Chill

16 blackest kinslaughter

Gavin was ready, even expectant, when Tristen dropped away beneath him like a splash of falling water. He dared not close his talons hard--they might pierce the Prince's armor--and so he could not ease Tristen's fall. But he could spread his wings, cup air, and beat up out of the writhing mass of black-and-cream serpents that swallowed the fallen knight. The swarm of cobras heaved, shuddering, so Gavin knew that, under their weight, Tristen convulsed from the venom.

The basilisk hovered, churning air, and extended his neck to give vent to the hiss of a snake ten times his size. He would have done it alone, but Mallory stepped up beside him, an ally suddenly terrible with snapping eyes and a cloud of storm-black hair.

"Priestess," Mallory said, "Lady of the Edenites. Call back your creatures, or this necromancer will see to it that nothing here leaves this Heaven alive."

Dorcas remained before them, impassive as a queen, hands at her sides in the folds of her gown. Gavin reared back, crest flaring. "I'd listen to the wizard if I were you, Lady."

She cocked her head, seeming fearless. "By whose authority do you speak, familiar beast?"

"By my own," Gavin said. "By the authority of light."

A thin crack, only. The barest sliver of vision, enough that he caught a glimpse of her face, her form, as something other than a sensory shadow. Enough to let slip a sizzling fragment of light and smoke the dais between her feet.

He'd hoped to make her yelp and scuttle back. Instead, a serpent lunged for him. He felt it coming, the machined whisk of scales on scales, the nigh-invisible speed of fangs that could slice armor like butter. Gavin sideslipped, cranked his head around, and sizzled it in midstrike. He flapped up through air threaded with the rankness of burning mechanicals as the cobra thumped limply back among the bodies of its brethren draped over Tristen's seizing form.

My Prince, Gavin thought, I seriously question your judgment.

"The wizard meant it," Gavin said to Dorcas. "Call them off."

Her throat worked as she swallowed. He felt the way the atmosphere flexed around it, the accelerating beat of her heart. But neither her gestures nor her stance betrayed fear.

"Do you disregard your master's command so easily?"

"He is not my master," Gavin replied. He felt Samael behind him, closing up the gap between. Mallory stepped forward, graceful and martial as a cat, body surrendered for the moment to the control of some long-dead fighter. The warding ring of serpents had collapsed; nothing would hold Mallory back now.

"This is your third warning," Mallory said, as if Gavin and the necromancer spoke from one mind.

Her chin lifted. "Very well," she said, and raised her hand again.

The cobras rose with it, as if on marionette strings--an alien and unified motion. They swayed together, forward and back like stalks of wheat tossed in a circulation current, and flowed back to pool, hissing, around Dorcas's feet.

Dorcas shrugged as if it were all the same to her. "We have done what was needful, in any case. I will have refreshments brought, and you may stay with him for the time being. Or, if you prefer to leave him and continue on your quest--which I understand to have been of some urgency--we will make arrangements to allow you to pass beyond our lands. If you remain, and if he emerges from his trial, we shall discuss this further."

Dorcas had already turned and was taking the first step away when Mallory interrupted. "If he emerges from his trial?"

The priestess paused. "Many choose not to, having faced what awaits them."

Gavin backwinged to settle on Mallory's shoulder and felt Mallory bear up under it. He would have preferred to drop by Tristen's side and give the stricken First Mate his closer attention, but he did not feel that this was the time to sacrifice the advantage of height.

"Choose?" Mallory said.

At Samael's mismatched feet, Tristen convulsed again, a long, shocking extension of his legs and spine. Samael crouched, his immaterial hands passing through Tristen's armor as if it were the hologram.

Dorcas smiled. "Of course," she said. "We are the Woodsmen of the World, we Edenites. We are not executioners. We are only followers of the true path. We are not God. We cannot know a man's heart: that is between himself and what is divine. Whose judgment do you think he faces, if not his own?"

She stared down at them for a moment, but Gavin pointedly turned his head away. It didn't matter. He wasn't watching her with his eyes, but the message was unmistakable. A moment later, Dorcas raised her hood and stepped away, vanishing among the shapes of her followers.

"He's alive," Samael said from the earthen floor, his hands still buried in Tristen's chest, flakes of unidentifiable substances swirling where the bones of his wrists should be. "But that's one hell of an inducer virus. Psychotropic nanotoxin."

"Inducer virus?" Mallory asked. "What's it induce? Not a ghost personality?"

The Angel of Biosystems shook his head. "To a first approximation, I'd say it's just about the opposite. It's a tailored memory trigger, with an autoextinction function."

