Chill

19 take the world apart

Tristen wedged his gauntlet into a broken crevice of the nitrogen rock and let it support his weight. It held him in the truncated end of the corridor, even if the contact transmitted the grinding of the winches into his armor and from there to his bones.

His native senses weren't enough to pierce the nebula, even with the assistance of his symbiont, but the armor managed better, providing heat signatures and a schematic drawn from the pattern of the running lights. Though he'd never seen it with his own eyes, he knew what he was looking for. There had been diagrams, holograms, extensive discussions. Out there, steadily being drawn closer, was an enormous, almost incomprehensibly complex cage and, pinned in its center like a spider immobilized by a paralytic wasp, was the surviving member of the only alien species the Conn family had ever encountered that was not of their own creation.

Over his comm, he heard Mallory whisper--with patent awe, not the affected nonchalance Tristen would have expected--"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

The deeps stretched out before him, chilling his soul and leaving him quailing and courageless in their regard. Despite everything he knew about the darkness, Tristen could not prevent himself from straining his eyes, and eventually a shape loomed through the smoke, as he had known it would--a teardrop trelliswork of incomprehensible size, picked out like a tree wrapped in festival lights. And at the heart of the cage, spiked through with impaling bars, a lumpy crater-pocked oblong as mottled and dark as if its surface had been daubed and smeared by ashy paws.

If the flawed ice palace of the outer Broken Holdes had awed Tristen, the Leviathan was sheerly bewildering. He felt his lips move, but whatever prayer he mouthed never passed them, and he had no objective idea what he had meant to say. He licked his lips inside his helm, where no one could see, and steeled himself to go down and meet the devil in the dark.

The others arranged themselves against Gavin's netting around him, fingers linked through mesh, all peering into the darkness. Tristen didn't turn his head to regard them: his sensors told him everything he needed to know.

The Enemy was bottomless, and infinite, and he--Tristen Conn--was very small, and every sense and instinct told him he should stay safe in his cage.

This time when he spoke, it was loud enough for his own ears to hear, for the suit mikes to amplify and broadcast. "Benedick, Chelsea, Gavin. You'll engage the defenses and distract it. Mallory, I know this isn't your kind of fight. I trust you'll do what you can, and otherwise stay out of the way."

"And me?" said Samael.

"With me."

Beside Tristen, Mallory made a throat-clearing noise. "So now that we've enslaved this thing, mutilated it, and killed its family, we're going to kill it, too?"

Benedick looked over his armored shoulder at Mallory. "We're Conns," he said. "It's what we're good for."

Tristen winced, but the armor hid it.

"Gavin." Tristen wished he could somehow dry his sweating palms. The armor was slow in absorbing the moisture. "It's time to let us pass."

Jsutien seemed essentially unsurprised when Caitlin rounded on him. His chin came up, but his hands stayed relaxed on the console. She tried to bridle her anger, bring her frustration to manageable levels, but despite her best attempts to control it with her colony and will, the fury rose up like a standing interference pattern, a mass of static that threatened to drown out rational thought. She opened her mouth to speak, choked on her first sentence, and had to resort to her symbiont for additional chemical calm before she managed to get out a one-word accusation.

"Sabotage?"

Jsutien laced his fingers together and leaned back in his chair, but held her gaze shamelessly.

Caitlin advanced a step and tried again. "Sabotage, Astrogator? Is that what crippled my ship? My grandfather marooned us on purpose?"

Five hundred years ago, she soothed herself, but it was still her ship, and the outrage flared bright.

Finally, he lowered his eyes. "It wouldn't surprise me," he said. "But I have no personal knowledge that it was so."

She stared hard, but all his tells--respiration, perspiration, pulse--hinted that he was telling the truth. "It's ridiculous," she said, dropping into her own chair.

"It's fanatic," he replied. "It's an experiment in forced adaptation."

"The cost," she said, with a gesture that swept her battered engineering deck but extended, in intention, far beyond. Lives, material, effort. "What could be worth that? It's not rational."

The shake of Jsutien's head, the way he laced his fingers tiredly through Oliver's hair, made her think of when she had been a young woman and asked her father some question he found painfully naive. Jsutien wasn't dismissive and condescending as Alasdair had been, however; he just seemed weary and ill. "Faith is not rational. Do you know what a cathedral is, Chief Engineer?"

