Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 272
descended, Jordan had learned he could hear the voices of the
Winds too. Until this morning he had deliberately tuned them
out, because he’d been afraid that at any moment the Heaven
hooks would rear out of the empty sky and grab him up.
He had bundled Calandria May’s golden gauze into a
kind of poncho, then awkwardly buttoned his jacket over that.
The gold stuff stuck out behind him like a bird’s tail, and up
around his neck like a dandy’s ruff. But he was pretty sure it
was still doing its duty. The Winds did not know where he
was.
As the Heaven hooks descended on the Boros estate,
Jordan had learned that he could hear the little voices of
inanimate and animate things. Each object within his sight had
a voice, he now knew. Each thing proclaimed its identity, over
and over, the way a bird calls its name all day for no reason but
the joy in its own voice. Now that he knew they were there,
Jordan could attune himself to the sound of that endless
murmur. Last night and this morning, he had worked at tuning
into and out of that listening stance as he walked.
If he closed his eyes, he could see a ghostly landscape,
mostly made up of words hovering over indistinct objects. He
could make little sense of that, so he left that avenue alone.
It seemed that he could focus his inner hearing on
individual objects, if he concentrated hard enough.
He held up the knife he had been whittling with, and
concentrated on it. After a few minutes he began to hear its
voice. "Steel," it said. "A steel blade. Carbon steel, a knife."
At the Boros estate, Jordan had spoken to a little soul like
this, and it had answered. I am stone, a doorway arch had said
to him. This ability to speak to things didn’t surprise him as
much as it might have, considering everything that had
happened. According to the priest Allegri, some people had