His filial loyalty to Ariane had only led him to another betrayal-in all the long line of betrayals that marked his history with his family, perhaps the most bitter. Even after her death and consumption, Tristen could not forgive that she had guided him astray. It wasn"t exactly that he had trusted her-Conns did not trust one another-but he had cared for her. That caring was what had enabled her to trap him, break his blade, and imprison him in a horrible dungeon.
But as he wrapped the tail of his braid with a blue ribbon that crimped itself tight to bind the locks into a blunt club, he thought: If I had been a dutiful brother, father, husband, grandson-I would have saved the family so much grief, and killed the old man long ago.
It hadn"t mattered in the end, because Alasdair had created his own destroyer. And no one could say if the collateral damage had been greater or less because Tristen had not found the resolve to consume his father when he should have.
Tristen knew himself to be as crippled as the rest of his family. Living under his father"s will, watching Bened.i.c.k spill Cynric"s blood at their father"s command, had made him quiet. It had made him cowardly. It had made him cold.
He let his braid fall behind his shoulder and turned from the mirror.
Things change, he thought. And then, feeling as if he dared greatly: It is time things changed in the house of Rule.
When Tristen emerged into the relaxation chamber, his heap of pack and water bottle lay ready, his armor standing nearby. Mallory, Gavin, and the ghost of Samael-outlined like a dust devil in the sc.r.a.ps of things swept up inside him-awaited by the door. The necromancer was also festooned with travel gear.
Mallory shrugged to settle a pack strap. "Is everything ready?"
"I want a weapon." Tristen came before them and turned his back to step into his armor. It folded him into its embrace, the cool resilience of shock gel lining molding to his skin. As it sealed, fasteners sliding into housings with soft, round-sounding clicks, Mallory stooped to hand him the pack and the water. Tristen slung them through carabiners at his shoulders. His armor protested good-naturedly as the sacks thumped it, but Tristen ignored the complaint.
Then thought again: That is what your father would have insisted upon.
He unsealed the helm and looked from Mallory to the artificial intelligences. "Follow me."
Ariane had carried Caithness"s unblade Mercy, a gift from their father to his most trusted child, and that sword had been consumed in Nova"s creation. Tristen, as eldest, had borne an unblade, too, though his had shattered against Mercy when he could not bring himself to strike down Ariane. Caitlin had taken the third and final with her into exile, and that blade had died when Mercy did.
But there were other family weapons, treasured heirlooms, whose bearers would be chosen and controlled by whoever held the house of Rule.
He knew where Alasdair kept his captured riches, and as the acknowledged head of house, all locks in Rule would open to him. Still, when he paused before the vault door, stripped back his gauntlet, and laid his left hand against the contact pad, apprehension chilled his neck. "Open sesame," he said, for luck.
The door gaped wide.
Tristen gestured his escorts back with one hand and stepped within. He moved into dimness and light followed, floor and walls and ceiling panels catching a rippling circle of illumination that matched his pace. The light was clear, sun-spectrum, bright enough to reveal the details on Alasdair"s a.s.sembled treasures without washing them away.
Tristen walked between urns and scepters, ancient books and electronics, a jeweled crucifix sparkling with mined diamonds. A crystal vial full of brown earth caught his eye. He turned to it with reverence: dust from the homeworld, to be sown wherever they should make planetfall. Beside it hung a second flask, containing a few scant ounces of the Earth"s enormous world-encircling sea. For a moment, Tristen tried to imagine such a thing, a body of water as big as a planet.
The mere consideration made him spin with vertigo.
He turned to the wall that held the weapons. Empty s.p.a.ce awaited the dead unblades-Mercy, Charity, and Innocence. Another niche awaited the someday return of a blade called Humility-leading Tristen to wonder which of his siblings might be its bearer now-and a fifth and sixth were respectively bereft of Benevolence and Grace.
But beside the gaps others still hung: Purity, Compa.s.sion, and Sympathy. And the one his hand gravitated to, without thought. A weapon Aefre had carried, and Sparrow after her, curved of blade, with a hilt swept like the neck of a black swan and filigreed guards like golden wings.
"Mirth," he said, and drew it from the sheath as he took it into his hand.
