any?”

“I don’t–” began Mounce. The voice of the ship interrupted her. Axel couldn’t hear what it said over the roar of a nearby fire.

With a curse he hauled himself in the hatch after Calandria. She was rooting in a suit locker near the lock.

For a second Axel just let himself drink in the sight of the clean white floors, padded couches and trailing wall ivy decorating the ship. The Pan Hellenia represented civilization, with all the amenities–flush toilets, air beds, hot showers and sonic cleansers, VR, fine cuisine…

“Axel, help me!” He sighed, and turned away from it all.

Calandria was throwing things indiscriminately into a survival bag. Axel spotted a first-aid kit, diagnostic equipment, some emergency rations, a flashlight–

“Aha!” He pounced on the laser pistol. “Now I feel whole again.”

“Forget that–help me with this.” She was struggling to unclip a heavy box from the wall.

“What’s that? Cal, it’s way too heavy–”

“Nanotech customization kit. It’ll save our lives, believe me.”

“Okay.” He helped her wrestle it down and into the bag.

“Uh, guys?” Mounce stood in the entrance, framed nicely by a vision of burning forest. “We’d better get going. The swans are here.”

Calandria leapt past her, carrying two metal cases. Axel had never seen Calandria like this. It made him more than a little uneasy–as if his own vivid imagination was underselling the danger they were in.

“Hell!” Caught in her urgency, Axel swung the survival bag onto his shoulder and, staggering under the load, followed. Mounce accompanied him, her hands fluttering as she visibly tried to find a way to help.

A strange twilight glow pervaded the shattered clearing. Calandria had dumped both cases on the ground and was frantically rooting through one of them when Axel and Mounce caught up to her. Drifts of wood smoke stung Axel’s eyes and the roar and heat of nearby flames made his head spin. Sparks of static electricity were flying everywhere, and Mounce’s clean hair puffed out around her head like a dandelion.

Suddenly Calandria cried out, and collapsed. She curled into a ball on the smoking ground, hands clutching her head.

Axel felt it too–a ringing pain his head. It was centered on the left side, just above his ear. Mounce cursed in some foreign language and pulled off her crescent-shaped hair clip.

“What’s happening?” she shouted over an impossible roar of sound. The sound of the fire was drowned out by the approach of the swans. It wasn’t a single sound, but many, like a thousand strings. The swans sang a single unison chord as they reached to touch ground.

Lightning arced from the top of the starship. “Our implants!” shouted Axel. “We’ve all got hardware in our skulls. It’s shorting out from all this power! Calandria’s got more than either of us–she’s augmented in a dozen ways.” She lay insensible now, twitching next to the golden gauze she had half-pulled from the case.

“We’ve got to get her out of here!” He grabbed Calandria’s arm, hoisting her into a fireman’s carry. “Bring the stuff!”

Marya threw the cases into the survival bag and bent to haul it after her. Axel didn’t look back to see how she was doing; it took all his concentration just to navigate the splintered branches and gouged earth around the ship. Finally he reached untouched forest and toppled into a thorn bush with Calandria on top of him. The singing pain in his head continued, but not as strongly as it had right next to the ship.

Marya Mounce struggled her way across the obstacles, the huge bulging sack getting caught on every jutting spar. She seemed determined, her mouth set in a grim line.

She had nearly made it to the trees when a rain of white light pattered into the loam right behind her. The ground sizzled and smoked under it.

“Run!” Axel waved frantically at her. “Forget the sack! Just run!” He knew she couldn’t hear him over the chorus of the swans.

The rain intensified. It was like a funnel somewhere overhead was pouring down liquid light. Where it landed, the light coalesced, pulsing. The rain stopped abruptly, and started up again farther around the clearing.

The glow it had left behind flashed brightly once, and stood up.

Axel’s voice died. He was glad Marya seemed oblivious to the thing behind her, because it would have paralyzed him were he in her place. It looked like a man, but was entirely made of liquid light. Long electric streamers flew from its fingertips and head. As another such being grew behind it, the first began to pirouette this way and that, like a dancer, obviously looking for something.

Marya landed heavily next to Axel. The survival bag spilled open. “Damn,” she said meekly. Then she grinned crookedly at him. “Made it!”

