Dust

14 evidence of war

Once it became evident they meant him no harm, the naked and filthy man Perceval had rescued attached himself to her. He didn't speak at first, and Perceval wondered if he was capable. He would not give up his broken sword, but he held her hand peaceably and he also would not be shifted from her side.

Perceval felt odd talking around him, but as he would not speak, she didn't see an option. "If he couldn't get out, what makes you think that we can?"

The bats had finally quieted.

Rien, appearing to notice this, said, "The bats get out somewhere."

"You are bigger than a bat."

Rien scratched the basilisk on her shoulder under the hackles. "I know where the door is," she said. "Also, we have lights. And a cutting torch."

And with the assistance of those things, to Perceval's inexpressible wonderment, they escaped the realm of the bats without further incident.

Abandoned crew quarters lay beyond, overgrown with kudzu. In daylight, the stranger cringed and covered his eyes until Perceval took pity and bound a blindfold over them. As they walked, she picked the tender leaves from the end of the kudzu shoots and shared them with the others. They were good, spinachy, and if they were to have a third, Perceval thought anything that might stretch the food budget should be investigated. The stranger—blindfolded—sniffed them, and then with his smeared and crusted hands stuffed them into his mouth, one-fisted.

She looked at Rien while he ate, and Rien nodded. "You were right."

Perceval smiled at her, and handed her another serving of kudzu leaves. Rien rolled them into tubes and gnawed, chewing as if the sharp green taste could drive the flavor of ammonia from her throat. "Space," she said, softly as if that meant that only Perceval would hear her, "how long do you think he was locked in there?"

"Let's get clean," Perceval answered, and Rien began circumventing locks.

It took them three hours to clear the overgrowth away from enough washrooms to find a working shower, but as soon as they found it, they looked at each other and at their new companion, and sighed. Perceval coaxed his blindfold off—he held onto it at first, emaciated fingers wrapped through the band—and Rien adjusted the sonics and the fine, warm fog in the stall.

"It's even hot," she said, trying not to sound envious.

"You'll get your turn," Perceval answered without rancor. "Let's see if we can find him something to wear."

They were not the only things that rustled among the kudzu, but whatever might have lived there was shy and wary of predators. They could hear little animals skip-hopping ("mice," Perceval said, but Rien said, "toads") and there were insects, which Perceval caught when she could, remembering that they were rich in protein.

As they rummaged through abandoned, vacuum-sealed closets, they found many good things, including unfashionable but warm clothing that would fit a tall, thin man. "Perceval," Rien said after they had given up looking for shoes and sat side by side near the washroom door, "how many of the habitats in the world are deserted?"

"Oh," Perceval said, "I would suppose most of them."

"Where are all the people?"

"Dead," Perceval said. Rien's fingers tightened on her wrist, driving nails into the skin, and Perceval flinched and tried to find an honest way to soften that news. As if she had meant to, she continued, "Or congregated in a holde, more rarely a domaine. There were a lot more of us, in the moving times."

Behind the door, the sound of sonics stopped.

"Are we dying?"

"Yes," Perceval said. She stood, as the door opened, and extended an armload of soft shirts, underthings, and coveralls to the man—

She stopped short, her arms bent under the flat-palmed offering.

She'd thought his skin chalky with layered guano and lack of sun, his hair white and caked with the same limy excrement.

But no.

Clean, he was whiter. Blue-skinned in the filtered light through the overhead, his hair sculptured from ice-white curls, his beard still long but washed now. Perhaps he had not found a depilatory, but he had found a comb, and an elastic. He wore a towel wrapped at his waist, and the stub of his sword protruded from it.

His hair, braided, still hung most of the way down his back now that it was clean. Looking at it, thinking of what it must have taken to clean it, Perceval was grateful for the loss of her own. The stubble would be easier to scrub out.

He smelled not at all of ammonia.

And the eyes that met Perceval's were ice-blue, faintly luminescent with the same blueness that stained her own veins, in his case unalloyed by pigment.

"Thank you," he said, his voice creaky and cracking but perfectly intelligible. He reached out to take the heap of clothing. His warm, moist fingertips brushed Perceval's.

"Lord Tristen," Rien said. Stammered, really. "You're meant to be dead."

And while Perceval looked at Rien in disbelief, Tristen Conn said, "Do I... know you?" and Rien reached out to steady herself against the wall.

That night, they camped in a kitchen with a stove, and they had hot soup for dinner. The cooking surface didn't work at first, but thanks to her spontaneous mechanical knowledge, Rien repaired it. Gavin curled up in the corner, the tip of his tail in an electrical socket, though Perceval thought he was only pretending to doze.

As for Tristen, once he'd determined who they were, where they were going, and why, he remained quiet— painfully so—but it turned out he could cook, so Rien and Perceval sat shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in Pinion's warm but worrying embrace, and watched. There was something tremendously comforting in having an adult appear and take care of things, Perceval admitted, watching the tall white man stir dinner with curious focus.

She was fascinated by that. And by how very white his hair was, and the soft translucence of his skin. She could see the blue veins where his salvaged clothes did not cover, and she was surprised that not only was his symbiont apparently healthy, but that it had managed to keep him so. She was also amazed by his resilience; she had only been captive a few days, and she thought she would lie staring at ceilings the rest of her life. She could not feel safe.