A blue spark raced from his palm to the tip of the blade; a golden spark ran back. His palm tingled as his colony and Mirth"s made their handshake, proof that the weapon had acknowledged and accepted him. It felt light, peculiar, though it had been fifty years since he"d touched Charity in its intact state. The unblade had been inertialess, weightless, a null s.p.a.ce in his hand-but it had expressed also a weight beyond the physical-the presence of its own chill alien will and intellect. In bearing it, Tristen had always been able to feel it at his side, like a wary demon: considering, a.s.sessing, making its own judgments.
An uneasy sensation. Mirth in his hand generated no such discomfort; rather it felt alert and responsive. Command me. He resheathed it, breaking the circuit, but was left with a sense of its eager pleasure in having been handled.
There were other treasures: rings and geegaws, suits of armor, ancient and mysterious electronics. Tristen walked past it all, back to where the others waited, and with a gesture sealed the vault behind. His companions in misadventure stared at him, one question plain in three regards.
Tristen clipped the sword onto his hip. They parted before him, stepped aside and let him pa.s.s through as if he held some authority over them. As if they were following where he led.
What a kingdom, thought Tristen Conn. The shadow of an angel, a necromancer, and a reinvented power tool. What an army I bring against you, Granddaughter.
"I"m ready," he said, and steeled himself for plain statement. "Let"s go kill Arianrhod."
In the arms of her angel, Arianrhod rested. Asrafil lifted her on vasty wingbeats, her newly variegated hair trailing like a banner over his adamantine forearm, her weight borne up like a doll"s. She curled against his chest, face pressed into the black warm nap of his coat, and felt the waxy leaves of the trailing vines he bore her through brush her body. He moved like a tramcar, stately, unstoppable, with rhythmic surges and hesitations carried on each stroke of the wings. When he turned she could feel him bank and slide and glide, the way the forces wanted to tug them along their initial vector, the long smooth arc as he veered and swung.
She had never felt so safe.
It was a disappointment when broad pinions flared and slapped atmosphere-a halt as abrupt as if some unseen hand had snapped their leash. Arianrhod"s body jerked against Asrafil"s grip. As she had never feared that he would drop her, she felt only a kind of thrill-ride exultation. She burst out laughing, her hair tousled in every direction by the wind of their pa.s.sage, her arms uplifted and back arched as she surrendered entirely to the angel"s strength. In perfect love and perfect trust.
She thought they flew and then descended for a long time-nearly a day, by her colony"s clock. During some of that time she dozed in Asrafil"s arms, less than aware of her surroundings. He would wake her if a threat required her attention, or he would deal with it if it did not. When she opened her eyes again they had entered a chill place, cavernous by the echoes of Asrafil"s wing-beats, and she had lost what sense of orientation she"d had. The light here was banded, gray and grayer, and when she turned her head she could just make out a glimpse of tombstone ranks of machinery. She felt them buffeted by twisted gravity, gasped as he swept her through a pa.s.sageway so narrow she felt the brush of metal on her skin.
At last, soft as milkweed down, he settled to the deck, his wings a curtain enfolding them. As his boots brushed soil, the shadow of the wings faded into nonexistence. He set her on her feet at arm"s length, and stepped back.
Arianrhod felt irrationally as she had when she was small, and her father had kissed her forehead. "Thank you, Asrafil," she said.
The angel bowed from the waist. "You are loyal and deserving," he said as he straightened. "If I can make your burdens light, my dear, well-broad are an angel"s shoulders."
Arianrhod turned away to hide the flush of pleasure warming her cheeks. She wrapped her arms across her chest to ward off the chill. Noticing, the angel wrapped her in his coat, and kept his arm around her shoulders. Though he was only warm because he chose to be, still his heat soothed. An animal response, primitive. Perhaps something she should have grown beyond-something all Exalt should have grown beyond, to earn their rank as half-mortals placed just below the angels.
But who could disregard the love of G.o.d when they saw it shining from the eyes of a holy messenger? Here was the devotion that she had looked for all her life. The filial duty, the sacred trust, which she had received in such scant measure from her family. And oh, she basked in it.
She wanted to say that all her burdens were made more bearable simply by his regard, that he himself was the remuneration of her faith. But there was too much vulnerability in such a statement, and anyway-he was the Angel of War. He knew whatever she might have said to him.
