“How are you feeling?” he asked Tamsin.

“Good.” She stopped and massaged her shin. “Still hurts, but it’s okay to walk on.” The wagon vanished behind them, but the fire remained a diffuse orange landmark.

As they walked on, he tried to think of something more to say. For some reason, his mind had gone blank. Tamsin seemed to be having the same problem. She walked with her hands behind her back, head down except at intervals when she made a show of peering through the fog.

The low grey lines of the ruins coalesced ahead of them. Tamsin stood on a low wall that once must have supported a large house. She raised her arms, making the mauve poncho fall into a broad crescent covering her torso.

“Your uncle’s not used to travelling,” Jordan observed.

“He was a cloth merchant back home,” she said. Tamsin lowered her arms and stepped down. “He was really rich, I think. Before the war. When he had to leave home, he took some of his best cloth. We’ve been selling it to buy food and stuff. But we’re all out of it now.”

“Did you live with him before?”

She shook her head. He wanted to ask her about her family, but could think of no way to do it.

“He saved me. When… the war came to my town, the soldiers were burning everything. It was a surprise attack. I was trying to get home, but the soldiers were in the way. Uncle… he appeared out of nowhere and took me away. He saved my life.” She shrugged. “That’s all.”

“Oh.” They walked on.

“Thanks,” she said suddenly.

“For what?”

“For coming with us. For helping out.” She hesitated, then added, “and for putting up with me.”

Jordan found he was smiling. She walked a few steps away, her face and form softened by mist. She was looking away from him.

“You uncle told me you had a tragedy very recently,” he said as gently as he could. “It’s understandable.”

“It’ll be all right, though,” she said a bit too brightly. “When we get to Rhiene Uncle is going to introduce me to society there. There’ll be balls, and dinners, and the rest of that. So you see, I’m ready to take up a new life now. Uncle is helping me do that.”

“That’s good,” he said cautiously.

She took a deep breath. “My foot feels a lot better.”

“Good. But you shouldn’t use it too much yet.”

They took a faint path down a long slope to a pebbled beach. The sound of the waves was strangely hushed here.

A vast translucent canopy of light hung over the lake now, and in the heart of it… Jordan and Tamsin stopped on the shoreline, staring. Impossibly high in the air, a crescent of gold and rose as broad as the lake burned in the morning sun. The crescent outlined the top of a deep cloud-grey circle that seemed to be punched in the mist overhanging the water. Jordan could see a long, nearly horizontal tunnel of shadow stretching to infinity behind the thing.

The sense of free happiness Jordan had felt only moments ago collapsed. He backed away, hearing his own breath roaring in his ears, and aware that Tamsin was saying something, but unable to focus on what.

The vagabond moon was utterly motionless, its keel mere meters above the wave tops. There was no way to know how long it had been here, though it must have arrived sometime after Jordan had fallen asleep.

Tamsin stared up at it with her mouth open. “It’s a moon,” she said. “A real moon.”

“Hush,” he said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“This… was this what destroyed the…”

“The Boros household.” Jordan nodded, looking up, and up, at the kilometer of curving tessellated hull above them. The thing was so broad that its bottom seemed flat above the wavetops; only by tracking the eye along the curve for many meters could he begin to see the curve, and then its dimensions nearly vanished in the fog before the circle began to close. If not for the sun making its top incandescent, he could almost have missed its presence, simply because it was too large to take in without turning one’s head and thinking about what one was seeing.

The important question was what was going on under its keel. Nothing, apparently; there was no open mouth there now, no gantried arms reaching for the shoreline.

Whatever reason it had for being here, it must not have to do with Jordan. It could have plucked him from his bedroll at any time during the night, after all.

The fog was lifting, but it didn’t occur to Jordan that this would make him more visible. He had no doubt the thing could see through night, fog or smoke to find him, if it chose to.

“It’s beautiful,” she said after a minute in which the moon remained perfectly motionless. “What’s it doing here?”

“It looks like it’s waiting for something.” The skin on the back of his neck prickled. Could it be waiting for reinforcements? No, that was silly. Jordan was no threat to this behemoth. It didn’t know he was here; he kept telling himself that, even as he fought to slow his racing heart.

“Uncle said he heard the one that attacked the Boros household was looking for someone,” said Tamsin.

“Really?” Jordan felt his face grow hot. “I hadn’t heard that.”

The rising sun slanted into the interior of the vagabond moon, and the entire shape seemed to catch fire. From a diffuse amber center, colors and intricate crosshatched shadows spread to a perimeter of gaudy rainbow highlights that glittered like jewelry on the moon’s skin. That was ice, Jordan realized, frosted on the upper canopy so high above. It must be cold up there.

A faint cracking sound reached his ears. At the same time, he saw a tiny cascade of white tumble from the sunlit side of its hull. The falling cloud grew quickly into a torrent of ice and snow that struck the water with a sound like distant applause.