Gavin flipped his wingtips one over the other, a tense scissoring that left him feeling no more comfortable. Around them, the Go-backs had withdrawn to the outside walls of the pavilion, but they were still present--and observing. "So you're saying, what, it inhibits his colony's life-extending functions? He's about to crumble into the dust of a Mean five hundred years dead?"

"No," Samael said. "I'm saying it makes it possible for him to wish himself dead."

A pause for the sharing of worried glances followed. Samael drew back his hands, wiping them on immaterial trousers. "She wasn't lying."

"Yeah," Mallory said. "We gathered that. What now?"

"Go on without me," Gavin said. "The two of you. I'll wait here with the First Mate. You keep tracking Arianrhod, and we'll catch up when Tristen is recovered."

"If he recovers," Mallory said gently. "No. Too risky.

I can't fight Arianrhod, birdy. And Samael certainly can't, in his current condition."

The necromancer glanced apologetically at the angel; the angel dismissed it with a hands-spread shrug of acceptance.

"It's only the truth. We need you, Gavin. And we need Prince Tristen."

"So what are we going to do?"

One-handed, Mallory gentled the basilisk's wing, then scratched under his crest. Gavin lifted the feathers to allow better access, stretching into the caress. "We're going to wait," the necromancer said.

Every breath Tristen drew was one less, Gavin told himself, that they had to worry about. One breath closer to survival. One breath closer to resuming their quest.

One breath further behind Arianrhod.

Dozens of cobra fangs pierced armor, pierced skin, punctured flesh, and left their venom in Tristen's blood. There were colonies in the venom, and the colonies attacked his symbiont as the venom attacked his central nervous system.

Summoning the memory of the scent of lemon blossoms.

Lemon blossoms, and the brush of a cold wind across his neck. The smell--sugary, thick, not really like lemons at all--still made his stomach clench. Not nausea, but the salient memory of hunger.

There were some lean times then. As there would be lean times now.

Tristen knew, with the part of his brain that knew such things, that he had fallen to the carpets in the pavilion, that a hissing ring of cobras surrounded him. But all he felt was the chill breeze, the scent of the lemon tree, the hunger, the emotional pressure of Aefre at his left side and Sparrow beyond her, on her left--and the tension of a troop intent on battle, on the morn of revolution. It was not reliving, exactly. There was no surprise in what he experienced, just the event horizon of inevitability as he recognized where he was and what he recollected.

His horror was all at knowing in advance.

Aefre had been so golden, with her lion-tawny hair and her eagle-tawny gaze. Hazel, he supposed the color was called--but tawny was the right word, for everything about her should be defined in terms of predators. Her armor was golden, too, not the gold of metal but the gold of wheat, and so her skin would have been if not for the Exalt stain rendering it a pollen-dusted blue. The sword at her hip gleamed with care and use, and he had wanted to lean over and kiss the stern line between her eyebrows away. But one did not kiss a general before the assembled troops.

She was Alasdair Conn's eldest daughter, the Princess of the Jacob's Ladder. She was both fierce and beautiful, and why she'd chosen him, he'd never know.

Too much memory there. Memory was not, never had been, Tristen's friend. Most especially not when his great-granddaughter had tricked him into the imprisonment that Perceval and Rien (also his great-granddaughter, though he had not known it then) had so recently freed him from.

Tristen had survived by refusing to experience. By remembering those days through his symbiont, the machine memory where what had occurred was cool and distant and safely scrubbed.

Gavin was correct. Knowledge was not identity.

What cannot be cured must be endured, and Tristen excelled at enduring. But as his perfect memory led him from Rule at the vanguard of an army, he was not certain he could endure this.

They had traveled in close quarters and swiftly--the lifts and commuter shafts still worked, in those days, and in wartime they burned consumables on transports. So they packed in like marines cramped in anchores, waiting for the hatches to spring open and the killing to begin. He and Sparrow and Aefre had been separated in the transports--commanders do not travel together--but there was comm contact, and even though he heard nothing more over the comms than he should--that being terse, coded orders--some of those orders were in Aefre's voice, or Sparrow's.

The arguments were long over, passed through the night before: "I'm going," Sparrow had said. "Those are the Commodore's orders. If we don't hold the world together, no one will."

Tristen had met Aefre's eyes over Sparrow's shoulder and frowned. But Aefre had tipped her head from side to side in a kind of nod that wasn't.

"I'm not fighting for Alasdair," Sparrow continued. "I'm fighting because the alternative is doing nothing, and that will not halt our destruction."

"And if the Go-backs are right?" Aefre said. "And if your General disagrees with your Commodore, what then?"

Tristen shook his head. "Even if they are right, we have no means by which to implement their plan. We have no time in which to bring them to see reason." He touched the hilt of his unblade, trusting his meaning was plain. "War," he said to his wife, "is uncomplicated."