So instead she looked around the chamber she found herself in-too small for a holde or a Heaven or even a domaine; a mere anch.o.r.e, just one tiny bead swelling along the myriad stems of the world-and drew a breath of its dank, unwholesome air. There was only a little light here, dim and filtered, slanting through a clouded panel on the curve of the ceiling above. But as her colony and her eyes adapted, Arianrhod saw a floor lined with leaf litter and bones. Along one wall lay a filthy nest of shredded, matted tufts of hair and salvaged sc.r.a.ps from many levels. No plants grew within this chamber, not even leggy, yellowed, light-starved ones. But somewhere in the darkness, trickling water ran.
"Where are we?" she asked, and half answered her own question. "I see that it"s a lair."
"Don"t worry," the angel said. "The swine are hunting at this time of the local day, and anyway they are quite harmless so long as you are alert and on your feet. But their waste can help conceal us."
"This is not where I asked to be brought, Asrafil."
"It is in service to your cause." He crouched and dug long fingers in the floor, unearthing fistfuls of compost writhing with shiny black beetles. "Here," he said, rapidly sifting them through a nanotronic net until the rot fell free and only the insects remained. When he had finished, he cupped a double handful of insects no bigger than pinheads at her, his expectant impression prompting her to hold out her hands.
When she had dropped to her knees and done so, steadying herself by watching his face intently, he poured the beetles across her palms.
They did not stay neatly contained in the cupped hollow, as they had for him. Instead, they scrambled up her arms, scattering, finding refuge in the dark recesses of her borrowed coat and the warm creases of her body. The p.r.i.c.kle of their tiny barbed feet made her want to squirm and slap at them, but she set her jaw and waited it out. It was only a little while before they seemed to have chosen their places-in her hair, behind the cuffs of the coat, moving lightly across the outside of her arm in search of some eventual destination. Settled, they p.r.i.c.kled no more than hairpins or jewelry.
Arianrhod shuddered, and tried not to scratch her scalp. "What are those?"
"Symbiotes," he said. "They"ll eat what you shed, and keep you from leaving a trail of DNA. If you are comfortable, come along; we should be gone before the swine return from foraging. They do not take kindly to interlopers."
She followed on. A few steps brought them to a narrow pa.s.sage, the sort that must be navigated in a half crouch. Their footsteps echoed-or at least, hers did. The Angel of Weapons walked silently.
Eventually, they emerged into another anch.o.r.e, slightly larger than the last. Here, Arianrhod could see the game trail threading the earthen deck, the packed dry dirt that spoke of something-yes-hoofed, or running on sharp trotters. She stood up straight between the long veiling falls of glossy-leaved foliage that marked either side of the trail and said, "Asrafil, tell me your plan."
He glanced at her, but did not stop his steady, effortless progress. His coat swung against her ankles. She hurried to catch up. "You have been loyal," he said.
"I am loyal," she insisted. "And again, I asked you for something-"
"We will go there now," he said, so smoothly she could not tell if she imagined his air of humoring her.
"But I can"t help you if I don"t know what you plan. Surely not just to beard the new angel in his lair?"
"I am too small for that," Asrafil admitted, ducking his bald head as if it cost him. He looked so frail-bird-boned, delicate, his simulated collarbones projecting over the collar of his white T-shirt now that the long coat did not cover them.
For a moment, Arianrhod felt sympathy for him, protectiveness. She reached out and brushed his sleeve with her hand. "I support you, Asrafil."
He drew up short, shoulders lifted, eyes on the egress hatch a few more yards across the width of the anch.o.r.e.
"It is terrible work I"m on," he said, when she had given up hope of him speaking at all. He turned pale eyes on her and made a gesture as if to wet his mouth, though he had neither salivary glands nor the need for comfort. "I go in search of an ally, Lady Arianrhod."
She folded her arms. "That was but half an answer."
He nodded. And holding her gaze as if to hold, also, her understanding, he said, "I seek the beast. To make of him a weapon, Arianrhod."
"The beast?"
"Cynric"s beast," he said. "Her darkest sorcery."
Arianrhod stretched her shoulders. "That"s all well and good," she said. "But first you have to bring me to Ariane"s strongholde."
