Chill

12 this time of trial and desperation

The mammoth was still screaming.

Gavin, perched on Mallory's shoulder, hid his head under his wing as Prince Tristen and the angel Samael discussed options in low tones. Gavin would have imagined Tristen ruthless, but the First Mate had made it flatly obvious that he had no intention of slaughtering the infant mammoth unless no other humane option remained.

Unlike Tristen, the basilisk wasn't distressed by the uncertain fate of the mammoth, but rather the recurrence of what was becoming a chronic sense of deja vu. He'd been here before; he had seen this before--the broad strokes, if not the particulars. It shouldn't have left a worm of unease gnawing his complacency, but there was something about the mammoth, in particular, that came with a kaleidoscope of unresolving images.

Gavin had never suffered disorientation or the impermanence of memory before the last few days, and the experience was one he would have gladly forgone. Meat people lived with this all the time. It was no wonder every last one of them was clinically insane.

Mallory withdrew a step or two, head tilted, unwilling to intrude into this argument. Gavin, forcing his filters to process the overload of fragmentary remembrances, pulled his head from under his wing.

Whatever Tristen had just said, Samael protested. "Sentiment has no place when it comes to the engineering of biospheres."

Tristen had folded his arms. "Give the mammoth its chance."

"Because there's a place for an elephant on a spaceship?"

"The Builders made one," Tristen said. "They brought it here and ordained its birth in this time of trial and desperation. Who are we to gainsay their insight?"

Gavin forgave Tristen that last, because he said it with a mocking lilt, but he didn't blame Samael for his flinch, the contraction of all his motes and scraps as if around a blow--or the headshake that followed.

"Besides"--Tristen paused, his hand curling restlessly around the pommel of his sword as if to give the speaking weight--"are we not on Errantry?"

Samael looked away, unable to deny the truth of Tristen's statement. Instead, he fell back on the practical. "It won't reproduce."

Tristen's voice went wry, even muffled through Gavin's feathers. "How do you know? Maybe somewhere out there is its perfect complement, already bumbling through some Heaven on broad calf feet."

"We must consider lifeboat rules, My Prince. It will die," Samael said. "And whatever resources it consumes along the way to starvation may result in the deaths of other life-forms, ones with a better chance of long-term survival. It will starve, and perish in great travail and suffering."

"That is," said Tristen, in a voice so strange that Gavin stretched his head forward on its long neck, the better to listen, "the purpose and privilege of life, my dear Angel of Poison. And as your First Mate, I command you to respect it."

The angel made a small noise--perhaps of protest, perhaps of acquiescence. Gavin supposed that in the final analysis, the two were not mutually exclusive.

Tristen continued, "But surely I don't need to remind you of that. The mammoth gets its chance."

Mallory stepped forward, startling Gavin, who remembered not to clench his talons only when he felt the necromancer wince. Mallory had lived and prospered by staying aloof from conflicts between the powerful and by serving Samael quietly and well, so even Gavin was startled by what was said. "At the Breaking of the world, Samael, there were creatures such as this brought forth. Some lived and evolved, and some fell to the inevitable. If we could predict which species would survive and flourish, would we not be like unto gods?"

Mallory spoke with the conviction of experience, leading Samael to sigh and let his shoulders drop. "And its competitors?"

That was the glint of light off a toothy grin. Perhaps Tristen was ruthless after all. "Then they shall by the hand of God learn to adapt, won't they, angel?"

Mallory tensed beneath Gavin's feet, but Gavin did not need the unconscious warning. Gavin knew Tristen's expression of old: the Conn look of eagles, of certainty and command. They might be wrong, the family. They might even understand, in a sort of hypothetical, abstract fashion, that it was possible for them to be wrong. But neither before Rien nor since had Gavin met one who acted, even occasionally, as if she believed the possibility could apply to her.

It was a failing with which he had a sense he once had understood--in a sort of hypothetical, abstract fashion. As something that was possible. As something that could happen--had happened--to somebody else.

Now, staring through closed eyes at the improbable mammoth, comparing its massive, present reality with the fragmentary oneiric memories that harassed him, he understood much better the hazards of grandiose plans.