Calandria pushed herself onto her elbows. “Steath gauze,” she croaked. “Where’zit?”

Axel grabbed the golden filigree she had been trying to unwind earlier. He pushed himself to his knees and flipped it open, letting it drape over all three of them, as Marya hauled the survival bag in under it.

The creature that had built itself behind Marya turned and looked in their direction. Axel forgot to breathe. He felt the other two freeze too, ancient instinct kicking in to save them from a superior predator. Slowly, deliberately, the thing stalked toward them.

“Oh, shit.” Axel fingered the laser pistol. It felt hot under his hand; he wondered if it was shorting out too. It looked like he would find out in a second, when he had to use it.

The thing’s head snapped to the left. It paused, chin up as though sniffing the air. Then it stepped over a log and headed away. The gauze had worked.

Axel blew out his held breath. Of course the stealth gauze worked–it was designed to fool the senses of the Winds. At times like this, though, he found it hard to remember that the technology of the Winds, including the swans, was a thousand years older than his own.

Old, maybe. But not primitive. He sucked in a new breath, and tried to will his racing heart to slow.

Soon six humanoid forms walked the clearing. Everything they touched caught fire. They tossed downed trees aside, and sent beams of coherent light into the treetops, hunting high and low, but never noticing the three small forms huddled right on the edge of the clearing.

One entered the ship. Loud concussions sounded inside, and the lights went out. Then spiral tendrils of light drifted down from above, and gently but firmly gripped the sides of the ship. The five remaining humanoid forms reached out, and dissolved into the ropes of light. Then, with hardly a tremor, the swans pulled the Pan Hellenia out of the ground, and retreated into the sky with it in tow.

The stellar glow faded; the full-throated cry of the swans diminished; soon the clearing was lit only by ordinary fire. But over the smell of burning autumn leaves lay the sharp reek of ozone.

For a time the three lay where they had fallen, head to head, watching the spiral aurora recede into the zenith, until finally the stars came out one by one, like the timid crickets.

Marya Mounce sat up and brushed dirt off her sleeves. “Well,” she said briskly. “Thank you both, very much, for rescuing me.”

An hour later they paused in the center of a darkening field in the very middle of nowhere. The milky way made a broad swath of light across the sky. Diadem was setting, its light glittering darkly off a lake near the horizon. There were no houses visible anywhere; other than the road, the nearest feature to the landscape was a dark row of trees along a nearby escarpment.

“There she is.” Calandria pointed to a slowly falling star at the zenith. “We’re going to have to break radio silence.”

Axel nodded. If Mounce’s ship landed back at the Boros manor, it would take them a week to reach it, and by then she would surely have lifted off again. Particularly if the Diadem Swans came down after her.

They watched the little spark overhead grow. Chill autumn wind teased at Axel’s long black hair. Neither spoke. Axel wasn’t sure what Calandria was feeling, but that dot of light represented escape to him, if they could get aboard it and evade the things that were chasing it.

“We may have to act quickly,” Calandria said. “Where would be a good spot?”

“Nowhere’s a good spot,” he said. “So we might as well flag her down right here. At least it’s level and open.”

“Here goes,” said Calandria. Then her voice spoke in his mind. “This is Calandria May calling the Pan-Hellenia. Can you hear me?”

They waited in tense silence. The brightening star had begun to drift away over the lake, following Diadem.

“Hello! Yes, it’s me, Marya. Are you with Axel Chan?”

“Yes.”

“They’re behind me, so I’m coming down at your last location–”

“No! Can you find us from this signal? We’re a couple hundred kilometers south of where he last contacted you.”

“Oh. I don’t know if I can… Yes, it says it can do that. Do you have shelter?“

Axel and Calandria exchanged a glance. He squatted down and began pulling stalks of grass out of the ground. “Shit. Shit, shit shit.”

“Why do you need shelter?” asked Calandria. “Are you trying to pick us up, or–”

“Pick you up? I’m trying to stay alive! The Swans are behind me, they’re closing in. They’ve picked off every ship that’s tried to get past Diadem. I’ve stayed ahead of them this far by skimming the top of the atmosphere, but they’re all over. Everywhere! I– hang on–”

Axel could see his shadow on the grass. He glanced up, in time to see the star brighten again to brilliant whiteness, and swerve quickly in their direction. Around and above it, a coruscating glow had sprung up, like an aurora.