As Tristen led his band through the corridors and domaines near Rule, what they found at first was simple farmland-serried hydroponics tanks in racks twice Tristen"s height, crushed strawberries and melons moldering unpicked on bruised and twisted stems, plastics cracked and nanopatched to hold water the world must have mopped from every corner and returned to containment. The plants were healing, slowly, but there was no hope for the fruit.
The party scavenged as they walked-cuc.u.mbers broken open but not yet rotten here, sprays of round green eggplant the size of eyeb.a.l.l.s there-and ate on the move. Or rather, Tristen and Mallory scavenged, Gavin complained, and Samael looked on from his half-realized transparency, arch or amused.
All my life is running, Tristen thought, entertained by the irony when all his life had been waiting but a few days since.
Already the chamber of the bats seemed another lifetime, a story recounted but not experienced. He was growing scars over it, he knew, sealing up the raw place with proud tissue. Soon all that remained of a weeping wound would be a rough, unsightly patch, and the raised seam where the flesh had grown together.
Comfortable and relatively safe surroundings brought them half a day"s travel from Rule. Things grew wilder there, but incrementally. At first, one could fail to notice that the hydroponics tanks had been full of sediment since before the nova. But before long they came to places where k.n.o.bbed tree roots, blindly seeking moisture, had heaved open wall and floor panels, popped welds, rent sheet metal wide.
There was nothing in all the world so implacable as a tree. Out of the world, the only rival was the Enemy.
The braided web of pa.s.sageways and chambers that comprised the agricultural domaine wore on Tristen, though he would not show his discomfort to the others. Quiet words, soft eye, straight spine. Push through, carry on. You can walk on a broken leg if you set your jaw against it. It"s not good for you, or for the limb, but there"s time to be fragile when the war is won. That, too, he had learned from his father.
Just as he had learned that the war is never won.
The angel"s oversight rea.s.sured him not at all. He only remembered the breaking of Israfel with his native memory, as he had not yet been Exalt when it happened, but he remembered it well enough. Tristen Conn did not trust angels.
When they pa.s.sed into one of the null spots, he found comfort in their isolation, despite knowing he was leading them into the heart of whatever opposed Perceval and her loyal followers-among whom he must number himself.
Still, he breathed a sigh when they came not to another in the seemingly endless series of pressure doors, but instead a proper air lock, big enough to move large equipment. The ma.s.sive doors had sealed against some ancient pressure drop. Tristen"s band drew up before the first. While they paused, he looked from one companion to the next.
"Samael," he said, having considered. The angel was not to be trusted-no angel was to be trusted, and the Angel of Poison least of all-but Tristen held the Captain"s authority by proxy, and if anything could force a recalcitrant angel to duty, it was the word of Perceval Conn.
Without a glance, the angel pa.s.sed forward, ghosting through the door, flakes of things swept from his field and pressed flat against it. Fifteen seconds-timed by Tristen"s colony, during which he heard mostly the drip of condensation and Mallory breathing lightly, quickly, in antic.i.p.ation-pa.s.sed before Samael returned, dusting translucent hands one against the other and making the motes inside them sparkle and tumble.
"Heaven," he said. "Quite pretty. Within tolerances, I believe. I don"t know why the lock tripped."
Tristen sealed his helm up anyway. Mallory, unarmored, watched with amus.e.m.e.nt, but though Tristen thought of an apologetic glance, he didn"t share it.
He palmed the air lock controls, entered his command security override, identified himself as First Mate-and found that the air lock would not open.
"Huh," he said. "Isn"t this thing supposed to listen?"
Mallory chortled. "Sure it is. But only if you know the right commands. The whole world does not yet know you"re in charge of it. Let me try."
Tristen stepped back, folding his arms so the armor clattered, and tried not to frown as Mallory laid hands on the panel, concentrated, and a moment later the lights began to cycle blue and green.
"There"s no colony in the lock," Mallory explained, straightening. "It has no connection to Nova. No way to update."
When it ground wide, protesting every centimeter, the atmosphere within stank of mold and must but was not toxic. Even through his suit filters, Tristen wrinkled his nose. He strode into the small s.p.a.ce, ignoring the filth stirring around his ankles, and gestured the others in behind. When all the corporeal ones were clear of the outer door, he cycled the lock.