Aefre had frowned at him, consideringly, then nodded. "All right," she said. "I hate complications. We'll fight."

So Tristen had marched with the others and failed with the others. They met the Go-back army on the banks of the River and beat them back as effortlessly as he had foreseen. In only hours, he watched Aefre's shoulders as she went to accept the surrender of their leaders. He watched them cut her down, too, in contravention of truce, one of the Go-backs triggering a suicide weapon that vaporized himself, Aefre, and two bystanders.

They must have thought they could fight him, that the heart and skill would go out of Rule's soldiers with the death of their General.

Tristen and Sparrow had seen to it that they learned the error of their thought. When he returned to Rule--Sparrow by his side, still carrying Mirth, the blade Aefre had left with her when she went to parley--blossoms rained down on their heads again.

And that was not the worst of his failures of his daughter.

No, he thought, and wondered if it would be his last thought. He could not claim he did not deserve her justice.

"What can his crime have been, to deserve such punishment?" Mallory mused--a voice out of the silence and cool darkness that enveloped Tristen.

"Blackest kinslaughter," Tristen said, and opened his eyes to find the ghost of an angel leaning over him. "Guilty, of course. Don't be an idiot."

Samael jerked back, which was just as well, as Tristen would have sat up through him. Instead, he found himself nose to nose with the angel, specks and bits of things filling up his vision, until the angel retreated--and Tristen arose. He glanced down the white length of his armor, seeing where the paired holes smeared about with dark blue pierced it. They would heal, given time. The colony in the armor would see to it. The armor would be good as new.

Unlike Tristen.

"Where's Dorcas?" Tristen heaved himself to a crouch, rocking his feet under him, and stood. Not wobbly at all, which surprised him. He felt clean and strong and a little attenuated, as if with hunger. Sharpset and ready to hunt.

Purged. That was the word he was groping after.

Samael stood up beside him, rising like a train of smoke. "She's over there. Somewhere."

The bitter curve of the angel's lips said it all. Samael knew which one of the coarse-clothed figures she was, knew exactly. But it was polite to pretend otherwise, unless Tristen ordered him specifically to abrogate that politeness.

When he gestured, the curve of his arm led Tristen's eye to Mallory and Gavin, huddled beside an upright post, their attention obviously turned inward. "They didn't go on?"

"They thought they needed you," Samael said with a shrug.

"They may not get me," Tristen said. "I think I've been convicted of crimes against humanity."

"You had a tough judge," Samael said. "It's a hard sort of existence. Come on; I'll walk to the gallows with you."

Tristen had been only half kidding. Samael's expression hinted that the angel had the other half. Tristen guessed that added up to one complete sense of humor between them. Serious or not, they walked together toward the cluster of three or four farmers by the pavilion wall.

The sense of lightness, of being constructed of something dry and strong, did not leave him. If anything, it increased, as if the soil under his boot were pushing him forward with each step.

"Dorcas," Tristen said. He waited while she turned to him, watched the dark amber strands escape around her face as she pushed back her hood. "I have fulfilled my part of the bargain."

Her mouth did a funny thing, very unlike any expression of his daughter's. He couldn't read it as either relief or approbation, and he didn't know anything else it might be. It didn't last long before her expression settled back to impassivity. "I see that you have. And what was the verdict, Prince Tristen?"

"Guilty," he offered. "As you knew it would be. Guilty of kinslaughter--by negligence and recklessness. Guilty of moral cowardice and the failure to protect all I should have held sacred. And certainly I am culpable in the deaths of my wife and daughter."

For all it was the answer he would have expected her to want, it did not seem to satisfy her. "And yet you stand before me. How then has justice been served?"

He thought of darkness, humid warmth, the blinding, incessant reek of ammonia. He folded his fingers closed against wet palms. "Death is not the only justice. I paid for my sins before you met me, Lady of the Edenites. I am well acquainted with my monstrosities. And I have long since learned to live with them, which is harder."

From the manner in which she stared down the bridge of her nose at him, he thought she might disagree. He braced for her word to break their bargain, and the wasteful carnage that must follow.

But at last she drew in a breath and let it out again on a sigh, and folded her arms before her. "Good enough," she said, "if unsatisfying."

Tristen felt Mallory and Gavin at his shoulder. He didn't feel Samael, but he could not imagine that the angel was not there. It gave him a little strength to press forward. "You know that Sparrow Conn, whose form you wear, was my daughter."

Dorcas nodded. "So you gave me to understand."

He let his fingers cup Mirth's pommel, but did not grip the hilt, nor move to draw the blade. The cool, resilient polymer of the blade's handle conformed to his touch. He could imagine how his fingers would sink into the grips, how the sword would become an extension of his hand.