But there was Tristen Conn, singing to himself as he tasted broth and stacked and rolled tender kudzu leaves into long tubes for chiffonade. And he made her feel safer, his broken sword tucked into his belt and a knife from a magnetic rack inside one of the mouse-rummaged cabinets rocking in his left hand. Perceval hadn't seen a wild mouse, but she knew that all the mice in the world were as white as Tristen, albinos. They would have red eyes, though—natural mammal blood color—not stained blue by the symbiont blood-marker.

She and Rien sat and watched Tristen cooking, and she tried not to let herself feel too safe. But that was hard, when he brought them plastic mugs of salty broth full of shredded rehydrated mushrooms and soy protein, the delicate rags of sliced kudzu floating on top, a soft and saturated green.

She cupped the mug in both hands, first undraping her arm from around Rien, and sipped. It tasted fantastic. The tightness across Perceval's shoulders—where the weight of her wings wasn't—eased at the warmth. They sat in an uneven triangle, eating in silence.

When Perceval had finished, she flicked Pinion shut— even the brief breeze was warm and welcome—and got up to get more, collecting Rien's cup as well. Tristen placed his hand over his mug when she reached for it. He'd only gotten through a little more than half, and was taking it slowly.

Too much food in a hurry might not be good for him.

As she ladled more soup into the cup, she spoke. It was easier, somehow, when you were not looking. "Rien, do you think we're being maneuvered into finding things?"

Rien made a noise. Startled, rather than affirmative. "I hadn't thought of it." In the stainless-steel trim around the backsplash, Perceval saw Rien press three fingers to the side of her head.

"Lord Tristen," Perceval hastened to add, "no offense. I did not mean to insinuate that you were a thing."

"Considering how you met me, I could hardly be offended if you did," he said. His voice was returning, but it was still soft and weary; she wondered how it felt for him to be clean and clothed and full of salty soup after the builders knew how long crawling through bat muck and gnawing raw bones. She hoped she could remain glad to never know. "But I don't believe anyone knew where I was."

"Then how did you come to be there?" Perceval asked, just as Rien volunteered, "We got help and directions from a necromancer." Perceval turned back in time to see Rien's guilty glance at Gavin, but Gavin never shifted.

Tristen, however, craned over his shoulder to look at Perceval, then watched her walk back, balancing mugs, to sit again beside Rien. "You're trusting of a stranger." His tone ruined it, though—he might be trying for menace, but he only sounded avuncular.

Which, Perceval supposed, was exactly what he was. Their father's brother.

"Only strangers who can cook," she replied. "And anyone who would bury himself under a metric ton of bat shit to fool us deserves to. We mean to try to stop a war, Lord Tristen—"

"Don't Lord me," he interrupted, the electric blue eyes narrowing in colorless sockets, "and I shan't Lady you."

"And so are all the forms of courtesy defeated," Perceval said, but she smiled. "So are you for war?"

"When I was free, I was for any war I could get," he said. He touched the hilt of his broken unblade. "Now that I am free again ..." He shrugged. "Durance vile can alter your expectations. You think someone is machining this war, Perceval?"

"Ariane Conn," she said, without hesitation. "And somebody on the Engine side, too. Who is willing to risk biological warfare. And to arrange things so that I might be captured by Rule, so as to bring the contagion among them."

That was dangerously close to topics Perceval was not yet ready to discuss—not without first gathering some intelligence—so she drank soup and then changed the subject before someone could pursue it. "In any case, I'm feeling schooled. And I do not think your sister is the Commodore who is needed in Rule."

"Commodore?"

"I'm sorry," Rien said. "La—I mean, Ariane killed your father."

"Good riddance," Tristen said, his woolly white braid sliding forward over his shoulder. Despite two elastics, the end was fraying. "But how can she have declared herself Commodore, when I am legitimate, and so much older?"

For the time being, even Tristen seemed content to avoid conflict. They skulked and hid, Gavin their ears and Rien's unsettling, newly intrinsic sense of geography their guide. They saw no one else alive, and Rien was both grateful for and worried by it.

They might have been not too far from Benedick's residence on a straight line, but many of the corridors were blocked or ruined. Two days' careful and unobtrusive journey followed. Tristen acted impervious, Rien thought— but she also noticed that he slept propped in corners, and that she'd wake and find him staring into space or reading on a hand-screen he'd scavenged in one of the rooms they bunked in, his nose pressed almost to the display as if his sight were failing.

As they came closer to the border between Rule and Engine, the travelers saw at last evidence of Ariane's war. Foliage scorched and trampled by battle, a blasted bulkhead. A body, which Perceval knelt beside and brushed with her fingertips.

"His name was Alex," she said, and rasped her hands over her stubble in the thinking gesture of someone accustomed to long hair. The prickles looked as if they must itch, but perhaps knights, like ladies, did not scratch.

Gavin seemed to have the knack of riding shoulders; when Rien hunkered to wait, he aided her balance.