But the principles of inertia did not permit what had been set in motion to be casually set aside. Whatever the Builders had intended, they had been earthbound souls, of limited vision. They had been less than what they spawned, constrained by assumptions and fanaticisms, their creativity rooted fast. The Conns had grown beyond their progenitors. And whatever their failings, their delusions, their tendency to overreach, the tragedies they might inflict upon those who looked to them for guidance--

--the Conn family was not earthbound.

It seemed Samael knew the stare as well as he did, because the angel folded his leaf-litter arms over his scarred leaf-litter chest, grimaced, and shook his hair over his eyes. The argument was ended.

Samael said, "What would you have of us, First Mate?"

Tristen nodded a small acknowledgment and replied, "Free the mammoth, angel."

"And once I've freed it, First Mate? What would you have me do with it then?"

Tristen's smile was not promising. But--somewhat to Gavin's regret--Samael turned away before Tristen said whatever was on his lips.

Whatever its earlier panic, the mammoth went very still when the angel crouched beside it and pressed his hands to its trapped ankle. Its trunk snuffled toward him, hesitant, almost thoughtful. For a moment, Tristen thought it might attack--not that he expected any animal, no matter how impressive, to stand a chance against even a diminished angel. But the reaching trunk simply brushed Samael's cheek, snuffed deeply, and stroked his grass-fluff hair aside.

Even the beasts of the holde and Heaven, it seemed, could recognize an angel of the lord.

Samael, however reduced his circumstances, was perfectly competent to infiltrate himself between the beast's foot and the tree roots, and ease the one loose from the other. The foot glided up, Samael stood, and the mammoth backed away, moaning and swaying. The angel regarded it, frowning, wiping his hands on his trousers until the beast whirled and vanished into the leaves and trunks.

Tristen felt Mallory at his elbow, and turned in time to catch the sidelong glance. "Hope it eats figs," was all Tristen said.

Mallory winked, surprising him, and Tristen winked back. The necromancer's face lit up around a startled smile. Tristen glanced away, back at the angel, pausing to wonder just for a moment what it was like to be Mallory, with a head even more full of dead people than the Captain--and by choice.

When he was done wondering, he started forward, one hand on Mirth's hilt to keep it from swinging. A sense of praise and excitement filled him; the sword was pleased. I didn't do it for you, he told it, but that didn't seem to affect its happiness.

"Push on," he said, and didn't turn back to make sure the others had fallen in behind him. They'd follow.

Giving people something to follow was pretty much the only thing Conns were good for.

Arianrhod and her angel strode side by side over warm, shallow water. The sea of the Heaven was illuminated from below, water reflecting rippled light over their clothes, on the undersides of their arms, underneath their chins. The light seemed to catch in the folds of Asrafil's coat, to gild the bare skin of his skull and his pale fingers. The water's surface dimpled under a languid stride that took each wavelet into account without ever seeming discomforted by them.

Arianrhod esteemed his grace even as she hurried to keep up. But his hand was always there when she stumbled, his coat cast around her shoulders when the cold wind whipped steam from the balmy water below. Fish in jeweled colors and vivid patterns flashed beneath the surface, schooling or as individuals. Arianrhod thought she and Asrafil would have been more comfortable like the fish, just swimming. She wondered how she would have managed the waters with the unblade across her back. Probably it wouldn't impede her at all.

The fish were not only in the waters. Dark, knobby lozenges flitted past the overhead panels, fins and elaborate mouth barbels fanning as they glided on elecromagnetic currents along the walls of the Heaven. Ship cats, synbiotic plecostomi as big as a man, scrubbing the walls of the world. They breathed air and hovered on their own gravity nullifiers. This was their breeding ground, where they returned to spawn.

It was beautiful.

Arianrhod said the angel's name. "Wait," she added, and put her hand on his coat sleeve.

He stopped at once, turned to her, and laid a steadying palm against her elbow when she stumbled on a wavelet.

"Have they found us?" she asked. "Or are they still seeking at random?"

