Ventus

by Karl Schroeder

  "We are in position. It is no longer a concern."

  Lavin resisted a very real urge to push the bast out the door. Instead, he took a deep breath and looked down. If he had faith in his own body and ignored the suggestion that the world was turning in two diametrically opposed directions at the same time, he had found he could look down through the doors quite safely.

  The northernmost Gate lay directly below. The moon had slowed dramatically, and was also rising. They were a good two hundred meters above the flat top of the peak. He could see their shadow slide across the grey stone tables with their dotted pine trees. Vapour rose from a number of suspiciously round pits there. There were also a surprising number of buildings; as he watched, tiny running figures appeared around several of them.

  "We're rising, not descending," Lavin pointed out. "Are you proposing we jump?"

  The bast shook its long head. "The wind gusts here are strong and unpredictable. It would also be bad if we shorted out on the Gate machinery. We will lower your men using the Heaven hooks."

  Even as it said this, something huge and black appeared below, blotting out the view. It took a few seconds for Lavin to realize what it was: a large railed platform, pinioned at the sides by huge metal arms. The arms extended off somewhere underneath the moon. In consternation and awe he watched it rise smoothly and silently until it blocked the door with a deep thump that he felt through his feet.

  He turned and waved at the marshalls. The moon's other doors were blocked too, he saw. The Hooks should be able to lower a couple hundred men at a time to the peak. That should be enough, depending on how quickly they did it.

  "Move out!" The men had been champing at the bit for some action; now they surged forward, and didn't have to be prompted to leap off the stable black surface of the moon onto the metal platforms below. When the platforms were full the marshalls whistled and the surge stopped. Immediately there was a lurch and the platforms began to drop away. The men on the one below Lavin started shouting and most fell to their hands and knees—but the descent was smooth and except for the icy wind that now whirled through the doors as well, he was sure it would be painless.

  For all that he mistrusted the Winds, he knew they were efficient. They would not waste his men in the descent.

  §

  Jordan had been anticipating this moment for days. What he hadn't imagined was that he would be completely soaking wet and freezing cold when it came.

  He stood shivering with the others at one end of a gigantic chamber that must penetrate deep into the mountain. It must be at least a hundred meters broad, and as high. It didn't really have a floor, more a lattice of pipes both mammoth and small. They were all uniformly grey and unmarked. The tangle was so complex that the eye lost itself in detail after only a few meters. Jordan had just spent the past few minutes trying to figure out a way across the vast maze, but every route he traced either got lost or ended in an impassable drop or roll under a bigger pipe.

  "I have our route," said the woman whom the others called the Voice. "Follow me." She stepped out confidently onto a pipe as broad as a house and began walking.

  Axel and Marya followed without hesitation. Tamsin shrugged, and went too. After a moment Jordan followed.

  He had envisioned this space in his mind, but the reality was nothing like the vision. There was something called a conveyor at the far end of this chamber, he knew, and it would deposit them far above, near the peak of the mountain. Mediation had told him it was safe. On the other hand, Mediation had not told him about this daunting labyrinth, and that was unsettling.

  Biting his lip he hurried after the others. In Vision he could see Armiger issuing orders as men in dark robes rushed back and forth along a broad ledge. Some men were passing out weapons, chiefly pikes and bows, and nearby Galas was pleading with a grey-eyed man. She wanted them to retreat into the monastery, Jordan knew. Armiger disagreed, and so did the abbot.

  Mediation said that the Heaven hooks had dropped part of Parliament's army on the peak of the mountain. They were on their way down, using numerous paths and stairs. Armiger knew it too; the plateau lay in shadow and once when the general looked up Jordan too could see the vast swell of the vagabond moon that perched like some mythical bird atop the mountain.

  Human soldiers would be just the first gambit by the Winds. If Armiger resisted this onslaught, they would escalate things, and Jordan knew by now that they would not stop until they had levelled the mountain if need be. He also finally knew why Armiger had not acted—it was because he could not. The general was helpless until he knew the final secret.

  Ka had been lost in the attack on the basts that had surrounded Axel, as had many of their animals. Jordan felt the loss of the little Wind keenly; he hadn't told Tamsin yet, and wasn't sure how he would. Ka had been a friend of sorts, and now he wished he had protected it, not sent it into danger.

  It was too late now. Ka was dead, and there were no Mediation Winds capable of speech near the surface of the mountain. If he was going to contact Armiger, Jordan would have to get there himself.

  The Voice took to the maze of pipes confidently—hopping from high ones down to broad lower ones, zig-zagging, doubling back without hesitation. Several times it looked like she was leading them into cul de sacs, but every time a surprising new avenue opened up, and after only a few minutes they emerged on a single straight pipe that ran a full kilometer straight to the end of the chamber. Tamsin began running the instant they reached it, and Jordan took off after her. He could hear her laughing ahead of him, and he grinned too. The others followed more quietly.

  She was waiting at the small square chamber at the end. She kissed him then said, "is that our way up?"

  Where she pointed, a black hole opened into a rattling space where every now and then a large metal bin or bucket would slide up and past.

  "You're not afraid?" he asked her.