All over, thought Axel. Great.

“The forest,” said Calandria. “Come on!” She began sprinting. He looked up again, then followed.

Low rumbles like thunder began. Instead of fading, they grew. The sound was familiar to Axel, and unmistakable: something was coming in to land. The sound had a ragged edge to it. Years of exposure to spacecraft told him it was a small ship. The big ones sang basso profundo all the way down.

Their shadows sharpened as they ran. Axel began to feel heat on his face. The roar became a steady, deafening thunder. On the shoreline below, the crescent of sand lit amber under a midnight dawn. Axel knew better than to look directly at the spear of light settling towards them, though it seemed as though Mounce was going to bring her ship down right on top of them.

The sky was starting to glow from horizon to horizon. He’d never seen that effect accompany the arrival of a starship.

Axel redoubled his effort, though he had twisted his ankle and it spiked pain up his leg with every step. Calandria was pulling ahead, but he didn’t have the breath to spare to tell her to slow down.

Suddenly spokes of light like heat lightning washed across the sky. Their center was the approaching ship.

A blinding flash staggered Axel. Childhood memory took hold: he counted. One, two, three, four– Ca-rack! The concussion knocked him off his feet. He came up tasting grass and dirt.

Whatever that flash had been, it had happened less than a kilometer away. He blinked away lozenges of afterglow in time to see the brilliant tongue of fire overhead waver, and cut out.

A dark form fell with majestic slowness into the forest. As it disappeared a white dome of light silhouetted the treetops, and Axel felt the deep crump of impact through his feet.

Calandria was waiting at the edge of the forest. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “Let’s go.” They waded into the underbrush. The darkness would have been total under the trees, except that a fire had started somewhere ahead, and the sky was alive with rainbow swirls. Axel would have found them beautiful if he hadn’t been so frightened.

Of course, if there were any witnesses to this within fifty kilometers, they’d all be cowering under their beds by now. No sane person would want to be caught in the open when the swans touched ground.

It was dark enough that Axel couldn’t spot branches and twigs fast enough to prevent himself getting thoroughly whipped as they went. Stinging, his feet somehow finding every hidden root and rock, he soon lost sight of Calandria, who as usual moved through the underbrush like a ghost. He could hear his breath rattling in his lungs, and somewhere nearby the crackling of the fire. Above that, though, a kind of trilling hiss was building up. It seemed sourceless, but he knew it must be coming from the sky. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end; so did those on his arms. He might have preferred it if they were doing that from fright, but he knew it must be the effect of a million-volt charge accumulating in the forest.

“Axel!” He hurried in the direction of the voice. Past a wall of snapped tree trunks and smouldering loam, Calandria stood on the lip of the crater Marya Mounce’s ship had dug.

The ship was egg-shaped, maybe fifteen meters across. It was half-buried in the earth. Smoke rolled up from its skin, which was blackened and charred. Neither the heat of reentry nor the crash could have cindered the fullerene skin to that degree. “She can’t have survived that,” Axel said as he staggered to a halt next to Calandria. “What did they do?“

“Can’t you feel it?” she asked. Stray wisps of her hair were standing up. Little sparks danced around Axel’s fingers when he wiped them on his trousers. “They hit her with a lightning bolt.”

“Well they’re about to fire another one,” he said. “We’d better get out of here–” He was interrupted by a flash and bang! of thunder. He ducked instinctively, though it had come down at least a few hundred meters away.

“There!” Calandria pointed. Warm orange light was breaking from somewhere around the curve of the egg. A hatch had opened.

They clambered over the smoking debris, and rounded the ship in time to see a small figure step daintily out of the hatch, arms out for balance.

“Hello!” shouted Marya Mounce. “Is anybody there?”

The woman revealed by the glow of the ship’s lights was not the brave rescuer Axel had hoped for. Marya Mounce was tiny, with pale skin and broad hips. Before seeing her face he noticed the frizz of her dun-coloured hair, which was held back by an iridescent clip. She was dressed in a blouse that swirled like oil, and a black skirt. It was evidently some inner system fashion, spoiled by the kakhi bandoliers slung over her shoulders.