"I have kept us to the places where their angel cannot sense," Asrafil said. "Its power wanes as other powers wax, and the territory it controls is shrinking. As long as we remain beyond the disputed borders, it can locate us only through extrapolation and guessing."

He left unsaid that the guesses of an angel were often very good indeed.

"I would like to better understand where you are leading me." She could defy him. She was a Conn and an Engineer both, and if she ordered him he would have to obey her. But he was also the angel she served, and in many ways she trusted his wisdom as greater than her own.

"To parley with one of those powers," he said, reluctantly. "I will speak more if you order it, but know that I have promised to hold some information private, and I will be breaking a vow at your command."

She considered, and wondered if angels could be said to have a sense of honor. Asrafil had never betrayed her trust. Was it fair of her to command him to betray another's? She dropped her head to stare at the tossing water, her lip caught between her teeth. He shifted restlessly.

"We are pursued," he said gently. "You know it. How shall we then tarry, beloved? Come with me, and you shall soon see with your own eyes the answer to your questions, and the power that will make you Captain and return me to my rightful place as your servant and master."

"I tarry because we are pursued," she answered. She laid a hand over his on her arm, as if he escorted her. "And I know how to further delay our pursuers. Listen, Asrafil. There is a Heaven that Tristen Conn will not easily leave, if he but enters."

Tristen kept the lead as his party maintained a steady pace through the next nine hours, passing through a variety of microenvironments in various states of reconstruction. It might have been pointless bravado, but it couldn't hurt--and while the angel was close to invulnerable, he was also close to immaterial. And it was to him that Mirth whispered suggestions--not so much words as the vague sense of rightness or wrongness, the chance turn of the world.

The group passed through domaines and anchores, Heavens and corridors--and a holde full of giant, sleeping machines. They hung like strings of beads on racks stretched floor to ceiling, hundreds of meters tall, filling the width of the holde to where it curved from sight. They were yellow and black, green and blue, some marked with checkered livery. In their brilliant colors, with their blades and buckets and manipulators, they looked to Tristen like engines of war. But he could see no means for them to maneuver, unless by friction of the soil under their caterpillar treads. They would be useless in microgravity, worthless in a vacuum.

He said as much: "Are those for fighting planetside?"

"They are for terraforming," Mallory answered. "You use them to reshape planets. The Builders sent them against the time they foresaw, when we would reach a destination."

"And cannibalize the world to settle a planet," Samael said.

Gavin snaked his head from under Mallory's black mane. "What would you want with a planet?" he asked.

Tristen pursed his lips, craning over his shoulder to glance from angel to necromancer. "He asks a good question. And why this--discrete machinery, Samael? Why not something like you? Or like Gavin? A colony tool. Something with a personality, free will. Multiple uses."

"The Builders could not have anticipated that your sister the Princess Cynric would develop the colonies," Samael said. "They sent us prepared with the technology they had available at the time."

"Huh." Tristen folded his arms over his breastplate. It was a thorny thought, that the Builders might not have foreseen what their creation would grow into.

Mallory leaned back, staring up, and said with elaborate casualness, "What a pity they can't be made to multitask."

It sparked an idea, as Tristen was sure had been intentional. The necromancer's sideways glance gave it away, which Tristen presumed was intentional, too.

"So these are scrap," Tristen said.

"They're necessary resources!" Samael protested. "When we make planetfall, they will be the primary tools we use to make our new home habitable. They are not essential now, but they will be when the world is no longer our home. They must be conserved and protected. Would you eat your seed corn?"

Tristen felt a pop like a pleasantly stretched spine, except this click was in his mind. It was as if someone had delineated a limit of the angel's program with bright lines.

He said, "You mean they would be essential supplies. If we had not, in the centuries since they were loaded aboard the world and set in mothballs, developed technology that renders them obsolete."

"First Mate," the angel said, very carefully and precisely, "are you ordering that these terraforming engines may be repurposed as salvage?"

"I order and reinforce it," Tristen said. "And when we have contact again, please pass my instructions to Nova, that it may obtain the Captain's agreement."

He was pretty sure that painful-looking curve of Samael's rose-petal lips, tugging the corners of his nose, was a smile.

