Chill

7 back into rule

There had been twelve who survived being sealed into the kitchen in addition to Head, and all of them were hale, if restless and dingily dressed. Head set them to work at once, readying the house for occupancy. Gavin felt it would be cruel to tell hir that the chances that Tristen was home to stay were slim, so he held his silence. He was surprised that Mallory did as well.

They would have insisted upon feeding Mallory, but the necromancer refused, more concerned with being shown to central biosystems at once. Head had keys and codes to all the house, and brought them hirself. When Gavin identified the most direct route, by the servant's stair, Mallory insisted on it, though Head fussed about inappropriateness.

While they walked, Mallory questioned an expansive but cautious Head about hir captivity.

"I had hoped for Prince Benedick," sie admitted. "He'd not let Ariane kill us all. Which is not to say, Honored, that your appearance was not welcomed, and timely!"

"Indeed," Mallory said. "It was resourceful of you to survive as you did. Ariane had an angel on a leash when she brought her bioweapon to Rule. Whose idea was the electrostasis? It's what truly protected you. And how did you manage to become Exalt, locked away like that? You wouldn't have survived as Means."

Head turned, astonished. "But Honored, it wasn't anybody's idea. It was the other angel."

Surmounting the stair back into Rule was one of the more surreal experiences in Tristen's long and storied existence. He kept a hand on the banister, not because he needed the assistance, but because he needed the stability of something cool and real pressed against his palm.

When last he'd left here, he had not expected it to be a journey of decades to see him back. He had not expected to be lost in darkness for the duration--but then, who ever did? And when he was trapped, sleeping in guano and roaches, gnawing raw meat, he had not expected ever to come home again. He had retreated into an animal self he barely remembered.

Barely chose to remember. Because should he want it, each moment of the endless wearing march of hours was crystalline and perfectly akin in his symbiont's memory. The same symbiont whose resources he used to manipulate his neurochemistry, calm the constant wash of anxiety and jagged edges that rolled like broken glass under the false floor he built himself. You're going to have to deal with that eventually.

Eventually, sure. Someday. When I have time.

Perhaps by then, the passage of days (or better, years) would have worn some of the sharp-shattered edges down. Like the pain of so many years spent without any expectation of ever returning to Rule again, and certainly not as its master.

And yet here was the stair, and here was the rail, and there were the white and golden and brown cascades of mushrooms swathing the walls like frozen waterfalls. The scent was strong and familiar. Heartening.

He reached out left-handed, broke off the rim of a shiitake, and tucked it into his mouth. He didn't bite down, just pressed it between teeth and lips and cheek, tasting the sweet musky moisture. It tasted of childhood and escape, of the places you could vanish to where your father would be too busy to come looking. The places where even a royal child could find a modicum of freedom.

He swallowed the mushroom unchewed, and went into Rule.

Somewhere in all Mallory's stolen memories there must be some of this house and Heaven, because Gavin was surprised when they turned in the opposite direction from where his internal map indicated that their destination lay. In the Rule of Gavin's uneasy knowledge, access to central biosystems had not been located in the Commodore's chambers. But the Commodore's chambers themselves were in the same place, so changes to layout were likely to have been cosmetic.

Gavin wasn't privy to the transmission, but Mallory said, "Tristen's at the stair" just as Head unlocked the door to the Commodore's quarters.

Head twisted, one hand still on the handle, the oft-repaired panel held open a crack. Sie glanced back the way they had come, an artist's study in conflict. The mastiff curve of hir heavy neck, the longing stare--that burned familiar yet elusive in Gavin's memory also.

It troubled him. He was a machine intelligence. His was not an organic memory, lossy and prone to gaps and iterative errors. There should be nothing in his experience that he could not recall with the definition and precision of a holographic recording.

He'd been here before. He knew it. He knew Head.

And yet, he had never been here before. And he could tell from the caution with which sie approached their interactions that Head did not know him.

"Go on," Mallory urged, a hand lightly on Head's wrist. "We can take it from here. See to the Prince on his Homecoming."

Head's evident reluctance should have been comical, except that Gavin had witnessed the grim determination with which sie defended the lives in hir charge. "I should--"

"The Prince will forgive you leaving us unescorted," Mallory said gently, "in the face of exigencies, and the shortness of your staff. I believe he will be grateful to find that any survivors remain at all. You have given extraordinary service, Head."