What made his heart sink, though, was the sight of her feet.

Mounce had succumbed to a fashion sweeping the inner worlds, and had her Achilles tendons shortened. Her toes, the balls of her feet and calf muscles were augmented, so she stood en pointe at all times. All she wore on her feet were metallic toe-slips. He doubted she could run, much less climb over the broken trees strewn about this new clearing.

“There you are!” she shouted as Axel and Calandria fell over one last log. “See, we survived! You–you are May and Chan, aren’t you?”

“Who else would be crazy enough to be here?” he said. “Are you alone?”

“Yes, it’s just me.” Mounce turned and waved vaguely at the ship. “I was doing a demographic survey, it involved some close orbits, so that’s why I got caught in the–”

General Lavin laid his quill down wearily, and peered at the manacled prisoner Hesty had led in. “Why is this of interest?” he asked.

Hesty grimaced. “I hate to bother you with trivial matters. This man is a looter, we caught him skulking in the ruins of one of the outlying villages.”

“Yes? So execute him.” Lavin turned his attention back to his plans.

“He claims to have valuable information to sell. About the siege.”

“Torture it out of him.”

“We tried.”

Lavin looked up in surprise. The prisoner was a small man, wiry and grey-haired. He stood in an exhausted stoop, trembling slightly. His left arm was broken, and had not been set, and there were burn marks up and down his bare torso, and rope burns around his throat. He glared dully but defiantly at Lavin from his good eye; the other’s lid was bruised and swollen, as were his lips.

Lavin stood and walked around him. A large portion of the skin was missing from his back; the flesh there wept openly.

“He completely defied the torturer,” Hesty explained. “He insists on speaking only to you. And,” he shook his head in disbelief, “he wants to bargain!”

Lavin half-smiled, and came around to look the prisoner in the eye. “And why not? He obviously loves his life, Hesty. But there’s no reason to believe he knows anything.”

“Hear me out,” whispered the prisoner. He hunched, as if expecting a blow, but his gaze remained fixed on Lavin’s.

Lavin threw up his hands. “All right. Your torturers are incompetent, or this man has more character than they do.” He sat on a camp chair, and gestured for the prisoner to sit opposite. Awkwardly, as if his legs would not bend properly, the prisoner sat, hunching forward so as not touch the back of the chair. Hesty folded his arms and looked on in amusement.

“What is your name?”

“Enneas, lord Lavin.”

“You were caught looting, Enneas. We punish that with death, but we’re not cruel. Why did you choose to be tortured instead of letting us hang you quickly?”

Enneas breathed heavily, and seemed on the verge of fainting. He put his good arm on his knee to steady himself, and said, “I know something that will win you the siege without much bloodshed. But why should I tell you, if I’m going to die anyway?”

Lavin nearly laughed. The answer was self-evident: they would stop torturing him, that was why. But the torture hadn’t worked, and by the look of him, the man wouldn’t survive much more of it.

“I can’t believe you mean to bargain with us.”

Enneas tried to smile; it came across as a grotesque grimace. “What do I have to lose?”

“Your testicles,” said Hesty impatiently.

Lavin waved him silent. “I’m sure all that has been explained to Mister Enneas. Some of it done, too, by the looks of things.”

“I want to live!” Enneas glared fiercely at Lavin. “Free me, and I’ll tell you what I know. Kill me, and things go badly for you in the siege.”

“I don’t bargain.” Lavin stood. “Kill him.”

Hesty took Enneas by his broken arm and dragged him screaming to his feet. “Sorry to have bothered you,” Hesty grumbled as he pushed the prisoner through the flap of the tent.

Lavin sat brooding after they had left. He was preoccupied with plans for the siege, and it did look like it would be costly. There was an option yet to be tried but, much as he hated to admit it, that might not work. If it didn’t, a frontal assault would be his only choice.

Enneas had made a pitiful figure, sitting in his clean tent. He was a ruined man, and there would be many more like him before this was all over. Lavin had no compunction about sentencing a man like him to death; he would rather the money Enneas had taken go to feed wounded veterans, widows or children.