“Maybe we should leave,” said Tamsin.

He nodded. He was afraid, but he wished he didn’t have to be. The vagabond moon was so achingly beautiful, the way wolves and other wild things were. How he wanted to make peace with such beautiful, dangerous creatures.

I could speak to it, he realized. A mad idea; its wrath would descend on him for sure then.

“Let’s go.” Tamsin took his hand.

“Wait.” He shook himself, stumbling over the words he wanted to say, to express what he was feeling. Then he thought about what Calandria had told him about the Winds, and his awe deepened even further.

“We made that,” he whispered.

Neither said anything more as they walked back to the camp.

They arrived to find Suneil frantically hitching the horses. They didn’t speak, but fell to decamping alongside him. It was nice to have Tamsin’s help this time, since she knew where everything went. As they worked, each would pause now and then to stare at the gigantic sphere standing over the lake. Now that the sunlight was filling it, it was beginning to slowly rise.

The other two seemed increasingly frightened, but Jordan was calm, more so as the mist burned off completely, leaving them exposed to the gaze of the Wind. It had no interest in him; unlike Tamsin and her uncle, he was certain that today at least it was no threat. So when he paused, it was to admire it rather than to worry.

The road led along the edge of the lake, under the shadow of the moon. Suneil wanted to go the other way, backtracking until it was safe. Jordan did his best to calm the old man, and eventually convinced him to go forward. Still, he couldn’t shake a feeling of unease as they passed beneath the now sky-blue wall of the moon. Maybe it hadn’t acted because there was no way he could escape; when he got too far away, it might just waft after him and pick him up.

They were about two kilometers down the curve of the lake, just starting to relax, when thunder roared behind them. This is it, thought Jordan, and turned to look.

The clamshell doors on the bottom of the vagabond moon had opened. What must be thousands of tonnes of reddish gravel and boulders were tumbling into the lake, raising foaming whitecaps in a widening ring. As he watched, the waves reached the shore and erased the distant thread of footsteps he and Tamsin had left in the sand. The water washed up the hillside nearly to the ruins, and receded only when the last of the stones had trickled into the water.

Lightning played around the crown of the moon. It began to rise, and in a few minutes it had become a coin-sized disk at the zenith. The nervous horses trotted on, and no one spoke.

They made camp near the etched outlines of vanished buildings and streets. Jordan sized up the place in spare glances while he got the fire going and tended to the horses. Tamsin sat listlessly on the back step of the wagon, watching the men work.

Jordan knew that in his country, a small town might contain a handful of buildings made of stone, and dozens of wooden houses. The wooden structures would make no permanent impression on the land after they were torn down or burned. Stone buildings left a kind of scar, and it was these that patterned a rise near the end of the lake. If there were ten wooden houses to every stone, and every house held eight people, then half a thousand people had lived here once.

Suneil confirmed it. “It was a border town once. They traded with Memnonis. But the Winds razed it to the ground, four hundred years ago.”

“Why?”

“They use this place.” Suneil gestured to the lake. “It’s a transfer point, or something. Don’t really know. Anyway, they won’t let people build here.”

The thought made Jordan uneasy. Since the clouds and their threat of rain had vanished, after dinner he walked down to the edge of the lake. Using his new talent, he listened for the presence of the Winds.

The water was perfectly clear, the bottom covered in a fine yellow sand with red streaks in it. He remembered someone telling him once that clear water was unhealthy for any lake or river outside mountain country. Dark waters held life, that was the rule. He dipped his hand in it, marvelling. This was only the second lake he had seen up close. The water laughed quietly along the shore, and the flat vista glittered hypnotically in late daylight. It was surprisingly peaceful.

He could hear the song of the lake. It was deep and powerful, belying the tranquility of the surface. Thin grass grew here, but the soil beneath his feet was shallow, quickly giving way to sand. Below that… rock? He couldn’t quite make it out, though it felt like there was something else down there, a unique presence deep below the earth.

There was no indication that anything supernatural dwelt here.

He sat down, mind empty for the first time in days, and watched the water for a while. Gradually, without really trying, he began hearing the voices of the waves.

They trilled like little birds as they approached the shore. Each had its own name, but otherwise they were impossible to tell apart. They rolled humming towards Jordan, then fell silent without fanfare as they licked the sand. It was like solid music converging on him where he sat. He had never heard anything so beautiful or delicately fragile.

He didn’t even notice the failing light or the cold as he sat transfixed. His mind could not remain focussed forever, though, and after a while he made up a little game, trying to follow individual waves with both his eyes and his inner sense.

He tried to follow the eddies of a particular wave as it broke around a nearby rock, and in doing so discovered something new. It seemed like such an innocent detail at first: as the wave split, so did its voice. From one, it became many, then each tinier individuality vanished in turbulence. As they did, they cried out, not it seemed in fright, but in tones almost of… delight. Urgent delight–as if at the last second they had discovered something important they needed to tell the world.