Gavin resettled his wings, a triple-flip that left the feathertips crossed in the opposite direction from before, and leaned a shoulder against Mallory's ear.

"Well," Head said, wavering on hir feet like an indecisive pendulum. "You are the Prince's servants, on the Prince's business--"

Mallory did not correct hir, and even laid an unnecessary warning hand over Gavin's feet. "We can find our way."

Head twisted both hands in hir apron. "Mind you don't move things around. There might be something in there of the old Commodore's, or Lady Ariane's, that the Prince will want."

"Indeed, good Head," Mallory said, and swept hir away with a bow that made the stout housekeeper giggle like a child.

Not until sie had vanished down the corridor and they were well inside the door did Gavin say, very quietly, "Angel?"

Mallory tickled the feathers alongside his neck. "I heard."

"You suppose something held on inside the static field? Something not the angel?"

The necromancer, moving rapidly through lushly comfortable surroundings, made a noncommittal noise. "Back here, do you suppose?"

"It would explain why parts of the world are going dark to communications," Gavin said, and added, "Nova will eat it if it finds it."

"Then maybe Nova shouldn't find it. Oh, look, a concealed door. It can't be identity-coded; the new Commodore has to be able to win entrance after the death of the old one, so the world wouldn't permit it. What do you suppose Alasdair would choose for a code?"

The entrance was not heavily concealed. It had been hidden behind a facade and a screen of greenery, but acceleration forces had smashed the plants and cracked the paneling, leaving the armored door obvious to casual inspection.

Gavin cocked his head at the seal. No, this hadn't been there before, according to his fragmented memories. But Alasdair Conn, in his own way, had been a predictable man.

"Cecelia," Gavin said, without hesitation. "Open the door."

If his hearing apparatus had been made of membrane and bone, he would have winced as hard as Mallory did at the grinding noise that followed. The structure was plainly warped, but the servos struggled valiantly against the damage. The door jerked along its track, finally sticking fast when it had opened a spare half meter. Beyond it, Gavin could see a second door, this one old-fashioned and constructed with a single lever handle, its finish tarnished by the rub of many hands.

Mallory had to crane to do it, but managed to offer Gavin a respectful stare nonetheless. "That wasn't your memory, you jumped-up power tool."

"It's mine now."

"Cecelia, as in Alasdair's second wife?"

Gavin fanned pale wings for balance. "It didn't end well."

Mallory pushed against the concealed door. It had been repaired many times and no longer operated automatically. But expert counterweighting ensured that, despite its mass, it swung open lightly to Mallory's exertion.

The chamber within was small, a sanctum with a single "chair"--of sorts--sculpted of the living earth of the deck. The seat had humped arms, a high back that sloped like a pyramid, and a surface upholstered in deep, springy grass. One soft light shone down on it from above, filtered as if through leaves. A mirror hung before it, the surface lightly rippling in response to every vibration and change of air pressure as they moved into the room. It all could have been the throne room of some nature deity.

This was not the complex of labs and cloning tanks that haunted Gavin's borrowed memories. He craned over his shoulder, wishing Head were still close enough to ask, but sie was long gone. Instead, Gavin hopped to the back of the chair and turned to face Mallory, slightly surprised when the necromancer did not sit. Instead, much circling ensued, Mallory circumnavigating the tiny chamber and trailing fingers along the walls. "Is this isolated as well?"

"If the door were shut," Gavin answered. "Is it safe to seal ourselves in?"

"Is anything?" Mallory crossed to the chamber door and tugged it until the latch clicked. Arms crossed, leaning against the now-seamless panel, Mallory said, "You can come out now. We won't hurt you."

No answer but silence.

The necromancer sighed, stretched arms wide like a dramatized conjuror, and arched fingers back until Gavin heard the joints crack. "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

"There could be dozens of angel fragments lurking in shielded corners of the world," Gavin said. "They may not have any awareness to speak of. They may have had everything consumed but their purpose, or some scrap of identity, or--"

"The ghosts of angels," Mallory said. "Their revenants."

"Junk DNA," Gavin said. "Fragments of reassorted viruses." Gavin felt the earth of the throne separate beneath scoring talons. The colony within it moved to heal the damage at once, grass growing cleanly over the cuts. "What a stroke of good fortune we thought to bring along a necromancer," he said. Then he settled back smugly, neck drawn in a tight S-curve, and added, "He's in the throne."