  She shook her head. "You're not, so I'm not."

  Jordan's heart managed to miss a beat. He was saved from having to say something in return (his mind had gone blank) by the arrival of the others.

  "Oh no," said Marya, when she saw the opening. "I'm not going in there."

  "Fine," said Axel. "We'll leave you here then."

  "It's perfectly safe," said Jordan, striving to make his voice sound confident. "Just wait for a bucket to go by and climb in. You'll just slide into the next bucket in line."

  "Okay, if you're so smart, demonstrate," said Marya.

  I hate being the leader, thought Jordan as he waited for one of the big metal bins to go past. He felt himself hesitate, felt a sudden surge of fear at the thought that he might wait too long and get crimped by the next bucket in line while only halfway through the opening—so he jumped.

  There was a moment of blackness and falling, then he was in a bucket, banging his elbow and hitting his head. "Ouch!"

  A square opening came into view. Several silhouetted heads were blocking what little light tried to come through it.

  "It's fine!" he shouted cheerfully. His heart was still racing. "Just follow along."

  I'd better be right about this. The light cut off below him, and then he was rising in darkness, supported apparently only by faith.

  §

  It will not happen again. Galas slipped out the gates of the monastery, grabbed a pike that a harried monk handed her without looking, and raced after the line of men heading south along the plateau. She had entered the monastery on Armiger's orders; he wanted her safe. At her first opportunity she had raided a closet and stolen a robe, and with this as her disguise she had slipped out again.

  They will not die for me.

  She knew that the Heaven hooks were after Armiger, and that they were using the soldiers of Parliament's army as their own. The army was obviously decapitated; she couldn't imagine Lavin agreeing to place his men in such jeopardy. If he had he was a fool.

  Galas knew she could not compel the Winds to retreat. The men who had once been her loyal follow
ers however, were another matter.

  Sore as she was, she forced herself to keep up with the monks as they raced around the southern curve of the mountain. Here the ledge opened out into a vast grassy plateau encircled by spires of stone. Pyramids of mist stood beyond these, permanent residents of the space between the two Gates. As she ran the sound of roaring water became louder, and Galas remembered the first time she had come here. She had gone to stand on the edge of the plateau, and peered down into mist and the vision of a hundred waterfalls that plummeted into bottomless shafts below, or exploded hissing off rounded, red-hot domes in the saddle between the peaks. There was no way down to that inferno; it was entirely a place of the Winds. Behind her and above, on the south face of the Gate, other apertures opened, venting steam or small trickles of water that could become torrents that arced out and into the gulf below. There was so much sound here that she had sometimes been sure she heard muttering voices under it all—an effect the monks sadly assured her was an illusion.

  Galas had been a young queen then. Flushed with the success of her communication with the desals, she had imagined herself the goddess her people claimed she was. When she came here she had felt ownership, not fear, and she had stood upon a stone here and preached a sermon to the monks and the Winds. Her own words returned to her with ironic pain—she had spoken breathlessly of a new age for Man and Wind. Her own sincerity returned to her now like the remembrance of a crime.

  The monks were forming up into columns, preparing for the great run up the stairs. Far up there, she could see a column of men on their way down. There was no time to think.

  She raced past the head of the line, ignoring the shouts that followed her, and started up the steps. One of the monks came after her, and when he laid a hand on her sleeve she turned and shouted, "Get back to the line! I have to do this alone."

  He stammered something and let go. She ran on, trying with little success to ignore the daggers of pain in her thighs from days of riding combined with her recent climb. After only a few meters she was gasping, her legs wobbly beneath her, but she kept on.

  Men were shouting above her. She flipped back the cowl of her robe and looked up into a bristling mass of men and weapons. "Halt!" shouted the one in the lead, who was young enough to be the son she had never had.

  She stopped, panting. They came down, slowly, and she had to smile at their caution. These were the veterans of Lavin's army—men who had committed atrocities in her experimental towns, and had cursed her every day for the past year. They were little more than boys, and were visibly scared. And they were her people, whether they wanted to admit it or not.

  Drawing herself up to her full height, Galas wiped her tangled hair away from her forehead, and said, "This attack will not happen."

  The leader gaped at her. "Who are you to tell us that?" Somebody laughed behind him.

  She raised her voice, letting it echo off the mountainside. "I am the one you pursued over leagues of charred ground, and over the bodies of thousands. I am the one you obeyed as a child, and feared as a soldier. I am your sovereign, your compass and your ultimate meaning. I am she who spoke to the oceans and commanded rain for your fields. I am Galas, your queen, and I am the only hope any of you have of living to see another day.

  "When you moved to destroy me you set in motion terrible events that threaten the very world itself. You know that now, but you do not know what to do about it. You desperately wish to turn back the hands of time, I can see it in your eyes. I am the one who knows what has happened, and why. Only I have the key to halting the advance of the vengeful Winds across our land.

  "So you will kneel to me now, and when you rise you will be mine and I will lead you out of this nightmare into which you have fallen."

  At her words they stopped.

  They stared in silence at her, then beyond her to the turmoil in the skies.

  Then they knelt before her.

