Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 760
Winds had reduced everything in the flood down to its
constituent molecules. Where pines had towered over needlestrewn
loam, now there was only grey rock and a fine, black
ash that shifted uneasily in the breeze.
High on the mountainside, a lone figure paused at a
narrow window on the northernmost facade of the monastery.
Here, where the ledge on the North Gate narrowed and
vanished, the monks had long ago built a precarious, wedgeshaped
tower that clung to every available contour of the
mountain. The window looked out from this tower’s furthest
point, with nothing but a six hundred meter fall beneath it.
Galas turned from the window to inspect her new
quarters. There were three rooms, all walled and floored in
granite. Her new bed chamber was triangular, with a single
slotted window. The room she stood in now was larger, and the
third was larger still. Each had a fireplace, where some of the
last of the available wood was crackling now. Generations of
abbots had lived and died in these small rooms.
"Are they adequate for you?" asked the present abbot.
She smiled at him. "They were for you. Why shouldn’t
they be for me? --But are you sure you’re willing to give them
up?"
He shrugged. "Everywhere is holy now, your highness.
We have no reason to stay here any longer."
Galas walked to a window and looked out. The pebbled
glass gave a distorted view of the devastated valley below, and
beyond it the desert of Iapysia, across which she had fled only
days ago.
"Am I going to freeze once the wood runs out?"
He laughed. "I didn’t. But I’m sure if you ask the rooms
nicely, they will be warm in the future."
"Yes, of course." So simple, yet impossible to conceive.