"Well then. It remains to lure him out." Mallory moved forward and stroked the grassy arm of the chair.

"The fragmentary angel? The same fragmentary angel, do you suppose?"

"A fragmentary angel. Once we get him out, we can ask if it's the same one who is haunting the kitchen." Mallory crouched before the throne and dug the fingers of both hands into the earth with a grimace. "Come out, come out, wherever you are--"

When the necromancer drew back cupped, separated hands, something shimmered between them. A swirl of nanotech, a tiny fragment of a colony. Maybe--just maybe--the scrap of an angel. Tautly, as if breath control were necessary to keep from blowing the fragile thing away, Mallory said, "Gavin? He would get lost in me."

Gavin shook out his wings in discontent, tail coiling against the backslope of the throne. Mallory was asking him to take in the broken colony, shelter it among his own symbiont, give it strength and a place to grow until they could recompile and reboot it. "You think you know who that is."

"I think if it fought off a plague, then it's likely Samael. I think we need to get him safely away, and retrieve the rest of what's left of him, before Tristen sits in this chair."

"You hope it's Samael."

"Who else would think to use a kitchen in Rule and the shielded biosystem core as his refuge of last resort?"

Gavin hopped closer, down to the edge of the seat, but did not reach out to sweep the colony to his breast. "What if it's Asrafil?"

Mallory held up the hands, the angel cradled between them. "Then, sweetheart, you eat him."

In the courtyard of Rule, Tristen Conn had to stop and lean against an olive tree. He could make a pretense that it was the ache of mending bones that led him to prop himself against a trunk just as cracked, but the truth was that being here hurt worse than any of the damage from the acceleration tank.

Some of what hurt was the quiet, the way the uncollected olives indented the healing earth beneath his soles. And some of what hurt was the Homecoming, after so much lost and so many years gone by. Neither one seemed likely to respond to anything so simple as medication and meditation, the symbiotic and mental discipline that had seen him through years in the dark. He felt his colony race to normalize his neurochemical load, support the limbic system and blood sugar levels, maintain blood pressure and heart rate. It was an electrochemical mask of serenity, a cloak over the fury and grief he would have chosen otherwise to feel.

He crouched, long, aching legs folding awkwardly, and raked his hands through ragged grass. Tangled strands encircled his finger joints, stretching and parting when he tugged. The grass remained perfectly manicured--the ghostly machine gardeners setting things right even when there were no overseers to direct them.

Rule's maintenance colony--which should be possessed by Nova now, and inexplicably wasn't--tickled the edges of Tristen's own. He found the resilient ovals of two ripe, silver-black olives in the grass, rolled them between his fingers, and picked them up.

If he put them in his mouth in this state, just as they were off the tree, the alkalinity would pucker his mucous membranes and burn his tongue. Inedible unless processed--well, no: edible, perhaps, if you were Exalt, but Tristen was not that desperate now--and still the staff of life. Someone, sometime, had figured out how to render this tiny, loathsome fruit into delicious and essential oil and flesh. The olive, far from being vile, was transformed by technology and ingenuity into a resource so indispensable as to be regarded as sacred by every ancient culture that had encountered it.

He leaned against the trunk of the olive tree once more and dented the flesh of its fruit with his nail. When he was young, he and Aefre had dared each other to chew unprocessed olives from these selfsame trees, to hold them in their mouths as long as they could stand the bitterness. The first time she'd kissed him had not been beneath this tree--it had been in the hallway near the kitchens, and afterward she'd claimed a lock of his hair as her prize. But this was where they had married, under their father's gaze, and this was where the procession that had carried her body down into the graveyard of the holdes had departed Rule. And it was here, on this very spot, that Benedick had executed Cynric, and her blood had soaked the grass under his feet.

A ghost of her colony might still inhabit the colony in the earth here, in the flesh of the fruit in his hand.

In a moment, Tristen would collect his thoughts, collect himself, and walk forward into Rule. He would pass down the hall, and the portraits of his brothers and his sisters, living and dead, including the three that his father had ordered turned and nailed to the wall. And he would come face-to-face with what he feared most--the black-draped one of Aefre, leaning on a scabbarded sword almost as tall as she, her hair falling across her forehead in springy coils like yellow ribbon stripped against a blade.