But sometimes he lost sight of why he was here. The siege would be bloody, and dangerous, not only to his men, but to the Queen. And that did not sit well with him.

He stood and left the tent. It was late afternoon, and cool and cloudy, but dry. A pall of smoke hung over the staggered tents of the encampment. Men bustled to and fro, carrying supplies and marching for exercise. Far away, on the outskirts of the camp, a simple scaffold stood. Someone was being hung even as he watched.

Hoping it was not Hesty’s prisoner, he picked up his pace, mindful to nod and acknowledge the greetings of his men as he went.

The scaffold disappeared behind some tents as he got closer. He hurried, but just as he was about to leave the edge of camp someone hailed him.

“Yes?” He waited impatiently as his chief mechanist ran over. The man was bowlegged and hirsute, and his helmet perched atop his head like some metallic bird. He bowed awkwardly, and pointed in the direction of the siege engines.

“General, sir! Someone punctured the water barrels last night! The supply’s shot–I mean, it’s leaked out! There isn’t enough left to run the steam cannon.”

Lavin hissed. “Sabotage? Is that what you’re saying?”

The mechanist backed away. “Yeah. Yeah, sabotage. What are we going to do?”

“What about our own rations?”

The man’s eyes widened. “The drinking water?”

Lavin nodded. “Is it safe?”

“Uh… not my department…”

“Find out. We will use it if we have to. Report back to me in an hour–and tell Hesty about this right away. Now excuse me.”

He rounded the tent in time to see them lower a body from the scaffold. Two soldiers heaved it up between them and carried it to a low pile of corpses nearby.

The rope had already been put around Enneas’ neck. The other end went up over the arm of the scaffold and to the halter of a bored horse. To hang Enneas, all they would have to do was walk the horse a few meters.

The thief’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be praying. But he didn’t beg, and he stayed on his feet, though he tottered.

Lavin was angry about the sabotage. It would cost him lives if the steam cannon were inoperable. He nearly turned and marched back his tent. Maybe though, just maybe, this man could make up for those potential casualties.

Still, he waited until the horse began to walk, just to see if the thief would break down. The rope tightened around his neck, but he didn’t struggle as he was lifted skyward.

“Stop! Cut him down!” Lavin strode over to the scaffold. Surprised soldiers jumped to untie the rope from the horse’s harness. Enneas fell to the ground, choking, dirt grinding into his bloody back.

They hauled him to his feet and unwound the rope. He coughed and gasped, and blinked at Lavin with his good eye.

“You have your life,” Lavin told him, “if you tell me what you know, and if I judge that it will be of use to me.”

Enneas’ knees buckled. He managed to croak, “Done!” before he fainted.

24

Through dusty, unventful days the passenger carriage had trundled its way south. Calandria May knew the shape of the seats intimately now; she felt her body had become moulded to conform to them, it certainly wasn’t the other way around. The primitive suspension of the vehicle sent every jolt and rattle of the wheels up her spine and into her throbbing head. And the thing was slow, stopping frequently at mail drops or to exchange horses.

Still, it was all they’d been able to afford with the last of their funds. This route would take them unobtrusively into Iapysia, where hopefully they could acquire some faster transportation. The country was in enough chaos that hopefully a couple of stolen horses wouldn’t be missed.

“My, you’ve become a paragon of caution,” Axel had said to her when she told him of this plan. “What happened to ‘get the hell down and find Armiger at all costs?’”

She’d shrugged. “What’s the point? We don’t have the weapons necessary to destroy him anymore. All we can do is observe until we can contact a passing ship and call in a strike.”

Their last reliable information had Armiger on his way to visit Queen Galas, who was either dead now, or still holed up in her palace, depending on who you talked to. Either way, it seemed unlikely that Armiger would still be going there, because her cause was doomed. They were rattling along in this carriage because the queen was their only lead. But there was no urgency to the journey now.

Axel was mostly recovered now, though you wouldn’t know it from the way he slept most of the day away. Without action to sustain him, he folded in on himself and became a dead weight. Calandria didn’t have the fight left herself to try to bring him out of his lethargy.

