Karl Schroeder - Ventus

Turcaret stepped to the window and shouted "Men! Get up here!" loudly.

"Oh, right—" Axel began, but just then the door behind him burst open. Four large men with swords spilled into the room. They stopped their onrush when they saw Axel, bloody by the table, and Turcaret backed against the window.

The leader's eyebrows hopped up and he sneered at Turcaret. "Shall we finish him, sir? It's well past time for—"

He had laid himself wide open, so Axel put a side kick into him. The man sailed across the room and shattered a fine lacquer cabinet. Axel staggered and nearly fell over.

A sharp blow to the shoulder drove him to his knees. This time he had the sense to roll forward, and came to his feet on the far side of the table. The man who had tried to chop his head off was looking at his sword in surprise.

Two of them came around opposite sides of the table. Axel hopped onto it and let one stab him in the chest. He reached out and took the man's wrist; Axel twisted it and took the sword out of his hand while the other bodyguard watched in confusion.

He couldn't let these men catch him. He turned to see a good view of Turcaret's rear end, as the controller struggled to get out the window.

Axel put the pommel of the sword into its owner's face and got off the table. He kicked a chair between himself and the other bodyguard and ran for the window. Turcaret had made it outside, and was clinging to the casement, some three meters above the roof of the manor.

No more time to look—they were converging on him. He grabbed the window frame and pulled himself through it as they howled after him.

The fall would have broken something had he been unarmored. As it was, he was stunned for a second. When he pulled himself to his knees on the rooftop, he could not at first spot Turcaret.

But there he was struggling with the metal door set into the rooftop. Behind him the moon was rising, huge and white. Axel barked a laugh and painfully pulled himself to his feet.

Turcaret looked up in fear—and it took a moment for Axel to realize the controller was not looking at him, but past, at the sky.

Ventus only had one moon, and Diadem was small. The thing Turcaret was silhouetted against was huge—larger than Earth's moon—and growing by the second. It glowed from within.

Turcaret was staring at something behind Axel. He turned around, and looked up... and up.

"Oh, thank you," Turcaret said.

§

The Boros family feud really wasn't any of Calandria's affair, but right now she was surrounded by shouting men for whom nothing could be more important. She let herself be swept along with them, thinking that by doing so she might find Jordan.

Linden raised a hand. "Silence!" he thundered. "Where?" he said to the man who had told them of Yuri's death.

"In his bed-chamber!"

"Oh, pray he was not butchered in his sleep." They hurried out into the courtyard, which was ablaze with torches. The sky was lit by the crepuscular glow of a vagabond moon, huge and lowering over the estate. Servants crowded everywhere, gawking. Linden's men were rallying under the main doors to the manor. "Where is Sheia?" roared Linden.

"We've got his men barricaded in their rooms!" crowed a lieutenant. "Don't know where he is—doubtless he's run, like the cur he is."

"Where is Marice?"

"With Yuri."

"Come then." Linden hurried into the manor. They followed. August stayed close to Calandria, but said nothing.

Yuri's bedchamber was on the third floor, at the front of the house. It had a commanding view through many floor-to-ceiling leaded glass windows. Two fireplaces faced one another across the room; Yuri's giant, canopied bed hulked near the one to the right. Linden's men crowded in after a whole mob of people, who were babbling and wailing incoherently.

Everything had been knocked about in the course of Yuri's final battle. Tables were overturned, chairs smashed. It was astonishing no one had heard the fight—but then, the walls were thick stone, and the door was four centimeters-thick oak.

Yuri lay on his back on the bed. His belly was slit, and intestines bulged blue out of the wound. His eyes were still open, glaring at the ceiling.

Lady Marice stood next to the bed. There was no expression at all on her face; it was as if she were carved from stone. She watched as people ran back and forth shouting.

"The assassin fled," someone said to Linden. He stepped up to Marice and took her hand. She snatched it back, and turned away from him.

"But he left his sword." The man pointed to the floor by the bed.

"Did he now?" Linden knelt and prodded the blade that lay there. "And whose is this, I wonder?"

Calandria gasped. It was Axel's sword.

The bowl of the sky was being filled. Jordan could see stars only near the horizon; the rest of the firmament was taken up by the dark mass of a vagabond moon. He had never seen one so low to the ground before—had never realized how big it was, like a thunderhead. It seemed ready to drop on him at any moment.

From a distance the moons seemed featureless, but up close he could make out tiny patterns in its dark skin, like the veins of a leaf. And directly above him, in the center of the bowled-in sky the moon made, he saw a deeply black star-shaped opening appear, and motes of light drifted silently down from it.

The Heaven hooks. He could see them among the lights now: black filaments, like spider's thread, with the lights strung along them like paper lanterns at a fair. Everyone knew the hooks rode on vagabond moons, reaching down through clouds like the hands of a god to scoop up entire fields. He had never seen them before—no one he knew had. But he knew the stories.

The entrance to the manor was only a hundred meters away. Jordan put his head down, and ran for the doors.

Linden Boros picked up Axel Chan's sword. The blade was covered in blood. The lord turned it over in his hands thoughtfully. "Foreign make," he said. "Could be Iapysian?" A fresh commotion was breaking out in the hallway outside Yuri's bed chamber. The whole estate, it seemed, was erupting with noise.

"What does it matter," said the lieutenant at his side. "We know Brendan Sheia is behind this."

" Is that so? "

Silence fell like a cloak across the room. Calandria stood on her tiptoes to see what had happened.

Brendan Sheia stood in the doorway. He had one hand on the pommel of his sword, otherwise he appeared calm. "Is it wise to jump to such conclusions, brother?"

"I'm not your brother!" Linden paced up to him. "It was very stupid of you to come here, Brendan. I suppose, though, it saves you the humiliation of being run to ground."

"You're too quick to jump to conclusions," Brendan said. He went to Marice, and gravely bowed. "My lady, I don't know what to say. This is terrible." Again, Marice turned away.

Brendan Sheia wheeled about like an actor on stage. He knew he had the attention of every person in the room. He was a hulking man with a square face, black hair and beetle brows. He wore a house coat embroidered with the family crest, and simple grey breeches, a doubtless calculated attempt to look like he had come from his own bed chamber, which the sword spoiled.

He would have had to be insane to enter this room without the weapon, judging from the way people were looking at him.

"What is that?" He nodded at the sword Linden held. "The murder weapon?"

"Yes," said Linden, "and as soon we find which of your men it belongs to, we'll pin him to the south wall with it—just ahead of you."

"One of my men?" Sheia frowned. "Not likely. That belongs to one of our other guests... the tawny fellow, you know, the irritating one."

"Sir Chan," said Linden's lieutenant.