He wasn't sure yet how he would look at her, when he passed. He would deal with that in a moment. Just as soon as his legs stopped aching quite so much.

He was still leaning against the olive tree--gathering himself, surely that was all--when Head came to greet him. As with so many things, he could have predicted exactly how it played out. Sie was still Head--virtually unchanged from the images stored in his symbiotic memory, except for having grown slightly stouter and slightly more lined, and Tristen thought the apron was new. That was to be expected, though. A Mean who was so valued by hir masters as Head was--and always had been--could expect a life as indeterminate as an Exalt's. And Head had never quite been a Mean like others, being as perfect for hir job as Cynric had made hir--back when Cynric made so many things.

Head still bustled as Head always had. Short steps bobbed hir briskly over the pavement and then the lawn. Sie plowed up to him like a cargo tug, stopped abruptly enough that hir toes furrowed the earth underneath, and--fists on hips--glared up at him until Tristen expected hir to reach right up, stand on tiptoe, and twist his earlobe between chastising fingers.

"Hello, Head," he said, holding out his right hand.

There was a long pause. Then sie muttered "Space you!" and threw hirself into his arms.

It might have been ridiculous--Tristen was half a meter taller--but the tears that wet the breastplate of his armor between hir clutching fists were anything but humorous. So he wrapped his arms around Head's head and hir stout shoulders, took a deep breath, and said, "There, there."

Having lost something, lost it, he thought, forever, lost everything good it ever brought into his life, he knew that sometimes it could be easier to simply let it go. To choose to remember only what was dreary, or terrible, so he did not feel the loss so acutely. For a long time, all he had permitted himself to remember of Rule was the storms of his father's house, the rages, the broken bones and savage politics, the funerals. The feel of family blood across his knuckles.

But that was not all there had ever been, and standing here under this broken tree, he found he remembered some of that now, as well.

He was taking a breath to tell Head so when sie tilted hir head back, stared up past his chin, and said--as clearly as if hir eyes were not still inflamed with weeping--"I thought the bitch had killed you."

Tristen stroked hir hair. "She tried. She didn't know her own limits, that was all." Then he put hir back at arm's length. "I'm First Mate now, Head."

"I know. Your necromancer told me," sie said, provoking a slow blink while Tristen wondered exactly when it was that he'd grown a personal necromancer. "Come on. You must be famished. Come inside."

The walk through the doors was as weird as he'd anticipated. A Homecoming. If Rule had ever been home, precisely.

Well, it was not as if he--unlike Benedick--had found another.

Head had recovered hirself, and though Tristen could read hir micromovements well enough to tell that sie was resisting the urge, sie did not take his elbow to steer him. "The house is in disarray. Please do not believe that what you will see is the normal state of affairs, sir. Things have not fallen so far from that to which you were accustomed." Sie hesitated, as if considering how to broach a delicate subject.

"Head," Tristen said. "You need never temporize with me."

"We are twelve," sie said, after an additional weighty pause. "There were twenty who escaped with me to the kitchens, but--"

"Acceleration trauma?"

Sie nodded. "I had no warning, sir. And even if I had, there were no tanks accessible."

Tristen would have touched hir shoulder, but the moment for that was past. It would be an affront to hir dignity now, and intimation that Tristen did not believe in hir strength and professionalism. Now he was lord, and sie was servant.

Still, he could not quite believe that sie was apologizing to him for saving twelve lives out of twenty-one, under impossible circumstances.

"Head."

Sie turned to him, eyes big, and he wondered--not for the first time--how he could be both things to hir: Tristen, whose wedding sie had catered; and Prince Tristen, lord of the House of Rule. "Lord?"

There were so many things he could say and only one of them would be the best one. Too much consideration before continuing would only feed hir worry. "When you have done something requiring an apology, I shall demand it. Are we clear?"

Hir hands knotted in the new apron--violet, and very flattering. Hir lips began to shape something. An apology, or he missed his guess. Then sie swallowed hard and said, "Yes, Commodore. Perfectly."

He nudged hir, because he couldn't resist, and because in the long term he was certain he couldn't live with this fawning obsequiousness. He thought he'd rather employ revenant servants, like Benedick did. And that would be a horror. "There's a Captain on the bridge now, Head," he reminded, "Call me First Mate."

Sie blanched, as he had known sie would. So he offered a compromise.

