Chill (11 page)

“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.