If he closed his eyes, now, he could see the waves and the lake, finely outlined as in an etching, grey on black. Many words and numbers hovered over the ghost-landscape, joined by lines or what looked like arrows to faintly sketched features of the shoreline or lake surface. If he focussed on one of those, it instantly expanded, and he was surrounded by a swirl of numbers: charts, mathematical figures, geometric shapes. It was beautiful, and nonsensical.

The most important part of it, he decided, was that this ghostly vision apparently let him see with his eyes closed. Was this how Calandria May had seen the forest when she lured him away from the path, so many nights ago?

He stared at the wavelets, listening down the chain of nested identities: lake, swell, wave, crest and ripple. Each sang its identity only for so long as it existed. In water, consciousness arose and vanished, merged and split as freely as the medium itself.

Jordan had been raised to think of himself and other people as having souls. Souls were indivisible. What he heard happening out in the lake were voices that could not possibly be attached to souls, because the very identities behind those voices freely changed, merged, and nested inside one another. Even the word beings couldn’t be applied to them, because it implied a stability impossible for them.

“What are you?” he whispered, staring out at the lake of voices.

I am water.

Over the next hour Jordan asked a few halting questions of the lake, the sand and the stones. Few of the answers made any sense. For the most part he sat with his head tilted, listening to voices only he could hear. If Tamsin or Suneil crept up to watch and sadly shake their heads, he didn’t care, because he had taken a great secret by the edge, and he wasn’t going to let anything stop him from grasping it entirely.

When he finally dragged himself back to camp, the others were asleep. Suneil had offered to let him sleep in the wagon tonight, but Jordan was too tired to make the effort, and saw no point in disturbing them. He rolled himself near the fire, and fell instantly asleep.

He dreamed about dolphins, which he had heard of but never seen. In the dream they swam in the earth itself, and leapt and splashed in it as though it were a liquid. He chased them across a rough, rocky landscape and at times he almost caught them, but they laughed as they danced just out of reach. Finally he made one last effort and dove after one as it entered the ground, and he followed it into dark liquid earth. He slid among the rocks and sinews of the solid world with perfect ease, knowing now where the dolphins were going: to find a secret buried deep in the earth.

He woke up. He lay on his back by the cold embers of the fire, and it seemed like some sound hovered above him. Someone had spoken.

Jordan rolled over. It was early morning, and fantastically misty. It looked like the camp had been put inside a pearl. Directly overhead, it was bright; at the horizons dark still reigned. There was no sound at all now. The mist absorbed everything, causing him to cough hesitantly to check that he could hear at all.

As Jordan sat stoking the fire, Tamsin emerged from the wagon. She was dressed in woolen trousers, several layered white shirts and something she had yesterday told him was called a poncho. She looked around once, and a big grin split her face. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and it utterly transformed her. She became at once ugly and electrically exuberant when she smiled.

“It’s great!” She waved at the mist. “I’ve never seen it so thick. I’m going to go see what the lake looks like.”

“Okay.”

She walked purposefully into the directionless grey, stopping when she had become a two-dimensional shape against it.

“Mr. Mason?” Her voice sounded timid; there were no echoes, and no other sound.

“Yes?”

“You can come too, if you want.” Jordan shook his head and followed. He was cold and achy, but he knew the walk would warm him faster than sitting by the fire.

“How are you feeling?” he asked Tamsin.

“Good.” She stopped and massaged her shin. “Still hurts, but it’s okay to walk on.” The wagon vanished behind them, but the fire remained a diffuse orange landmark.

As they walked on, he tried to think of something more to say. For some reason, his mind had gone blank. Tamsin seemed to be having the same problem. She walked with her hands behind her back, head down except at intervals when she made a show of peering through the fog.

“I said, hello.”

Jordan looked up. Suneil’s niece Tamsin stood in front of him, arms crossed, her head cocked to one side.

He was annoyed at the interruption, and almost told her to go away-but he was a guest of these people, after all. “I was meditating.”

“Uh, huh. Looked more like sleeping with your mouth open.”

Jordan opened his mouth, closed it again, and then said, “Did you want something?”

“Uncle wants a good supply of firewood in the wagon before we get to the border. Isn’t that why you’re here, to do that stuff for us?”

Jordan stood and stretched. “It is indeed.” He saw no need to say anything more to this shrew.

“Well good,” she said as she followed him into the grass. “We wouldn’t want any freeloaders on this trip.”

Jordan noticed that Suneil was watching this exchange from the vicinity of the wagon. “I’ll work my keep,” said Jordan, as he increased his stride to outdistance her.

“See that you do!” she hollered. Then, apparently satisfied, she limped back to the wagon and began arguing with her uncle about something.