Once upon a time, he would have found comfort in that. He would have been eager to draw the blade. He would have looked forward to the carnage and displays of prowess that followed, the song of battle along his nerves.

But that man was dead, and he realized with a shock that he did not miss the bastard.

The sword's awareness stirred, pushing against the palm of his hand like a questing cat. The blade was hungry, after the manner of blades. But that did not mean that he had to feed it.

Tristen said, "If you are not she, why do you crave her vengeance so badly?"

"Your misguidance led to her death," Dorcas said. She lowered her voice. "And her death led to my life in this shell far from the embrace of Mother Gaia, and that is a burden with which I would rather not be troubled. How do you answer to that, Tristen Conn?"

"I failed you," he said, amazed that the deep sting in his chest was not shame or humiliation, but simple grief. Five hundred years to the death of the ego, he thought, and shook his head in bemusement. "I failed you as a father, as a fellow soldier, and as the eldest member of the house of Rule."

"That was not me--"

"Whatever." And maybe there was a little of the man he had been in the interruption. But even a shed skin left its pattern behind. "If you are not her, then I am not him. And as you have already determined that I am accountable for his crimes against her, then by God you will listen to my accounting."

It drew her up, and brought the lingering three or four Go-backs hurrying forward to flank her with their support. Tristen imagined the high priestess of the Edenites was unused to being placed off her balance. Somewhere behind Tristen were Mallory, Samael, and Gavin. For the time being, he would pretend they could not see him.

He unclipped Mirth's sheath from his belt and balanced the sword across his palms. "There's half a bargain to be sealed."

He knew he hadn't imagined the quirk of her lips. "So there is." She reached out, but he held the blade back for a moment.

"There was more in your venom than hallucinogens, wasn't there?"

"An inducer virus," she agreed. "Are you feeling it?"

Light, strong, like something woven out of carbon fiber and high-end ceramics. As if his mind rode the chassis of a synbiote, and not his own body at all. It made him feel as ungrounded as it did capable.

Mallory brushed his elbow. Tristen ignored it.

"Behavioral controls?"

"Not as such. But if you had really believed you deserved death, it would have carried out the sentence."

"Of course," he said. "Why leave such things to chance?"

The smile they shared was not what he would have expected, but it was satisfying. When she lifted her palms, he laid the blade across them, flat as a tray.

"Draw it," he said, stepping backward to give her room.

Whatever knowledge and elements of personality were earthed in the brain, the body had an intelligence of its own. And the body of Sparrow Conn had not forgotten how to handle a weapon.

With one smooth extension, she skinned the blade.

Tristen held his breath, feeling his companions behind him, the way Mallory edged still closer. The necromancer's shoulder brushed Tristen's armor, and the armor transmitted that sensation to his arm.

Dorcas weighed Mirth in her hand as effortlessly as if it were an unblade. She tilted her head to squint its length and frowned. "After all that, you deliver me your weapon?"

"If I'm not a harsh enough judge of myself, who better to make up the deficit?"

When she looked up at him over the blade, he found himself hard-pressed not to see her mother in her hazel eyes. Smeared reflections of her features blurred along the length of the sword. She turned it in her hand, let it glide back along her forearm and beyond. "I am not an executioner."

"I was," he said. "My father's dog, at first because I believed in him, as he had raised me to. Then, after Aefre died and Alasdair turned his attentions on Arianrhod, your antecedent had the sense to remove herself from the family, out of grief and because it was easier than opposing him. If I had kept my granddaughter away from my father, Sparrow might never have left Rule at all."

He sighed. Arianrhod was a question all her own. It was not as if anyone had ever been able to control her. "And then when your antecedent died in Engine"--in the Go-back riots, during Caitlin and her sisters' attempt to wrest control of the world from Alasdair, but now did not seem the most exemplary time to mention that--"if I had been with her, if I had stood up with her, she might be living still."

Dorcas's eyebrow raised, but he did not feel guilt in saying it. She might inhabit Sparrow's body now, but the scarce resource had historically been allocations for memory, not resurrected flesh. People were easy to make. There were always more dead than remnants to fill them with.

Dorcas said, "You were not the brother who went to war for him against Cecelia's daughters. You are not the brother whose blade cut Cynric's head from her shoulders."

"Nor did I join them in rebellion," Tristen said. "Think of all the evil I might have averted had I cast down my father then. Apathy is no excuse. Nor is a taste for combat."

She smiled and allowed Mirth to glide back into its sheath. "You were terrifying then."

"You remember?"

"I wasn't an Edenite during the Moving Times, Tristen Conn," she said. "Go-backs don't store their data, or accept colonies." She paused, ironically. "Until now, anyway. I served under your wife. I was a soldier. Do you know what we called you?"