The inner door was stuck, but whatever jammed the tracks was not solid enough to stand against the whining motors that forced it back. The cincture rasped apart, bringing in a rush of sweet, oxygenated atmosphere even before Tristen could see what lay beyond.
Immediately upon the breeze came a flutter of fairy-bright objects that Tristen at first thought were leaves, until by their beat and settle he knew them to be wings. b.u.t.terflies, a half dozen, flitting in vortex swirls around each of the travelers. Mallory waved them away with an airy gesture, caught Tristen"s eye when he turned, and smiled.
Despite himself, Tristen returned the smile. He reoriented himself, laid a hand on his weapon, and stepped forward into the Heaven.
It was green, lushly so, and the first thing he noticed was that the trees here had not failed during acceleration. The deck underfoot was one fibrous gnarl-the roots of a feral tangle of fig trees, or perhaps just one giant, ancient tree gone wild with suckers and overgrowth. Whichever it was, multifarious smooth-boled trunks competed for s.p.a.ce to lift their parasol canopies to the light, and no earth showed between matted roots. The branches were heavy with fruit and bloom at once, the air redolent of fermentation. From the valleys between gray-barked, ridge-backed roots, clouds of bright b.u.t.terflies arose at every gesture, startled from feeding on burst and rotten fruit. Overhead and alongside darted minute jeweled birds with sewing-needle beaks, whirring like soft-spoken insects.
On Mallory"s shoulder, Gavin swung his head to track an iridescent blue-violet bird, abruptly snakelike until the necromancer flicked his tail tip sharply. "Behave."
Sulkily, the basilisk pulled his neck between his shoulders and rocked between his feet. "I wasn"t going to zap it."
Tristen might have laughed, but the closeness of the trunks raised his concerns of ambush and he bit it back. There was motion everywhere-darting things, the slender green coil of a snake as long as his arm and no thicker than his pinky gliding between branches overhead. The plop as a heavy, tender fruit fell set his heart racing. From Samael"s raised eyebrow, he knew his startle had been visible through the armor.
Well, he was ent.i.tled.
"Single file," he said. He glanced at Samael, shook his head, and said, "Behind me, everybody but the angel."
Samael laughed-or gave the illusion of it. The sound bubbled on the air, anyway, and Tristen saw the dust-mote-and-dry-gra.s.s muscles of his avatar"s belly shake. "Shall I make myself solid enough to spring a trap?"
"Kindly," Tristen said, and though it was not necessary, he deemed it polite to stand aside so the angel might pa.s.s. Samael"s tipped head of acknowledgment was nothing but blue-eyed mockery through the strings of his hair. The casualness with which Tristen unsealed his helm and faceplate, and allowed the armor to retract played to the same pretense and bravado.
Moving like a stag, Samael slipped sideways between b.u.t.tressed trunks. Now moss yielded under his bare feet, pale brown moisture puddling in the gap beside his great toe with each step, dripping away again when the construct foot was lifted. Each drop fell silently, absorbed again without a trace.
Tristen followed. Mallory walked a few steps behind, lithe as if dancing.
"It"s a big Heaven," Samael said, when they had been picking their way for fifteen minutes through forest so dense that even the two meters between them often meant that Tristen could glimpse the angel only as a gleam of pale skin, pale hair, fluid motion behind leafy concealment.
Tristen pushed between cl.u.s.tered trunks-some mere slips, some bigger than the span of three men"s arms. Orchids and bromeliads dripped amazing sprays of bloom from head height and higher. The air droned and sang with the vocalizations of tiny animals. Tristen ducked a scentless, vivid, fuchsia-and-lemon Cattleya only to find himself face-to-wing with a pair of black-and-green b.u.t.terflies engaged in a savage territorial dispute. A matter of life and death to them; to him, an amusing minor spectacle. And that"s what you look like to an angel.
"Is this all one tree?" Tristen laid his hand on the bark of the nearest trunk.
Samael nodded. "It"s choked out everything else that grew here," he said. His feet might be material, but the fat ant-crawling fig that detached from a branch over his head fell through his outline to explode against a root, spattering Tristen"s boots with pulp.
Tristen wrinkled his nose at the reek of sugar. "We should collect some of those."