In the shadowy, emergency-lit control center, Caitlin's hands rested almost motionless on contact pads that detected her involuntary micromovements and converted them to inputs. Practically telepathic, the interface allowed her to work at the speed of thought. The only drawback was the training and experience required not to wipe out several subsections when Nova pinged in before her, manifesting as a sparkling violet mote.

Across the frost-rimed tangle of wires, panels, and hologram tanks making up their temporary ops center, Jsutien registered the angel with a flick of his eyes but otherwise did not comment. He was awake, but Caitlin was not sure he was aware. At least he was not raving. His breath steamed in intermittent clouds around his face; soon they would need to divert more energy to heating, though it griped Caitlin to admit it. Before her, Nova hung glimmering, turning, awaiting recognition.

"Problem?" Caitlin asked, longing with no particular hope for reassurance.

Nova's denial still took her by surprise. "No. I have a possible location on one of the pursuit teams."

"Tristen?" Caitlin asked, because she could not force herself to ask after Benedick.

"Based on proximity and extrapolation, that seems most likely," the angel said.

Caitlin didn't wince, but it was only long training as a Conn and as an Engineer that kept her impassive. "You don't have contact, then."

Nova continued without hesitation, adapting to the interruption. "No reciprocal contact. But a large quantity of previously interdicted resources have been released to reconstruction applications under crew orders, and the information came encoded in a micropulse that appeared to originate with Samael. The Captain has directed me to refer to you for repurposing instructions."

Caitlin didn't need to ask for stats. They were already scrolling through her awareness. Multiton quantities of metal, polymer, ceramic, conductors, fuel cells, and miscellaneous material had been made available. "The obvious use would be to shore up the unraveling superstructure. Less obviously, we could hold this stuff in reserve for repairs and reconstruction in case we have to cut loose the infected portions of the world. It looks like a lot, but once we start ... Using it is a commitment. And until we determine what the cause of the unraveling is, shoring up would more or less amount to tossing it into a disassembly machine."

Caitlin reached out and swiped a finger through the ice crystals on her console. The remaining ones glittered in the dim lighting. Hoarfrost.

"Sloughing off the damaged portions of the world presents problems," Nova said. "First, in locating them all. And second, they are not limited to the fringes of the superstructure. The infection has metastasized, and many of the affected sections contain biota."

"I know," Caitlin said. She glanced from the angel's jewel-presence to Jsutien, but he had closed his eyes again, and anyway this was her decision. She swallowed and made it. "Start constructing backup life-support and propulsion systems. Increase the size of the ram-scoop. Be ready to cut core systems free if necessary."

"But for now?" Nova asked, a nonhuman system seeking unambiguous confirmation.

"For now we hold on."

Much of what Tristen and his companions passed was devastation, and much of the devastation was not new. They slithered among wreckage in chambers from which the Enemy had torn all breath and life, ruptured bulkheads frozen in twisted alloy petals like balloons captured at the moment of bursting. The empty sockets of shattered viewports reflected nothing, or--in cases where the panes had webbed but another member failed before the pressure blew them clear--reflected too much, in awkward fragments that never quite matched at the edges.

Salvage had already begun here: many of the damaged sections were obviously in a state of partial deconstruction, and there were great, smooth-edged gaps in the world's superstructure where materials must have been repurposed to reinforce what could be saved. But there were no signs of rogue colony activity here--the damaged systems and sections were not merely evaporating into space, and nothing attacked the travelers.

In the blasted sections, some strata had gravity, and more did not. The domaines where one could drift or glide were easier than the ones where one must pick a route across destroyed landscapes and machinery. Tristen had his armor, and Gavin and Samael thought nothing of traversing awkwardly among rent metal, shredded wiring, and the remains of animals and plants frozen brittle at the moment of decompression, though Samael's tender petals withered and froze bruised-dark, their cell walls shattered. But Mallory suffered in the Enemy's cold, each such crossing demanding its levy in burst capillaries and lingering shakes.

Tristen had never seen the necromancer so discomfited. Nevertheless, though azure bruises blossomed under pale skin and--each time they returned to the relative warmth of a pressurized section--cerulean blood dripped from Mallory's nose to splatter the decking or float in eerie globules, there was no complaint.