Consequently, when on a completely typical evening of jolting over rutted tracks, her skull computer said without warning Incoming transmission, Calandria May sat up straight and said, “Thank the gods!”

The passengers seated opposite them in the carriage didn’t look up; all three of them were nodding drowsily. They would have found it hard to hear Calandria over the noise of the wheels anyway.

She turned to find Axel staring back at her. She was just opening her mouth to ask him to please tell her he’d heard it to, when a different voice spoke in her mind.

“This is Marya Mounce of the research vessel Pan-Hellenia. Can anyone hear me?”

Axel’s face split in a wide grin. “A ride!” he said.

The other passenger on their side of the carriage mumbled something, and butted Axel with his shoulder.

The voice continued. “I’m on a reentry trajectory. The Winds are after me. The Diadem Swans went berserk a couple of days ago and they’ve either captured or driven away all ships in the system. I tried to ride it out but they’re on to me now. I’m going to try to land at the coordinates of the last transmission we received from our agent on the surface.“

“Agent?” whispered Calandria. “So there really are some researchers down here right now?”

Axel looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes, but maybe not like you think,” he said.

It took her a minute to catch on. “You’re the agent she’s referring to?” Calandria said to him.

“Yeah, yeah. Look, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t make some money on the side, so when those galactic researchers asked whether I could feed them regular observations while I was here, I jumped at it. Why not? I didn’t think the Winds would be jumping down our throats quite so enthusiastically.”

She had to laugh. “You are full of surprises, you know that?” Usually they were unpleasant, but if this Mounce person was on her way to this part of the continent…

Calandria reached out and rapped on the top of the doorframe. “Driver. You can let us out here, please.”

They were ten alleys away from the Boros house before either spoke. “Wait,” said Jordan, holding up his hand. “Gotta rest.”

“They’ll come after us.”

“Not for a while.” He had an odd distracted look on his face. He’d had it back in the hall, too. Bemused, almost sublime. “Everything’s quiet.”

She didn’t ask how he knew that. “I’m cold.”

“Yes, we’ve got to find some shelter.”

Tamsin nearly said, “We just left shelter,” but that would have taken too much energy. It didn’t make any sense to go anywhere; there was nowhere to go now. She supposed there might be for him. But why had he come for her?

Jordan closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and smiled. “Yes,” he said, “you’ve done well. Now please return to your master. I’m sure he’ll be frantic without you.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her. She knew he was anticipating a question. Tamsin just stared at him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

The question was so ridiculous she laughed. “No, no I’m not.” She opened her mouth to say more, but the words tripped over one another. And she didn’t know where to start, or why telling him would do any good.

He spoke, touched her arm. But something distracted her, a nuance of emotion like a thing seen out of the corner of one’s eye. Where to go. That was it.

Tamsin looked around. Nothing was familiar. She had no idea where she was. The buildings looming high around were nothing like the ones in her town. Even the air tasted different. She was lost, sliding. Drowning again. “I–” she said. Jordan had hold of both her wrists now. He was speaking to her, low and urgent, but she didn’t understand him. She had no idea who he was.

“We have to go!” Finally words she understood.

“Yes, yes.” She nodded, not to him but to herself.

Jordan began to lead her through the alleys. “Out of the city,” she said. “Take me to the desert. I have to go home.”

“Home?” He tightened his grip on her arm.

“Home, I have to go home, I have to…” She wanted to cry so badly, and she wasn’t able to. It was the most awful thing she had ever felt. She gasped for breath.

“Tamsin, don’t think me cruel for saying this,” said the young man leading her. “But your family is dead.”

“I know.” But she quailed at his words; until this night, she knew, she had never really believed it. Even now… if she could get home, find out the truth. “Maybe somebody survived. They couldn’t have killed everyone–”

“Yes, they could.”

“But you need to get to the queen anyway. To find this Armiger person. Do you know the way? No. The way lies through the desert. I can guide you. We have to go that way anyway.”

“We’ll talk about it. I promise. For now we’ve got to find somewhere to hide.”

He wasn’t really listening. Tamsin felt, if possible, even more alone. That sense of drowning came back, like a roaring, unstoppable noise in her head.