"A kind of church," she said. "A big church."

"A church that took centuries to build," he clarified. "And could cost hundreds of lives in the building. A church that represented an absolutely absurd investment for a medieval lord. And yet they got built anyway. For the glory of God."

"That's sick," she said.

The astrogator pressed the heels of both hands to his temples and squeezed, as if to press the ache back inside. He jerked his head to the tanks full of schematics lining the bulkhead. "So is this."

Perceval looked up from her study to find Nova standing before her. The angel could not have been there long, because Perceval had not been so far away as that--or had she? In any case, the angel did not appear impatient, and she had not yet made a gesture for Perceval's attention.

"Speak," Perceval said, smoothing her hands over the prickles on her scalp.

But the angel did not answer. She reached out as if to lay her hand against Perceval's, fingers overlapping and cradling her scalp, and then froze there, avatar rippling with waves of interference. "Nova?" Perceval said, rising.

Nova's eyes gaped blank and wide. "Run," she grated. But before Perceval could so much as step away from her chair, a wall of static--voices, cries, interference--crashed into her head.

As the cables draw you to the hive, at first you think to consume the creature who has come to you, and with her the splinter of enslaved entropy contained and strapped across her back. She is vermin, nothing more, and vermin are for destruction. She is frail and half dead already, a life-form so fragile she can't even survive the benign environment of the nebula. The sons you should have had would have been stronger even as kittens; this tiny creature could never even endure the benevolent winds of a balmy gas giant. It's an obscenity, the final degradation, that you have been infested by the spoor of such fragile parasites.

You would crush her--you are already opening yourself to destroy her--when something whispers to you, Stop.

Think, Leviathan.

She could be useful.

And though the hesitation comes from the infection that riddles you, you know that what it speaks makes sense.

You have been alone, purposeless, too long. But in your dreams you hold the power to change that. You will remake her, claim her. Rework her into something you can in truth call part of your pod.

It will be another vengeance on the vermin who have so wounded you.

As will their destruction.

You reach out, into the microbes you have made your own, so long, with such patience. They are poised there, usefully, having infiltrated the superstructure of the vermin's hive, having infected it as they infected you. You have bided so long, so patiently. Maneuvering by inches. The time for waiting is passed. Now, you will take their world apart.

Tristen dropped into emptiness as the world unraveled around him. He tumbled helplessly for an instant before he recovered his wits, tucked, controlled the spin, and emerged oriented enough to burn reaction mass and take command of his movements again. As he whirled to face the world and the others, a yielding and resilient mesh brushed him, snagged his armor, and stabilized him. It was the webwork extension of Gavin's wing, and it held Tristen steady as he watched the Broken Holdes recede, unweaving themselves before his eyes.

"Nova!" he said, but--as evidenced by a flare of gold-white light and the rapid slowing of the deconstruction, the angel was already present, and already at war. There was no subtlety now, no infiltration or counterinfiltration. Instead, bright arcs and spikes of material slammed around the horizon of the world, peeled away from more secured regions, colonies arcing and flashing as they exploded one against the others.

Something caught Tristen's wrist. He jerked inside the armor, swinging hard enough to wobble Gavin's stability. The basilisk squawked protest over his intercom, but Tristen didn't relax until he saw it was Chelsea, with Benedick just beyond her stabilizing Mallory. The necromancer did not seem at home in the absence of gravity. Behind them, Samael had faded into near invisibility, evident only as a shadow against green fog.

"I think it's pissed," the angel said.

"Of course it's pissed," Mallory answered. "We killed and ate its girlfriend."

Samael smiled benevolently through cold-withered lips. "The Captain and Nova are under attack on the bridge, Prince Tristen. We should return the engagement and draw its attention if we would protect them."

The man-thick cables that had bound Leviathan's cage were evaporating--faster than the superstructure of the world, for there was nothing close to defend them--and the cage itself had begun to exfoliate in layers, like peeling bark.

Malignant colonies. Ones Leviathan had either subverted or generated. The war was on the nano level now, if it had ever left it. A war that Gavin and Samael could help fight, and so could the knights-errant, as long as their armor remained uncorrupted.

"Tristen," Benedick said, faceless behind the mirrored gold of his faceplate. "You have the sword."

