Grail

22 wounds

Under the roof of a pavilion in a Go-Back Heaven, before an audience of cobras and Go-Backs, Dust’s patron prepared to conquer the world.

She had arrived hours before, slipping away from Engine in the confusion of Perceval and Tristen disembarking for Fortune. She had brought the paper Bible. Dust, curled inside her collar, lifted his head to watch as she laid it out on the table before Dorcas and two or three of her people. The embossed leather covers were shiny with many hands. The book had a scent—faint, not musty but sweet and clean—and as Ariane reached out to lay it open, Dust heard the whisk of high-rag-content paper.

He also heard Dorcas’s controlled intake of breath. “May I?”

The fall of Ariane’s hair moved against Dust’s fur as she nodded. “I had expected you would want to. The key to the world is in there. And the Captain is gone; we will never have a better opportunity.”

“Think of all the hands that have touched this.” Gently, Dorcas added her own to the litany. She turned the book to face her and ran the tip of a fingernail down the page. The words were so black, the ink set deep in creamy fibers. “You’ll use this to claim control of the Angel?”

“And the world,” Ariane said. “You and yours must stand ready to fight, once it is done. There are some in Rule and Engine who will oppose us, even when Dust is restored to his rightful place. I brought him back for a reason, and his knowledge of how to use the Bible was one part of it.”

“And you to yours.” Dorcas set the open book back from herself with a fingertip push, releasing its custody to Ariane.

Because Dust nuzzled his patron’s ear, delighted to be remembered, he felt the muscles in her jaw tense with her smile. “This may take a little while.”

“I have nothing but time,” Dorcas answered. She lifted her chin, her eyes unfocusing as if a distant sound had drawn her attention. “Let me find you a chair.”

The sound of the firearm was lost to the sound of the thunder, but Tristen Conn would not have been Tristen Conn if he had not seen the flesh of his niece’s torso leap back around the point of impact—the shock wave ripple through her—and automatically turned away from her collapsing form to track the trajectory of the bullet to its firing point.

“There’s a gun!” he shouted, while Perceval accordioned into a puddle. Tristen lunged forward, to and through the assembled dignitaries, desperately missing his armor and half aware with his peripheral senses that Captain Amanda—with a weapon in her hand—lagged only a few steps behind.

Danilaw never saw where the shot was fired from. One moment he was moving forward to facilitate the meeting of ship’s Captain and City Administrator, the next he was watching in horror as Perceval slumped to the tarmac, blood leaking from her body front and back to stain the rainwater and the asphalt a ropy, luminous blue.

He did see the warriors move. Barely, for Tristen and Amanda were there, and then they were gone. The echo of their footsteps lingered only a moment longer as they pushed through the group and stretched out, running hard through the rain.

With the curious detachment of crisis, Danilaw found himself wondering how the hell anybody had managed to sight through the wind and the rain, never mind hitting what they were aiming for. But curiosity didn’t stop him from doing what was needful.

He dropped to his knees in two centimeters of water and started pushing Perceval’s clothes aside, looking for the entrance and the—presumed—exit wounds.

A moment, and Gain was beside him, tearing cloth in her haste. Danilaw found the deceptively tiny puncture at the bottom of the alien architecture of Perceval’s rib cage, the slow meandering ooze of cobalt telling him the worst was elsewhere. He raised her shoulder—she made a noise of pained protest, his first clue that she was conscious and alive—and with groping fingers he outlined the exit wound high on her back, and felt the hiss of air against his fingers as she struggled to breathe.

“Shit,” he said.

He doubled his fist—unclean, unsterile, but there was time to worry about that later—and pushed it hard into the injury. The wound—wet and sucking—swallowed his fist.

When Danilaw was still in secondary education, he’d satisfied his economic Obligation on a fishing trawler. It was safer and more sustainable than it had been in millennia past, but it would never be the sort of work that one could take lightly. Oceans were dangerous places, as were young colonies.

He’d once held an artery in a half-severed arm—not his own—pinched shut for two minutes, seventeen seconds, until the ship’s medic responded. This was not the most blood he’d seen flow across his hands.