As soon as he was out of sight of the camp, Jordan sat down and tried to re-establish his link with Armiger. This time, it took all his concentration to bring the voices to him; Tamsin seemed to be a bad influence on his concentration. When the voices did return, he found that Armiger and the queen were now discussing military logistics. The terms meant nothing to Jordan, so he stood up with a sigh, and went to gather the wood.

When Jordan staggered back his first load of sticks, Suneil was sitting on the wagon’s back step, but Tamsin was nowhere to be seen. “I apologize for my niece,” said Suneil. “She lost her parents and sister recently. The shock has brought all her emotions to the surface.”

“The war?”

Suneil nodded. “The war. We fled Iapysia three months ago to escape it. Now we’re on our way back. They say the queen is defeated… maybe things have settled down.”

“I don’t know,” said Jordan. “I know you can’t run away forever.” He longed for home. Once he had gotten Armiger to raise this curse that was on him, he would return to Castor’s manor.

“Well spoken,” said Suneil. “You were patient with her just now. I’m glad. She strikes out, but if you strike back, she’ll shatter like glass. Just remember that. I know it’s an imposition, but–”

Jordan waved a hand. “No, it’s fine. These things happen. We have to help one another.”

Suneil grinned. “Thanks. And thanks for the wood. We’re going to need a lot more, though, when we get to the border.”

“Why?”

Suneil glanced at him, raised an eyebrow. “Well, you said you’re from Iapysia, you’d know there’s no trees in the desert, wouldn’t you?”

“Uh… yes, of course.”

Suneil gave him an odd little smile, and walked away.

18

Two days’ travel brought them deep into the barren hills that signified the border of Iapysia. He was confident now that the Winds did not know where he was. The gauze continued to protect him, and hence the people he travelled with. That was good; but he couldn’t wear it for the rest of his life. He would have to find Armiger soon–or Calandria would, and either way there would be an end to this.

He was riding up front with Suneil when the wagon topped the crest of a particularly long hill, and Suneil reined in the horses. Standing to look at the vista below, Suneil sighed and said, “Home.”

Jordan stood too. Sun had broken through a rent in the autumn clouds, illuminating the valley below within a vast golden rectangle. Within this frame, the land fell in a series of green steps to a landscape of grass and forest cradling a long sinuous lake. The road wound down switchbacks to the floor of the valley, and vanished beyond the sunlit frame at the far end of the lake, where the valley seemed to open out into a plain.

Jordan could see some blue-grey squares and lines near the lake. “Are those ruins?”

Suneil nodded. “That valley lies in Iapysia. The desert starts beyond it.”

“It’s beautiful. Nobody lives here?” He could see no sign of settlement, though he could easily imagine dozens of farms fitting in near the lake.

“The Winds do. It’s okay to visit, but no one stays.”

They sat down again, and Suneil flicked the reins. Over the past couple of days they had talked a lot about the local countryside, and Suneil had grilled Jordan at length about the war between Ravenon and the Seneschals. Jordan had spun a long tale about the destruction of Armiger’s army and the death of the general, pretending he had heard it from other travellers.

His own eavesdropping had yielded few results, since the queen had not met with Armiger since their first encounter. She was busy with preparations for the siege, and it seemed Armiger was content to wait.

Jordan had reluctantly admitted to Suneil that he was not from Iapysia. His Memnonian accent didn’t match his story. Suneil had asked no further questions, but he had also volunteered nothing about his own past. Jordan let his curiosity lead him now, though, as it seemed a natural time to ask. “Tell me about the war. And the queen. All I’ve heard is that she’s mad, and that the great houses revolted.”

Suneil nodded. “I suppose your countrymen think it’s a scandal that we’re deposing our queen.” He scowled at the road that rolled down before them. “We do too. Even the soldiers in Parliament’s army. But things got… out of control.”

Jordan waited for more. After a while, Suneil said, “Iapysia’s a very old country, but it was one of the last places settled. At the beginning of the world, they say the Winds made Ventus–and they’re not finished making it yet. But they didn’t make Man. Some say we made ourselves, some that we came from the stars, and some say that renegade Winds created us as an act of defiance. That’s what I believe. How else to explain what Queen Galas has done?

“The first people spread across the world from one original tribe. They had great powers, and they wanted Ventus as their own. They fought the Winds, because the Winds were still sculpting Ventus, and would not let the people build cities or cultivate the land. Men defied them, but the Winds beat them down, until at last there were only scattered communities, who learned to get along with the Winds by obeying their laws. We learned to stay out of the Winds’ way, and appease them when we went too far. Your general Armiger went too far–they took notice of him, and swatted him like an insect. There’s a lesson in that.

“In the early days after our defeat, some folk wandered to the edge of the desert. There they found the desals hard at work, flooding the sands to strain salt from ocean water that poured in from the Titans’ Gates–those are the Wind-built dams at the seaside. They pumped the newly freshened water deep into the earth. We know now that it comes up again through springs all across the continent. Back then, it was just another miraculous and incomprehensible activity of the rulers of the world. Our people huddled on the edge of it, watching the floods in awe.