Unbidden, Tristen's hand stole to Mirth's hilt. "Yes," he said.

Without another word needed, the plan was formed. Tristen turned from his brother, the mesh of Gavin's wings de-adhering to neatly release him. He let Mirth slide into his hand, for a moment missing Charity. An unblade would serve him better, now. It would part the Leviathan's flesh like pulp, find its own way to basal nuclei or central circulatory cores like the tool for fatal surgery that it had been.

Mirth was as sharp, but whatever will it cradled was not the will of a scalpel. Tristen would have to find its targets on his own.

Or maybe not.

"Gavin," he said, as the basilisk collapsed itself from a net to a cord, binding Mallory to Chelsea for now. "Or Samael. Which one of you knows the anatomy of that thing over there?"

"Key," Samael said, leaving Tristen to roll his eyes in exasperation. But he recited it again and felt the angel stretch through the colony contact like a man popping his spine.

"Schematic," Samael said, and the pattern of the Leviathan's body lit up Tristen's heads-up display.

"Great. Where's it keep its brain?"

"That," Samael said, "would appear to be the problem."

When Perceval opened her eyes again, it was five hundred years before. She stood under olive trees, on a lawn mown plush as velvet, and a woman draped in white robes and swagged with chains was being led before her.

Perceval smiled inside, but she would not let her lips curve. No one must see her mirth at an execution--no one except the executed, who would know it without being shown.

The woman knelt, her straight brown hair slipping apart to bare her nape as her head was lowered. A man came up behind her. Benedick, a naked unblade in his hand.

"Last words?" Perceval said to her daughter. As if in a dream, she knew what she would see--

No. Not Perceval. Perceval had never stood on this condensation-damp grass and watched her child be led out to slaughter.

Cynric lifted her chin for the last time. "May you have what peace you earn, Father."

Alasdair who had been Perceval would not let the pressure of Cynric's gaze force her back. She hooked a hand, and Benedick stepped up alongside her. He closed his eyes and opened them again when he lifted the unblade. Of course. Benedick would not spare himself the sight; he would rather make the blow true.

How perfectly like him. Alasdair who had been Perceval had raised him well.

Cynric rested her forehead upon the ground. Benedict passed the blade through her neck without seeming to exert any force at all. Blood fountained, and Alasdair who had been Perceval was splashed, because he would not step back from that either.

No, Perceval said to Alasdair, who stretched inside her, wrestling for the memories first Ariane and now Perceval had eaten. Wrestling for control. This is not me. This is not something I would have chosen.

That was not my father, not really. That was somebody he was before. That was not my father, and this is not me.

Cynric's blood tasted like the sea. Perceval only realized when she licked her lips what she was savoring, and that she had never, in her own self, tasted of the sea.

The taste of it brought her home again, but it could not put her in control.

Nova fought, and in this field of combat Perceval could do nothing but observe. Alienated from her own body, which slumped in the Captain's chair all but untenanted, Perceval watched the angel's drive and dance, the way Nova warded her resources and protected herself like a fighter born. But it was secondhand, too fast and too sharp for even Exalt reflexes to follow. This was a war of angels, limited only by the speed of light, in which mere augmented flesh and mind could not compete.

Still, Perceval's focus lay with Nova: elsewhere, externalized. Into the silence of that concentration, unbidden, Perceval's brain offered the thought: The last Captain is the one who put us here. On purpose.

This was planned.

Unfair. Perceval didn't know it was the Captain who made that decision. And she was not ready to dive back into her morass of clinging memories to see if she could find out. Had he known what the astrogators knew, that there was no destination? That the whole world was just a blind hand groping in the dark?

She didn't know it hadn't been the Captain, either. And it had been he who authorized Cynric's brutalization of the Leviathan.

Just like a Conn, she thought. Eating everything in sight.

But she was a Conn. She was a Conn who had consumed Conns, who had eaten the remains of Commodores and Captains before her. Before it was inhabited by others, Perceval Conn had known her own mind. And that thought ... did not feel like hers.

Nor did it feel like it came from any of the clamoring presences with her--Ariane, Alasdair, Gerald, and behind them the elder ancestors whose memories were not preserved in the colony. Felix, Sarah, Emmanuel Conn: Conns back to when the family had held another name, when human life was brief and frail, and human memory subject to the shifts and winds of neurochemistry. How subjective the world must have been, then, when no one could remember the same events, and nobody would remember them for long.

