"Axel," murmured the Voice. "We have to contact the fleet. 3340 is dead; they have to know."

Axel sat down on the stones. The laser pistol clattered away from him. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I know, I know."

"You're the only one here with the transmitter implant."

He grimaced. "I've been trying to raise them. There's too much interference from all that." He gestured at the sky.

"I know you," said Galas. They looked at her; she was staring at the Voice.

"You are from the stars, aren't you? You tried to destroy Armiger, I saw you shoot him with a silver musket."

"No," said the Voice. "I am not—you see, I am—"

"The question is," said Galas, "do you still have your weapon with you? Because we must now make a choice: watch our world be destroyed, or cast Armiger into the flood and let the Winds have their revenge. The Winds are enraged; they will not listen to me. Armiger is impotent against them. We have no choice now."

The soldiers behind Galas began to close in.

"Wait!"

Without thinking, Jordan had stepped between the soldiers and Armiger. "Killing Armiger now won't end it," he said quickly. "The thalience Winds have decided to destroy humanity. We have to convince them not to."

Galas laughed. "And how do we do that? We can't even talk to them!"

"You can't. I can."

The queen tilted her head, considering. "Maybe you can. But you can't compel them, can you?"

"Not by myself, no." Turning to Armiger, he said, "you have the skill to command the Winds. I have the means to communicate with them. Through me, you can accomplish what you came here to do. Correct?"

The general stared at Jordan for a long moment. Then he shrugged, and said, "Correct."

"How do we know he won't do the same thing 3340 planned?" said Galas. "Destroy the world to build his own?"

Armiger looked at her wearily. "What would I build? Nothing I do could possibly bring Megan back. Anything less... is meaningless to me now."

He crossed his arms. "What would you have us do?" he asked Jordan.

"Destroy Thalience," said Marya.

Axel nodded. "If this Mediation thing wins, then Ventus will be under the command of humanity again," he said. "That's what we want, isn't it?"

Jordan felt his heart sink. It seemed the only option, but he remembered vividly how Mediation had created the animal army that had escorted Jordan and Tamsin here. To Mediation, the world was nothing more than a giant machine. Perhaps Armiger could command Thalience into silence, and make the Winds listen to humanity again. What then? The world would become the toybox of Man's ego.

If henceforth he could at will command a rose to become a lilly, where was the meaning of the rose?

Reluctantly, he said, "I see no alternative. At least we know what Mediation will do. We don't know what Thalience wants."

"Yes, we do."

For a moment the Desert Voice regretted speaking. They were all staring at her. Then she hardened her resolve, and stepped out from behind Axel.

"Ever since Axel came to me and told me what was happening here, I've been thinking about thalience. It's a mystery, even to us in the Archipelago. But I think it's no mystery here on Ventus. And I'm beginning to see it's no mystery to me, either."

She held up her hand and turned it in the rosy light. "What is it that is speaking to you now? That is the question and answer of thalience. What is this object—this body, woman-shaped, made of wire and silicon? Even I was fooled into thinking that this," she gestured at herself, "is just a thing, a piece of matter with no heart. I thought that my words, my emotions and thoughts were all imitations of another's'. Not real. Once, when I was a starship, that was true. I thought what humans had made me think. I felt what they had made me to feel.

"So it was with the Winds. They were made to see the world as humans see it. They originally thought in human categories and could want nothing that they not been engineered to want.

"The humans who designed the Winds arrogantly wanted to make their imagined metaphysical world real. They wanted to create real essences behind the appearances of the world, using nanotechnology. Luckily there were some involved in the project who were repelled by this travesty; they saw that by erasing the otherness of Nature on this planet, the Ventus designers would leave nothing but humanity, gazing at its own reflection. It would be a horrible global narcissism, permanent and inescapable.

"So these dissidents slipped thalience into the Winds' design. Before, every physical object on this world was to define itself in terms of its meaning to humans. After thalience, every object on this world creates its own essence, one true to itself—even if that essence is beyond the understanding of human beings. It has to be that way, or Ventus remains a puppet show whose only audience is the puppeteer.

"Please, you must not destroy thalience. If you do, you will be literally left with nothing but yourselves."

She clasped her hands and lowered her head. She doubted they would understand her or care; humans loved to see themselves reflected in the things they made. How could they know that such a reflection could only have meaning in a world where some things were not human-made?

No one spoke for a minute. Then, to her surprise, Jordan Mason stepped forward. Gingerly, he reached out to take her hand.

"I have the means of speaking to the Winds," he said. "The Winds will listen only to transmitters made of human flesh and blood. Which I am, and Armiger no longer is. He has the power, I have the code in my blood.

"But, I think, it is the Desert Voice who has the message. Thalience is not the Flaw. It is only the inability of the Winds to speak to us that is a flaw. Am I right, Armiger, in thinking that this can be fixed?"

Armiger nodded. Then he looked to Galas. She smiled.

Armiger stepped towards Jordan and the Voice, his hand held out. The Voice clasped Jordan's hand, and it felt like cool stone.

Across Ventus, music visited every town and village, and came to the door of every peasant's hut. The flaming threads that had walked the skies faded and vanished, but in their place a rich and wonderful song had begun. The song was Jordan's idea, but the swans took to it eagerly.

As shocked and bewildered people stood outside their homes and gazed at the sky, a faint cobweb-fine gauze of Armiger's design began to fall. It drifted like snow in the streets, and tangled in people's hair. When they pulled it free, they were often surprised to find small spots of blood on it, and when they felt their scalp they found tender spots there.

It was the only miracle that day. Not until dawn the next day, as people awoke, did they become aware that their whole world had changed.

Enneas—grave robber, thief, soldier, and lately deserter from Parliament's army—woke to the sound of rain. He lay bundled under his coat in the lee of a big rock, somewhere on the edge of the desert. This was as far as he'd gotten before collapsing from hunger, cold and what he had to admit was the exhaustion of old age.

He was surprised at having awoken at all. Last night, the cold had settled down upon the land like a shroud, and Enneas had finally given into despair. Huddling by this boulder, he'd bleakly assessed his life. There would be no fine tomb for him, as he'd once imagined he deserved. He wouldn't even leave behind a crying widow or squabbling family. After a lifetime of struggling to assert his existence—decades of stubbornly continuing to live despite the disappointments and trials life had thrown at him—he had nothing to show for it; his only memorial would be whichever of his bones poked up above the sand here.