“Iasin the first, ancestor of all the kings of Iapysia, was the man who realized that the desals were utterly indifferent to the plants and animals that struggled within the flood plains. The ocean water brought nutrients from the sea, the desert sands strained the salt, and fresh water poured up and out through a thousand channels into rivers that flow into your lands, or that vanish into bottomless lakes. A thousand kinds of life thrived during the flooding, and when the Titans’ Gates closed to draw strength for another great gasp, they withered and died. Iasin led his people into the heart of the inundated lands, and they began to grow huge crops there, in open defiance of the Winds.

“Our people have always believed that we have a silent pact with the desals. All our laws were made to preserve the pact. As far as we can see, the desals will always use the desert to purify water for the continent. What was in the beginning, will be always. So it should be with our laws, our kings and our traditions.

“The laws are harsh. They dictate everything from our professions to the size of the family. Our cities have grown only so big as the desals will tolerate, and can grow no more. We cannot divert the Winds’ rivers to suit our needs. The nobility trace their lineage back to the time of Iasin, as do people in the guilds and trades. All life is fixed. While your nations have been in a constant uproar of change and growth all these centuries, we know you will reach the same point eventually. Humanity cannot rule Ventus. We are merely tolerated. In my country, people believe that life will always be like it is now, for all eternity.

“I should say, we used to believe that. Then came Queen Galas, to upset a thousand years of tradition.”

“What did she do?” asked Jordan. The swath of sunlight that had blanketed the valley below was gone, leaving the landscape blued by lowering clouds. More rain was coming.

Suneil pointed along the road that led past the long lake. “Our lives are tied to the floods. We prosper insofar as we can predict them. We have always relied on observation and our records to do that. Galas had no need of such indirect means. She negotiated with the desals, and the desert flooded when and where and by how much she said it would. No sovereign has ever had such power over nature. We prospered as we never have.

“It wasn’t enough for her. Galas despises the Winds. She sees humanity as the rightful rulers of the world, and the Winds as usurpers. People find her views shocking, but who could argue with her success? She gained a great following, and began to erase a thousand years of law and tradition, replacing it with daring and unsettling edicts of her own. She wanted to remake the world in her own image.

“She went too far. About five years ago, the desals turned against her. Her predictions for that year’s flooding were tragically wrong. Thousands died in the waters or the famine that came after. Whatever she had done to alienate the Winds, their rebuke simply hardened her heart. She pushed ahead with her reforms, although for our own survival we now had to fall back on our old ways of predicting the floods.”

“You supported her,” ventured Jordan.

“At first, yes. I won’t pretend I didn’t profit by it. By the time the Winds turned against her, I had become entirely her creature. I’m not a fool, I could see what was coming, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. Parliament tabled a document demanding Galas cease all her meddling, and rescind the edicts that had broken centuries of tradition. She refused. The war… I think no one really believed it would happen, or that it was happening, until it came to visit one’s own town or relatives. I believed. I ran. To stand and fight… well, she lost. She’s probably dead by now. I wish I knew, that’s all.”

Jordan could have told him, but a new caution, perhaps learned from his experience with the Boros’, made him hold his tongue.

Many leagues away, Jordan Mason paused in his whittling and closed his eyes. He had been basking in the wan autumn sunlight and listening to Armiger and Megan with half an ear. He sat on a log by the remains of last night’s fire; he faced away from the wagon, where the girl Tamsin was hiding again.

Jordan had told a carefully edited version of the story of the Boros catastrophe yesterday. Both Suneil and his niece had listened intently. He had excluded any mention of Axel and Calandria, and said nothing about August’s duel or the attack by Turcaret’s men. Apparently the word was out that Yuri and Turcaret had been killed; Jordan simply shrugged and said he hadn’t seen that. His story was that he had panicked and run. Since he was visiting the household on his own anyway, he had just kept walking when daybreak came. Suneil seemed to accept this. It wasn’t at all implausible that he should want to get as far away from the place as possible, after all.

Suneil had arisen early this morning, but had said little. Jordan walked the boundaries of the small encampment, kicking the dirt and wondering whether his presence here was endangering these two.

When he heard Galas ask Armiger about the heavens, he forgot all about his problems. Megan had never asked about that, and Jordan was intensely curious. When he closed his eyes he could see what Armiger saw, and if he stayed still the voices became clearer and clearer, until he seemed to be there with them.

The words seemed to emerge from his own mouth. Whenever that happened, Jordan felt almost as though they were his own thoughts he was speaking, and he invariably remembered them with perfect clarity later. Just now he was saying, “The stars in the night sky have their retinue of planets. Millions are inhabited, but if you gaze up at them tonight, know that only one in every thousand you see has people living by it, there are that many. Millions have been visited and explored, but for every one of them a million more are still mysteries.