Her hand extended, the sword laid across it. Offering. Slowly, he reached out and lifted it from her palm. Her face remained impassive, but a long chill ran up her spine when the sword left her grasp, so he knew it troubled her. He wondered what the sword had said to her, if indeed it had spoken at all.

Of course he remembered. There had been political cartoons, the white ruff, fangs, stripes, talons. The devil eyes. He'd nursed a little secret pride about it, then.

"Tristen Tiger," he said.

"The man-eater. The tame killer. You do remember." He touched his temple. The colony remembered for him.

"Tristen Tiger would not have survived the venom, you know. I think perhaps you have changed more than I have." She shrugged and spread her hands. "Half a millennium is a long time to live within a monster."

It hadn't been that long. Or rather, he had indeed lived that long, but it was only in the years he'd passed pent up in a dungeon of Ariane's devising, living in filth, that he had come to realize he had been a monster, after all.

A thousand things crowded his mouth, none of them willing to be refined into sensibility. So, instead, he clipped Mirth to his belt and said, "I am glad you've found peace. Even if you are not the woman you were."

"And I am glad you are not the man you were. And I hope you find peace as well, before too much longer." She pursed her lips, craning her neck to see over his shoulder to Samael and Mallory--and Gavin as well. She paused, seeming puzzled, and glanced down at her fingers, which flexed and stretched as if she were absently working out a cramp.

Recollecting herself, she continued. "You've passed the test. We will guide you across our Heaven, and show you the fastest path to your destination."

"You know it?"

"We built it," she said. His eyes must have widened with the surprise and disbelief he felt, because she smirked--turning her head to include Mallory and Samael in its arc--and said, "What did you think the Go-backs were, exactly, Tristen Tiger?"

Tristen glanced at Mallory; the necromancer nodded. Not that it mattered--he suspected Dorcas was interested in his opinion, not that of his companions.

He could have given her the snap answer, the dismissal. And maybe he would have, not too long gone by. To alienate the enemy was a useful defense. But he thought now of ancient history, the thin, perfect memories of his colony predominating over the richer, chemical, organic ones. They had been Engineers, convinced that the best means of survival was to cannibalize what could be saved of the world and return to Earth in a smaller, stripped-down vessel, leaving behind everything designed for colonization and terraforming as useless ballast. Many of them had also been heretics of another stripe: they had believed in the perfection of the human form as a reflection of God's will, and had refused inoculation with Cynric's then newly invented colonies, or any physical augmentation whatsoever.

Alasdair Conn, the Commodore, had opposed them.

Alasdair had believed passionately in the goals and edicts of the Builders: that the purpose of God's creation in Man was to confront harsh environments, to master them, to evolve to meet any challenge. That the ultimate expression of faith was to subject one's self and one's offspring to ever harsher challenges, ensuring survival of the fittest through mortification of the flesh. Of all the species of God's creation, only man had the power to reshape himself in God's image, and Alasdair--whatever his other failings--had not been a hypocrite. A deeply religious man, as moral and spiritual leader of his people he had believed in that obligation with all his heart.

And, as Benedick had pointed out at the time, given conditions when the Builders left, there was no guarantee that Earth was any more able to support life than would be a smoking cinder.

Tristen--a dutiful son, and a dutiful soldier--had gone to war to drive the Go-backs from Engine. He had been doing what he was bid, and in every way that mattered to his father, he had succeeded. If Sparrow died in the war, well, that was the cost of selection. In any case, she'd already passed along her genes to Arianrhod, so it would be easy for Alasdair to fix the line. That the result had been Ariane, Alasdair's eventual murderer, gave Tristen a bitter little frisson of complicated pleasure--his own history with his great-granddaughter notwithstanding.

Whatever Tristen had been about to mouth, unthinking, died upon his tongue. He eased his shoulders in his armor, feeling it resist and settle as he pushed against the gel interior.

"I think you were right," he said.

Dorcas led them through the Heaven like a woman showing them around her house. The snakes and sycophants had mostly dispersed, returning to their tasks in the near-vertical rice paddies, and Mallory came up to walk beside them, Samael trailing like a wisp of smoke behind. Dorcas acknowledged Mallory with a nod, but otherwise continued to speak chiefly to Tristen. To judge by smirk alone, Mallory was more amused than offended.

"Soothe my curiosity," Tristen said. "Why in the world are you willing to help us?"

"Is it not the role of a dutiful daughter?" She must have seen his wince, because she looked away, as if scanning the moss-draped boughs, and gave him a moment to recollect himself. Neither Sparrow nor Aefre had ever had need of such social manners, so the gesture carried with it a hard freight of reminder that Dorcas was not Sparrow.

Again.