It was not Ariane's thought. It was not Alasdair's or--Perceval would guess, strictly on the basis of history--Gerald's. But she thought she knew that tone, the arch sarcasm, the lilting intelligence. She could almost hear the voice in her ear, a real voice--

Far to ship-south, Nova whirled and twisted, warred against the Leviathan. She had long since abandoned all semblance of an avatar and now reserved her energy for things more important than appearances. Perceval could just about image her fight, pull it up from the microscopic scale. Nova was a hive of bees beset by a swarm of wasps, and the wasps were driving her back, pushing her from her boundaries, and disassembling the world as they forced its angel to withdraw.

Just like a Conn. Eating everything in sight.

A voice Perceval knew. Oh, no. Rien.

She realized she'd said the name out loud only when she heard it in her own voice. She choked it back, though her lips shaped it a second time, disoriented and startled to find herself in her body, bound to the slow, helpless meat that would not let her save her ship, her angel, or her love.

Nova, she thought, then silenced that as well. The angel did not need her distractions.

She needed her help. And Perceval had to figure out how to get it to her. Perceval stood, suddenly, knees wobbly. Blood stung in her feet and calves, circulation returning. She'd been still too long. It felt good to stretch into her neglected meat--good, and painful.

"Samael," she said aloud to the still air of the bridge. "Make current your archives, angel. Back yourself up and make ready for combat. It is time for you to become useful."

Gavin made a bower of his wings, and folded the humans within, the angel without. They fell together, a dagger plunged across the bosom of the Enemy, aimed straight for the unraveling cage beyond. Tristen moved forward in his embrace, foremost of the incarnate intelligences he protected, suspended like a figurehead at the expanded basilisk's prow. Gavin felt the prickle of Mirth's presence, the blade naked and aware in Tristen's gauntlet, and drew himself gently further from its slicing edge.

Not an unblade, no, but sufficient to the day.

The other humans huddled in silence within Gavin--Mallory bloodless and chill inside unfamiliar armor; Chelsea vibrating with excitement and youth; Benedick still and calm, collected within himself like a tree. Ahead, Samael broke trail, making of himself a thin wedge ablating in rainbow tatters of light as the Leviathan's forces wore away at his boundaries. Gavin gave the angel what he could--resources, cycles, material--but he was a small torch, and he didn't have much to spare.

"Weary," Benedick said, inside his armor, as if he had read Gavin's thoughts. "We are weary. It's the nature of war."

"The war's only begun," Chelsea said.

"This war is as old as I am, child. This is just an installment." Tristen sounded not scornful, but exhausted. "You'll be tired of it soon."

"Brace for impact," Gavin said. "I can only do this once."

He opened his wings, releasing the humans to their trajectory. Chelsea, Benedick, and Mallory initiated burns, curving in flanking arcs, while Tristen huddled small, bent into himself, silent and still and undeviating from the course Gavin had set.

Steeling himself against the energy drain, Gavin opened and focused his eyes.

The savage light of the basilisk's gaze sliced through the disintegrating cage surrounding Leviathan, struck the beast's mottled hide, and left a cloud of dust and vaporized stone to sublimate on the empty breath of the Enemy. Tristen plunged through it, an abrasive hiss caressing the skin of his armor, the roughness transmitted as a prickling scrape. He resisted the urge to block his face with his arm to protect it--the armor was perfectly capable of keeping him safe, but all those animal reflexes didn't know any better--and instead extended both hands before him, left fist clenched on Mirth's hilt and right palm bracing the pommel. He made himself a blade, a living spear, a mass driven behind an infinitely fine point.

Around him, colonies sparked and glittered, his allies and family risking themselves to shape a distraction. Tristen allowed them only the peripheries of his attention. He knew where he was aiming, and his aim must be perfectly true. Something shattered, spinning, on his left. He feared it was armor; he feared more it was flesh.

He did not glance aside.

One thousand meters. Seven fifty. Five hundred. Trajectory confirmed, Tristen commenced his burn.