“Humans like yourself moved into the galaxy a thousand years ago. Your ancient homeworld is now a park, where few can go except by special permission. All the other worlds in the home system were settled centuries ago, and are overflowing now. The’ve even dismantled the minor planets and smaller moons and built new habitats with them. The population of that star system is now over seventy trillion.

“Many other stars have similarly huge civilizations. Add to that the dozens of alien species, genetically altered humans, cyborgs, demigods and gods, and the peace you see in the sky seems more and more like an illusion.”

“What are these things?” asked the queen. “Cyborgs? Demigods?”

“Mecha,” said Armiger curtly. “But designed by people for the most part. Some people have had themselves transformed into mechal beings, so that they can live in hostile environments, like open space, or the crushing depths of giant planets’ atmospheres. The boundary between human and nonhuman began to blur centuries ago, and now it’s completely gone.”

“And you? What are you?”

Jordan felt Armiger’s hands form fists in his lap. “Demigod. Human once, I think–but I no longer remember. I’m ancient, your highness, but mortal. Even the gods are mortal. And I will die, unless I can find a secret known only to the Winds of Ventus.”

Armiger was lying, according to what Calandria had told Jordan when they travelled together. She had told him the demigod had come to Ventus to subvert the Winds, and take control of the entire world. He knew Armiger was weakening, though, and Jordan didn’t know if he could trust Calandria May.

“What is this secret?”

“It is the secret of why the Winds ignore or abuse humanity,” said Armiger.

Galas laughed. “Countless generations have wondered that. I do too. Do you believe I have the secret?”

“I think you may know more than you realize.”

“You came to see me because of the legends,” she accused. “They say the Winds placed me on the throne, so I am assumed to know their secrets. For a god, you are rather naive, Maut.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “The legends brought you to my attention, but even if they’re wrong, I made the right choice in coming to you. I am sure of it.”

“Now you speak like a courtier.”

“My apologies.”

Galas returned to her seat. Jordan admired her through Armiger’s eyes; she was not so old as she had appeared in the throne room–perhaps in her late thirties. This war was aging her prematurely, he thought. He wanted to touch her, but had never learned the trick of making Armiger’s limbs move at his own urging.

“Why not just ask the Winds of another world?” asked the queen.

“There are no other Winds. There is no other place like Ventus.”

Jordan watched Galas’ eyes widen. He remembered sympathetically how he had reacted when Calandria told him the same thing. “But,” she started, “you just spoke of millions of worlds–trillions of people–”

“There are a million organizing principles in human space. None resemble Ventus. Your world is unique, and the records of the design of the Winds were lost in a war centuries ago. Most of humanity lives in something known as the Archipelago–an immense region whose boundaries are so vague that much of its citizenry doesn’t even know of its existence.”

“Now you’re talking madness,” smiled the queen. “Not that anything you’ve said so far would survive debate in the House.”

“Archipelago is the only answer to ruling a population of trillions, who own a million different cultures, mores and histories.” He shrugged. “It is simple: an artificial intelligence–a mechal brain, if you will–exists that mediates things. It knows each and every citizen personally, and orchestrates their meetings with others, communications and so on so as to avoid irreconcilable conflict. Beyond that, it stays out of sight, for it has no values, no desires of its own. It is as if every person had their own guardian spirit, and these spirits never warred, but acted in concert to improve people’s lives.”

“A tyranny of condescension,” said Galas.

“Yes. You worried earlier that everything was known. Well, yes and no. The government of the Archipelago has the sum of human knowledge and can speak it directly into people’s minds. But it’s only the sum of human knowledge. It is only one perspective. Here on Ventus, something quite different has come to exist. A new wisdom, you might say. The sum of the knowledge of an entire conscious world, unsullied by human perspective. Ventus, you see, is infinitely precious.”

“Then why aren’t they here? A trillion tourists from the sky?”

“The Winds don’t permit visitors. Though there are a few, I suppose–researchers vainly trying to crack the cyphers of the Diadem Swans. Hiding from the Winds, of course.”

“But you slipped in.”

“I did. The Winds know something I must learn if I am to survive. I cannot speak to them. So I must ask you, as the one person on Ventus who knows them best, to help me.”

“And why should I help?”

Armiger stood and walked to one of the tall windows. “Outside your gates is an army. That army did not need to come here. You need never have embarked on the path that led you here. And you knew things would end this way, didn’t you? It was inevitable from the moment you began to try to change the fundamental beliefs of your people.”

Below this high window he could see a crowded, hectic courtyard. Beyond that, walls, then the hazy, unbelievable crush of the besieging army.

“They had to kill you in the end,” he said.

“Yes,” said the queen in a small voice. “But I had to try… to end this long night that has swallowed the whole world.”