Tristen was still working to swallow that when she said, "The reason for our existence as a sect is gone, you know. We are under way again. A solution has been implemented, and in any case, we no longer have the option of abandoning the world and returning home. We have been infected with your symbiont, against our wills; the purity of our form is compromised."

Tristen was tempted to comment on the fact that Dorcas herself had enjoyed the benefits of her symbiont for the last five hundred years, without apparent ill effect to her rise among her church--but under the circumstances he considered the wisdom of discretion and bit his tongue.

She continued, "Which means that if we are to survive in the world to come, we must make some choices. Assuming we live to reach a planetfall, it's likely to take all of us working together. And toward that end, I can think of worse allies than the world's First Mate." She paused. "So, to put it in plain terms, you have passed my test. And whatever I have done today to earn your enmity, I hope that it will be balanced against the aid I offer now."

"I see," he said. "You will understand if I make no promises?"

She smiled and glanced aside. "What will you do with Arianrhod when you find her?"

"Bring her to justice," Tristen said. Unable to resist, he raised his eyebrows and added, "You know all about that."

Maybe it was too early to tease her--though after all, she had started it. Or maybe not, because the sharp glance she gave him modulated smoothly from irritation to amusement. Dorcas, Tristen suspected, was a person who took quiet pride in not becoming irritated.

She said, "I don't suppose you know where you're going?"

Gavin's long neck rose above Mallory's frizzy curls. "South," he said. "Into the belly of the beast."

Dorcas chuckled. "It's possible you speak truer than you know. I can get you to the bottom of the world, to the Broken Holdes. Can you find your way from there?"

"Inasmuch as we know where we are going," Tristen said. "Something down there has interfered with the world-angel's sensory apparatus, and we are only guessing based on another tracking party's information that her destination is somewhere in the null patch." He would not tell her, just now, how long it had been since his team had had contact with Benedick and Chelsea, or with Nova and Perceval.

"The null patch," Dorcas echoed. "You really have no idea what lives there?"

Samael mimicked a few quick strides and came up between them. "You do?"

"We know all sorts of things," Dorcas said. "Many of us--we were Engineers, remember? After I was a soldier, I became an Engineer, inspired by the memory of Hero Ng." She lowered her voice and spoke conspiratorially. "Some of us are more cynical than others when it comes to the question of the will of God."

Tristen glanced at Samael, at Gavin, at Mallory--each by turn. All three avoided his gaze. "Some of us learned our cynicism the hard way," he replied. "So what's in the null zone?"

"Cynric's last weapon," she said. "A captive monster. A demon so terrible that, after she captured it, Captain Gerald concealed its existence from all but a few. When Alasdair became Commodore after him, Alasdair hid it even from his children, for fear of what they would do with the information."

"For fear of what he'd made them, you mean."

She smiled. "Perhaps that, as well. In any case, Cynric caught two of them. One she took apart, and made things of the pieces. The other she kept captive, held in reserve."

"She used it," Gavin said, craning his neck around to stare at Samael. "Do you really claim no knowledge, Poison Angel, of what it was your mistress wrought?"

"My memory is incomplete," Samael said drily. "Do enlighten us."

Tristen wondered if the basilisk's glance at Dorcas was meant as a request for permission. She made no move to interrupt, and he continued, "She built on it, the way she built on everything she touched, everything she knew. As Dorcas said, she created it a weapon."

"Something to fight our father," Tristen said. "Well, I guess if anyone would remember that--"

Gavin flipped his wings, tail coiling and uncoiling along Mallory's spine so that Tristen wondered what social discomfort looked like on a power tool.

"Those memories are not mine," Gavin said. "And they are ... also incomplete. So you have a route that will take us there, My Lady of the Edenites?"

"We have more than that," she said. "We have regained some limited control of the world's musculature. I can put you there."

In unison, Mallory and Samael said, "Musculature?" which made Tristen feel somewhat more comfortable in his own ignorance.

Dorcas pressed her palms to her eyes. "By the sacred spiral, people. Do you know how the world generates its electricity?"

Silence answered her.

She sighed. Then her hands began to move animatedly as she explained. "It's not just the reactors or the solar panels. I'll give you a hint. The exterior of the world is sheathed in self-healing carbon nanotube 'muscle' that can be used to move portions of the structure around relative to one another."

"That's ingenious," Samael said.

"It's not rocket science." Her lips twisted. "Actually, I guess after a fashion, it is. When not in operation, the musculature uses flex and inertial effects to generate electricity. Thereby"--she snapped her fingers--"keeping the lights on. And the temperature constant, though under the current circumstances I wouldn't be surprised if there are failures on that front."

Tristen blinked, trying to integrate the scientist now emerging with the autocratic priestess he'd thought he was dealing with.