Jordan stopped, and put his hands on her shoulders. She blinked, suddenly seeing the grey crescents of his eyes gazing on hers. “I am listening,” he said. “And I’ll do everything I can to help you. We just have to take things one step at a time.”

This time she followed him attentively, and to her surprise, after she had gone ten paces in his footsteps she began, at last, to cry.

§

Jordan stood on the wall of an alley near the vertical uplands of the city. It was deep night now, but the moon was still up, and he could see its light glinting off the spires of the desal that waited half-submerged in the bay.

“You want to talk to a desal?” It was the first thing Tamsin had said since they had bedded down here. She stood below him on the nest of trash they had made. She still appeared stunned, distracted, her hair a bird’s nest and her hands grimy. Even a little curiosity from her now was an encouraging sign.

“It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

She didn’t answer for a while, merely chewed her knuckle and looked around herself aimlessly. Jordan returned his own gaze to the desal; ghostly in Diadem’s glow, its pinions rose from the middle of the lake like something discarded there, a sunken building or, he imagined, the shipwreck from Queen Galas’ story. Except that the spires were perfect, undamaged by time or the elements. The waves slapped against their sides as peacefully as they did the docks; there was no sign of preternatural life to the thing. Just now an ornate barque from the temple was anchored near the giant central tower. He could see the torchlit figures of priests moving about in it, but couldn’t tell what they were doing. Some kind of ceremony.

“I thought you were crazy when I saw you,” said Tamsin, so long after his own rhetorical question that it took him a moment to connect the two. He glanced at her; she summoned a smile, like an unpracticed conjurer, and hid it as quickly. “With, with your gold underwear and, and talking to things and all.”

As they ran he had given her a very sketchy rendition of his story: that he could talk to the mecha because of something Armiger had done, and that the Winds were after him. She would have heard some of it from through her uncle, if Suneil had bothered to explain why Brendan Sheia wanted him. Jordan didn’t know if she believed any of it yet.

“I can’t think of any other way to put an end to all this,” he said. “I can’t go home, because this curse will just follow me there. The Winds are hunting me because of the mecha in my head; the Boros want me as a scapegoat. The only one who can do anything about it is Armiger.”

“What can he do?” She crossed her arms and looked away; but she was listening and talking now.

“The first time I saw Armiger–saw through his eyes, I mean–he was commanding an army. It was so strange, but part of it was that he was strange. The things he looked at, listened for, and the things he said… they weren’t what I would have done. He didn’t seem to care about the battle, or the people he was commanding, he just gave orders, and they were always good. When the Winds sent the animals to destroy his army, I remember he was totally calm during the retreat. He escaped because he was as confident and calm in the middle of that butchery as he had been standing on the hillside watching from a distance.

“I’ve been watching him for weeks now, and he’s not the same man anymore. I think Calandria was right, he came here to conquer the Winds. He was the agent of some other creature even more powerful. But that one is dead, and Armiger is free.”

She was eyeing him now. He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. You have to be there, you see, to see the difference. But he has a woman now, and he cares about her. And he’s affected by things around him now, where he wasn’t before. The siege, he’s really bothered by it. People are dying, you know, starving and injured, and he’s realizing he can’t do anything to help them. He’s not thinking about conquering the world anymore.”

Tamsin frowned. “So how can he help you? Can he make the Boros’ go away?”

“Maybe. If I can convince him to help me.”

“How are you going to do that? By letting that,” she nodded to the desal, “eat you?”

Jordan took a deep breath. “Well, this is the crazy part. He went to Queen Galas to learn from her why the Winds are the way they are. Why they persecute people. She told him enough to give him an idea of where to look–but he can’t talk to the Winds, and he’s trapped in the palace with her now. But I can talk to the Winds. And I can search the places he needs to go.”

“So you want to be his errand boy!”

He winced. There was a little of her former haughtiness in her voice, though, and the thought cheered him. “Errand boy for a god is not a bad position,” he said. “I want to trade him the information in return for him getting the curse off my back.”

“Why should he trade? You said yourself he no longer wants to subdue the Winds.”

He hesitated. She did seem interested; he wondered if what he was going to say would make her dismiss him as crazy, and turn her back on her own misery.