He turned, and Jordan felt his eyes narrow, his mouth set hard. “Then help me. If I survive, I may well be able to do what you could not.”

Megan had never seen so many books. They crowded on high shelves around all the walls of a large room on the third floor of the palace. All the shelves had diamond-patterned glass doors. She watched as Armiger walked from cabinet to cabinet, opening them in turn and gazing at their contents. This was their second day here, but as yet the queen had not found the time to speak to them. Armiger was getting restless.

The books didn’t interest Megan, but the room itself was sumptuous. It contained a number of couches and leather-bound armchairs, with side-tables and many tall oil lamps. The entire floor was covered with overlapping carpets that glowed in the shafts of morning light falling from tall windows along one wall. She curled up in one of the armchairs, feet under her, to watch as Armiger prowled.

This room and the others in the queen’s apartments provided a shocking contrast to the other parts of the palace she had seen. Below this tower, the palace grounds were crowded with the tents of refugees; children and the wounded cried everywhere, there was talk of cholera. The lower corridors and outbuildings bristled with armed men, and conversation there was strained and infrequent. Here, though, it was like another world–luxurious and calm.

Megan knew she would always remember their entry into these walls. Her first glimpse of the interior of the Summer Palace had been of torchlight gleaming off the helmets of a sea of men. Ragged banners hung from the facades of buildings half-ruined by Parliament’s steam-cannon. The place reeked of fear and human waste. She had shrunk back on Armiger’s arm as they were led along cordoned avenues between the tents, and into the vast tower that held Galas’ audience chambers. And the moment they were inside its walls, they were in a minor paradise.

This contrast had disturbed her more than the misery itself. It still disturbed her, the more so since she found herself responding to the comfort of this armchair, the warmth of the nearby fire.

“Amazing,” said Armiger.

She smiled. “You? Amazed? I doubt it.”

He reached up to take down a very large, heavy and scrofulous looking volume. “I’ve been looking for this one since I arrived,” he said. He waggled it at her as he went to perch on the edge of a desk. “Early histories relating some of the events immediately post-landing.”

“Really?” She didn’t know what he was talking about, but it was good to see him enthusiastic about something–something other than this queen Galas, anyway.

Armiger flipped through the pages quickly. “Hmm. Ah. There are major distortions, as one would expect from such a large passage of time.”

“How large?”

“A thousand years. Not really very long; living memory for me, most of it. And on Earth there are complete daily records of practically everything that went on there from before that time… but Earth never Fell the way Ventus did. Miraculous.” He shut the book; it made a satisfying thud and a waft of dust rose before his face.

“I take it you are glad we came,” she said. “Despite the army outside?”

He waved his hand, dismissing either the dust or the besieging force. “Yes. I’m most likely to find out what I want to know here. In case they burn this library down, I’m going to read it.”

“Read it? The whole thing? Tonight?” She didn’t hide her disbelief.

“Well… maybe not all. Most, anyway.” He smiled, an increasingly common thing lately.

“But why? This queen, she is important to you for what she can tell you. I see that now. But why is she so special? You want to talk to her. Her people want to kill her. What has she done?”

Armiger inspected another shelf. “Of course you wouldn’t get much news living alone in the country as you did. Where to start, though? Galas has always been different, apparently.

“She was installed on the throne at a young age by the Winds. No one knows why. Whatever they wanted, she apparently didn’t provide it, because they haven’t lifted a finger to stop Parliament marching on her. But she’s done extraordinary things.”

He came to sit on the arm of a couch near her. “Galas is the sort of philosopher-monarch who arises once in a millenium,” he said. “She may rank with Earthly rulers like Mao in terms of the scope of her accomplishments. People like her aren’t content to merely rule a nation–they want to reinvent both it and the people who live in it.”

Megan was puzzled, but interested now. “What do you mean, reinvent?”

“New beliefs. New religions. New economics, new science. And not just as a process of reform or nation-building. Rather as a single artistic whole. During her reign Galas has viewed her nation as an artistic medium to be shaped.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “That’s… horrible.”

Armiger seemed surprised. “Why? Her impulse has been to improve things. And she’s almost never used force, certainly not against the common people. Her actions are reminiscent of those of the Amarna rulers of ancient Egypt… sorry, I keep referring to things you can’t know.

“Anyway, what she did was give her people a completely new, and all-encompassing, vision of the world. Nothing has been left unchanged–art, commerce, she has even tried to reform the language itself.”

Megan laughed. “That’s silly.”

Armiger shrugged. “She’s failed at a lot of things. In terms of language, she tried to ban the use of possessives when speaking of emotional states, motives and people. So that you could not say, ‘he is my husband’ for instance.”

She glowered. “That is evil.”

“But you could also not say that something is his fault, or her fault. She wanted to remove assignments of blame from speech and writing, and refocus expression on contexts of behavior. To eliminate victimless crimes, crimes of ostracization, for instance the ‘crime’ of being a homosexual. Also to move the emphasis of Justice away from blame and punishment to behavior management. Far too ambitious for a single generation. So it didn’t work.