Mallory came to the rescue. "It is our information that there have been failures, some catastrophic. The angel and Engineering were working to contain them when we entered your Heaven. It is possible that by now they've been redressed."

"Your confidence in your masters is touching."

Tristen said, "One thing that troubles me still, Dorcas. When we came in, we saw scrape marks in the air lock. As if you had been discarding trash."

She made a moue. "Sacrifices," she said. "Some believe in appeasing the Enemy."

"Oh," he said. "I see." Desperate for a change of topic, he added, "When do we reach your mode of transport, then?"

"We're in it," Dorcas said. "And in fact, if you look up ahead, you'll see we're almost there."

Tristen craned his neck. Through the tunnel of bowering trees, he glimpsed the hard, clean oval of an air lock. "We're moving."

"Relative to the rest of the world, anyway," she said. She paused, one hand hovering over a DNA lock. She palmed it and the door slid aside, revealing a standard barren cubicle.

It crossed Tristen's mind to imagine that she might very well just decoy them inside to space them, but if that happened, it wasn't as if he and Mallory couldn't survive the Enemy's embrace for a few moments.

He turned to Dorcas and said, "Thank you. If we survive this--"

"You'll be in touch," she said, and touched the armor over his right arm. She met his eyes. "Go with luck. I think you will be sad a long time, Tristen Tiger. But I hope not too sad."

When they passed through the air lock and the interior door sealed across Dorcas's face, Gavin found himself prey to emotions too complex by half for a simple power tool. Grief, regret, guilt, resignation.

These were not his emotions. His emotions currently encompassed concerned anticipation at what they might find ahead, irritation at the delay, vulture worry. The others--the indescribable ones, the painful ones--he knew better than to try to own them. They belonged to someone else, someone to whom he bore no more resemblance than Nova did to Rien. Than Dorcas did to Sparrow. But in conjunction with that knowledge came the uncomfortable corollary: whatever he had behind him had left traces.

As shields glided up over the external windows before him, he observed the latticework architecture scrolling past on all sides and the looming wall of their destination before them. It was an old world, scarred and scorched, blasted bright by radiation and by particles in the nebula. Made clean and new. But inside, so much history, so much betrayal, and so many twisted loyalties.

He wondered if Dorcas were the tabula rasa she pretended.

Tristen seemed impassive, leading Gavin to suspect that his internal turmoil mirrored Gavin's own. Gavin was not prey to the irrational hormonal urges of meat--a kindness for which he thanked his makers--but he was not without feelings. Early researchers had determined that there was no intelligence without desire, and had proven the dispassionate artificial brain to be a wishful construct of twentieth-century myth. Synbiotic emotion might be chilly and distant by human standards, but it existed. Reason was not possible in its absence.

Gavin felt for Tristen, and only part of that was his program for empathy. Because as sequestered memory cascades continued triggering, he remembered what Sparrow had meant to Cynric. Sparrow was not merely the daughter of Cynric's heart--Cynric, like Perceval, had chosen to remain fallow--but a daughter of her own creation, as well. There were secrets in Sparrow's bloodline, data and talents that Cynric the Sorceress had selected for and machined into the genome.

Then she had hidden them from Gavin, choosing to forget, when she had also chosen to die by her brother Benedick's hand.

Gavin felt her back there now like a shadow over his shoulder, a person he didn't know but somehow remembered snatches of. He thought she had been a strange and manipulative person, even by the standards of the Conn family, and that she had had agendas and obligations that she had never shared with anyone--not Caithness, not Caitlin, and she certainly had not passed them on to him.

There was no doubt in his mind that the resurrection of Sparrow's body in service of a slain Engineer was not an accident. And it made him wonder, then, how Sparrow had died that her body was preserved, but there had been no backup of her mind--not even so much as a seed personality--so soon after the Moving Times, when such technology was still common.

Something must have left her damaged enough that her colony's memory failed. And perhaps she had made a core seed, and it had been purged--either to make a place for some fragment of the world-angel, or in the service of intentional murder.

Despite the value of hindsight--perhaps especially in hindsight--Gavin found he did not much like Cynric. Or even her memory. And yet these were her fond feelings for Sparrow infecting him.

As the exterior air lock cycled, the basilisk hunkered on Mallory's shoulder and kept his own counsel.

What stood revealed beyond seemed innocuous enough. Gavin identified a garden, chestnut trees made to seem venerable, mossy stones walling a yard. The corner of a building framed one side of the prospect, and as they emerged cautiously from the air lock, Gavin's senses informed him that the space was little more than an acre and a half in area, a tiny Heaven if it qualified as a Heaven at all. The trees were still healing, fat cracks twisting along their boles in some places, but there was some damage that would take years to mend. Heavy shelf mushrooms lay crushed at their bases, and once they were clear of the lock it became evident that the stones forming the back side of the building had tumbled into a heap.