The pressure doors themselves created another sort of hurdle, as many of them were not actual air locks, just emergency doors intended to maintain the integrity of sections near a damaged module. Mallory knew every code with the certainty of dead men's memories, and Gavin and Samael between them managed to improvise vacuum seals from their colonies. Through these Mallory and Tristen--with some awkwardness--could pass.

Mallory and Tristen differed on details of navigation. When they paused in pressurized corridors, twice Mallory suggested a route that would take them ship-east. The necromancer believed this route would allow them to leapfrog through a potentially more intact series of domaines and Heavens, but a combination of half-forgotten organic memory and the urgent opinion of the sword Mirth had Tristen tending more to true south.

After traversing a string of particularly devastated anchores, they passed through a battered hatchway into warmth. "More salvage," Tristen said, trying to keep from his voice the bitter awareness of how much of what lay behind them had been lost to the Enemy. The saddest module had contained rank after rank of apparently unused acceleration pods, open to space, their interiors boiled dry.

Samael, handing Mallory a white handkerchief of dandelion clocks with which to mop the blood, said, "We shall have a far smaller world when we are done."

Mallory's hand folded around the scrap of cloth, but all the necromancer's attention was bent on the pressure door beyond the small antechamber in which they stood. Samael tapped the hesitant fingers, reminding Mallory to absently press handkerchief to nose.

"Grease," Mallory said, and started forward, feet picking their way unerringly across the buckled but clean-swept floor despite patent inattention. The necromancer bent down, blinking eyes splotched cobalt with petechiae all through the sclera. "This door's in use."

Tristen found his palm on Mirth's hilt. He turned slowly, scanning other potential entrances to the chamber. There was only the door through which they had entered. He licked his lips and looked again at the floor. Buckled, as he had noticed, with the force of the impact that had sheared through the corridor and the anchores beyond. Scraped, too, in long parallel lines that led toward the pressure door. But the floor was very clean.

"Trash," he said, with a particular nauseated horror. "Someone is using this chamber to discard trash. And recently." Recently, because not even the world's ubiquitous dust and scruff had had time to settle on surfaces.

Samael, if he were human, might have blanched. Instead, he raked back his hair with twig-straw hands and tilted his head as if weighing any number of scathing responses--though Tristen did not think himself the one slated for scathing. The head-tilt was curiously like Gavin's, which was in its own turn curiously like one Tristen remembered with clear perfection through his colony, though the head-tilter was long lost. When you get old, everyone starts to look like somebody else. And the more important that person was to you, the more people look like them.

Cynric had been ... important, yes. To a lot of people.

After a brief pause, the angel said, "So who throws things away?"

"Children," Mallory answered. "Cultists. Uneducated Means, but all the Means are meant to have been Exalted."

"And all the angels were meant to have been subsumed in the angel," Gavin said, from among Mallory's hair. Wings made for an expressive shrug, when he chose to use it. He pointed at Samael with his beak.

Samael bowed with a vestigial flourish. "At your service," he said. "I hope you'll forgive me for ruining the symmetry of your genocide. I was invested in remaining discrete."

There were times to rise to the bait, and times not to. "So what's beyond the door?" Tristen asked.

"Let's see," Samael said, and--laying his mosaic hands flat against the alloy hatch--thrust his head through the door to the shoulders. Bits of fluff and leaf, as always, scraped from his field and slid to the floor, left behind.

Tristen thought he heard Gavin snort. Or perhaps he was himself projecting. Angels.

But a moment later, Samael was back, in all his slight translucence, glowering and crossing his arms. "The Heaven beyond the portal looks exactly as it should," he said. "There are signs of habitation, flora and fauna, a well-trammeled path to the pressure door. It seems they're using this chamber as an improvised air lock."

Mallory echoed the arm-folding gesture. "They who?"

Samael pushed out his lower lip and dropped his chin, frowning up at them past bushy eyebrows. "Go-backs," he said. "I think."

Mallory and Tristen shared a glance. Tristen thought of the open acceleration pods, their fluids boiled away on the Enemy's empty breath.