“But no one on Ventus has ever thought of these things before. Galas is entirely original in her thinking.”

“So why are they out there?” She pointed to the windows.

“Oh, the usual reasons. She started threatening the stability of the ruling classes, at least in their own eyes. No ruler who does that ever stands for long. She’d built experimental towns recently, out in the desert. Each operated on some one of the new principles she espoused. Naturally most of them flew in the face of orthodox mores. Of course the salt barons will revolt if you display an interest in eliminating money from commerce!”

“You make me sound like a fool.“

Galas stood in the doorway, in a blue morning-dress, her hair bound up by golden pins. Megan hurried to her feet and curtsied. Armiger languidly bowed, shaking his head.

“It is merely the voice of experience, your majesty. Humans become violent when they feel their interests are threatened.”

Galas scowled. “They were never threatened! Parliament is a rumor-mill staffed by trough-fed clods who abuse the tongue of their birth every time they open their mouths. They all gabble at once and confuse one another mightily, and when this confusion is committed to paper they refer to it as ‘policy’.”

“I won’t dispute that, having never attended,” Armiger said.

The queen swept into the room. Two members of the royal guard followed, to take positions on either side of the doorway. “I had to try,” Galas said bitterly. “For centuries no one has tried anything new! So what would be one more life in dumb service to tradition? Where would it get us, except back where we started when the wheel of this life had come around again? Someone had to ask questions men have been afraid to ask all that time. It has always been obvious to me that no one else would do it, either now or in the future. I had to do it all, even the things you call foolish. Else how could we know anything? Anything at all?”

Armiger said nothing, but he nodded in acquiescence.

“Sometimes one’s responsibility goes beyond one’s own generation,” Galas said. She sat in the chair next to Megan’s, and smiled at her warmly. “I trust you slept well, lady?”

“Yes, thank you, your highness.”

“And you, Sir Maut? Do you even sleep?” Her voice held a teasing note.

He inclined his head. “When it suits me.” Then he frowned. “I hope you don’t view us a pair of jesters, here to distract you from what’s waiting outside your gates. My purpose is quite serious–as serious as your own situation.”

Galas’ eyes flashed, but she only said, “I remain to be convinced. That is all.”

“Fair enough.” Armiger moved from his perch on the arm of the couch, to sit down properly. “So, who am I, and what do I want of you? That is what you would like to know.”

Galas nodded. Megan saw that the moth-note Armiger had written her was stuck, folded, through the belt of her dress. Perhaps she had been rereading it over breakfast. For reassurance?

Megan couldn’t begin to imagine what it must be like for her, with those men camped outside, waiting permission to brutalize and destroy everything. Servants killed, treasured possessions robbed… but Galas was outwardly cool.

She must be crying inside. It’s cruel of Armiger to give her any hope now.

“Ask me anything,” said Armiger. “Ask me something to test my knowledge, if you wish.”

“Were all my mistakes obvious?” blurted the queen. “Is what I’ve fought for all my life trivially simple anywhere else? Am I a primitive, next to the people who live on other stars?”

“They might think so,” said Armiger. “I do not.”

“If you are what you say you are, then it makes all the pain I’ve suffered–and inflicted–pointless.” Galas was not looking at them, but off into the middle distance. “I’ve been so busy since you arrived, making final preparations… the assault will come soon. But there hasn’t been an instant when I didn’t wonder why I was bothering. If everything I’ve tried to discover was learned millenia ago… I feel like the gods are laughing at me. I feel like an ant all puffed up with pride over having laboriously mapped out the boundaries of a garden. I don’t think you can tell me anything to change that impression.”

Armiger smiled. “I must be the fool, then, to waste my time talking to an ant.”

“Don’t make light of this!” She rose and went to stand over him. Megan was amazed at how Galas seemed to tower over Armiger, though the difference in their heights was such that even with him sitting, they were almost eye to eye.

Armiger was unfazed. “I was not. It is you who are belittling yourself.”

Galas whirled and walked to the windows. “Then tell me I’m wrong! Tell me about the heavens–who lives there, what are they like? Have you walked on other planets? Talked to their people? Are they all-knowing, all-wise–or are they fools like us?”

Armiger’s smiled grew wider. “They are all-knowing, but no wiser than anyone else. In fact, since they know everything they believe they possess the wisdom of the ages. Hence, I’d have to say, they are bigger fools than you.”

“But I don’t want to hear that either,” said the queen. “Because it means there is no progress. If I educate my people and yet they remain fools, why have I bothered?”

Armiger crossed his arms, shrugged at Megan, but said nothing.

“All right,” said Galas. She turned around and leaned on the windowsill. “Tell me about the heavens, please. I do want to know.”