Benedick had never expected to find himself defending an angel. But here he was, fighting at Samael's side--fighting as Samael's vanguard!--when Samael was far more adapted to this particular conflict than Benedick himself. The angel had to stay safe a little longer, though, and so he huddled inside Mallory, and Benedick defended two intelligences in one form. As Benedick groped through the swirling clouds of dust and nanotech, he had no difficulty losing himself in the rhythm and savagery of conflict. It was his grace and shame, he thought, that he could always find peace and clarity in the midst of ruin.

"I see him!" Gavin said sharply, in Benedick's ear and for Samael's hearing. Benedick held his concentration, turned, and parried the foray of a voracious colony with an arm of his own symbiote. It tore at him, but Benedick reinforced, surrounded, and a moment later Chelsea was there to back him up, her colony a formless destroying presence amid the raging, invisible skirmishes that surrounded them.

Further back, a twist of energy glittered, elusive in the light-wreathed textures of the nebula. Driving for them, identifiable by the taste of its energy signature as the wreck of an angel. Also, it was careful to stay well back from the front where Nova and the alien colonies battled, as marked by sparks and dazzling scars. Benedick understood that it didn't dare touch an angel who could relay direct instructions from the Captain.

But it could come and fight them--or so it was meant to think.

"Asrafil," Mallory said. As the angel closed the distance, the necromancer's armor began to vomit forth Samael, in the form of ropes of savage light.

Gavin threw himself into the fray, linked with Samael's colony, driving as much of himself into the battered angel as he dared. I am behind you, Angel. Take what you will. Drive through.

Samael's acceptance flowed back down the connection, his determination and the flare of outrage as Asrafil spotted him and began to withdraw. Spurn your Captain, construct?

But challenged, Asrafil only fled faster. For a moment, Gavin pitied him--wouldn't everyone prefer freedom of choice?--but then something rose up in him, a long-concealed subroutine of betrayal, and he leapt forward into Samael, through him, pushing forward though hostile colonies frayed his edges and gnawed his wings to electronic marrow.

It didn't hurt, not as Gavin understood and half remembered human hurting. But it felt strange, and his reflex was to withdraw, defend himself, pull close. Instead he made himself the head of an arrow, with Samael the shaft behind.

He'll take us apart, Gavin said, just to hear Samael's mocking laugh. Within him, he felt something ticking. Sizzling. As if the touch of Samael's colony under these conditions of war had activated a long-quiescent program, and now they were conjoined--partnered--in ways Gavin had never anticipated.

Then he'll get what he deserves, the angel answered. Gavin felt Samael's long-archived memories flaring bright. A plan, something held in abeyance and secret, seared through their conjoined identity.

Together, they gathered themselves and plunged into Asrafil's sphere of control. Asrafil fled, drawing up his skirts, but he could not run fast nor far enough. They burned into him, broke through his wards, and ... ... detonated.

Asrafil screamed as the virus downloaded into his core.

Leviathan was hot at his heart, a simmering heat from which Tristen's armor offered only partial protection. The heat was an aid as much as a torment, though, for Tristen let his armor boots adhere to stone, and it gave him the leverage to hew at Leviathan's core as if he hacked with an ax. Chunks of stone shining with a blue foxlight sprayed out of the hole he chopped, came apart into swirls of matter as the battling colonies appropriated and consumed them.

Through those same soles of his boots, Tristen heard Leviathan screaming. And something else, like a shard of something deadly and foreign lodged in the flesh of the beast. He could feel Arianrhod in there, feel how Leviathan had surrounded and subsumed her. And more, he felt her moving now, coming to the surface, sent for him full of the alien poison that, in altered form, touched his blood as well.

He raised Mirth once more, and the rock before him splintered out, spinning away in cascades and shards, scattering off the faceplate of his helm and chipping the reflective surface of his armor. A swath of ebony cut free of the Leviathan's hide--an unblade truncated but still painfully familiar--and a woman stood free behind it, dragging herself up in the hole he had made. Someone caught his wrist in a grip harder than the stone he swung against.

--Grandfather,--Arianrhod said.--Enough. I speak for the beast.--

Perceval's awareness flinched back, confused, withdrawing. If she were wearing her body, she would have windmilled her arms, but as it was she merely tumbled in confusion, out of control, disoriented, seeking something on which to focus her stumbling mind. She slammed up against something hollow and malevolent, circling the confines of her body, her own mind. Walling her out of her own senses and awareness.