Tristen, in his blue fleece and salvaged sandals, knelt, too. He placed one hand on the dead man's forehead, as if in benediction. And then he began to go through his pockets.

"Sir!" Perceval protested. And Tristen paused, and only looked at her.

They stared, back and forth a moment; Rien noticed the sameness in the shapes of their features. Though Perceval's face was squarer, and Tristen's was long, they were both thin and tall, with deep-set eyes. His nose wandered; hers was incongrously pert. Nevertheless, Rien thought the resemblance would have been striking if Perceval still had her hair, and if Tristen's was pigmented rather than wooly and white and if the line of his jaw was not concealed by the beard.

He glanced down, his lashes thick and ivory against his blue-tinged cheek, and drew the dead man's sheath and knife from his boot. There was a holster for a sidearm, but the pistol was not in evidence. Tristen, however, did pull two clips of caseless ammunition from his pockets.

Silently, he offered bullets and knife to Perceval.

"You take it," she said, without looking at his hands.

They continued on.

They made camp when they grew tired, in another abandoned section of crew quarters. The irrigation system had failed here, and nothing but crisped brown stems grew in the beds and wall boxes. The air could have been fresher, for it—but there was running water from the taps, though it was cold only, and Rien, whose menses had started, took the opportunity to scrub herself with a soapy rag and wash her hair. Gavin stood on the edge of the basin and studied a cracked dry valve from the irrigation pipe, turning it over and over in his claw, before eventually putting it in his beak and swallowing it, like a chicken gagging down pea gravel for its crop.

Later, as they sat waiting for Tristen to cook dinner, Rien searched toiletry drawers until she found a cracked tube of conditioner. It had dried into a solid, oily cake, but it smelled all right. She rubbed it between her hands to oil the palms, stroked it into the drying frizz, and began picking through the tangles curl by curl with a heavy wide-toothed comb. It broke into ringlets, damp, but even with the oil on it, it would never stay that way.

Tristen was still flipping pancakes when they heard the voices. He set the spatula aside, turned down the induction plate almost as far as it would go—there was a click when it shut down—and glanced up at the overhead light. Turning it off would of course be incredibly obvious.

It didn't matter, Rien suspected. The smell of cooking was all through the air.

"Space," she said, without breath, as the tromp of heavily shod feet approached. She slipped her comb into her pocket and crouched, wishing she had something on hand to use as a club; she'd feel far more comfortable with that sort of weapon than anything with a point.

But across the room, Tristen's hands were like bones on the black hilt of his appropriated blade, and that was reassuring. And it was reassuring as well that when Perceval stood, Pinion flaring like a cloak, and squared her shoulders, her face was as serene as any angel's. With only a glance between them, she and Tristen went to flank the door.

Rien could see the people advancing in her head. There was a sort of Y-intersection ten meters down the corridor, and they were coming along the left-hand path. She could tell from the echoes and the map in her head, and that was a very strange thing indeed. She strained, trying to pick out words, voices, but all she heard was a marching cadence, and it didn't sound familiar.

Not of Rule, then, and that was something. But it might be whoever had locked up Tristen, and it might be whoever in Engine had sent Perceval to die in Rule.

Gavin hunkered on the back of a chair, wings half up and neck elongated, as if he scented the air. And then Tristen's chin came up and a little smile lifted the corner of his mustache that Rien could see in profile. He slipped the knife back into its sheath on the belt he used to cinch his too-big trousers, raised his hands beside his head, and stepped out into the corridor, beckoning Rien and Perceval after with a tilted head and an arrogant little cup of his hand.

Perceval looked at Rien.

Rien shrugged.

Perceval shrugged right back, and turned to follow.

Maybe we shouldn't just waltz out into the line of fire after him, Rien started to say, but maybe there was something in the knightly code of conduct that also said you had to be fucking stupid all the time, because that was exactly what Perceval did. And then Rien wasn't going to skulk behind a plastic chair so somebody could scruff her like a kitten and drag her out.

She stayed Gavin with a hand gesture. She'd given up trying to figure out how he maneuvered when his eyes were always closed, but in any case he was more effective backup than she. He froze in place, those fanning wings uplifted, for all the world like an alabaster sculpture. And Rien jumped up and hustled the three steps to catch up with her sister, and as a result almost tripped over Pinion's trailing edge. Somehow she managed to enter the corridor, third in line but dripping all the dignity she could muster, and perversely glad she'd smoothed her hair.

Like Tristen—like Perceval—she raised her hands. And faced a corridor full of armed men and women, ten or more arrayed in ranks, all dressed in black and golden-brown.

The one in the front wore plain black, trousers and a constructed uniform jacket. He was of a height with Tristen, black hair hanging razor-cut to the edge of a lantern jaw, his eyes a dark-ringed hazel that caught the light. Rien's eyes widened—she'd known they were close, but not so close—and her hand darted out to close on Perceval's wrist and drag her down on one knee as Rien herself genuflected.

"Tristen," said Benedick Conn, his gloved hand resting on the grip of his pistol. "I thought you were dead."

"I'm back," said Tristen, and Rien did not think that anyone except she or Perceval was close enough to see him shaking like a leaf. "And these are your daughters."