"Or just Lord."

"Yes, Lord Tristen," sie said. "I thought I'd show you to your chambers first, and where you could also meet with your servants."

Mine, are they? But he held his peace. If Mallory had practiced deception, Tristen would bring his displeasure to the necromancer's notice at some convenient time, and it did not need to become Head's problem. Head had suffered enough of late that Tristen thought it fitting to shield hir a little.

The main hall of Rule was as much of a challenge as he had anticipated. Long and dark, echoing with footsteps and paneled in the dark wood of storied Earth, it offered no shelter, either physical or emotional. His chambers, sie said, so glibly.

But what sie meant was his father's rooms.

And he wondered now--passing the portraits of his murdered brothers and sisters, passing Aefre's portrait and the three turned to the wall without a sideways glance, though the muscles in his neck trembled with the effort of ignoring them--how was it possible that the old man still terrified him so? Head did him the politeness of pretending ignorance, for which he was grateful, but they both knew it for kindness instead of truth.

His symbiont would have remembered perfectly what the three effaced portraits had looked like, but Alasdair had ordered all his children to forget, as well, so all Tristen had was the blurred and transitory memories of flesh. Worse, he had seen Caitlin recently and so her adult face--more worn with responsibility, no longer the mask of an impudent, auburn-haired pixie--had overlaid what he remembered of her portrait.

Alasdair was dead and eaten. At the end of the corridor, Tristen hesitated. After a moment, he turned and stalked back.

He paused before the first of the reversed frames and tried to remember what lay behind it. A woman, tall and broad, her body concealed by charcoal, lavender, and violet armor blazoned silver and purple over the heart with a stylized iris. Caithness had held an unblade in one relaxed hand and rested the other on her hip, and her eyebrows had been the same rich brown as her hair. The second frame had also outlined a picture of a woman, but one more different from her sister than Cynric had been from Caithness was hard to imagine. Cynric had been fallow--sexless by choice, like Perceval--tall and spare and bony-chinned, her dark hair falling along either side of her face as if to accentuate the angles. She had been prone to flowing outfits remarkably unsuited for micro-G.

Tristen arrested his hand before it could touch the back of her portrait, aware that Head was staring. He turned away instead and continued with hir down the hall, past all the staring faces of his siblings, dead and living.

By the time they came to the end of the gauntlet, Tristen's hands were clammy and tendrils of hair stuck unpleasantly to his nape. As Head keyed the lock at the far end, Tristen looked down at the bones of his wrists. "I'm not glad of much that happened in this house," he said. "But I'm glad he's dead."

Head let hir shoulder brush his sleeve. "So am I. And you know what, Prince Tristen?"

He didn't correct hir to the less formal title. He'd registered his protest. He knew better than to make more of it. "What, Head?"

Sie opened the door and stepped through. "I'm glad that she's dead, too."

Tristen nodded. They had found something else to agree on. Neither one of them missed Ariane.

He had thought the hall, with its ghosts and memories, would be the hard part. When he thought of Rule, it was the hall he'd recollected--Alasdair's ringing footsteps, Cynric the Sorceress in her white and gold, a data-etched green sapphire glinting against her nostril as she paced in the midst of guards, dragging the sweep of nanochains. He thought of his father returning from the battle in which he had destroyed his oldest daughter, with Caithness's black unblade Innocence slung across his shoulder. That blade had eventually been handed down to Ariane, and, with a kind of horrible poetry, come back in her hand to claim Alasdair's life, as if with Caithness's death-curse behind it. Yes. The hall, he had assumed, would be the hard part.

But he'd been wrong. And as soon as Head unlocked the door to the family quarters, he knew it. Because in his memory, these had been the walls and corridors that held every rare happiness of the house. They had burst with family: his father, his father's women, his brothers and sisters and himself and all their lovers and children.

And now there was him and Head. And every door along the corridor was sealed.

Somehow, he made it past those as well. Here, he gave himself permission to look, to take in what was lost. In all honesty, he could hardly have stopped himself.

At last they came to his father's door.

His own door. He was the head of House Conn now. All that lay before him, and all that surrounded him, was his. Or, at least, his in service to his Captain, Perceval.

"Thank you, Head," he said, and stepped over the threshold. At least that was his intention, but the reality of the motion left him arrested, tottering, halfway in and halfway out. Because before Tristen, relaxed in an armchair, shirtless and clad only in the appearance of archaic blue jeans and boots, lounged the blond-haired, hound-faced angel Samael.