  §

  Armiger stood on the edge of a cliff. Three hundred meters below and kilometers away, his mecha were dying under the lightning bolts of the Heaven hooks—all save one, a thing like a great metal tree that had begun in the past hour to sprout strange multilimbed animalcules, which were harvesting minerals and ores from the rocky terrain around it. This abomination fended off the lightning as if it were rain. He could see it from here, for it glowed a dull red now from its internal furnaces. The forest around it was burning.

  He could hear it, too, chuckling inside his head.

  You did well, Armiger. This place is perfectly suited to our task.

  He shuddered. If he probed deep inside himself, he knew he would find that the strange repository of nanomemory, which he had calculated could hold centuries of vast experience, was gone. It had slipped out of him on its own accord when he began creating mecha. It had been a resurrection seed, and he had unwittingly set it free.

  Feel the energy under us! These local beings have tapped geothermal potentials of magnificent power. When my roots have reached deep enough, my growth will be geometric. You could not have chosen a better ground in which to seed me.

  3340's voice alone was enough to freeze Armiger in his tracks. He felt pinioned as by a giant searchlight—the attention of a god was on him. Compared to it, the wrath of the Winds seemed trivial.

  We will eat this world in no time.

  He tore his gaze away from the red spot and the lightning flickering around it. The Winds would not be able to stop 3340. Maybe the human fleet that he knew waited in orbit could—but their methods would guarantee the deaths of every living being on this continent. There had to be another solution.

  The monks and even the army marching down from the mountain's peak were forgotten. Armiger stood still, frowning into the false day, wracking his brains for a way out of the trap he had himself set and sprung.

  §

  "Sir, they're not fighting."

  The lieutenant lay at the very edge of the door, a telescope jammed against his eye. He was staring straight down.

  "What do you mean? They haven't engaged the enemy?"

  "I think the monks must have surrendered. They're all together down there, but there's no fighting going on."

  "Excellent. Have they got the semaphore set up yet?"

  "It's just coming on line now, sir. They're sending a test message."

  "Read me the first real message as it comes in. I don't want to waste a second."

  He paced back and forth, fighting vertigo and cursing the basts who got in his way. Nearly the entire army was on the ground now, either here or at the mouth of the valley. They would never be in a better position than they were now.

  "I want to know the instant you have your hands on General Armiger."

  "Yes," said the bast who had been overseeing the operation. "So do we."

  "Sir, we confirmed the test message. Now they're sending. The message is..."

  Lavin staggered over and sat down heavily next to the man. "Yes, yes?"

  "The message... the message is..." The lieutenant took the telescope away from his eye and rolled over. He looked at Lavin with a puzzled expression. "It said, 'The queen is alive.'"

  Lavin felt his whole body go cold.

  What a terrible, terrible joke to play on him. I will kill the man who thought of this, he decided.

  "Signal them. Tell them to stop fooling around and tell us what's happening."

  The lieutenant ran to comply. Lavin sat gasping. It took all his willpower not to leap to his feet, and hurl the bast standing over him into the sky.

  The flag man lay with his head and shoulders over the opening, and began waving the bright banners of his trade. The lieutenant sat on his legs as he did this. He was still holding the telescope, so Lavin crab-walked over and snatched it from him. The metal was freezing cold, like everything at this altitude. Lavin lay down, inched up to the edge of the door and looked down.

  He was immune to heights now, since he'd felt like he was falling for days.

  It took h
im a while to find the semaphore man on the ground. When he did the man was in mid-message. "—is alive," the flags said. "Galas is here."

  "No." He wiped his eyes and looked down again.

  Each letter took several waves of the flag, so the next message came to him with excruciating slowness.

  When the message completed he rolled away from the opening, and lay staring at the false sky inside the moon. Way up there, guy wires thrummed with the tension of trying to hold the moon in position against the buffeting mountain winds. The bast was speaking to him, but he ignored it. The semaphore message had been read aloud by the lieutenant, and the commanders and soldiers left aboard the moon were in an uproar.

  Galas commands General Lavin to surrender his army. Only she could be so audacious.

  He sat up, vertigo forgotten. "Lieutenant! Reply to that message!"

  "Sir! What should we say?"

  He thought about it, heart racing. "Ask her... ask her this: 'What was the name of the inn?'"

  "Sir?"

  "Just send it." He felt lightheaded now, but not because of the vertigo. He lay down again.

  If she was alive... if she was alive, he could never look her in the face again. Yes, he had loved her, but he had also failed her—both as a man and as a soldier. It no longer mattered what she felt for him in return. He knew his real value, and with that knowledge came a certain measure of calm. He also knew what he could do to let her know he was sorry, and that too was a healing thought.

  It seemed to take forever for his message to be relayed. He knew the answer was the right one, however, by the third letter.

  "Nag's Head."

  That was the inn where he had first met Galas. Nobody else knew that, except maybe her old bodyguards, who had all retired long since, and wisely held their tongues.

  Lavin rolled to his feet, staggered, but stayed up. "Send this: 'The army is yours.'"

  They gaped at him.

  The bast stepped forward. "What is it you are doing?" it demanded. "Cease this. We command your army."