"Exalt Go-backs," Mallory said. Then said it again, with a headshake, as if that would help to settle the idea. "Go-backs. For real."

"You can see the dome of the shrine from the pressure door," Samael said.

Gavin flipped his wings and said, with a negligent tail flick, "We could--go back--the way we came."

Tristen shook his head and licked his lips. He tasted the bitter grease of blood and only then realized he'd bitten down.

"Religious fanatics," he said. Then with all the cascading irony of his personal history, though he knew nobody else would understand, he added, "How much can they hurt us?"

He touched Mirth's hilt, for the comforting click when his gauntlet brushed the pommel. No one else spoke, though Tristen let his gaze rest for a moment on each.

They awaited his decision. Even Mallory, though the necromancer did it with a frown and a challenging arch of eyebrow. Well, that's what Tristen got for pulling rank.

Tristen said, "We'll go on."

The hatch was sealed, locked, and even mechanically barred, but that proved an insignificant barrier to a necromancer, an angel, and the First Mate. They opened the ways and stepped through, the angel in the lead once more because Tristen had not chosen to object.

Tristen had been in many Heavens through his long life, but the wide world was vast and varied, and he had never seen one such as this. It must be a narrow, irregular space, and to make the most of it the Builders had terraformed it into a zigzag valley, soil hilled up like canyon walls to either side, one or two towering pinnacles fading into its misty length. It looked steep and water-eroded, and yes, ahead through soft fog Tristen could see the minarets and the blue-and-green enameled-appearing dome of a Go-back Earth shrine.

The entirety of the space was lush and green, and seemed completely undamaged by the acceleration catastrophe.

Tristen glanced at Samael and Mallory. "What do you call this? This ... landscape?"

To his surprise, it was Mallory who closed eyes in thought, then smiled and answered, "Karst topography. On Earth, it was caused by limestone subsidence."

Along each of the valley's walls grew massive trees hung with moss and strange parasites, through which twined the mist. The angles of growth were odd. Then Tristen realized the gravity was set parallel to the pitch of the slopes, so if one were to step onto them, they would seem level. It was the Builders' way of coaxing a little extra useful space into the Heaven. They had had their sense of aesthetics, the old ones, rooted in their appreciation of the sublime as God's creation. They had tried to uphold that where they could.

Gavin beat wings and heaved himself far more heavily into the air than was, strictly speaking, necessary. "If we're going forward at all costs," he said, "then let's stop lollygagging and go forward at all costs."

Irritable words or not, he took care not to outpace them, so Tristen found it easy to keep up. Samael and Mallory flanked Tristen on either side, intent on their surroundings. Mallory in particular seemed determined to soak in every detail, walking hushed and attentive.

The mist--Tristen knew the word, but had rarely felt the phenomenon before--curved around each of Gavin's metronomic wingbeats on an elegant spiral, as smoke in a test chamber might circle an airfoil. It was breathtaking, as was the sensation of cool water-without-water on his skin where he had left his helm retracted and his faceplate open to show they came in peace.

The mist was their friend, he thought, as they came out of it--Tristen in armor just as white, now in the lead. Mallory was on his left, Gavin's white wings fanned from one shoulder like an improbable headdress. Samael was on his right, a black coat of beetle shell flaring about his calves like an animated gunslinger's, transparent enough that Tristen could glimpse landscape through his shoulders.

As the clouds thinned, they came up between black, hunch-shouldered shapes working in the fields that clung to each wall of the valley. People began to straighten from their toil, turn, and stare. It was novel to watch, because the residents stood at obtuse angles to the road, as if the steep valley walls were perfectly level and the rice paddies that covered them were on terraces. Around the ankles of the black-clad farmers, Tristen saw the ripple and splash of fins as fish thrashed away from the waders.

Tilapia. An ancient technique, adapted from Old Earth: cofarming the fish with the rice. Tristen smiled.