The facade still stood on the near side, however, hollow-eyed and showing the foliage behind it through the windows. Around the footings, colored shards sparkled against grass, light reflecting from hard-edged splinters.

Tristen unsealed his helm and jolted forward, nearly running, Samael at his heels. Mallory advanced more cautiously, so Gavin had only to fan his wings for balance.

Gavin said, "It's a chapel."

"It's mined stone," Tristen corrected, dropping to his knees beside it. "Mined stone."

"From Earth?" Gavin asked. He flapped hard, kicking off Mallory's shoulder, and flew up to circle the top of the chapel wall. He could see chisel marks, it was true, though it was common enough to fake those--but when he landed and his claws scraped rock, he felt the deadness of it, the internal weight, and knew that no colony had ever touched this stuff. "It came off a planet?"

"Can you imagine how much energy that cost?" Mallory's voice had enough awe in it that Gavin snaked his head over the edge to look down, but the necromancer had merely paused beside Tristen and knelt there, running long fingers through the shaggy grass. "Ow!"

"Careful," Gavin said helpfully. "Broken glass is sharp."

"I noticed," Mallory said, frowning at blue-spotted fingers. "What's glass?"

"Fused silica," Gavin said. "Very hard. Very brittle."

"Very heavy," Samael commented, selecting a piece and running ghostly fingers through it. "The Builders put this here."

"It certainly got made before the world left the home system." Tristen reached out to touch the stone, his gauntlet slicking back from his fingers. He stroked the wall of the chapel with a reverential hesitancy, then grimaced at his fingers. "It feels like stone."

Mallory said, "No wonder the Go-backs had a means to get here."

"Indeed." His armor would have given him a sensory sphere as complete as Gavin's, but Tristen nevertheless glanced over his shoulder as if expecting to find somebody watching. He shook his head. "It's a little piece of what we were. It looks so ..."

"Primitive?" Gavin suggested.

"Fragile," Samael said. "Somebody should see if they can check in with Nova."

"I already tried," Tristen answered, as Gavin felt the attention of another colony tickle along the borders of his awareness. "Still no contact. Come on. We're on the clock."

"We're on the clock," Gavin agreed. "And something's coming."

The something was a familiar shaggy-humped outline bigger than a mastiff dog. As they came up on it, Tristen easily identified the mammoth calf he had insisted they free from its trap among the massive fig tree's roots. It waited for them by the far air lock, beyond a gap in the garden wall, its trunk raised as if it were scenting the air, its piggish eyes blinking through strands of coat.

"It followed me home," Samael said. "Can I keep it?"

Tristen shot the angel a scathing glance. "Tell me the truth. You don't actually know how that got here, how it got ahead of us. Or do you?"

"I don't," Samael answered, with every evidence of seriousness and sincerity--though an angel could not lie to his First Mate. Theoretically. "But it's Exalt--more than Exalt. I can feel the edges of its colony from here."

"That's what I sensed back at the chapel," Gavin agreed. "It's waiting for us."

"The world is weird," Tristen said, a catchphrase his mother had been fond of. "Let's go see what it wants, shall we?"

They picked their way toward the gap, Tristen in the lead with one hand on Mirth's hilt. He tried to move with grace, but now that his euphoria was fading he felt the stiffness in every limb, damage from the cobra venom that his colony had not yet restored.

Tristen paused a few steps from the calf and held out his other hand, fingers flattened to present as smooth a target as possible. The calf tapped his palm with its trunk, fingerlike nubbins moving on his palm. Warm, moist air huffed against his skin. "Hello," Tristen said.

The mammoth calf opened its mouth and said, "--"

Mallory blinked and turned toward it. He held out one hand. "Tristen."

"What was that sound?"

"A language," Mallory said. "The Language. Did you not understand it?" Perhaps--

"Yes," Tristen answered, knowing what it meant. Not knowing how he had understood it. "How do you know that?"

Mallory said, "I am full of dead men."

Oh.

The necromancer continued, "Job forty-one. Verses thirty-two and thirty-four. You know them."

"In my bones," Tristen agreed.

But he allowed Mallory to recite them. "He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear."

Samael, who had been standing silent, head cocked and staring, jerked himself upright like a badly managed puppet. "It's a key. Remember it."

"A key?" Tristen frowned at the angel, hard enough that his face found it uncomfortable. "A key to what?"

The angel spread his arms, lank, pale locks stirring as though his gesture made a wind. "That information has not yet been unlocked to my program," he said. "But I would wager the mammoth knows."

"Great," Gavin said. "What the hell are we going to do with a mammoth?"