Not exactly as Tristen remembered him. He seemed assembled from bits--his hair bleached hay and bits of feather, his left eye a snail shell and his right eye flecks of bright color that Tristen understood from their powdery iridescence to be fragments of a butterfly's wing. The broad wings that spread from his shoulders whirred against themselves with his movement--the pinions were scraps of leaf and withered petals--but there was no mistaking his mosaic face.

At Samael's right hand stood Mallory, the basilisk as always on one shoulder, arms folded, wearing an expression composed of one-half self-satisfaction and one part childish apprehension over just how such a prank might be received.

"Hello, Tristen," Mallory said. "I made you an angel."

"Made?" He would have shut the door to seal Head out, but sie stepped through and put hir back to it.

"Collected," Samael said. He stood, and the light shone through the bits and pieces that made him. Tristen could make out the outline of the chair behind, and the curve of Mallory's hip. "As you can see, there isn't much left of me."

That explained why Nova had lost contact with Rule. And possibly why the world had started to come unraveled around Tristen on his way here. Tristen stepped forward and to the side, turning so he could keep all of the other inhabitants of the room in view. Trust was a lovely thing, when one could afford it. He made himself light inside the armor, ready for battle, and mourned the death of his old unblade. It would have been good to have at hand, facing such an enemy as this.

"Samael," he said. "I am the First Mate of this vessel, and the head of the house of Conn. Was it you who tried to destroy me on my journey here?"

Samael shook stringy blond locks across stringier shoulders, a swarm of organic particles tumbling. "First I've heard of it."

Head stepped forward, shoulders hunched miserably, and said, "He saved us, My Lord."

"Saved you?"

"From Lady Ariane's disease. And from the acceleration."

Tristen was not about to drop his guard, or shift his attention from the angel. His armor gave him a panoramic view, through which he observed Head's response as he demanded, "Explain."

The ghost of Samael spread his arms wide like a conjuror and made a bow complete with the scrape of one foot across the earth. Beetle shells and ant thoraxes glimmered, tumbling, in his boot. He said, "I am the Angel of Life Support, First Mate. I serve the world and the life within it--above anything."

"And how did you survive?"

"I found electrically sealed pockets of the world." Samael's shrugs had grown no less expressive for all their transparency. "And I hid in them like a snail, First Mate. The kitchens here had reinforced gravity, for safety's sake, and with those resources I helped preserve Head and hir people. And before you grow angry with your allies, there's something you should consider. What I can do, so can another angel."

The chill that ran the length of Tristen's spine would have made him shudder had his concentration not been so absolute. Voice level, giving away nothing except what the very question itself offered, he said, "Dust?"

Samael folded his arms. "Asrafil."

Not the worst news, then. But bad enough. Both angels had opposed each other, and both had tried to choose the next Captain. While Dust had allied himself with Perceval, going so far as to kidnap her, Asrafil had been the power behind Arianrhod and Ariane. Tristen would take Asrafil over Dust only because Dust had been the cleverer and more political of the two, being as he was wrought of the remains of the world's library. Asrafil, the Angel of Battle Systems, however, was quite challenge enough. All assuming that Samael could be trusted--but if there were one thing to be said for angels, it was that they did not generally lie. Tristen bit his lower lip and turned to Head. There was something he needed done to make this place his. And it should be done immediately, with as little ceremony as possible, as if all it were was the setting right of something misplaced.

"Head?" He knew he was working up to it by stages.

Head colluded, because that was what friends do. "Yes, Prince Tristen?"

"Before anything else, please turn my sisters' portraits to the light."

"Yes, Prince Tristen."

He didn't need to move his head to see that sie was smiling. He heard hir sharp intake of breath. "And Ariane?"

"Is there crepe to be found?"

"There is."

He nodded. "Then we shall do her memory all honor. Meanwhile, it appears yon angel has made some work for my undertaking."

"I am sorry, First Mate," Samael said. "Please consider my powers--diminished though they temporarily are--to be yours to direct, and my services under your command."

"I will," Tristen said. "You understand that I am going to report this first to Perceval."

"And her angel," Mallory added, with widened eyes.

Samael shrugged. "The one thing amounts to the other, necromancer."