But this blood felt wrong: slick, cohering, and … wriggling. Still, it pulsed against his hand like any arterial bleed—and arterial bleeds in general were on the list of things Danilaw never needed to have pulsing against his hand again.

He set his teeth, set his fist into the wound, and yelled for a doctor, now.

Perceval hung in darkness, in wet cold, the only heat in her own blood as it spilled from her with every heartbeat. She felt the blood crawling back, oxygenating from air contact, pulling whatever life-sustaining molecules it could inside her as it struggled upstream against the rhythmic pressure of her heart.

Hands pulled her close and pressed her wounds, more pain than expected, and she felt whoever touched her recoil when her blood writhed and knotted, fighting to seal the wound. Fighting its way back inside.

The question was, could her symbiont save her life before her heart killed her?

If her heart stopped, it could. Hearts could always be restarted. They were simple electrical engines, after all. Pumps. Uncomplicated. Easy. And Perceval would have five to ten minutes of consciousness in which to seal the wound and restart the thing beating. Her lungs would work on their own; her blood could crawl through her veins, albeit inefficiently.

All right, then. She killed the pump.

Distantly, on the other side of the cold and darkness, she heard somebody start cursing.

The rain was like so many small hammers drumming on Tristen’s head, soaking his hair and clothing, stinging his eyes and beading his eyelashes. Wind slashed sideways, but his hair was so heavy with water it swung and stuck rather than whipping about him. That might have passed for a mercy, but the whole thing was foreign and unpleasant and cold, and Tristen tried to think more of making himself a challenge to incoming fire than of how miserable he was.

His feet drum-splashed on poured stone, the shock of each step in such gravity making his bones and ankles ache. The pain helped the Mean woman keep up, but Tristen ran through it.

Amanda pounded along beside him, her firearm bouncing in her hand, until they came within the boundary of the long line of purple-black trees. The broad palmate leaves cut the worst of the downpour, and suddenly Tristen could breathe. He might have accelerated, but Amanda dropped behind and stepped aside.

Tristen understood. Ahead, through the trees, a flicker of movement.

A human being. Running away.

He had hesitated to assess; now he redoubled his effort. Though he pressed against his own crippling weight, the rich atmosphere supported him.

He was not adapted for this, but muscles and bones could strengthen with time. If time he had.

But right now time was suspended. There was only the chase.

Until the firearm spoke behind him—once, twice, a third time—and the running figure ahead staggered, spun, raised a weapon to return fire—

—and toppled majestically backward, as fast as Tristen had ever seen anything fall. Fell like a whole planet was pulling it down.

He drew up, panting, as Amanda closed the gap between them and then pulled ahead, jogging through mud and puddles and leaf litter rather than running flat-out. Tristen dragged himself into a trot to keep up with her, staggering every third step now that the adrenaline and opiates were waning in his blood.

She pulled up a second before he caught her, and stood over the man sprawled on the wet ground, frowning.

“I hope he’s not dead,” Tristen said.

Amanda hefted the gun she trained on the downed assassin—would-be assassin, Tristen told himself firmly. “Non-lethal rounds,” she said. “If he’s more than unconscious, it’s not my doing.”

A circle of people heaved around them. Gain’s hands clutched Danilaw’s wrists. She pulled hard; he shouldered her aside. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing? You’re hurting her—”

“I’m stopping the bleeding, curse you. Waste and wreck, let go of me!” The pulse of blood against his fingers ceased; he swore more fervently. “Her heart—check her pulse, check her pulse.”

Gain reached for Perceval’s throat. Danilaw had just enough presence of mind to realize his mistake before she got there. Had Gain been impeding him on purpose?

He grabbed her arm with his free hand and pulled her aside. “Not you,” he said. “Get the medic now.”

“Alive,” Perceval said, her voice a wheezing rasp. “Stopped heart—blood loss. Can fix.”

“Perceval? Perceval!”

Gain pushed back at him; Danilaw looked up from the alien he’d dragged half across his lap and fixed her on a stare like a bayonet. “Don’t.”

“Good,” Perceval said, sliding into ever more boneless limpness. “I’ll be back.”