Another sky drew overhead, this one of yellow stone. The ceiling was centimeters away. The deeply pitted sandstone was painted in abstract clouds of grey and black by the passage of many torches. The smoke from those burning now swirled up and around him, settling into a layer of trembling heat.
Around a corner, and now he was being carried down a steep flight of steps. His bearers spoke back and forth as they lowered him carefully. Ten meters down, then twenty, into a region of dead air and penetrating cold where squat pillared
halls led away to either side. His bearers moved more quickly now, and the torchlight flickered off an uneven ceiling and dark niches in the walls where objects, long or round, were piled.
He was lowered to the floor in front of a black opening, and unceremoniously slid in. The ceiling here was just above his nose. Bricks thudded down just behind his head. What little light there was disappeared, and of sound, only that of stones being mortared into position. After a few minutes, even that ceased.
There had been no name carved above the niche. So, after a while, he raised one hand, slid it across his opened chest, knuckles scraping the stone, and felt behind his head. There, in a band of moist mortar, he wrote the letters:
ARMIGER.
"What is it? A dream?"
"Him, him againI saw him" He seemed not to know where he was.
"Saw who?"
"Armiger!"
Calandria lowered him back onto his bedroll, and when he closed his eyes and drifted off again, she smiled.
4
"Come," was all she said, and they set out again.
He was content not to talk for most of the morning, but the warm sunlight and the shared exertion of the walk was bound to loosen his tongue eventually. She might have been counting on this. Even so, he cast about for a long time for a subject other than the dark vision he'd had last night, finally asking, "Why are we going this way?"
Lady May looked back, arching an eyebrow in apparent amusement. "It speaks," she said. "That was a question you should have asked yesterday, Mason."
He glared at the ground.
"We're avoiding the people who are searching for you. I had my man say he'd seen you going south, but even so they may search north. But not this far into the forest."
"Did Emmy hear that?" he asked sharply. "She thinks I ran away?"
"I don't know what he told her," she said. "He's a compassionate enough man, if a bit of a libertine. I'm sure he wouldn't hurt her by telling her that, if he thought he could trust her with the truth."
Jordan chewed on that. Just how much could Emmy be trusted with something like that? He had to admit he didn't know; she kept secrets pretty well, he thought, but what about the secret abduction of her brother? It made more sense to let her believe the lie everybody else had heard.
In which case she would believe he had abandoned her.
After a while he asked, "How can you know where we are? You say you aren't a morph, but you're not using a compass or anything. And you can see in the dark." And you're pretty strong , but he didn't say that.
They were walking through an area of new growth now. Slender willows and white birch stood in startled lines all around, and the sun had full access to the ground. Very high in the sky, mountainous white clouds were piling up over one another.
Lady May squinted up at them. "Storm coming," she said.
"What are we going to do when it rains? We'll get soaked."
"Yes." She shrugged. "We should be under shelter in time."
"How do you know that?"
Lady May sighed. "It's rather difficult to explain," she said. "And I really didn't want to get into it yet. But you and I are going to have to make an agreement to work together, I mean really work together, and I'm going to tell you some things and you're going to tell me some. Understand?"
He nodded. He didn't want to talk about Armiger; even in daylight, he vividly remembered the embalming tent and the slot in the hillside, and the disturbing implication that he had been looking through the eyes of a corpse.
There was little, however, that Jordan Mason could do with anything she might tell him about the wider world. He was a prisoner of this
place, like all his countrymen. There was no prospect of rescue, or escape, for the people of Ventus; compassion dictated that she not even hint that Mason's life could be other than it was.
She was going to have to tell him something, though. It might as well be the truth, as far as he was able to understand it.
They skirted the edge of an escarpment for a while. This path gave a great view of the endless, rolling forest, and of the towering thunderheads that were bearing down on them. Calandria sniffed at the air, feeling it change from dry and still to charged, anticipatory. There was no way they were going to get to the manse in time.
It was ironic, she thought. In idle time before landing she had stood at the window of her ship, the Desert Voice , and contempated this world. Gazing down at Ventus, the human eye lost itself in jewel-fine detail. Her eye had followed the sweep of the terminator from pole to pole, gaining a hint of the varieties of dusk of which this world was capable. Sombre polar greys melted into speckled brown-green forests, along a knee of coastline reddened by local weather, and in a quick leap past equatorial waters her gaze could touch on this or that island, each drawn in impossibly fine detail and aglow with amber, green and blue. Each, if she watched long enough, summoned into night.