And kept smiling, though he realized as the farmers began to draw together, assemble, and walk out of the water that what rippled that water was not exclusively fish. However breathtaking the mist, the topography, the ranks of silent agricultural workers were, none of it was as breathtaking as the bronze-black serpents, creamy-bellied, that slipped from the rice paddies to follow. Tristen caught his breath. Each six meters in length, as large around as a man's thigh, the snakes were the colors of black pearls and butter.

Sliding across the earth, they seemed small-headed, inoffensive, their eyes like black star sapphires suffused with a silvery overlay of light. Tristen only knew the serpents for what they were because, here and there, one reared up and opened its infamous hood like a flower on an arm-thick stem.

"Cobras," Samael said.

"The Go-backs are snake handlers," Mallory said. "They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

"They're Exalt." Gavin fanned his wings again, stiff pinions rasping against Mallory's hair. "What's a little snake neurotoxin?"

"Can't you see?" Tristen said. "The snakes are Exalt, too."

The serpents in question braided and rebraided themselves across the mossy earth and the road like some animate, sapient memory of water. Tristen watched as one farmer and another paused to stroke the snakes, which seemed to take no notice. He reached out and opened his hand.

If he expected a serpent to flow up under it, pleased like a cat to be stroked, no such thing happened. Instead, the snakes surrounded them, intertwining in a plaited circle ten meters in diameter. A ring of farmers stopped just beyond it. However they dressed, and despite being unarmed, they carried themselves with a light-footed straightness that told Tristen he would not care to fight them. And he certainly would not care to fight them all at once, attended by their familiar serpents.

"Hello," he said, and the cobras rose as one, swaying on every side, ribs spreading wide to flare each hood behind a small, smooth head that could not have seemed less threatening until they rose in display. Tristen had seen pit vipers and other venomous snakes--they tended to be heavily jowled, and look savage. The cobras needed no menace by design until they chose to threaten.

"Hello," one of the farmers answered. A woman's voice, the timbre so close to familiar that it made him shudder, though the tone and the phrasing were wrong. Still, his open hand had half reached out, daring the cobras' hiss, before he pulled it back. Her face lay hidden in her black cowled work shirt, but she was obviously the leader. Nothing happens by accident, and so he already suspected what her response would be when he touched the control on his helm and retracted it back into the armor.

She lifted calloused hands and hooked the cowl back with her thumbs. She was fair, as fair as her mother, though not so pale as her father. Her hair was goldenblond, tending to ringlets, her features fine and regular, the pale skin reddened across her cheekbones from work in a high-UV environment.

And yes, he knew her face.

It is not her, he told himself, but that could not stop the rush of neurochemicals that flooded his brain, sent him soaring on a wave of purely incandescent emotion he could not begin to put into words.

It was not her. Not her mind. Not her soul, if you subscribed to the philosophy of souls. But her body, her flesh. His flesh, which theology said should concern him.

It did not matter who dwelt in her, he told himself with bitter sarcasm. What mattered was that his DNA lived on, his genetic potential. The consciousness inhabiting the shell made no difference. She could breed him grandchildren no matter who lived in her head.

"I am Dorcas," she said. "Welcome to our Heaven, Tristen Conn."

Whatever crossed his face, Mallory read it. And laid a hand on Tristen's elbow in silent, supportive questioning.

The leader of the farmers read it, too. "She died when you were young."

Tristen caught himself before he nodded. One could give away so much to fakirs, driven just by the human reflex to confirm communication. Instead, he fought against and mastered the reflex to swallow. I have never been young.

"How do you know my name?" Better than to admit that she should know his name. But the person who should was not Dorcas, though it was Dorcas who wore her body now.

"You are not exactly unknown, Prince Tristen. You will accompany us."

Her tone made no allowance for argument. She touched her hair. The cobras swayed between them. The circle grew no tighter. And time stretched weary and sharp-edged between them--the few seconds of this conversation, and the gulf of years behind.

In the house of dust, roll yourself in ashes.

Scripture was comforting in direct proportion to its bitterness upon the tongue.

Tristen shook his head. Mallory touched him again, long fingers curving around his armored biceps. Tristen opened his mouth and closed it, opened his mouth once more.

"Tristen?"

"Her name was Sparrow," Tristen said, eventually, because he had to say something. "Before she died, she was my daughter."