She looked up in that unspace and saw the shadow of Ariane Conn smiling down on her again.

Her features had changed, but Tristen knew her. He knew the way she moved, and even if the skin and bones were different, he knew the way the bones of her face lay under the skin.

Something else enfolded her as Tristen turned. She was naked to the Enemy, blue and ablaze, but there was more to it than just her energy, or her colony, or the Leviathan's contamination. She was wrapped in white light, a cowl like a raptor's beak, a cloak like the mantle of wings, old Charity a painful dark rip in all that brightness. It settled over her, pulled snug, soaked into her glowing skin.

She grew taller, as he watched, sparer, attenuated. Her storm-shadow hair grew fine and dark. He knew her. Not too far from where he stood, even in the thick of battle, he could feel Benedick knowing her, too, turning from his fight and coming in a rush.

Cynric Conn blinked. Her fingers opened, releasing his arm. "Let it be," she said aloud, and the Enemy's empty breath carried her voice. "Leave it be. Leviathan has served his purpose, brother mine. Leviathan has suffered enough."

Tristen drew his blade back. "You're still Arianrhod. And the beast has possessed you."

She spread her hands, the empty one and the one with the unblade in it. "O Brother, you have it backward. I possessed the beast, long ago. And now that our father is gone, and the world is in motion again, I'm here to see us to salvation. Sheathe your sword, Tristen Tiger. Welcome your sister back from the dead, cold realms of the Enemy, and let this poor mutilated monster go."

She was as he'd remembered her, no ghost of a Sorceress but the absolute item, chill and precise with her long hands motionless before her hips, the left one folded inside the right.

"I do not trust you, Arianrhod," he said.

Ariane reached out her hand, or the metaphor of her hand, and Perceval flinched back, flailing. The imaginary fingers could have closed around her, lifted her up--but she shouted for Nova with all her mind and suddenly someone was there beside her. Not Nova, but rather the necromancer, Mallory, who threw up arms like a barricade and shoved Ariane's groping fingers wide.

Ariane grabbed again, and again Mallory was too strong for her--but not by much. Perceval saw the necromancer wince, twist, grimace with effort as once more Ariane's hand came down.

Perceval just stood, awed, hands at her sides, watching.

The third time Ariane reached out, she pinioned Mallory's arms and lifted the necromancer into the air, swinging the kicking figure from side to side.

"Dammit, Captain," the necromancer yelled, each syllable rattled out between jerks. "We're in your head! Get control of her!"

But she's so big, Perceval thought. She's so much bigger than me.

Did that matter?

Maybe not. If they were in Perceval's head, maybe Ariane only looked so large.

Perceval imagined herself very far away, back away in the dark confines of her mind, so Ariane looked tiny enough to pick up between her fingers. And then she imagined herself close, and Ariane really so small.

Perceval pinched her up, careful not to squeeze, careful not to squish the microscopic Mallory clutched in Ariane's rattling fist.

"Ariane," Perceval said. "I want you to put the necromancer down."

Arianrhod/Cynric smiled. "Nor should you. But who other than me could have arranged this? Who else would have brought a child of the line of Sparrow here, and filled her form with the memories of the one person who can best help you now? Who guided you, Tristen, and our brother and sister, and the angel and the implement who held my memories? Who brought you through the abattoir in safety? Who introduced you to Dorcas? Who sent the mammoth, man, and all from the very grave?

"Leviathan dreams true futures, Tristen, after the nature of his kind. And I infected him and his dreaming long ago, and used them to dream you to me and the world to possibilities other than destruction. Trust me when I tell you that, for the nonce, you will find no Arianrhod here."

"Have you eaten her?" Carefully, neutrally, Tristen began disengaging his boots from the surface of Leviathan. Before him, the hole he and Gavin had gnawed in its side was sealing, seething at the bottom with the blue ropes of colonies.

"No," she said. "She's alive. I'm just borrowing her for now, because she's here and Leviathan remade her for me. And if she weren't, would you kill your granddaughter's body to be sure?"

"I'd kill her for her crimes," he said, and winced at Cynric's frown.

"Oh, yes," his sister said. "Her crimes. So much worse than yours or mine. Look at the thing you're standing on, My Brother, and tell me any Conn has the right to live."