“The thing is,” he said at last, “I think he should.”

Tamsin didn’t answer. She just cocked her head, and waited.

“This is the crazy part, Tamsin, and you have to promise to think about it before you laugh at me. See, I think we all of us could originally command the Winds. Everybody was once like I am now.”

Tamsin snorted. “If everybody could do anything they wanted, it would be chaos! Why pay for anything, if you can just summon the Winds to create it?”

“The world began in chaos,” he said. “Calandria told me Ventus was originally made for us, not for the Winds. Nobody in all the ages has ever been able to change it back, not even people from the stars like her. But Armiger could do it, if only he knew what their secret was. Before, when he was trying to find the secret for his own master, it would have been a disaster to have him win. Now it’s different.”

“You think he’d set things right?”

“He might. The man he’s become, would try.”

She didn’t answer, just made an odd noise, and thinking she was laughing at him again he turned to fire a retort back. She wasn’t looking at him, just pointing at the mouth of the alley.

“There they are!” Jordan saw a confusion of torches in the street, and the dark figures of a number of men.

“Brendan Sheia!” He knelt down. “Quickly, grab hold.” Tamsin boosted herself up and he pulled her onto the wall.

“That won’t do you any good,” said a smug, familiar voice from the ground on the other side.

Jordan looked down, into the eyes of the magician from the marketplace.

“Thief! I’ll have your head for stealing my power.”

For a second old habits took hold: “I didn’t steal him!” yelled Jordan. “I borrowed him and I gave him back.” Then he saw moonlight glint off the blade in the man’s hand.

There were six men on the alley side of the wall, and four including the magician on the other, which was someone’s garden. The wall itself ran between two buildings; there was no exit to be had by running along its top.

Three of the men in the alley had torches, as did the magician.

“Let us go!” said Jordan. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

The magician laughed. “Nice bluff.”

“Get ready to jump” Jordan hissed to Tamsin. “Torch, crack!”

Sparks and burning wood flew everywhere as the torch in the magician’s hand exploded. He screamed and fell, batting at the embers in his hair.

“Now!” Jordan and Tamsin landed in the dirt next to the magician, whose friends were smacking him on the head to put out his hair. There was an open gate at the far end of the garden, so Jordan made for that. Tamsin kept up easily.

They entered a moonlit street. In the distance he heard running feet; the others were coming around the end of the block. “Ka! Come to me.“

“Ka.” The ghost of a butterfly wafted through the open gate.

Tamsin tugged at his arm. “They’re coming!”

“I know. We can’t stay here. Ka, we need horses. Find me two of them, right now!”

“This way.” The butterfly flitted off down the street–thankfully away from the sound of running feet.

“So now I am the thief he accused me of being,” panted Jordan. “He deserves it though, the bastard.”

“What’s going on?” They entered another alley, this one shadowed by the high walls of buildings to either side.

“There! They went down that alley!”

It was too dark here to see anything. Jordan closed his eyes and looked with his other sight. “This way.” He followed Ka to a stable door; inside he could see the outlines of two sleeping horses.

“Ka, speak to the horses. I want them awake and ready to go with us if you can do that.”

“I have no power to compel. But I can present you to them as a Wind, if that is your desire.“

“Yes!”

Torches appeared at the mouth of the alley. Jordan made these explode as well, and their pursuers retreated in dismay. Jordan proceeded to saddle the sleepy horses in complete darkness, relying on touch and the ghost-light of his mechal vision. The horses were pliant and appeared unsurprised at this intrusion.

Tamsin had craned her neck out the door to watch the alley mouth; as he was cinching the second horse she said, “They’re waking the people in the houses. This house too. I think they know what we’re doing. Smelled the horses, maybe.”

“Well, we’re ready. Come on.” He led the horses outside.

“But where are we going? What about your plan to visit the desal in the bay?”

“You said there was another one in the middle of the desert,” he shot back. “You wanted to go home, Tamsin. Well, that’s where we’re going to have to go.”

He dug his heels into the flank of the horse and it bolted through shouting men, and when he looked back Tamsin was following, crouched low on her horse, wearing a grin that could be terror or satisfaction–and maybe was a bit of both.