"Touche," Tristen said, and shook Mirth free of blue blood before he put it away. "So assuming for the moment that you are my sister--and this would be very like her--what was the purpose of this charade?"

She smiled. She held out her fist, turned it over, and opened her hand. "Leviathan knows the universe," she said, as he watched a glittering star map of impossible brilliance unfurl above her palm. "I have built us an astrogator, Brother Mine. I have made us a way home. Now draw out your blade again."

"You told me to put it up," Tristen said. "What would you have me butcher now?"

"Butcher nothing, but part a chain. Cut loose Leviathan. Let him return to his people, for we have abused him sore."

"He wants to destroy us," Tristen said. "And I cannot say I blame him."

Cynric shook her narrow head. "He cannot have his vengeance, though I am without doubt the one most deserving of it. He will have to live with only freedom."

And all around them, the lights of combat were dying away.

Later, when Cynric had led them back inside, Tristen came up beside Benedick and rested one hand lightly on his shoulder. "I knew you were standing behind me."

Benedick glanced sidelong at him and nodded. "I thought you might not want to handle it. But then it turned out it didn't need to be handled. Not that way."

"Not yet," Tristen said, watching Cynric's slender, white-garbed spine retreat down the corridor before them. She moved fast. He stepped up his pace, aware of Benedick doing the same, of Chelsea and Mallory following. Aware of the way Mallory's hand came up to one shoulder, as if to steady a passenger who was not there. "What about when she gives Arianrhod back?"

Benedick shook his head. "Cynric's right. What has she done that's worse than you or me?"

"It's not about worse," Tristen answered. "It's about staying alive, not about what's right or wrong."

"Maybe it should be," Benedick said, and to that Tristen had no response except a short nod, curt and painful.

"Come on," he said. "It's a fucking long walk home."

In the warmth of the bridge, Cynric Conn walked forward across violets to meet the Captain. The Captain stood and watched her. In her borrowed flesh, with her borrowed spirit, Cynric knelt, and Perceval felt a shiver of recognition, a cold wash of sweat as the hair parted over her nape and fell in brown streamers to either side. Perceval's uncle, Tristen, stood behind her on the left side. Her father, Benedick, stood behind her on the right. Caitlin Conn, her mother, was in Engineering where she belonged, overseeing the removal of the last collars and clamps from the hide of Leviathan.

The Sorceress extended something in her two hands. A scabbarded sword with a rough, improvised hilt affixed.

Perceval did not reach out her hand. "I do not want that."

"It is Charity," Cynric said, raising her eyes in surprise. "The last of its kind."

What, did she not foresee this also? Perceval waved it away in irritation. She did not want a sword, and she did not want Cynric. What she wanted was Gavin back, but she would not say as much, for Captains did not weep. And if she said the basilisk's name, there would be no end to her tears. So instead she said, "It was Tristen's; give it to him."

But Tristen demurred. "I prefer Mirth, as it happens." He patted the hilt of the blade. "Give it to Benedick."

Benedick shook his head. "Give it to Caitlin," he said. "She probably actually misses hers."

When Benedick went to Caitlin, he knew she had been waiting for him because she was at such great pains to seem that she had not. She was alone in a booth at the center of a half-repaired Central Engineering, feet up on a console, studying schematics and frowning.

"Better?" he asked, having entered without knocking.

"Fair," she said. "Now that nothing's chewing the world apart from the edges, we're getting some actual repairs done. Have you talked to Perceval?"

He nodded, tightly. In the long run, he thought the new, fey Perceval with so many ancient souls behind her eyes might even be a match for Cynric the Sorceress, in wisdom if not in craft. "Perceval sent you something," he said, and held out the long nano-swagged parcel.

Caitlin looked from it to him, and did not reach out for it. "Tristen didn't claim it?"

Benedick laid the unblade down across her console. She could unwrap it later. "You should go and talk to our daughter in person."

Caitlin nodded, eyes bright. "I will."

"I'm not sure how she'll be," he said honestly, stepping forward to stand beside her chair. "I don't know where we go from here."

He touched her naked hand with his own so his colony could give her the map, the one he'd been saving to deliver personally since Cynric had imparted it to him.

"It's okay," Caitlin said. She tipped her head over her shoulder at Jsutien, who was visible through the glass. "Wherever the hell it is, we know how to get there, now."